Social Media and Social Control: how Silicon Valley serves the US State Department

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.

by Morgan Artyukhina 

Part 11 - Integrity initiative

Facebook was also a major funder of a British intelligence media front ironically named “Integrity Initiative,” which made it their primary business to push stories hyping up the “Russian threat” to Western Europe.

The outfit got its funding from the U.S. government via the State Department, the British government via the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the NATO alliance, and Facebook. The tech giant gave one of Integrity Initiative’s parent organizations, the Smith Richardson Foundation, £100,000 for research and education activities – a scale of funding only outpaced by the US State Department and NATO’s Public Headquarters Division, which gave the group £250,000 and £168,000, respectively.

Integrity Initiative, like so many of the other outfits discussed here, served as a network for journalists and experts, through whom the funders were able to organize vast disinformation campaigns under the aegis of themselves fighting disinformation.

The organization was essentially forced to shutter its operations following a damning expose by Anonymous and persistent investigative journalists in late 2018 and early 2019, but it had worked on an international scale under the direction of the Scottish think tank, The Institute for Statecraft, a group masquerading as a charity but actually cooperating closely with British intelligence.

In some cases, Integrity Initiative milled out its employees to ostensibly independent reporting outfits, such as the National Endowment for Democracy-funded Bellingcat; in others, it simply formed media disinformation hubs, such as the Open Information Partnership (OIP). 

Sputnik’s Kit Klarenberg revealed that the OIP partnered with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab and others to combat “Kremlin disinformation activities” by protecting “vulnerable audiences” with a slew of ostensible corrections. However, between peddling stories about the mysterious Skripal poisoning and amplifying al-Qaeda’s narrative on alleged Syrian government chemical attacks, the real disinformation activities were clearly the workings of the Integrity Initiative network itself.

Source, links:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/social-media-control-how-silicon-valley-serves-us-state-department/263267/

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