(Robert Jonathan, Headline USA) Another chapter in the ongoing censorship chronicles has emerged.
In a recent lengthy Twitter thread, America First Legal disclosed a compilation that included what it characterized as a core group of “international censorship czars…who decide what you can see online.”
Among other things, the Twitter Files previously brought to light about the U.S. State Department-funded, lofty-sounding Global Engagement Center, a network that allegedly colluded with corporate media to censor/blacklist conservatives and others through content moderation techniques.
Back in February, Twitter boss Elon Musk declared that “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.”
AFL, whose president is former Trump administration senior advisor Stephen Miller, sued the State Department over its GEC involvement.
Free-speech advocates have maintained that a multi-pronged joint venture among Big Media, Big Tech and Big Government and other allied protectors of democracy interfered in the 2020 election as well as clamping down on anyone questioning the authoritarian COVID-19 narrative.
1/🚨🗣️ EXPOSED — A secret list of journalists pushing propaganda on behalf of the US govt has been revealed as a result of our litigation against the State Dept to uncover the dark truth about the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Read on to see the secret list below:
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) June 14, 2023
If accurate, the purported key takeaway from the documents obtained in the course of its litigation was that “The global cabal of ‘fact-checkers’ do not appear to be the benevolent truth-seekers they say. They appear to be highly ideological activists, affiliated through the Poynter network, backed by the same money to say the same thing,” AFL asserted.
Poynter Institute, which is reportedly partially funded by far-left billionaire George Soros, self-describes as “a global leader in journalism.”
It also operates Politifact, which tends to bend over backwards to validate facts friendly to the Democrat agenda.
One of the 11 journalists that AFL highlighted is allegedly a former Politifact editor in chief. An Associated Pres editor is allegedly another member of the elite group.
AFL claims that the AP’s fact-check policy “reads like the talking points of a left-wing policy shop.”
An additional name on what AFL said is “a secret list of journalists pushing propaganda on behalf of the U.S. government” is purportedly the chief editor of a Turkish fact-checking platform.
“Where does a 30-something journalist in Turkey get the authority to control what people in the United States, and in other countries around the world, can and cannot see on social media platforms?,” AFL wondered rhetorically.
“And seemingly like so many of her peers, what is [her] solution to ‘misinformation’? More censorship and more control.”
A Belgium-based member of the “independent” fact-checking cohort “hates conservatives and their viewpoints, routinely mocking any conservative on his own Twitter feed,” AFL also noted.
“Their claim of independence is farcical. Independent means free from the influence of others. But as we will see, all fact checkers claim the credential of [the International Fact-Checking Network], a Poynter-backed organization that gives them their ‘legitimacy’ to influence content moderation online,” AFL claimed.
Poynter indicates that the IFCN was launched “in the global fight against misinformation.”
As alluded to above, it seems that, in general, those lamenting misinformation are often spreading it.
Given the revelations that have made it into the public domain, particularly in the last year or two, the Fourth Estate, traditionally meant to be a government watchdog rather than a lapdog, thus seems to have fallen into ethical foreclosure.
