World leaders, journalists, and activists helped fuel anti-American riots around the Middle East Tuesday evening by spreading the false claim by the Palestinian terror group Hamas that an Israeli airstrike killed 500 Palestinian civilians at a hospital in Gaza.
As Breitbart News’ Frances Martel reported, mobs attacked U.S., United Nations, and Israeli embassies throughout the region…
While Russia continues to blast Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for venerating a Nazi combatant in Parliament, Ottawa’s main website designed to fight Russian disinformation hasn’t been updated since the day before the incident.
During a visit to the House of Commons by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, the Speaker of the House led a standing ovation for 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, who had fought for Ukraine against the Russians in the Second World War, and was present at the event.
The Russians made Junior do it!
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has launched a United Nations declaration that calls for action to protect what it calls “information integrity” and to tackle “disinformation.”
Ms. Joly launched the declaration jointly with the Netherlands’ Minister of Foreign Affairs Hanke Bruins Slot, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 20.
Michael Shellenberger explains why climate change is not the end of the world.
The planet is on fire – and it’s all our fault. That has become the abiding mantra of the climate movement. This summer, wildfires from Greece to Hawaii have been portrayed as nature’s punishment for mankind’s polluting activities. Each disaster has been treated as a portent of the End Times. Reining in human development, we’re told, is the only way to avert an even more serious catastrophe. But is there any truth to these apocalyptic claims?
When the US State Department launched its Iran Disinformation Project in the autumn of 2018, it was hailed as a new weapon in the war on hostile foreign propaganda. Staffed by diaspora Iranians and handed an initial $1.5 million of public funding, the online operation was designed to neutralise Iranian “lies” about the West with “real-time counter narratives and truth-telling”. Moreover, it would achieve this by amplifying the voices and actions of “courageous Iranians who reveal the regime for the evil it truly is”. This, at least, was the grand idea.
False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia’s invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.
Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.
“And we all know by now how fringe movements can gain momentum if they are given enough attention and airtime.”
Those are the words of National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Knowledge Keeper and Elder Barbara Cameron, cited last week in the 175-page interim report by Kimberly Murray, Attorney General David Lametti’s Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools.
Recently, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines announced the creation of a new office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). It would encompass “election threat work, essentially looking at foreign influence and interference in elections, but it also deals with disinformation more generally.” Legislation creating the center was passed by Congress and signed into law in 2022.
Although its work nominally deals with disinformation targeting U.S. elections and public opinion within the United States, there are at least two questions that need to be asked: First, is this office essential or duplicative of other ongoing efforts? Second, is this even appropriate work in which the federal government should be engaged?
If legacy news corporations fail to report that large majorities of the American public now view their journalistic product as straight-up propaganda, does that make it any less true?
According to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, 59% of likely voters in the United States view the corporate news media as “truly the enemy of the people.” This is a majority view, held regardless of race: “58% of whites, 51% of black voters, and 68% of other minorities” — all agree that the mainstream media has become their “enemy.”
IN A previous article, I described how raison d’État – the doctrine by which the State acts in its own interests and ignores constraints of law or natural right – frequently comes in a benevolent guise. Segments of the population are conceived of as vulnerable, and the State exerts a ‘power of care’ to improve their well-being. This ultimately serves the purpose of securing their loyalty in the absence of a theological justification for ruling.
Ottawa Police Service stop broadcasting the trial of Detective Helen Grus – despite (or perhaps because of) intense public interest in Canada and worldwide.
Since September 2022, every appearance by Detective Grus before the Internal Trials Officer has been publicly broadcast on the Internet via MicroSoft Teams – but Ottawa Police have now arbitrarily decided to prevent citizens and journalists outside Ottawa from witnessing the upcoming April 28, 2023 motions hearing online.
What are they hiding?
The Biden regime’s abortive Disinformation Governance Board was a sinister initiative from the beginning. The board’s chief public proponents, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the board’s head, Nina Jankowicz, set off alarm bells when they were never entirely forthright or clear about what the board intended to do. Even now, long after the whole thing went sideways on them when they discovered, to their dismay, that many Americans still valued the freedom of speech, they’re trying to cover their tracks
Researchers found that on Twitter, members of Canada’s far left joined those on the far right in embracing pro-Russian messages created by a two-year Russian influence campaign.
While the torrent of leaks about possible interference by China in Canadian politics seems to have ebbed, the uproar over them continues and the federal government presented a budget this week containing some measures it hopes will deal with such meddling.
The budget sets aside 13.5 million Canadian dollars to establish a National Counter-Foreign Interference Office, and it will give the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 50 million dollars to counter harassment of Canadian immigrants by their authoritarian home countries.
Note that this study was government funded.
A State Department-backed “disinformation” tracking group blacklisting conservative news outlets pressured advertising companies to punish websites boosting the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory, which a federal agency now says is the most likely origin of the virus.
The Global Disinformation Index, a British group with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit organizations, has continued to come under fire for feeding conservative news blacklists to advertising companies. This same government-funded entity repeatedly applied pressure on companies to cut ties with websites promoting the once alleged right-wing “conspiracy” that COVID-19 emerged from a lab — which the Energy Department recently concluded is probable based on intelligence.
