Censorship News Stories

Facebook’s inscrutable feed algorithm, which is supposed to calculate which content is most likely to appeal to me and then send it my way ... feels like an obstacle to how I’d like to connect with my friends. British software developer Louis Barclay developed a software ... known as an extension, which can be installed in a Chrome web browser. Christened Unfollow Everything, it would automate the process of unfollowing each of my 1,800 friends, a task that manually would take hours. The result is that I would be able to experience Facebook as it once was, when it contained profiles of my friends, but without the endless updates, photos, videos and the like that Facebook’s algorithm generates. If tools like Unfollow Everything were allowed to flourish, and we could have better control over what we see on social media, these tools might create a more civic-minded internet. Unfortunately, Mr. Barclay was forced by Facebook to remove the software. Large social media platforms appear to be increasingly resistant to third-party tools that give users more command over their experiences. After talking with Mr. Barclay, I decided to develop a new version of Unfollow Everything. I — and the lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia — asked a federal court in California last week to rule on whether users should have a right to use tools like Unfollow Everything that give them increased power over how they use social networks, particularly over algorithms that have been engineered to keep users scrolling on their sites.

Note: The above was written by Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy and director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

Inside the Internet Archive it is as quiet as any library. But the subterranean staff working room in its cavernous San Francisco headquarters feels more like a bunker, the nerve center of an invisible war for the open web. Mark Graham, the director of the archive’s Wayback Machine, which saves billions of snapshots of the web, and his team of engineers have spent most of this month fighting to ensure the site is online and accessible after archive.org was swarmed with traffic by a hacker and forced offline earlier this month. Archive.org and its collections are back online, and the Wayback Machine is searchable again, although ... some features are not available yet. Prior to the hack the archive had been online uninterrupted for nearly 30 years, pursuing its mission to provide open access to knowledge for all. Now that mission has become an increasingly fraught battle, and amongst its staff a siege mentality prevails, the result of not only the monumental cyberattack but also a growing culture of censorship and the restriction of knowledge repositories — like the recent wave of book bannings or the copyright lawsuit that the archive have been fending off for a group of book publishers. “Libraries are under attack,” said Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder. Graham said he sees the recent cyberattack on archive.org and Wayback Machine in the context of hacks on the Calgary Public Library and another targeting the Seattle library system.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship from reliable major media sources.

Stanford University hosted the first major university-sponsored conference where different viewpoints on the appropriate management of pandemics were aired and debated. For much of 2020-2022, critical debate about the wisdom and effectiveness of mandatory Covid policies ... was treated with deep hesitation at best and outright hostility at worst. Professors and students who publicly questioned the mainstream consensus were censored on social media, vilified by their colleagues, and, in the case of Covid vaccine mandates, fired by administrators. Universities failed in their mission to promote academic debate and freedom during the most significant domestic policy issue of this century. During these years, colleagues and students with critical, sceptical viewpoints and countless members of the public [asked] why institutions of higher education were not hosting reasoned debate. The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson for those interested to hear. We need more freedom of expression and academic debate during crises and emergencies, not less. Many are tired of the vapid arguments of ideologues and hungry for a return to the ... academic tradition of debate. By that standard, the Stanford Covid conference was a huge success. The panels addressed key issues regarding the evidence for Covid lockdowns, the management of information and censorship, the impact of lockdowns on the world’s poor, and the contentious question of the origin of the virus. Experts who supported early school closures reasoned together with those who did not. Those who support the lab leak hypothesis argued their case with those who disagree. And they disagreed about the wisdom of social media censorship in a pandemic. In the end, the conference achieved its stated purpose: to bring serious thinkers and scientists into constructive dialogue with one another.

Note: Learn more about the Stanford conference that inspired this article. An article by The Nation about this Stanford conference is a significant example of how dissenting views get spun into divisive partisan rhetoric, contributing to the larger culture wars poisoning public discourse.

Lockdowns were instituted, they failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread - that’s the data: Bjornskov, 2021; Bendavid, 2021; Agarwal, 2021; Herby, 2022; Kerpen, 2023; Ioannidis, 2024. And yes, lockdowns also inflicted massive damage on children and literally killed people. Lockdowns were not caused by the virus. Human beings decided to do lockdowns. I was the ONLY health policy scholar on the White House Task Force. My interviews as Advisor to the President were pulled down: by YouTube on September 11, 2020, by Twitter blocking me on October 18, 2020. You might think the public – in a free society - should know what the Advisor to the President was saying? When you censor health policy, it's not simply ... a less-than-ideal environment for diverse views. People die. And people died from the censorship of correct health policy. Why is Censorship used? To shut someone up, yes; but more importantly, to deceive the public – to stop others from hearing, to convince a public there is a “consensus”. Truth is not determined by consensus, or by numbers of people who agree, or by titles. It is discovered by debate, proven by critical analysis of evidence. Arguments are won by data and logic, not by personal attack or censoring others. THAT is why lockdowners - at Stanford and elsewhere - needed censorship and propaganda; they couldn’t win on the data; they needed to delegitimize and demonize opposing views as highly dangerous, to convince the public.

Note: This was written by Scott W. Atlas, MD, who served as Advisor to the President and on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Read an insightful article by New York Magazine about the harmful effects of COVID lockdowns, highlighting how some countries achieved low death rates without resorting to lockdown measures. Former chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers published a study last year showing how non-COVID excess deaths soared as a result of lockdown policies. Prominent economists from John Hopkins University and Lund University concluded that lockdowns reduced mortalities by 0.2%. For more, explore our COVID Information Center.

On Oct. 14, 2020, three weeks out from the election, with Joe and President Donald Trump neck and neck in the polls, the New York Post’s first story about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop exploded like a bomb. The front page featured an email from Hunter’s Burisma paymaster, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking him for “the opportunity to meet your father.” It was hard to square with Joe’s assertions throughout the campaign that he knew nothing about Hunter’s seeming international influence-peddling operation. Even as Twitter and Facebook, in collusion with the FBI, censored The Post, and the mainstream media collectively looked the other way, the Biden campaign knew that the sheer weight of the evidence would eventually be impossible to ignore. [Antony] Blinken’s solution was to set in motion one of the most brazen dirty tricks in US electoral history. Using the intelligence community to sound the false alarm of “Russian disinformation,” ground already prepared by corrupt elements inside the FBI, he set out to discredit the whole laptop story. CIA veteran Mike Morell [organized] 50 intelligence colleagues to sign a letter falsely insinuating that the damning material from Hunter’s laptop published by The Post was Russian disinformation. The Dirty 51 letter, as it came to be known, was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate, to maximize its benefit to Joe, by giving him a “talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue,” as Morell put it.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.

UnHerd, the Britain-based publication I lead, published an investigation on April 17 into a transatlantic organization called the Global Disinformation Index. Having received money from the U.S. State Department, as well as the British, German and European Union governments, the GDI issues what amount to blacklists of news publications, on highly tendentious grounds, that online advertising exchanges then consult and can use to justify turning off ad revenue. What has emerged ... is an opaque network of private and government-supported enterprises that appear intent on censoring political views they find unpalatable. When the [GDI] was originally set up, in 2018, it defined disinformation as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive.” On this basis, you could see the argument for having fact-checkers to identify the most egregious offenders. But mission creep has set in at the GDI. It has since come up with a definition of disinformation that encompasses anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative” — stories that might be factually true but pit people against one another by creating “a risk of harm to at-risk individuals, groups or institutions” — with institutions defined as including “the current scientific or medical consensus.” The de facto alliance between government and groups working to defund disfavored publications — a sort of state censorship laundering arrangement — is particularly alarming. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act [bars] the Defense Department from placing military-recruitment advertising in publications utilizing GDI, NewsGuard or “any similar entity.” The unaddressed problem with these disinformation referees is how their rulings affect online ad services themselves, not just advertisers, with the power to throttle revenue to publications simply for ideological reasons.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.

A little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending supported efforts to defund news outlets and platforms including The Post — at points urging members to use a blacklist compiled by a shadowy government-funded group that purports to guard news consumers against “misinformation.” The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which reps 150 of the world’s top companies — including ExxonMobil, GM, General Mills, McDonald’s, Visa, SC Johnson and Walmart — and 60 ad associations sought to squelch online free speech through its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, the House Judiciary Committee found. “The extent to which GARM has organized its trade association and coordinates actions that rob consumers of choices is likely illegal under the antitrust laws and threatens fundamental American freedoms,” the Republican-led panel said in its 39-page report. The new report establishes links between the WFA’s “responsible media” initiative and the taxpayer-funded Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a London-based group that in 2022 unveiled an ad blacklist of 10 news outlets whose opinion sections tilted conservative or libertarian, including The Post, RealClearPolitics and Reason magazine. Internal communications suggest that rather than using an objective rubric to guide decisions, GARM members simply monitored disfavored outlets closely to be able to find justification to demonetize them.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media manipulation from reliable sources.

It wasn’t so long ago that the traditional film and television business was thriving. The Big Six media conglomerates—General Electric, Time Warner, Sony, Disney, News Corporation, and Viacom—ruled the industry. But the double whammy of streaming and the pandemic toppled the old-media oligopoly. So most of the legacy media giants now are struggling simply to survive, while a new breed of digital-age behemoths, led by Amazon and Apple, gauge their film and television prospects, and Disney and Netflix lead the way into an uncharted online landscape. The failure of the conglomerates to adapt is none too surprising. Spurred by Reagan-era economic policies and the FCC’s deregulation campaign, the media industries converged in a series of M&A waves that began in the 1980s with the News Corp–Fox, Time-Warner, and Sony-Columbia mergers and culminated in the acquisition of Universal by GE, NBC’s owner, and the launch of NBC Universal in 2004. At that point, the Big Six owned all the major film studios, all the broadcast networks, and most of the top cable networks. They dominated other media industries as well, but their key assets were their film and television holdings. The Disney+ launch was a tipping point in the streaming era, prompting the ramp-up of Warner’s HBO Max, NBCU’s Peacock and ViacomCBS’s Paramount+. It also came just before the outbreak of Covid-19, which accelerated the global move to streaming.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and media corruption from reliable sources.

In his annual Festivus report—named after the fictional Seinfeld holiday—Senator Rand Paul tallies up some of the most egregious examples of government waste from the year. In all, Paul identified $900 billion in government waste from 2023. The national debt continues to skyrocket. One of the many problems with carrying such a heavy debt burden is the sheer volume of money that needs to be spent on interest. The U.S. Department of the Treasury spent $659 billion(!) in Fiscal Year 2023 just on interest payments. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been pursuing some ... creative training programs. In a federally funded workshop last year, CISA employees focused on “effective strategies to build and sustain psychological safety that allows individuals to show up to work as their authentic and best selves.” “Ironically, the workshop coincided with CISA’s efforts to suppress protected speech on social media platforms,” Paul notes. “Even I was censored at the behest of our government speech minders. And all while I thought I was being my best self.” In addition ... CISA has been hard at work creating not one, but two graphic novels about “disinformation” as part of their “Resilience Series.” The first one covers foreign interference in elections. The second covers COVID vaccines. “There is nothing comical about wasting taxpayer money to justify censorship of constitutionally protected speech,” Paul notes in his report.

Note: Read more about CISA's role in manipulating and controlling public discourse. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and censorship from reliable major media sources.

Today’s managed information landscape makes it more difficult for journalists and our sources to report on ethical lapses, wrongdoing, and crimes. Today, much of the media is less likely to report those things, unless it serves certain political or financial interests. It’s been 11 years since CBS News officially announced that I was targeted by unauthorized intrusions into my work computer. Subsequent forensics unearthed government-controlled IP addresses used in the intrusions, and proved that not only did the guilty parties monitor my work in real time, they also accessed my Fast and Furious files, got into the larger CBS system, planted classified documents deep in my operating system, and were able to listen in on conversations by activating Skype audio. I sued after it was clear the Department of Justice would not hold their own accountable. The case is the first we know of in which a journalist spied on by the government received a clerk’s default against an agent working for government parties in a surveillance operation. It’s a small victory because he was soon reported dead, which means we can’t access potential information leading to the larger players. Besides that, I’ve learned that wrongdoers in the federal government have their own shield laws that protect them from accountability. Our intelligence agencies have been working hand in hand with the telecommunications firms for decades, with billions of dollars in dark contracts and secretive arrangements. They don’t need to ask the telecommuncations firms for permission to access journalists’ records, or those of Congress or regular citizens.

Note: The above testimony is from award-winning journalist and former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who was hacked by government operatives for pursuing stories that cast the Obama administration in an unfavorable light. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

We humans, by nature, are curious and rebellious; we strive to know more, and we often bristle when we’re told what we can and cannot do—especially when it concerns our right to knowledge. This very blend of curiosity and defiance is what often leads to a fascinating and ironic psychological phenomenon: the “Streisand effect.” In 2003, the California Coastal Records Project shared a photo online as part of an effort to document coastal erosion along the Florida coastline. However, the photo also happened to capture the Malibu mansion of the famous singer and actress Barbra Streisand. Streisand sued ... seeking a whopping $50 million in damages. However, Streisand’s lawsuit only served to make the issue she was facing exponentially worse. Before taking legal action, the photo of her residence had been downloaded only six times. But once news of the lawsuit broke, the photo became an internet sensation; it was downloaded over 420,000 times in the span of a month. In 2010, WikiLeaks released a trove of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, which exposed majorly sensitive information about international relations. In response, several governments—including the United States—attempted to block access to the WikiLeaks website. These efforts backfired spectacularly; the more governments tried to suppress the information, the more people were determined to access and share it. The documents spread like wildfire across the internet.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship from reliable major media sources.

Days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov's arrest, then, stands as ... part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech. Durov's alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. If bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There's no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody. Given that Telegram was founded by a free speech champion who fled his home country after refusing to monitor and censor speech for the authorities, it's very easy to suspect that Pavel Durov has run afoul of authoritarians operating under a different flag. The Twitter Files and the Facebook Files revealed serious pressure brought to bear by the U.S. government on social media companies to stifle dissenting views and inconvenient (to the political class) news stories.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee that his company's moderators faced significant pressure from the federal government to censor content on Facebook and Instagram—and that he regretted caving to it. In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio), the committee's chairman, Zuckerberg explained that the pressure also applied to "humor and satire" and that in the future, Meta would not blindly obey the bureaucrats. The letter refers specifically to the widespread suppression of contrarian viewpoints relating to COVID-19. Email exchanges between Facebook moderators and CDC officials reveal that the government took a heavy hand in suppressing content. Health officials did not merely vet posts for accuracy but also made pseudo-scientific determinations about whether certain opinions could cause social "harm" by undermining the effort to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated. But COVID-19 content was not the only kind of speech the government went after. Zuckerberg also explains that the FBI warned him about Russian attempts to sow chaos on social media by releasing a fake story about the Biden family just before the 2020 election. This warning motivated Facebook to take action against the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story when it was published in October 2020. In his letter, Zuckerberg states that this was a mistake and that moving forward, Facebook will never again demote stories pending approval from fact-checkers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and government corruption from reliable major media sources.

The internet can be misused. It is understandable that those in the Senate might seek a government solution to protect children. The Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms associated with mental health. As currently written, the bill is far too vague, and many of its key provisions are completely undefined. The bill empowers the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate content that might affect mental health, yet KOSA does not explicitly define the term "mental health disorder." Instead, it references the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders…or "the most current successor edition." Even more concerning, the definition could change without any input from Congress. The sponsors of this bill will tell you that they have no desire to regulate content. In truth, this bill opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation, as people can and will argue that almost any piece of content could contribute to some form of mental health disorder. Anxiety and eating disorders are two of the undefined harms that this bill expects internet platforms to prevent and mitigate. Should we silence discussions about gun rights because it might cause some people anxiety? Could pro-life discussions cause anxiety in teenage mothers considering abortion? What about violent images from war? They are going to censor themselves, and users, rather than risk liability. This bill does not merely regulate the internet; it threatens to silence important and diverse discussions that are essential to a free society. [This] task is entrusted to a newly established speech police. The ACLU brought more than 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to vote no on KOSA.

Note: This article was written by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and mental health from reliable major media sources.

More than half of Americans believe the First Amendment can go too far in the rights it guarantees, according to a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment–focused nonprofit. The survey, released on Thursday, asked 1,000 American adults a range of questions about the First Amendment, free speech, and the security of those rights. Fifty-three percent of respondents agreed with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees" to at least some degree, with 28 percent reporting that it "mostly" or "completely" describes their thoughts. Americans were further divided along partisan lines. Over 60 percent of Democrats thought the First Amendment could go too far, compared to 52 percent of Republicans. "Evidently, one out of every two Americans wishes they had fewer civil liberties," Sean Stevens, FIRE's chief research adviser, said. "Many of them reject the right to assemble, to have a free press, and to petition the government. This is a dictator's fantasy." Further, 1 in 5 respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" worried about losing their job if someone complains about something they said. Eighty-three percent reported self-censoring in the past month, with 23 percent doing so "fairly" or "very" often. Just 22 percent of respondents said they believed the right to free speech was "very" or "completely" secure.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.

Google announced this week that it would begin the international rollout of its new artificial intelligence-powered search feature, called AI Overviews. When billions of people search a range of topics from news to recipes to general knowledge questions, what they see first will now be an AI-generated summary. While Google was once mostly a portal to reach other parts of the internet, it has spent years consolidating content and services to make itself into the web’s primary destination. Weather, flights, sports scores, stock prices, language translation, showtimes and a host of other information have gradually been incorporated into Google’s search page over the past 15 or so years. Finding that information no longer requires clicking through to another website. With AI Overviews, the rest of the internet may meet the same fate. Google has tried to assuage publishers’ fears that users will no longer see their links or click through to their sites. Research firm Gartner predicts a 25% drop in traffic to websites from search engines by 2026 – a decrease that would be disastrous for most outlets and creators. What’s left for publishers is largely direct visits to their own home pages and Google referrals. If AI Overviews take away a significant portion of the latter, it could mean less original reporting, fewer creators publishing cooking blogs or how-to guides, and a less diverse range of information sources.

Note: WantToKnow.info traffic from Google search has fallen sharply as Google has stopped indexing most websites. These new AI summaries make independent media sites even harder to find. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

The National Science Foundation spent millions of taxpayer dollars developing censorship tools powered by artificial intelligence that Big Tech could use “to counter misinformation online” and “advance state-of-the-art misinformation research.” House investigators on the Judiciary Committee and Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government said the NSF awarded nearly $40 million ... to develop AI tools that could censor information far faster and at a much greater scale than human beings. The University of Michigan, for instance, was awarded $750,000 from NSF to develop its WiseDex artificial intelligence tool to help Big Tech outsource the “responsibility of censorship” on social media. The release of [an] interim report follows new revelations that the Biden White House pressured Amazon to censor books about the COVID-19 vaccine and comes months after court documents revealed White House officials leaned on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other sites to remove posts and ban users whose content they opposed, even threatening the social media platforms with federal action. House investigators say the NSF project is potentially more dangerous because of the scale and speed of censorship that artificial intelligence could enable. “AI-driven tools can monitor online speech at a scale that would far outmatch even the largest team of ’disinformation’ bureaucrats and researchers,” House investigators wrote in the interim report.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and censorship from reliable sources.

Once upon a time ... Google was truly great. A couple of lads at Stanford University in California had the idea to build a search engine that would crawl the world wide web, create an index of all the sites on it and rank them by the number of inbound links each had from other sites. The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk ... disrupts search behaviour. Google’s mission – “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible” – looks like a much more formidable task in a world in which AI can generate infinite amounts of humanlike content. Vincent Schmalbach, a respected search engine optimisation (SEO) expert, thinks that Google has decided that it can no longer aspire to index all the world’s information. That mission has been abandoned. “Google is no longer trying to index the entire web,” writes Schmalbach. “In fact, it’s become extremely selective, refusing to index most content. This isn’t about content creators failing to meet some arbitrary standard of quality. Rather, it’s a fundamental change in how Google approaches its role as a search engine.” The default setting from now on will be not to index content unless it is genuinely unique, authoritative and has “brand recognition”. “They might index content they perceive as truly unique,” says Schmalbach. “But if you write about a topic that Google considers even remotely addressed elsewhere, they likely won’t index it. This can happen even if you’re a well-respected writer with a substantial readership.”

Note: WantToKnow.info and other independent media websites are disappearing from Google search results because of this. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and censorship from reliable sources.

Google and a few other search engines are the portal through which several billion people navigate the internet. Many of the world’s most powerful tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have recently spotted an opportunity to remake that gateway with generative AI, and they are racing to seize it. Nearly two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, and with users growing aware that many generative-AI products have effectively been built on stolen information, tech companies are trying to play nice with the media outlets that supply the content these machines need. The start-up Perplexity ... announced revenue-sharing deals with Time, Fortune, and several other publishers. These publishers will be compensated when Perplexity earns ad revenue from AI-generated answers that cite partner content. The site does not currently run ads, but will begin doing so in the form of sponsored “related follow-up questions.” OpenAI has been building its own roster of media partners, including News Corp, Vox Media, and The Atlantic. Google has purchased the rights to use Reddit content to train future AI models, and ... appears to be the only major search engine that Reddit is permitting to surface its content. The default was once that you would directly consume work by another person; now an AI may chew and regurgitate it first, then determine what you see based on its opaque underlying algorithm. Many of the human readers whom media outlets currently show ads and sell subscriptions to will have less reason to ever visit publishers’ websites. Whether OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, or someone else wins the AI search war might not depend entirely on their software: Media partners are an important part of the equation. AI search will send less traffic to media websites than traditional search engines. The growing number of AI-media deals, then, are a shakedown. AI is scraping publishers’ content whether they want it to or not: Media companies can be chumps or get paid.

Note: The AI search war has nothing to do with journalists and content creators getting paid and acknowledged for their work. It’s all about big companies doing deals with each other to control our information environment and capture more consumer spending. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable sources.

According to the American Psychological Association, “Misinformation is false or inaccurate information — getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead — intentionally misstating the facts.” What we’ve seen over the past several years is our government purveying disinformation — deliberately misleading the public. When our government peddles disinformation, it undermines the public trust. That’s why only 22 percent of Americans say they trust the government. Hillary Clinton’s campaign made and paid for the Russian collusion hoax, which asserted that Donald Trump had “worked with the Russians to try to rig the 2016 election,” to quote then-House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). Clinton and her campaign ... were working behind the scenes with government agents — including the FBI and elected Democrats — to spread disinformation. Several operatives within the FBI were promoting the hoax and giving it the appearance of fact, which allowed the media to cover the issue ad infinitum. One FBI agent, Kevin Clinesmith, even lied to the FISA Court so the government could continue monitoring the phone calls of U.S. citizens. The hoax cost taxpayers millions of dollars, first with the Mueller Report and then the Durham Report. Yet no collusion was found, just disinformation. Retired Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ... [asserted] the natural origin of the COVID-19 virus. Several years later, there is a widespread assumption that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Virility Institute in China. Fauci did not want people to believe the lab-leak theory, perhaps because he and others had worked with and provided federal funds to that laboratory.

Note: Watch our 15-min Mindful News Brief video on the strong evidence that bioweapons research created COVID-19. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.

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