Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) is having a meltdown over the prospect of Russia's side of the Ukrainian invasion story gaining traction online.
In a recent tweet, Warner said he is "concerned" that "Russian disinformation" will spread unless the CEOs of all the major tech companies "restrict the spread of Russian propaganda."
YouTube responded to Warner's tweet by suppressing all videos from Russian state media channels so that they will be seen by fewer people in accordance with Google's openly acknowledged policy of algorithmically censoring "unauthorized content." All such videos have also been demonetized on the Google-owned video platform.
Over at Facebook and Instagram (Meta), Russian state media outlets are now prohibited from running ads and monetizing on their platforms. Twitter similarly announced a pause on all ads in both Russia and Ukraine.
"Glad to see action from tech companies to reign in Russian propaganda and disinformation after my letter to their CEOs yesterday," Warner tweeted after that. "These are important first steps, but I'll keep pushing for more."
U.S. lawmakers threaten to destroy Silicon Valley's profits if tech companies refuse to punish Russia
For a while now, the United States military-industrial complex has been trying to control what Big Tech does. For the past two years, for instance, platforms like Facebook and Twitter were pressured to censor all content questioning face masks and "vaccines."
Now, that censorship agenda has expanded to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, with Washington, D.C., of course taking the side of Ukraine.
"Articles and news segments warning of the sinister threat posed by Russian propaganda to misinform and divide western populations using the internet are being churned out at a rate that's only likely to increase as this latest narrative management campaign gets into full gear," Zero Hedge reported.
"The Associated Press has a new article out, for example, titled 'War via TikTok: Russia's new tool for propaganda machine.'"
In that article, the AP claimed that "[a]rmies of trolls and bots stir up anti-Ukrainian sentiment," and that "[s]tate-controlled media outlets look to divide Western audiences."
"Clever TikTok videos serve up Russian nationalism with a side of humor," the article added.
The same article goes on to claim that analysts at "several different research organizations" contacted the AP to report a "sharp increase in online activity by groups affiliated with the Russian state."
"That's in keeping with Russia's strategy of using social media and state-run outlets to galvanize domestic support while seeking to destabilize the Western alliance," the AP alleges.
One of these organizations is known as Cyabra, an Israeli tech company that "works to detect disinformation" in order to eradicate it from the internet. The Atlantic Council, a state-funded NATO narrative management firm, also interferes with the free flow of information online.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an empire-loyal non-governmental organization (NGO) that claims to focus on fighting "racism and prejudice" has also jumped into the fray with a new report accusing Facebook of failing to label "Russian propaganda" 91 percent of the time it appears.
The CCDH also blasted Mark Zuckerberg personally for his alleged "failure to stop Facebook being weaponized by the Russian state."
Russian media outlet RT, as one prominent example, is being censored all over the place, not just in the U.S. but also in Australia, Germany and Poland. The countries of France and the United Kingdom are also being pressured to censor RT.
"The imperial media aren't going to subvert RT by platforming voices who dispute the empire's narratives no matter how badly they hate it, because the exact reason they hate RT is because it disputes the empire's narratives," Zero Hedge says.
"They're not worried about Russian propaganda operations; they're worried about someone else running interference on their own propaganda operations."
More related news can be found at Censorship.news.
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