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A recent investigation by popular Twitter user Kanekoa the Great revealed that www.Greenmedinfo.com (a free health resource featuring public access to ~85,000 peer-reviewed studies supporting the science of natural health), was targeted in 2020 as one of 34 identified “disinformation-hosting websites” (along with other popular, independent media sites) by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK-based think tank headquartered in London, claiming to specialize in “research and policy advice on hate, extremism, and disinformation,” and founded by the highly influential British publishing magnate Lord Weidenfeld in 2006, also an honorary member of the Club of Rome.
Implicated in ISD's elaborate censorship scheme are NewsGuard and The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Additionally, and thanks to the investigative work of Kris Ruby, CEO of Ruby Media Group, whistleblower allegations have surfaced that Twitter deployed censorship lists provided to them by CCDH to algorithmically identify, experiment on, target, and suppress countless Twitter users, and which may still be active today. Pending proper investigations, there are far more questions than answers.
We implore Jim Jordan, chairman of both the Committee on the Judiciary and the Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and Elon Musk, to inquire further on these matters and address them accordingly.
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According to InfluenceWatch, ISD was founded in 2006 by members of the Club of Three, a forum founded by political leaders and power brokers from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Closely partnered with both Big Tech companies, the US Department of State, and the United Nations, ISD’s funding comes primarily from NGOs such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the United States Institute for Peace, the National Democratic Institute, and the Open Society Foundations.
For more details on ISD's activities, view the Thinking Coalition analysis of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue's Network, described as an "unhealthy alliance between Big Tech, government agencies (mainly security related) and oligarch foundations who cooperate in order to shut down dissent."
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While ISD Co-Founder and CEO, Sasha Havlicek (also former Under Secretary for Diplomacy and Foreign Affairs, U.S. Department of State and member of the European Council on Foreign Relations), is its most visible spokesperson today, ISD's original board is still visible on WayBackMachine from 2010 and features some of the most powerful individuals in the United Kingdom, and for that matter the world, including General the Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, former Chief of the General Staff (1994-1997) and Chief of the Defence Staff (1997-2001), and former director of N M Rothschild and Sons:
- Lord George Weidenfeld - President
- Michael Lewis - Chairman
- Sir Ronald Grierson
- General the Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank
- Baronness Helena Kennedy
- Lord Turner of Ecchinswell
- Lord Simon of Highbury CBE
Kanekoa's discovery is timely, given ISD’s crucial role in publicly endorsing the UK-based “dark money” front group in 2019 , The Center for Countering Hate (CCDH), and CCDH’s subsequent, multi-year long vendetta to remove www.Greenmedinfo.com and its founder Sayer Ji from the internet by placing him on its notorious “Disinformation Dozen” digital hit list.
Sasha Havlicek, CEO of Institute for Strategic Dialogue, endorses CCDH in 2019.
Another indication of CCDH CEO's ideological close ties to ISD is his association with the NGO-funded Inter-Narratives project (formerly known as Reset Narratives), of which he is the topmost featured 'curator.' We can thank another citizen investigator on Twitter for bringing this information to the public's attention. To get a flavor of the kind of work Inter-Narratives does, it hosted an event in July, 2023 titled, "Attack, Engage or Ignore? The role of ‘the enemy’ in climate narratives," which characterized those holding opposing views as 'the enemy,' Inter-Narratives describes itself as a community, with 120 stakeholders, some of which include some of the most powerful NGOs in the world, such as the World Wildlife Foundation, GreenPeace, the National Trust, and both CCDH and one of its primary funders, the Barrow Cadbury Trust.
ISD's related work on "Countering Narratives," it says targets hate speech and extremism, include a report titled "Countering the Appeal of Extremism Online," hosted on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's own website here. Clearly this is not regular 'story telling,' but narratives used as instruments of psychological warfare.
ISD's ties to CCDH may be especially relevant to the three concurrent proceedings happening right now: 1) a Congressional investigation into CCDH 2) a lawsuit alleging Fraud, Abuse, and Breach of Contract against CCDH by Elon Musk 3) a FOIA-driven investigation into CCDH by American First Legal.
All three of these efforts are focused on who is influencing and funding CCDH, and what role(s) it played in the complex and highly coordinated malign, foreign influence operation that suppressed the First Amendment rights of Americans (and other laws) during the declared pandemic.
ISD also played a notorious role in the sequela of targeting and deplatforming of www.NaturalNews.com, starting with its June 2020 publication of a report titled: Anatomy of a Disinformation Empire: Investigating NaturalNews. NaturalNews.com was one of the first, 100% reader supported websites to undergo highly coordinated censorship and deplatforming on the internet across all Big Tech platforms; a natural health advocacy site still banned on Twitter and Facebook, and whose links are deemed "harmful" and "dangerous" when clicked on.
In ISD’s May 12th, 2020 report titled, “Far-right exploitation of Covid-19,” subtitled “ISD and BBC Click Investigation,” the organization bills itself as “Powering solutions to extremism and polarisation," and places www.GreenMedInfo.com #6 on a list of 34 sites provided to them by Newsguard, an organization heavily criticized for its Orwellian policies towards organizations that publish information divergent from or contrary to its extremist ideologies, and who was recently called out by the CFO of Florida, Jimmy Patronis, for attempting to roll out the equivalent of a social credit system for private entities, aimed at deplatforming and debanking those who do not conform to their narrative and agenda. Newsguard also works with the Pentagon-State Department, winning a $25,000 contract in 2020 for"detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation," and receiving an additional 750k contract from the Dept. of Defense in Sept. 2021, with one of its specialities being AI-driven surveillance and analysis of "disinformation campaigns," tracking what it calls "Misinformation Fingerprints."
As a result of its surveillance of the Facebook activity of these 34 websites using CrowdTangle, ISD claims to have discovered the following:
“ISD researchers found that 34 known disinformation-hosting websites gathered the staggeringly high volume of 80 million interactions on public Facebook between January and April, 2020. For context, in the same time period, posts linking to the WHO’s website received 6.2 million interactions, with the website of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) receiving 6.4 million interactions through posts on public Facebook."
Moreover, ISD claims to have found “disinformation and weaponized hate” in “far-right circles” on Facebook attempting to “exploit the pandemic online” by discussing or referencing the following topics which ISD described as “unfounded” :
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“[the] virus as a tool of social control”
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“[there existing] a purposeful plot to kill off certain populations
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“[the virus as] a means to make money for these individuals and their institutions
Also highlighted in their report as a cause of great concern:
“a marked increase in conversations within far right circles about so- called ‘elites’ including Bill Gates, George Soros, the Rothschilds and Jeff Bezos and false information about their role in the creation or spread of the virus.”
Clearly, given that ISD’s funders include Bill Gates, George Soros, one of its board members was former director of the N M Rothschild & Sons, and that Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is responsive to ISD, their “concern” over increased discussion amongst the public on the role these powerful people play in their lives as far as COVID lockdown and associated policies go as “misinformation” or “disinformation” appears disingenuous.
Perhaps more concerning is how these extremely powerful individuals have direct access, and are able to collaborate with and influence the intelligence and "counterterrorism" apparatus of the States they partner with, and that their 'reports' and definitions of 'disinformation' and 'extremism' are adopted, wholesale by these governmental agencies, resulting in everyday citizens being defined as potential domestic security or even terrorist threats simply for questioning authority, or diverging or challenging orthodox narratives related to COVID-19 origins, or the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines.
ISD report stated that it shared its findings with Facebook, who responded that they had removed a number of the links shared by BBC Click for violating their policies on hate speech and the spread of harmful misinformation.
It is not clear that Facebook removed them in response to ISD/BBC’s inquiry, or simply communicated that those links were already removed; nevertheless, this direct channel of communication between a Big Tech platform and an NGO funded by billionaires and the US government is highly concerning.
Moreover, ISD’s report shows that BBC – a legacy media outlet – may have been in violation of anti-Trust laws by using Facebook for ‘censorship by proxy’ vis-a-vis suppressing competing independent media outlets. The list provided by Newsguard to ISD as a de facto blacklist list included the following domains, many of which are focused on disseminating information on natural health, and yet all were lumped into the "Far Right," "Extremist" banner, ostensibly to justify censoring them:
BBC, in fact, founded Trusted News Initiative (TNI), which according to their website, includes the following media outlets across the entire EU, North America, and Asian Pacific:
“AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.”
TNI is facing a lawsuit by RFK Jr. and plaintiffs Dr. Mercola, Erin Elizabeth, and Ty and Charlene Bollinger, who are included in CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” hit list, for allegedly creating an “early warning system” that Big Tech firms used to censor content they purported to be “misinformation” or “disinformation,” effectively eliminating their growing list of competitors who collectively (before widespread deplatforming starting in 2020) had orders of magnitude greater reach on social media than all legacy media outlets, put together.
It should be noted that the true number of how many independent voices were silenced during the course of the declared pandemic by organizations like ISD, working in collusion with Big Tech and other stakeholders, may never be known, but it may turn out that tens of thousands of additional website domains were black-listed, and hundreds of millions of individuals silenced, as a result.
Given that the types of information suppressed concerning mRNA jabs, or the real-world impacts of COVID lockdowns on the physical and financial well-being of those affected, were of life and death significance, these censorship regimes likely affected, and in some cases, violated human rights, with informed consent/medical choice being top of the list.
TNI founder, BBC, also has close ties to The Center for Countering Digital Hate. One of CCDH’s top funders includes the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, a UK-based charity founded in 1972 whose trustees include the former General-Director of the BBC Tony Hall, Baron Hall of Birkenhead, and Sir Anthony Saltz, former Board of Governor of the BBC. On Oct. 4th, 2021, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation gave CCDH a £100,000 grant earmarked for "Growing the digital presence and impact of Center for Countering Digital Hate." [Source: GrantNav].
Thanks to the work of Matt Taibbi, and other investigative reporters and citizen journalists, we now know that TNI is a major media player in a "Vast Censorship Enterprise,” of which ISD, CCDH also play major roles.
One thing, however, that was not revealed by Matt Taibbi, or any of the TwitterFiles journalists thus far, was the true extent to which this Censorship Industrial Complex penetrated the AI-driven censorship algorithms that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of social media users around the world were subject to. And moreover, how organizations like CCDH colluded with Twitter by providing these censorship word lists.
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We only know about this, thanks to the remarkable investigative work of Kris Ruby, in a report titled “Artificial Intelligence on Twitter: An inside look at how Twitter used big data and artificial intelligence to moderate content,” published on Dec. 26, 2022.
Tellingly, Ruby writes:
“While much of the conversation around the so-called Twitter Files releases have focused on how government agencies sought to pressure Twitter into moderating content on its platform, the role of artificial intelligence has remained widely misunderstood."
Social Media content decisions today are aided by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing, which helps facilitate moderation at scale. I spoke with a former Twitter Data Scientist, who previously worked at Twitter doing machine learning in US Elections and political misinformation on AI and machine learning. The former employee consented to this interview on the condition of anonymity.
Twitter created a data science team that was focused on combatting U.S. political misinformation. This new division was created after the 2016 election. The team was comprised of data scientists who frequently corresponded with Trust and Safety at Twitter as well as third party government agencies including The CDC to identify alleged political misinformation. Content moderation and Machine Learning at Twitter was directly influenced by third party government agencies, academic researchers, and Trust and Safety.
The Ruby Files reveals an inside look into how Twitters’ machine learning detected for political misinformation, and the word lists used in natural language processing.
I was granted access to internal Twitter documents by a former employee. These documents showed examples of words that were flagged for automated and manual removal by Twitter.
These company documents have never been previously published anywhere else. What follows is that discussion.”
Here is the executive summary of her article:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
ALGORITHMIC POLITICAL BIAS. Political bias was exhibited in Twitter’s training dataset in the US Political Misinformation Data Science division that monitored election content. Multiple independent Data Scientists who reviewed the dataset confirmed this to be true.
UNINFORMED CONSENT FOR MACHINE LEARNING EXPERIMENTATION ON USERS. Twitter ran numerous Machine Learning experiments on users at any given time. Some of these experiments were ethically questionable. Users did not give consent, nor were they told that any of the experiments were happening. It is reasonable for a company to do A/B testing or Machine Learning experimentation as long as the process is transparent and users can opt-in or opt-out and know what they are participating in.
LACK OF PARAMETER TRANSPARENCY. A former Twitter Data Scientist alleged that the n-gram parameters pertaining to US political misinformation were changed weekly at Twitter. How often are these parameters being updated, clean, and retrained now? If any of this algorithmic filtering is live on the platform, censorship will still be in effect on Twitter. Since the n-gram technology used by Twitter was referred to by Musk as primitive, what new Machine Learning system & technology will Twitter replace this with to incorporate deep learning to prevent word filtering mistakes that often result in suspensions due to lack of context?
NO CLEAR LINE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AGENCIES & BIG TECH AI. The CDC, government agencies, and academic researchers worked directly with Trust and Safety at Twitter to propose word lists to the Data Science team. This team was responsible for monitoring US political misinformation at Twitter. Should The CDC and government agencies have such a large role in the oversight and implementation of the algorithmic work of engineers and data scientists at Twitter? Data Scientists assumed that what they were told to do was accurate because it came directly from trusted experts. Are data scientists being put in a compromising position by government authorities?
Highlights of her report include the following findings:
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Misinformation included real information.
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Censoring political opponents by proxy
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Twitter was complicit in a crime.
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Whoever controls the model (algorithm) controls the narrative
Ruby's report is long, well-documented, deeply insightful, and well worth reading and disseminating as widely as possible. But for the purposes of our report today, one key disclosure we wish to highlight is that the whistleblowing data scientists Ruby interviewed revealed that among the outside organizations providing censorship word lists to Twitter was “The Center for Countering Digital Hate”:
Kristin Ruby: “What are some examples of outside groups you worked with or that provided input?”
Whistleblower: "CDC. Academic Researchers. Center for Countering Digital Hate. FBI. Law Enforcement. There were others. I don’t know all of them.” [my emphasis added]
One of the conclusions of Ruby’s groundbreaking report is that, “Machine Learning was weaponized by Twitter to dismantle the core tenants of free speech in America.”
Given the ongoing Congressional inquiry into CCDH by Jim Jordan, chair of the Committee of the Judiciary and Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, it is essential that we discover what communications and/or contracts occurred between foreign, dark money organizations and Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech companies, and how exactly and to what extent the civil liberties of countless US citizens were violated, or are still being violated by their malign influence.
Please share this article with others, especially affected parties, or those who are conducting these inquiries and investigations and who may not yet know the relevant details contained within this article. Find me on Twitter, Telegram, and various other platforms here. Make sure to get our daily updated via the Greenmedinfo.com newsletter: www.Greenmedinfo.com/newsletter and to follow our work at Stand for Health Freedom (501c4)
If you appreciate independant journalism, please consider supporting the work of Kristin Ruby, Kaneoka The Great, and Greenmedinfo.com (details below).
Additional Calls to Action
- If you are concerned about the role of foreign influence operations like CCDH in the US, and wish to support those whose protected speech has been quashed, please consider taking part in our More Than 12 campaign on Stand for Health Freedom (501c4).
- Please remember to stay abreast of our updates on our free Greenmedinfo.com newsletter. It's free and you can subscribe here to either the daily or weekly email.
- Familiarize yourself with RFK Jr's presidential campaign and his commitment to hold accountable CCDH, the government, pharmaceutical companies, and the media at www.Kennedy24.com
- Greenmedinfo.com has been under unprecedented attack over the past three years, and is now in a stage of rebuilding and shoring up its security. Please contribute in any of 4 easy ways at our REBUILD GreenMedInfo.com campaign. Thank you in advance for your support!
- Have a tip or testimonial? Are you a citizen investigator who has additional information on CCDH's shadowy funding network? Please email us at [email protected]
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