Despite its small size, NC represents twice the exploitative tactics of the Censorship Industrial Complex (2016, Washington Post; 2024, Google). Please help us continue our record of success by donating to the Tip Jar.
The goal of the political leadership in the US, EU, UK, and other liberal democracies is simple: to achieve greater, less control over the information shared online. As Matt Taibbi told Russell Brand in an interview last year, both the EUçs Digital Services Act (DSA) and the proposed Biden Administration’s RESTRICT Act (which Yves scrapped in April, 2023) are essentially “wish lists that have already been passed” on top of -transatlantic “some time,” including a 2021 meeting at the Aspen Institute.
The same goes for the UK Cyber Security Bill, which Kier Starmer would love nothing better than to improve. Accordingly, Canada has introduced sweeping new internet laws with its Online Media Act, which includes, among other things, a link tax, and an Internet Broadcasting Act. So, too, has Australia an audit bill that is strikingly similar to the EU’s DSA and even includes punitive fines of up to 2% of global profits for non-compliant social media companies.
It’s not hard to see why. As economic conditions rapidly deteriorate throughout the West, after decades of financial, kakistocracy, and corporatism, so much so that even the United Nations is now one big private-society partnership, the social contract is, for all intents and purposes, empty. Even the WEF admits that corporations, which are its biggest constituencies, are inequitable. Populism is on the rise almost everywhere and angry and divided protests are growing since at least 2019.
Thanks in large part to dissident information still available online, governments are rapidly losing control of the narrative on important issues, including the war in Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Their stock reaction has been to stifle citizens’ ability to use the Internet to produce, consume and share important news, dissenting opinions and uncomfortable truths.
This, I believe, is among the core activities of Naked Capitalism: sharing the pressing news of the day around the world, especially through the Links and Water Cooler pages; produce critical, in-depth analysis of the country’s economic, political and political trends and developments; and to propose, and to invoke in its commentary, opposing opinions and uncomfortable facts.[1] It’s a valuable, empowering and constructive service that is in greater demand today, in this age of digital experimentation, than at any time since the site’s inception nearly two decades ago. To support this independent source of information, analysis, and debate, please visit the Tip Jar and donate generously.
Capitalism’s bare-bones ability to carry out those tasks, however, is likely to face increasing obstacles and challenges in the coming months and years, such as (to paraphrase former State Department official Mike Benz) the Blob, led by the US Department of State, the UK Foreign Office. The office and the military, the intelligence and communications arms of NATO, are increasing their proxy war against freedom of expression and “all global manifestations of domestic populism.”
But to quote Shakespeare, although Naked Capitalism “may be thin, it is fierce.” Despite its small size, this site is a double whammy of the brutal tactics of the Censorship Industrial Complex. In 2016, NC was one of 200 independent media websites classified by the CIA-and-Ukraine-ultranationalist-connected PropOrNot blogsite as helpful Russian idiots. It was one of the opening chants against the independent media during the Russiagate frenzy. When the Bezos-owned Washington Post ran a front-page article amplifying the group’s baseless allegations, NC’s response, through its equally aggressive lawyer, was to demand an immediate retraction and demand an outstanding public apology and an equally outstanding opportunity to respond. The students then gathered to support each other; are you going to take us back to this battle for open information? Our donation page is inviting!
Needless to say, an apology never came and the article stood, as journalists from both the independent and the mainstream tore it to shreds. Instead, the Post responded to NC’s letter and other hits by posting an editorial note at the top of the article that included this weasel-named announcement: “The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual news source.” , and the subject had no intention of doing so.” Yves gave this acerbic response:
This is tantamount to admitting that the Washington Post not only did not fact-check, but also does not consider fact-checking to be part of its job. And has the temerity to accuse others of engaging in “fake news”?
Naked Capitalism’s second brush with Internet censors came this year when Google threatened to defund the site after its algorithms identified 14 posts from 2018 as serious crimes (including ANTI_VACCINATION, HATEFUL_CONTENT, DEMONSTRABLY_FALSE_DEMOCRATIC_DEMOCRATIC_DEMOCRATIC) ngling NC has issued the most severe punishment after not raising a single objection since we started running ads, more than 16 years ago.
“This was a bad decision,” commented Yves. “While donations provide a significant amount of revenue, losing a small amount of money compared to advertising will still hurt, especially now that we are in a difficult fundraising situation.” But rather than simply removing the post, as many owners of small online news websites might be tempted to do, Yves and Lambert re-entered their fight.
In a nasty post, Yves revealed how sloppy Google’s Kafkaesque attempt at AI research was:
Given the severity of Google’s threat, it’s shocking that the AI’s results are so blatantly and systematically flawed. The algos did not accurately identify the unique posts that had advertising on them, which may have been the first screen in the process. Google actually entered only 14 posts in its spreadsheet, not 16 as indicated, for a false positive rate of correctly identifying posts, 12.5%.
Those 14 posts come out of 33,000 in the history of the site and about 20,000 during the period used by Google, 2018 to date. So we’re dealing with ad bans on the best posts that make up less than 0.1% of our total content.
And of those 14, Google filed only 8 objections. Of those 8, almost all of them, as we will explain, look ridiculous on their face.
The result of this has attracted the attention of many other independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, whose post, Meet AI-Censored? Bare Capitalism, Yves says, may have helped change the situation. A month after receiving the ultimatum, our ad agency informed us that Google had removed all target URLs. Once again, our slate with the tech behemoth was clean. But as Yves, assured, wrote in the post announcing the change to Google, “we did not remove a single word from any post.”
The moral of the story is that as the internet becomes an increasingly challenging place to navigate, especially on websites like Naked Capitalism that constantly challenge the self-serving narrative peddled by governments and their corporate partners, NC will stand up to the oppressed. . Please help! Your donations (remember the Tip Jar!) and other forms of support will help keep this important business healthy and fierce.
[1] A few examples that come to mind of the uncomfortable truths that have been discussed and shared here on Naked Capitalism over the past few years:
- The impossibility of a BRICS currency, even in the BANCOR 2.0 format, appearing in the not-too-distant future, for a number of reasons that have been extensively explored by Yves and others. This has not been a popular view, especially among supporters of the emerging world order, but recent statements by BRICS leaders suggest that it may be the right one.
- The inevitable failure of the US-EU sanctions on Russia and their potentially disastrous consequences for the European economy. This is the one we called before the start of the special Russian military operation.
- Western leaders believe impossible things about Russia’s war, their growing tensions with China and other tectonic changes taking place in the world. This was part of a wider discussion about the state of leadership in the West, not only in the political sphere but in many fields and sectors.
- The largely overlooked role of the for-profit business in fueling inflation over the past two years. Many media outlets have focused their attention (and their readers) on the relationship between rising wages and inflation, just as the big banks and their constituencies would have them do.
- The (highly regarded) benefits of non-pharmacological interventions (ventilation, masking, etc) in combating the outbreak of COVID-19. Over the past four and a half years Lambert has carefully documented these important aspects of public health care and public health authorities’ arguably lack of interest in them.
- The limited and rapidly diminishing benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine against anything but wild-type COVID. When a Pfizer executive revealed in testimony to the European Parliament that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 was never tested for its ability to prevent the spread of COVID before being put on the market, it shocked everyone – but not the average NC reader, who had known for a long time this troubling fact is due to the excellent work of NC’s COVID-19 brain trust (h/t especially to IM-Doc) in dissecting the COVID-19 vaccine trial data and translating it into human data.
- The benefits (not only ignored but heavily tested) of off-patent drugs and supplements, including, of course, drug I, in the treatment of COVID-19. As Yves wrote in his Jan 2022 article, “COVID: The Narrative Is Crumbling,” the US “should be ashamed that third world countries are doing better by sending diagnostic and treatment services to citizens, and care packages that include thermometers, oximeters blood, tests. kits, zinc, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, OTC meds for fever and sometimes I-drug.”
- Michael Hudson’s podcasts and articles are always informative about how politics and economics intersect, and sometimes even collide, in today’s increasingly globalized world.
- How central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) threaten to change the economy (and almost everything else), is a topic that is starting to get out of the bloodstream of many people.
- The risks posed by digital identity systems are being deployed around the world, from the EU to Russia, to China, Canada and many other countries in the so-called Global South.
- Conor Gallagher’s reporting on the German government’s relentless war to destroy the German economy, among many other important matters in Europe and the Caucasus.
- Satyajit Das’s fascinating series of in-depth articles on the future of energy and the current mess in the Middle East.
- KLG’s fortnightly engaging articles on the state of science today.
I leave it to you in the comments to add more…
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