The Government Funded Group Pushing Facebook Censorship

Back in 2018, thousands independent media Facebook pages were removed in what is often referred to in indie-media as 'The Great Purge." This moment caused an uproar in the war against independent media, one that increased with the COVID pandemic.

At the time of The Great Purge, my inbox flooded with messages as friends and other Facebook page admins began asking me if we lost anything or when I thought we were going to be next. To think a business I had spent 10 years building (at the time) could be erased instantly because 'someone said so' was a bit scary.

I let the thought move through my mind and decided to keep focusing. I can't control what Facebook, YouTube or Google does to our business. All I could do was stay grounded in our thoughts and continue producing quality, neutral, conscious media.

Beyond all the political pressure Facebook has always received to stop fake news, which does exist by the way, to be receiving, I think many people have often wondered what exactly goes on behind the scenes when it comes to censorship campaigns at Big Tech. Thankfully, the Twitter Files are providing proof for many to wake up to the reality of this, and how governments are typically at the center of it all.

But beyond governments are powerful special interest groups.

One Group That Guides Facebook Censorship

Enter The Atlantic Council (TAC).

According to a Google Search,

TAC is an American think tank in the field of international affairs. Founded in 1961, it provides a forum for international political, business, and intellectual leaders. It manages ten regional centers and functional programs related to international security and global economic prosperity.

Sounds nice, but then again so do many things that have profit and authoritarian control driven intentions. Take Monsanto for example, here is an explanation of what they do according to a Monsanto rep.

Monsanto is a global modern agriculture company. We develop products and tools to help farmers around the world grow crops while using energy, water, and land more efficiently. We believe innovation has the potential to bring humanity’s needs in balance with the resources of our planet.

A look into what Monsanto really does might reveal such things as deceptive science to hide their harming and destroying nature en masse. Poisoning the masses and feeding them a genetically experimental food that in many studies shows dangers.

The point is, we have to look a little more closer at corporations, and not take their carefully crafted public statements as truth.

So who exactly are The Atlantic Council? And are they actually helping Facebook decide who to censor? Good questions. Let's begin by looking at who funds TAC.

Here are a few donors according to TAC's website. They include the US and foreign government agencies as well as prominent companies and figures tied to shadow government activity.

HSBC Holdings plc
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Google Inc.
Foreign & Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom
Lockheed Martin Corporation
The Coca-Cola Company
Chevron
Bahaa Hariri (prominent Lebanese billionaire)
United States Army
United States Chamber of Commerce
United States Marine Corps
United States Navy

Below is a recent tweet from Daniel McAdams, the Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, outlining the funding of The Atlantic Council.

Is this a private entity? pic.twitter.com/5oGABYjMqz

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) October 12, 2018

Groups like this have often been involved in careful propaganda to gain public acceptance on destructive ideas. Whitewashing wars, creating hatred between nations on the public level, and fostering narratives that lead to wars and conflict. After all, it’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.

In other words, TAC may very well be a propaganda arm for agencies like NATO, the US Government and so forth. This would mean they work to have a hand in controlling the narratives that come out of mainstream media so as to control what the public thinks and discusses. This leads to what the public will ultimately support.

According to Facebook's newsroom, on May 17th, 2018, Facebook announced its partnership with The Atlantic Council to combat 'fake news.'

Today, we’re excited to launch a new partnership with the Atlantic Council, which has a stellar reputation looking at innovative solutions to hard problems.

How did the mainstream media view this partnership with a council such as this? A council backed by the very billionaires and corporations independent media organizations prove fund wars, terrorism, and harm/mislead the public?

“US think tank’s tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media" - Reuters

"Facebook partners with Atlantic Council to improve election security" - The Hill

"Facebook Partners With the Atlantic Council to Fight Election Propaganda" - Fortune

Everything points to 'fake news' and 'propaganda.' The narratives that began the moment Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. Interestingly, incredibly levels of censorship began in 2017, eventually costing our business 80% of our social media reach and 80% of our revenue.

As the public, we have to ask the question, who's watching these 'watchers?' If mainstream media holds the position of never being purveyors of propaganda, then how do we know who's truly holding them accountable? Well, I guess it's the Atlantic Council. Helping to create narratives that point to independent dissenting media voices as 'propaganda.'

Does TAC Really Create Propaganda? Yes!

How do we know The Atlantic Council creates propaganda themselves? Let's look back to when Ben Nimmo, a one-time NATO press officer, and Atlantic Council board member, stated that grammar mistakes were “proof” that journalists or social media users were paid Kremlin trolls.

Ben Nimmo later went on to create a worldwide fake news story, that the mainstream media heavily ran with, calling a retired British citizen a Russian bot. The British citizen and Twitter user Ian56789 later came out on Sky News showing his real face and identity, proving Ben Nimmo was wrong about him being a Russian bot. Of course, the mainstream media didn't go national with that story. No, they saved going national for their fake news story. And the truth is, most people's perception of the truth was not corrected in the end.

WikiLeaks was critical of Nimmo and The Atlantic Council after that bout of propaganda.

You literally produced, with money from weapons companies and dictatorships, a fake news story that spread all over the world, defaming a very British retiree, who wants to reduce arms company profits, as a Kremlin bot. So who's the paid troll?

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 21, 2018

The point here is, Facebook choosing to work with this group essentially states Facebook is nothing more than a narrative controller just like the mainstream media. TAC on several occasions has created fake news stories, that went viral, about the very political narratives independent media is pointing out as false yet are being called propaganda. So who is truly creating propaganda?

The entity that is making censorship decisions for Facebook, as publicly announced, is the Atlantic Council, a partly US government-funded entity. At what point will the extremely tight ties between these companies and the US government end the "they are private" argument?

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) October 12, 2018

As a side, this is a council that gave its top global leadership awards to former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Seems like they don't mind celebrating corruption.

What Do We Do & The Takeaway

Independent media is crucially important right now. As Facebook, Google and other corporations strip funding from organizations like us, our reach stops, our work slows down, and the propaganda voices of the mainstream get louder. This is the agenda at work.

This is a time for us to come together and truly choose which direction we go forward in. Not only do we have to choose our media carefully, but I believe we must also work to improve our overall sensemaking processes. If we cannot make sense of what is going on around us reliably, how can we make goo decisions?

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