History is not without a sense of irony — or, more correctly, old lefties end up licking the boots of what they once pretended to rebel against. Case in point: Noam Chomsky. Chomsky co-wrote the hugely influential Manufacturing Consent, a book which argued that the mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function… without overt coercion”. In other words, the mass media serve to create a false consciousness in the governed that leads them to consent to support the interests of the powerful.
(If all that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially a rehash of neo-Marxist theory, as I’ve explored in the How We Got Here series for Insight.)
Yet, just last year, there was Chomsky foaming at the mouth that the non-Covid vaccinated should be “isolated”, forcibly if necessary, from the rest of society. Even if it means leaving them to starve to death. As the latest tranche of Twitter Files shows, Chomsky had not only consented to but was promulgating the very “system-supportive propaganda” he once railed against.
The “Virality Project” was a Stanford-based group of academics who banded together to advocate online censorship and control the Covid narrative. The Virality Project “partnered” with the Big Six social media platforms and the Biden administration to censor communications which they deemed “misinformation”. This “misinformation” included, as the Twitter Files show, information that even the VP conceded was 100% true.
Material targeted by the VP included:
“The release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Spring 2020 emails… [which] has been used to exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci.”
“Increased distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance.”
“Reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway”; “natural immunity”; suggesting Covid-19 “leaked from a lab”; even “worrisome jokes”.
All were characterized as “potential violations” or disinformation “events” by the Virality Project, a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billons of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs […]
Though the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself.
As Matt Taibbi writes, the Virality Project was a smash-hit Orwellian success at manufacturing consent. Government, academia and corporate media quickly rallied to a secret, monolithic project to control the public narrative. It spurred the move of digital censorship from “judging truth/untruth” to a sinister new model that knowingly demoted facts in order to maintain power and control.
It’s no coincidence that the Virality Project emerged within weeks of Joe Biden’s inauguration. Within weeks, Twitter was fully on board. In addition to the likes of Twitter, Facebook and TikTok, the VP also gained “visibility” to Gab, Parler, Telegram and Gettr — in other words, their surveillance of social media was near-total.
The VP pushed social media platforms to be more and more censorious. Where Twitter’s initial internal guidance on Covid required that a story be “demonstrably false” or contain an “assertion of fact” before it would be actioned, the VP, in cahoots with the CDC, leaned on the social media platform to go harder. VP demanded that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy” be branded as “misinformation”. The “vaccine passport narrative” was to be framed as “misinformation” despite vaccine passports quickly becoming reality.
Real testimonials about vaccine side effects were also branded “misinformation”, even when reported by the likes of the New York Times.
Accounts which posted “legitimate and accurate COVID-19 updates”, but also “attacks on Italian politicians, the EU, and the United States” were flagged.
VP was repeatedly, extravagantly wrong. In one email to Twitter on “misinformation,” it spoke of wanting to “hone in” on an “increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity.”
The VP in April 2021 mistakenly described “breakthrough” infections as “extremely rare events” that should not be inferred to mean “vaccines are ineffective.”
Later, when “the CDC changed its methodology for counting Covid-19 cases among vaccinated people,” only counting those resulting in hospitalization or death, VP complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts RFK Jr. and “WhatsHerFace” retweeted the story to suggest “hypocrisy.”
Without a blush of shame, the VP ran searches for the term “surveillance state”.
Yes: at the same time that the state was conductive massive, secret surveillance of its citizens, it branded the term “surveillance state” a “conspiracy theory”.
The VP’s direct ties to, and lockstep control with the state are demonstrated by such “coincidences” as the following:
On April 26, 2022, the VP issued a report calling for a “rumor-control mechanism to address nationally trending narratives,” and a “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” to be housed within CISA, at the Department of Homeland Security.
The next day, April 27, 2022, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced in a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing that a “Disinformation Governance Board” had been created, to be headed by the singing censor, Nina Jankowitz.
Twitter/Matt Taibbi
As Taibbi states, the whole point of the Virality Project was not telling the truth, but obscuring the truth. Because the central conceit of the establishment is that we hoi polloi are too stupid and venal to be trusted with the truth.
BFD readers are no doubt reminded of New Zealand’s very own Ministry of Truth.
