Free Speech Online Was Promoted By the Pentagon, Until It Turned on Them
01:56 GMT 23.02.2024 (Updated: 02:41 GMT 23.02.2024)
© AP Photo / Charles Dharapak
Subscribe
The US security state was the staunchest supporter of free speech online when it enabled them to foment discontent in countries they perceived as adversarial, but changed their tune when it turned against them and their allies, syndicated columnist and political cartoonist Ted Rall told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday.
“There are outfits like Freedom House that were co-founded by the CIA, these sort-of NGOs [Non-Government Organizations] that have helped precipitate color revolutions, among other things, overseas, always in the interests of the US empire, and they promoted this kind of [free speech online] ideology a lot,” Rall explained.
“It sounds very reasonable. We want people to express themselves. We want people around the world to be free to say and do whatever they want. And if they are complaining about their local governments, we're going to help them do that,” he continued.
Rall and Co-hosts Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon were discussing an interview between Foundation for Freedom Online director Mike Benz and journalist Tucker Carlson, during which Benz asserted that the plan to use the internet to support dissident groups online “worked magically from 1991 to about 2014 when there began to be an about-face on internet freedom and its utility.”
Rall agreed and compared it to the US support of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s “some of which became radical Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda*.”
The censorship of online media made headlines in 2022 when Meta** CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan that his social media platforms suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story at the behest of the FBI. Last year, the Section Chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force Laura Dehmlow testified in front of Congress that she warned companies that the laptop could be part of a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation ahead of the 2020, but the agency knew the laptop was legitimate and had been in possession of it since late 2019.
“They continue to promulgate their fraud. I would be very interested in knowing what percentage of American voters still believe that the laptop isn't real,” Rall said of the FBI disinformation campaign against the laptop. “There's been no evidence whatsoever that it's even been modified or edited in any way. But these narratives, they catch on and they stick. Trump rightly gets attacked over disinformation and misinformation, but it's really very bipartisan.”
Rall brought up the justification he’s heard from journalists who say they don’t want to influence elections and so delay or decide against publishing certain articles on that principle. “You're a news organization. News organizations traffic news, they report news. Whatever it is, if it's a legitimate story, there's no reason not to run it.”
Nixon contended that Rall was giving mainstream journalists too much credit by “implying good faith.” Rall agreed with the assessment.
“Let’s not forget the (US Senator) Bernie Sanders articles that were true, but spun in a false way. Like the fact that he visited the Soviet Union as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The implication was that he was some kind of Russian agent when, of course [it was Burlington’s Russian sister city] that he visited. There were lots of right-wing Republican mayors who went and visited their Soviet counterparts,” Rall recalled.
“It was a beautiful thing… during an otherwise bleak time in the Cold War. But The New York Times treated it as ‘Look, Bernie Sanders has a communist past.’ So there’s that kind of thing too, where it's something true-ish. He did go to the Soviet Union and that is a picture of him… but that doesn’t mean what they said,” he concluded.
*Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization banned in Russia and other states.
**Meta is banned in Russia for extremism.
