Twitter’s decision came after close collaboration with a deeply controversial U.S. and Australian government-funded think tank that has been denounced by Australia’s former ambassador in Beijing as “the architect of the China threat theory in Australia.”
by Alan Macleod
Part 3 - Big tech and the military industrial complex
While the exposure of minor Chinese manipulation of social media has made headlines, the news that a senior Twitter executive was unmasked as an officer in a British Army brigade dedicated to online and psychological operations was roundly ignored. Only one mainstream outlet in the West covered the story at all, and that journalist was forced out only a few weeks later.
Despite supposed foreign interference in social media becoming the number one story between 2016-2019, with many, including Hillary Clinton herself, arguing that Russia was responsible for Trump’s victory, concrete evidence of Western infiltration of these companies has garnered very little attention.
For example, Reddit’s Director of Policy is Jessica Ashooh, formerly a deputy director at the Atlantic Council, a NATO-cutout that also decides for Facebook what posts are verified and what posts are fake news and deleted. The Atlantic Council’s board is a who’s who of ex-Bush administration officials and CIA heads, including Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.
45 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook, with similar numbers in other countries as well, meaning it has essentially become a global public utility. Thus, the CIA effectively decides what you and billions of others see – and don’t see – in your news feeds.
Google, too, is rushing to partner with the national security state; in fact, it is a major part of its business model. “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century,” wrote Google executives Eric Schmidt and Larry Cohen in their book, The New Digital Age, “technology and cyber-security companies [like Google] will be to the twenty-first.” Their book was heartily endorsed by Atlantic Council director Henry Kissinger.
The latest mass deletion of accounts will likely do nothing to assuage critics of online censorship who note that it always appears that big tech companies can only find evidence of online manipulation coming from exactly the countries that the United States is currently attacking, and never itself or its allies.
Washington is currently ramping up hostilities with China, the Pentagon’s 2021 budget explicitly asking for extra funding to be ready for an aggressive war in Asia.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have attacked each other for being “soft” on China, with both parties seemingly trying to shift the blame onto Beijing for what has become one of the worst COVID-19 responses in the world, leading to over 116,000 deaths. As a result, public opinion on China has quickly soured; only nine years ago, Americans had a strongly positive view of the country. Today 66 percent dislike China and around 80 percent are ready to embrace a full-scale economic war against it.
If conflict with the world’s most populous nation is to occur, the information war must be won first. It seems that it is well on the way to being achieved.
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