Yaccarino, in her conversation with the Financial Times, appeared initially to champion the concept of free speech, only to subsequently divert the discussion towards other organizational aspects. This oscillation between defending free speech and avoiding the subject has drawn scrutiny, raising questions about the possible politicization of free speech and the role of tech giants in shaping public discourse.

“How is freedom of speech politicized?,” Yaccarino asked during the interview. “It is one of the foundational core values of what this country was formed on, so I don’t really understand how that’s a political issue. I think that would be something everyone, no matter what your opinions are, would agree on.”

But Yaccarino also during the interview repeated the contentious phrase “freedom of speech, not reach,” something that she has already been widely criticized for, as it suggests that X will have control over which voices are heard and which are not.

Yaccarino also repeated the equally contentions idea of X restricting what is “lawful but awful” speech and the interview reveals that X is “successfully” restricting such speech. Who is to decide what constitutes “awful?”

Yaccarino’s conflicting statements have come amidst rising debates over censorship and the rights of individuals to express their viewpoints openly.

Elon Musk, the tech magnate known for his eclectic political affiliations, previously vocalized support for Democrats but has been seen mingling with prominent Republicans like Tucker Carlson lately. The apparent change in Musk’s affiliations has heightened discussions around whether freedom of speech is increasingly becoming a politicized concept, a question Yaccarino claims she struggles to process.

When questioned about the establishment of a “content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” a proposal made by Musk during his initial tenure, Yaccarino responded with unfamiliarity, stating, “That is news to me. You’re the first person that mentioned that.”

This controversy emerged shortly after Yaccarino’s reputedly fruitful with ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt. The ADL has been calling for censorship on the platform and Elon Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for causing what he says is a drop in 60% of its advertising revenue after the ADL asked advertisers to suspend advertising on the platform.

Both Yaccarino and Greenblatt have publicly described their meeting as productive. Yaccarino clarifies, “The issue that’s being debated is not about supporting ADL’s mission to fight antisemitism. We’re all in on fighting antisemitism. The issue is about the ADL misrepresenting or not addressing the progress that we’ve made in our ongoing efforts.”

In anticipation of the upcoming 2024 US presidential election, Yaccarino is intensifying efforts to guard against manipulation and the prominence of inauthentic accounts, whilst maintaining stringent surveillance of the platform to thwart emerging threats.

(Article cross-posted from Reclaim The Net)

This unelected intergovernmental organization, which wields significant influence over its 193 member states, recently published the final draft of its Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.

The final draft contains several agreements from heads of state and government to crack down on lawful speech. Additionally, it contains pledges from these heads of state and government to back two instruments that will give the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) enhanced powers to target “misinformation” and build out its surveillance networks.

These instruments, the international pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005), have been in the works since 2021 and despite facing major pushback, are on track to be completed by May 2024.

The final draft of this political declaration is being developed for the UN’s High-Level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response which will take place on September 20, 2023 in New York. The political declaration outlined in this draft will be finalized at this meeting.

While UN political declarations aren’t usually legally binding, they do wield significant legal influence. According to the UN, declarations “represent the dynamic development of international legal norms and reflect the commitment of states to move in certain directions, abiding by certain principles.”

The proposed speech crackdowns are outlined in several sections of the final draft of this political declaration.

In section OP35, the heads of state and government agree to “take measures to counter and address the negative impacts of health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatization, especially on social media platforms” and counter “vaccine hesitancy in the context of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.” Additionally, section OP42 includes an agreement to combat “misinformation.”

The UN member states back the pandemic treaty in section OP15 and agree to encourage the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (the group that’s responsible for drafting and negotiating the pandemic treaty) to conclude their negotiations on the “WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response” (the full name of the WHO’s pandemic treaty).

Not only do UN member states give explicit backing to the pandemic treaty and push for it to be finalized but they also encourage the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) to prioritize the “need for equity.” Equity is framed by its proponents as something that encourages fairness but critics have warned that equity policies can lead to bias and the injection of “radical ideology.”

The support for the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) is contained in section OP16 of the final draft. This section encourages the working group that’s focused on these amendments to continue its work with respect to the intended finalization date of May 2024.

This political declaration is one of the many ways the UN is tightening its grip on speech. This year alone, it has started building a “digital army” to fight against “deadly disinformation”, encouraged people to snitch on each other for “hate speech”, and claimed that censoring “disinformation” and “hate speech” will protect “free speech.”

The UN has also consulted with several governments and blocs on their censorship work. Specifically, it has attended multiple “disinformation sessions” with a UK government censorship agency and held discussions with the European Union on how to address “disinformation” on digital platforms.

Plugging in a high-ranking member of the globalist elite cabal as CEO should be a crystal clear warning that Twitter is a trojan horse. I don’t care if Tucker Carlson is putting his show there. I wouldn’t care of Donald Trump started Tweeting again. I do not trust Elon Musk and I definitely do not trust Twitter to be the venue for the free expression of controversial ideas. Here is one of the reasons why, detailed by Tom Parker at Reclaim The Net…

Twitter’s likely new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, a World Economic Forum Executive Chair and NBCUniversal advertising executive, recently tried to get Twitter owner Elon Musk to commit to self-censorship and urged him to allow advertisers to feel that they can “influence” Twitter.

During an April 2023 interview with Musk, Yaccarino told Musk that advertisers “need to feel there’s an opportunity for them to influence what you’re building.”

She then proceeded to pressure him to self-censor by not tweeting after 3 am. Musk agreed to try to tweet less after 3 am but partially pushed back against the attempt to influence his speech.

“If I were to say, ‘Yes, you can influence me,’ that would be wrong,” Musk said. “That would be very wrong because that would be a diminishment of freedom of speech.”

Yaccarino disagreed, claiming that “influencing” is “more of an open feedback loop” for advertisers to “help develop Twitter into a place where they will be excited about investing” in areas such as “product development, ad safety, and content moderation.”

However, Musk continued to push back:

“It’s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places but it is not cool to try to say what Twitter will do and if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it, but freedom of speech is paramount.”

Despite Musk making it clear that he felt it was wrong for advertisers to try and influence Twitter, Yaccarino kept trying to press the point.

She asked Musk to recommit to reinstating an “influence council” that allowed advertisers to have “recurring access” to Twitter leadership.

“I would be wary of that creating a backlash among the public,” Musk warned.

Prior to being tapped as the upcoming Twitter CEO, Yaccarino was the Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal. She has previously served as NBCUniversal’s Chairman of Advertising & Client Partnership and President of Cable Entertainment & Digital Advertising Sales during her almost 12-year tenure with the company.

She also has several ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF), a global group that consistently advocates for the censorship of “misinformation” and supports mass data collection.

In her LinkedIn profile, Yaccarino notes that she’s been a WEF Executive Chair since January 2019. Currently, she’s the Chairman of the WEF’s Taskforce on Future of Work. She also sits on the WEF’s Media, Entertainment, and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee. Additionally, she is highly engaged with the WEF’s Value in Media initiative. Yaccarino has spoken at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting about shaping the future of media, entertainment, and culture.

Article cross-posted from Reclaim The Net. Header image CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

Among the various censorship requests they made were some that called on deletion of Tweets that accurately claimed the so-called “vaccines” did not offer protection against contracting Covid-19 and did not prevent infected people from spreading the disease. Those realities were already acknowledged by the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, as well as the Big Pharma companies themselves. For them to go after those facts so fervently tells us beyond a shadow of a doubt that Big Pharma relies on an ignorant populace. They cared only about shifting the narrative to back their lies. Moreover, they preyed on uninformed people to keep their agenda moving forward which is why suppressing facts was necessary.

On one of today’s News Clips for The JD Rucker Show, I broke down the hideous implications of this type of censorship. It’s bad enough that they were going after critics and those who were spreading debatable information, but for them to demand suppression of verified and widely accepted facts tells us they knew their narrative was false. Here’s an article by Tom Parker over at Reclaim The Net that breaks down the details of today’s drop…

Campaign Funded by Pfizer and Moderna Lobbyists Sent Twitter Weekly Lists of Tweets to Censor

Some of the content targeted by the campaign included articles that were “using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy.”

The Public Good Projects (PGP), a nonprofit that has developed several projects to fight so-called Covid “misinformation,” received $1,275,000 from the Pfizer and Moderna lobbying group, Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), to create a content moderation campaign that influenced Twitter’s Covid misinformation rules. As part of this campaign, PGP sent Twitter lobbyists and content moderators weekly emails containing lists of tweets to censor.

Journalist Lee Fang published one of the weekly emails that Twitter received from PGP as part of the latest release of the Twitter Files — collections of internal Twitter communications that have exposed the censorship relationships Twitter had with government agencies and other powerful groups before Elon Musk took over.

The email shows Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, sharing “this week’s misinfo report” from PGP. The February 24, 2022 email included a list of top trends the PGP had seen during the week and two attached lists. According to Fang, one of the lists contained tweets the PGP wanted Twitter to take down and the other list contained tweets that it wanted Twitter to verify.

Despite flagging two trends in this weekly misinfo report, the PGP admitted that articles related to the first trend “do not contain misinformation themselves but are using the news to further prove the CDC is untrustworthy.”

The PGP also acknowledged that the second trending article it flagged, which described a German health insurance company official suggesting that reports of healthcare visits for vaccine side effects may be severely undercounted, “is difficult to fact check because it does note that this data includes any side effect, not just serious side effects.”

Fang said many of the PGP’s emails to Twitter focused on independent news outlet ZeroHedge which was banned from Twitter in January 2020 and reinstated in June 2020.

Fang also noted that this campaign flagged a tweet from senior Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist Stephanie Seneff that questioned vaccine passports on the basis that vaccinated and unvaccinated people have “roughly the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the virus.”

Additionally, Fang shared a screenshot of a BIO tax form that revealed part of the funding ($883,000) it provided to PGP for this campaign.

The PGP campaign is called “Stronger” and, according to Fang, it worked with Twitter to craft the platform’s content moderation rules around Covid misinformation, helped Twitter create content moderation bots, and helped Twitter select which public health accounts got verification.

Stronger says its goal is to “stop the spread of misinformation” and its website contains a page that encourages people to flag misinformation to Twitter and other platforms.

This page also contains a form for users to submit alleged misinformation to Stronger.

“Paste the link to a post, account, or website below, and the Stronger team will report it to the appropriate platform,” the form states.

Previous campaigns from the Public Good Project have involved recruiting pro-vaccine keyboard warriors to mass report anti-vaccine social media posts.

Fang’s revelations are the latest of several examples of those affiliated with Pfizer pushing for the censorship of content that questions or criticizes Covid vaccines.

Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb complained to Twitter in August 2021 that it was promoting an article from journalist Alex Berenson. A few days after this complaint, Berenson was banned from Twitter. Twitter also censored another tweet after it was flagged by Gottlieb in August 2021.

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s CEO has branded those who share what he deems to be misinformation about vaccines as “criminals.”

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Eric Schmidt, a former Google CEO who has also advised the United States (US) Congress and the White House, has helped to pay the salaries of more than 24 Biden administration officials via donations from his research and investment firm, Schmidt Futures, to the nonprofit research and advocacy organization, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

Schmidt Futures and other organizations help to pay the salaries of these officials by providing funding to a “Talent Hub” which is part of a FAS “Day One Project.” This Day One Project runs a FAS “Impact Fellowship” program that places “Impact Fellows” in influential government posts.

Not only has Schmidt Futures contributed to FAS but Schmidt has considerable ties to top FAS leadership and one of the Impact Fellows who was placed in a federal government role was also listed as an adviser to Schmidt Futures.

Additionally, some of the Impact Fellows are placed in federal departments to focus on areas such as clean energy and artificial intelligence (AI) — fields that Schmidt and the ventures he supports have significant investments in.

For example, FAS’s 2021 Annual Report states that some Impact Fellows were “deployed at or being recruited to enter” the Department of Energy “to support the Undersecretary for Science’s office in driving critical market-based efforts to spur a clean energy revolution” and US Citizenship and Immigration Services “to focus on the intersection of immigration policy & artificial intelligence in advancing the nation’s national security and economic growth.”

Schmidt and the ventures he supports have investments in the clean energy companies WattBuy (an energy marketplace) and Amprius (a high-energy battery company) and the AI company Rebellion Defense (which builds mission-focused AI for national defense and security).

And some of these Schmidt-backed companies have ties to the federal government departments where Impact Fellows have been placed. For example, WattBuy has partnered with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Amprius has received a funding grant from the Department of Energy.

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit watchdog organization, reported that Schmidt is “a primary benefactor” of this FAS initiative “that has placed at least 24 fellows in influential government posts, many of which align with Eric Schmidt’s private financial interests.”

According to TTP, two of the fellows placed in the federal government “explicitly identify themselves as Schmidt fellows.”

One Impact Fellow at the Department of Education, John Whitmer, is listed as a “Schmidt Impact Fellow” and an adviser to Schmidt Futures in his speaker bio at the annual Arizona State University and Global Silicon Valley summit.

Another Impact Fellow, Jonathan Lipman, was listed as being deployed to the General Services Administration on March 23 but this listing was removed by March 29. At the same time, Lipman was also working as an Associated Product Manager at Schmidt Futures.

Not only do some of the fellows have ties to Schmidt but Gilman Louie, the Chair of FAS and a member of President Joe Biden’s “Intelligence Advisory Board,” has multiple ties to Schmidt. He was a commissioner at the Schmidt-led National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) and a consultant on the Schmidt-led Defense Innovation Board. Louie is also the current CEO of the Schmidt-supported America’s Frontier Fund.

Additionally, several Schmidt Futures’ executives have ties to the FAS Day One Project. The Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, Tom Kalil, and a former Senior Director at Schmidt Futures, Kumar Garg, both spoke at the Day One Project launch event. The Day One Project website also has a section that highlights posts from Kalil and contains a policy paper that was written by Schmidt Futures employees or fellows and cross-posted to a Schmidt Futures-affiliated website.

Furthermore, Kalil worked as an unpaid consultant in the White House science office for four months in 2021 while also working at Schmidt Futures. He left the White House consultancy role after ethics complaints.

According to POLITICO, members of the Biden administration are “well aware that a significant amount of the money for the salaries of FAS’s fellows” comes from Schmidt Futures and that the organization was “critical to the program to fund administration jobs.”

POLITICO added that Schmidt Futures is so influential at FAS that White House officials sometimes conflate the two organizations and view them as “dual vehicles for the funding of jobs” and other departments and agencies regularly refer to FAS personnel as “Schmidt fellows.”

In an August 2021 internal email from the White House science office’s deputy chief of staff for workforce, Elaine Ho, wrote that the Department of Energy had “secured Schmidt Futures as a funding source” and that she had “already reached out to our contact at FAS/Day One.”

Spokespeople for Schmidt, Schmidt Futures, FAS, and the White House defended the arrangement in statements to POLITICO.

Schmidt’s spokesperson argued that Schmidt “has fully complied with all necessary disclosure requirements” and “is one of many successful executives and entrepreneurs committed to addressing America’s shortcomings in AI and other related areas.”

Schmidt Futures also deemphasized its contributions to the FAS talent fund by describing itself as “just one of 20 organizations or initiatives to contribute,” contending that the funding “is administered by a neutral party to several agencies based on need and Schmidt Futures has no control over specific appointments, policies or agencies that the funding supports,” and suggesting that less than 30% of the total contributions to the FAS Day One Project come from Schmidt Futures.

And the White House spokesperson downplayed the influence of Schmidt on federal policy by asserting that “neither Eric Schmidt nor the Federation of American Scientists exert influence on policy matters” and insisting that the Biden administration enacts “the most stringent ethics guidelines of any administration in history to ensure our policy processes are free from undue influence.”

FAS asserted that it has “strict policies in place to ensure the integrity and independence of the process by mandating a firewall between our 20+ philanthropic funders, including Schmidt Futures, and the federal agencies that solely determine roles and talent placements.”

However, critics of the arrangement argued that Schmidt is trying to influence the federal government in statements to POLITICO.

Katie Paul, the director of TTP, said: “Eric Schmidt appears to be systematically abusing this little-known set of programs to exert his influence in the federal government. The question is, on whose behalf is it? Google, where he’s still a major shareholder? Is it to advance his own portfolio of investments–artificial intelligence and bioengineering or energy? The public has a right to know who is paying their public servants and why.”

Alex Engler, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in AI policy, added: “Schmidt is clearly trying to influence AI policy to a disproportionate degree of any person I can think of. We’ve seen a dramatic increase in investment toward advancing AI capacity in government and not much in limiting its harmful use.”

These revelations about Schmidt helping to fund Biden administration officials’ salaries follow a previous report of Schmidt helping to pay Biden White House staff salaries earlier this year.

These reports are just some of the many examples of the former Google CEO attempting to influence the federal government and federal laws in areas where he or his companies have investments.

Between August 2018 and October 2021, Schmidt chaired the NSCAI. This commission made recommendations to the President and Congress to “advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.” It also proposed legislation that later became law and resulted in the government investing billions of taxpayer dollars in the AI industry.

While serving on this commission, Schmidt and Schmidt-linked firms made more than 50 investments in AI companies and more than half a dozen investments into national-security startups that sell machine-learning technologies back to the government.

Several members of Biden’s transition team, who were appointed while Schmidt was chair of the NSCAI, also came from Rebellion Defense (the AI company that Schmidt has invested in).

After the NSCAI ceased operations, Schmidt used the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to continue his advocacy for close ties between technology firms and the federal government by telling Big Tech to get involved with national defense.

Article cross-posted from Reclaim The Net.

The digital ID pilot is called the “Known Traveller Digital Identity” (KTDI) program and lists the World Economic Forum (an international organization that aims to “shape global, regional and industry agendas”), the Government of Canada, and others as partners.

Lewis was given the information by Transport Canada in its response to an Inquiry of Ministry – an official request for information that MPs can present in Canada’s House of Commons.

The Inquiry of Ministry reveals that Transport Canada has already spent $649,501 on the KTDI program which includes $428,671 on salaries and $220,830 on non-salaries.

The Inquiry of Ministry also provided a breakdown of this non-salaries figure which includes travel costs of $38,650, informatics costs of $177,351, and software licenses of $7,902. However, the sum of these figures was $223,903 – $3,073 more than the total non-salaries figure listed in the Inquiry of Ministry.

In addition to listing these expenditure figures, the Inquiry of Ministry also claims that the KTDI program has numerous “envisioned benefits” and that “neither the Department nor any project partners have been warned of any risks related to participating in the pilot.”

The Inquiry of Ministry also admits that the KTDI pilot program was deferred because of the pandemic but despite this deferral, the 2021 budget has still allocated $105.3 million to Transport Canada over five years, starting in 2021-22, to “collaborate with international partners to further advance the KTDI pilot project.”

In a tweet about this Inquiry of Ministry, Lewis wrote: “The gov’t finally admitted that they have a $105.3 million contract with the World Economic Forum for the Known Traveler Digital ID…It’s no longer a conspiracy theory – it’s a contractual fact!”

We obtained a copy of Leslyn Lewis’s Inquiry of Ministry for you here.

Lewis is one of the few Canadian MPs to speak out against this KTDI program and has vowed to end this and all other digital ID programs in Canada.

While the Canadian government is allocating $105.3 million to this KTDI pilot program and claiming that it has been deferred, one of the other partners in this project, the Dutch government, is claiming that the KTDI pilot program has been “paused indefinitely” because of “changed priorities.”

• Related:  Canada is on the brink of a digital ID future

Although this KTDI program is paused, both Canada and the World Economic Forum have big plans for digital ID and other forms of digital surveillance.

Canada is working on a separate federal digital ID program and exploring a central bank digital currency (CBDC). In addition to these official digital surveillance proposals, Royal Canadian Mounted Police were accused of using malware to spy on lawmakers and the Canadian government even tracked citizens through a federal weather app.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum has pushed for digital ID programs around the world, suggested turning heartbeats into digital IDs, and proposed a digital ID system that monitors online behavior, purchases, biometrics, and more. Outside of digital ID, the World Economic Forum has shared ideas on a personal carbon allowance surveillance system and its website has suggested there are “rational” reasons to microchip children.

Despite Transport Canada’s minimization of any potential risks associated with its KTDI program, the Canadian government’s actions in relation to other surveillance systems tell a different story. The government has been sued for its imposition of a vaccine passport app, with the lawsuit alleging that the app violates Canadian’s charter rights. Additionally, lawmakers have said the vaccine passport is about tracking, not health and citizens who refuse to use the app have been fined.

Yet, proponents of digital ID in Canada insist that criticism of these schemes is “misinformation.”

Article cross-posted from Reclaim The Net.