Social Media, Truthiness & Censorship

Google suppresses ‘suspect websites, Twitter deletes accounts, Shadow Bans others, as does Instagram, but for now, mainly the following  three (and all three links seem to be Creative Commons).  My thanks go out to all of the following authors and organizations, as this information needs to be known far and wide.  It’s a bit of a tome, but I’ve edited out all I can and still keep the key elements alive and burning.

‘Gates Foundation funds Facebook fact-checkers that defend it from allegations; It also provides funding to dozens of media organizations that regularly give Gates and the foundation favorable coverage’, August 21, 2020, Tom Parker, reclaimtheinternet.org

“The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides over $250 million dollars in funding to news organizations, charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, journalistic organizations, and fact-checking groups that regularly give investor and philanthropist Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation favorable coverage, according to an in-depth report from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).”

Parker hadn’t provided a link to CJR, but here it is: ‘Journalism’s Gates keepers’, Tim Schwab, Aug. 21, 2020 (cleverly titled, eh?)

“The Gates Foundation provides this funding through charitable grants and has given over $2 million to groups such as fact-checker Africa Check ($1.48 million), media company Gannett ($499,651), and the journalism school the Poynter Institute ($382,997). These groups have defended or favorably covered Gates and the Gates Foundation in their fact-checks.

CJR notes that it found “sixteen examples of Africa Check examining media claims related to Gates” and that its “body of work overwhelmingly seems to support or defend Bill and Melinda Gates and their foundation, which has spent billions of dollars on development efforts in Africa.” […]

“And the Poynter Institute-owned fact-checker Politifact also often defends Gates and the Gates Foundation from allegations such as claims that the Gates Foundation will profit from a vaccine and claims about Gates’ vaccine comments.

Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride told CJR that the money from the Gates Foundation was passed on to media fact-checking sites, including Africa Check, and noted that she is “absolutely confident” that no bias or blind spots emerged from the work. However, McBride acknowledged that she has not reviewed the work herself.” […]

In addition to giving funding to these organizations that have provided fact-checks, the Gates Foundation has also given charitable grants to the BBC, The Guardian, NBCUniversal Media, the Financial Times, ProPublica, The Atlantic, Medium, Al Jazeera, National Journal, Univision, the Texas Tribune, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, according to CJR’s report.

“When Gates gives money to newsrooms, it restricts how the money is used—often for topics, like global health and education, on which the foundation works—which can help elevate its agenda in the news media,” CJR added.” […]

CJR also notes that “during the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official” and describes this as the news media giving Gates “an outsize voice in the pandemic.”

Additionally, CJR suggests that when the Gates Foundation launched 20 years ago, journalists were much more critical of Gates’ philanthropy efforts and that “Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.”

While much of the report focuses on the favorable coverage Gates receives on health and education topics, Gates has also used one of his recent appearances on NBCUniversal-owned CNBC to take aim at private messages and end-to-end encryption.

During this appearance, Gates lamented not being able to see the messages in end-to-end encrypted messaging app WhatsApp and claimed that the company has “made sure they can’t intervene” when users share content such as anti-vaccine content.

A spokesperson for the Gates Foundation told CJR that a “guiding principle” of its journalism funding is “ensuring creative and editorial independence” and noted that many of the issues the Gates Foundation works on “do not get the in-depth, consistent media coverage they once did” because of financial pressures in journalism.

The spokesperson added: “When well-respected media outlets have an opportunity to produce coverage of under-researched and under-reported issues, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies in both the public and private sectors.”

In a follow-up statement, the Gates Foundation said: “Recipients of foundation journalism grants have been and continue to be some of the most respected journalism outlets in the world.… The line of questioning for this story implies that these organizations have compromised their integrity and independence by reporting on global health, development, and education with foundation funding. We strongly dispute this notion.” […]

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that when a warning label gets applied to Facebook posts after they’re fact-checked, this drastically cuts their viewership and results in users not clicking through to the content 95% of the time.

With Facebook being the world’s largest social network and having over 2.7 billion users, the decisions of these Gates-funded fact-checkers can determine how well content about the coronavirus or vaccine heath concerns performs with a “false” rating cutting its click through rate by around 20x.”

At the bottom of the page, readers are invited to subscribe to the organization’s newsletter.

Now here is epic evidence of other dimensions of Truthiness entering the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic contributions and claims compared to actual results, including the fact that since Billy began giving away his money two decades ago, the B&M Gates Foundation’s wealth had doubled to $51 billion in assets at the end of 2019.

‘Why the Bill Gates global health empire promises more empire and less public health, Behind a veil of corporate media PR, the Gates Foundation has served as a vehicle for Western capital while exploiting the Global South as a human laboratory. The coronavirus pandemic is likely to intensify this disturbing agenda’, by Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein, the grayzone, July 2, 2020, (Creative Commons)

“The US abandonment of the WHO means that the organization’s second-largest financial contributor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is soon to become its top donor, giving the non-governmental international empire unparalleled influence over one the world’s most important multilateral organizations.

Bill Gates has achieved a hero-like status during the pandemic. The Washington Post has called him a “champion of science-backed solutions,” while the New York Times recently hailed him as “the most interesting man in the world.” Gates is also the star of a hit Netflix docu-series, “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak,” which was released just weeks before coronavirus hit the U.S., and was produced by a New York Times correspondent, Sheri Fink, who previously worked at three Gates-funded organizations (Pro Publica, the New America Foundation, and the International Medical Corps).” […]

“Saving the world?

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation on Earth, reporting over $51 billion in assets at the end of 2019. Bill Gates says his foundation spends a majority of its resources “reducing deaths from infectious diseases,” and through this philanthropy, he seems to have bought a name for himself as an infectious disease expert.

Corporate media networks rolled out the red carpet for Gates as he advised the world on how to handle the Covid-19 outbreak. In just the month of April, while the virus was severely impacting the U.S., he was hosted by CNN, CNBC, Fox, PBS, BBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Daily Show and The Ellen Show. On the BBC, Gates described himself as a “health expert,” despite his lack of a college degree in medicine or any other field.

The ultimate solution

According to Bill Gates, creating and distributing a Covid-19 vaccine to everyone on Earth is “the ultimate solution” to the outbreak. Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman echoed these sentiments, proclaiming that “a successful vaccine has to be made available for 7 billion people.” […]

Conflicts of interest

Since shortly after its founding, the foundation has owned stakes in several drug companies. A recent investigation by The Nation revealed that the Gates Foundation currently holds corporate stocks and bonds in drug companies like Merck, GSK, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi.

The foundation’s website even candidly declares a mission to pursue “mutually beneficial opportunities” with vaccine manufacturers.” [lengthy snip re: buying the WHO and creating GAVI, briefly]:

“The foundation also funds the WHO indirectly through Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI), a “public-private partnership” that facilitates bulk sales of vaccines to poor countries. GAVI is the second-largest non-state funder of the WHO (after the Gates Foundation), and gave $158.5 million to the WHO in 2018.”

“Today, Tedros, the first WHO director general who is not a medical doctor, can be found tweeting praise for Bill Gates’ op-eds.” […]

“The Guardian’s entire “Global Development” section was made possible through a partnership with the Gates Foundation.” […]

Deadly double standards

“The foundation appears to see the Global South as both a dumping ground for drugs deemed too unsafe for the developed world and a testing ground for drugs not yet determined to be safe enough for the developed world.” […]

“As far back as 1977, a study published by British medical professionals in The Lancet established that the risks of the whole-cell pertussis jab (used in the DTP vaccine) are greater than the risks associated with contracting wild pertussis. After mounting evidence linking the drug to brain damage, seizures, and even death, the U.S. and other Western countries phased it out in the 1990s and replaced it with a safer version (called DTaP) that did not contain the whole pertussis cell.

However, African nations are still being financially incentivized to continue using the out-of-date, deeply dangerous DTP vaccine, with GAVI making DTP a priority for African children.

“The foundation has spent more than $1 billion distributing an oral polio vaccine (OPV) that contains a live polio virus to African and Asian countries. This live virus can replicate inside a child’s intestine and spread in places with poor sanitation and plumbing. That means people can contract the virus from the vaccine.” […]

“In recent years, more children have been paralyzed by the vaccine strain of the virus in OPV than by wild polio. In an interview with NPR, professor of microbiology Raul Andino said, “It’s actually an interesting conundrum. The very tool you are using for polio eradication is causing the problem.”

Back in 2000, the U.S. halted its use of the OPV. But in the developing world, the Gates Foundation uses its instruments of influence to ensure governments continue administering it.” [lengthy snip w/ other Gates-driven OPV paralysis horrifying stats in various nations]

“Despite the scientific consensus against the OPV, and the opposition to such programs in the target countries, OPV remains administered in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia as part of “aid” programs, creating windfall profits for pharmaceutical giants who may not have been able to sell their products elsewhere.”

Author Jacob Levitch called Gates sort of philanthropy: philanthro-capitalism in his thesis ‘The real Agenda of the Gates Foundation’, March 15,2018.

Their entire exposé must be 20,000 words, and the portions I’ve used are only half it.  I’ll just provide the headings of the remaining horrors:

With drugs discarded by the West, an illusion of choice for African women (contraceptives & eugenics)

Guinea pigs in the Global South

Weakening the public health systems of states (including his Green Revolution, invesstments in Monsanto GMO seeds, and agribusiness pesticides)

Operation Warp Speed immunizes Big Pharma from lawsuits (Gates & Trump)

A centralized stockpile to “make WHO dependent on the goodwill of Big Pharma”

History repeats itself

The Grayzone contacted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), and the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health (PATH) with requests for comment on this article, and has yet to receive a response.

You  may remember that Gates was behind Narendra Modi’s converting to a ‘cashless (digital) economy’ in India.  Microft’s cloud-computing has moved to New Zealand, and along the way I’d seen a version of  these in the Twittersphere:

‘CASHLESS SOCIETY 2020: Bill Gates Goes Viral on Digital ID and Digital Currency’, by David Haggith, May 7, 2020, thedailycoin.org

“This may be my most important article to date. Bill Gates went viral in several controversial interviews last month, advocating mandatory digital ID as proof of coronavirus vaccination as soon as a vaccine is available. The proof will be required, if Gates has his way, before anyone is allowed in large public gatherings.”

And from amrstrongeconomics, July 23, 2020:

“Gates and his wife were behind India canceling their currency, and they are pushing that agenda at the United Nations and in Europe. Only Russia is standing up against Microsoft and Gates.

Gates and everyone he buys, like the Clintons, joined him to further his world domination goal. We will see an unending parade of companies joining Gates and his dream. Mastercard has just joined ID2020.”

(cross-posted at caucus99percent.com)