ATO and AFP crackdown on Op Protego promoters
European court reverses course to rule in favor of LuxLeaks
In Russia this saying may be appropriate "Be nice to people on the way up because you may pass them on the way down”. Never stand close to window if you are next to Putins or Santos of this bizarre world …
When politicians have no shame, the old rules don't apply
Opinion | The story behind President Joe Biden not doing a Super Bowl interview with Fox
In the end, the White House and Fox News will both claim the high road.
Eight States Have Joined Forces to Raise Taxes on America’s Wealthiest Stephanie Kelton, The Lens
‘This is absurd’: Train cars that derailed in Ohio were labeled non-hazardous Grist
ChatGPT Is a Data Privacy Nightmare. If You’ve Ever Posted Online, You Ought To Be Concerned
More reasons to regard ChatGPT as CheatGPT.
“HAPPY TO TALK about it if this is interesting,” Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, texted Elon Musk last spring. He continued, opaquely: “Twitter conversational OS—the townsquare for your digital life.” This is how billionaires communicate: in slogans, brand identities, and occasional large sums. It’s up to everyone else to figure out the details
Freelancers Wanted: Help Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine Matt Taibbi, Racket. This caught my eye:
For decades, our government at least loosely complied with legislation like the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits aiming at the domestic population any official propaganda “intended for foreign audiences.” However, gloves came off in recent years.
In a remarkably short time since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has funded an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent “disinformation experts.” They describe their posture as defensive — merely “tracking” or “countering” foreign disinformation — but in truth they aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.
The end result has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda. Some of this messaging devolves into outright smear campaigns, with efforts to denounce the organic #WalkAway hashtag as a Russian “psychological operation” serving as a particularly lurid example. The Hamilton 68 story (about which more is coming) hints at this dynamic.
The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.
Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about “threats to democracy.” I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time. The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed.
I wish Twitter would at least label the New York Times and the WaPos “state-sponsored media.”
Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in cash to secretly blacklist conservative newsWashington Examiner
It’s Time To Codify The ‘NY Times v. Sullivan’ Standard Into Law TechDirt
What’s your story? Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books
Echoes of Marx Verso
