Investigative Journalist Unravels Secret Censorship Campaign

This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.

Guest post by John-Michael Dumais

“We’re in a crisis of trust” brought on by “newspapers and … social media companies and the government,” according to investigative journalist Lee Fang.

Fang appeared last week with Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., on Bhattacharya’s “Illusion of Consensus” podcast. The two discussed the latest revelations of collusion and deception involving the healthcare industry, the technology sector and government agencies.

The hour-long discussion centered on documented cases of censorship campaigns targeting academics and journalists for speaking scientifically validated truths that threaten powerful special interests.

Pentagon manipulation campaigns got preferential treatment from Twitter

According to Fang’s investigation of the “Twitter Files,” while X, formerly known as Twitter, was claiming to crack down on state-sponsored disinformation in public statements, it was secretly assisting U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) propaganda efforts behind the scenes.

The social media giant gave “velvet glove treatment” to military deception campaigns operating foreign accounts in places like Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen, Fang said.

Fang recounted reading reports detailing how the Pentagon, in an influence op that “went on for years,” created fake news outlets producing “exactly what the Russians were accused of” in the 2016 U.S. election. As an example, he cited “salacious stories that Iran takes refugees and chops them up and sells their organs.”

Twitter gave the Pentagon “a special tool” to get around its “blue check mark” verification system to hide the fact that CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command, a division of the DOD) in Florida, was operating the accounts, Fang said, while “[Twitter was] meeting with … DOD officials to help them keep the secret.”

With the rise of ISIS and the fear that it would use social media as a recruitment tool in the U.S., the U.S. Department of State founded the Global Engagement Center. The center coordinated with Stanford University and other organizations to censor speech before the 2020 election, according to Fang.

The Pentagon, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) set up similar offices and task forces, Fang said.

Fang and Bhattacharya discussed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which opened the door to domestic propaganda operations by allowing the U.S. government’s broadcasting arm to deliver programming to American audiences.

Suppression goes big with COVID and AI

It wasn’t long after the Pentagon began working with Twitter that the social media company began “talking to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [and] … various NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] that work with the federal government in identifying alleged pandemic misinformation and disinformation, and deciding who’s boosted and who’s shadow-banned,” Fang said.

“We found out that you were shadow-banned,” Fang told Bhattacharya, who as co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration received a lot of pushback from mainstream media and people like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Fang pointed to the artificial intelligence (AI) firm Logically, which during the pandemic was the U.K.’s “main government partner … monitor[ing] misinformation and disinformation.”

The firm’s “mission creep” resulted in using AI to flag people — including journalists, activists and members of Parliament — who criticized the mass vaccination of children, lockdowns, vaccine passports and “more onerous policies,” Fang said.

“They have a public-facing site … that publicizes the biggest kind of spreaders of misinformation,” Fang said. “Then they also have backdoor access at Facebook, content that they flag as misinformation” that is “automatically downgraded,” sometimes with “an automatic fact check that pops up.”

Bhattacharya wondered whether friends and colleagues from the U.K. who were subject to suppression and attacks on social media — including Oxford Professor Sunetra Gupta, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration and Carl Heneghan, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford — had been victims of Logally’s AI algorithms.

“If you have a firm like this, essentially putting their thumb on the scale, working with social media companies, how do you know that there were more scientists who favored lockdowns than didn’t?” he asked.

2020 elections ‘just a big pilot’ experiment

Logically, which also works throughout the European Union and in India, is “coming to the United States,” according to Fang.

“They’ve already secured contracts with the DOD, with Army Special Command,” he said. “They’ve piloted tests with the Chicago Police Department to analyze rap videos and predict crime.”

The company, which already had a contract for the 2022 midterm elections, is attempting to get a contract for this year’s election, according to Fang.

“They’ve negotiated with DHS for ‘radicalization’ and ‘election misinformation’ for this presidential election,” he said.

Fang said he was shocked to learn that DHS had partnered with the secretary of state to ban conservative accounts recommending people not trust “vote by mail” during the 2020 elections due to the possibility of stolen votes.

At the same time, people like Howard Dean were also warning people not to vote by mail, but saying it was because “Trump controls the Post Office,” Fang said.

“Identical messages … but for a conservative, those accounts got deleted or shadow-banned,” he said. “For Howard Dean — untouched.”

The 2020 election was “just a big pilot” experiment for NGOs partnering with tech companies and “investigative anti-misinformation firms,” Fang said. “And they failed the test. But they’re hoping to expand it for this election.”

Big Tech companies sold the suppression of misinformation as “an even-handed thing where they’re going to have some neutral way of dealing with … scientific information, election information,” Bhattacharya said. “But it’s not even-handed, is it?”

Fang agreed, noting how in 2021, the dominance of just three Big Tech firms succeeded in booting Parler, the conservative version of Twitter, off the iOS and Android app stores and Amazon cloud hosting.

‘Sleazy tactics’ playbook long used by Big Pharma, Big Chemical

Fang discussed the long profile he wrote on the history of neonicotinoids and other pesticides known to harm both bees and humans.

Because pesticides and herbicides make huge profits for companies like Bayer and Syngenta, those who criticize them are subject to highly coordinated censorship campaigns.

“The chemical industry came down like a hammer” on scientists and academics who were “simply doing the basic research” and “raising questions,” Fang said.

A prime example of this was the ongoing harassment campaign run by Syngenta against Dr. Tyrone Hayes for exposing the risks of atrazine, a commonly used herbicide known to cause cancer and disrupt the endocrine system.

“They were not just sending document requests designed to intimidate him,” Fang said. “They were sending a young person to follow him around the country and record him everywhere he went … [and] to physically intimidate him.”

Bhattacharya compared the significance of Hayes’ work to Rachel Carson’s, who through her 1962 book “Silent Spring” drew attention to the harms of DDT and other pesticides. Carson later was credited with launching the environmental movement.

Fang said that pharmaceutical and chemical companies “have every incentive to destroy the academic or researcher” — for example, lobbying university administrators to steer them away from their research or trying to get their funding canceled — because such research “increases the risk of litigation, of regulation, of public backlash.”

Front group websites will “plaster Google” saying the “scientist is a liar” and use all kinds of “sleazy tactics,” Fang said.

Many of the same tactics “went mainstream,” he said, with the pandemic and vaccine debate.

Bhattacharya described how a reporter did a “hit piece” on him after he wrote a paper about how widespread COVID-19 was in early 2020.

“There were insinuations that I’d done some underhanded thing just by doing research,” he said. “And it was really kind of shocking. And I remember the first time I saw online a call for me being fired because I’d published a study.”

“I thought I had thick skin,” he said, “but … it happens enough times, you just say, ‘Okay, maybe I’ll just be quiet.’”

Bhattacharya said some of his friends who, like many academics, were not used to this kind of fight, “decided to put their heads down and not stick them back up above the parapet.”

“That’s the intent behind these intimidation campaigns — it is to silence you. That’s all they do is harass scientists and researchers,” Fang said, referring to the many specialized PR firms that work for the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. “That’s what they sell their services as,” he said.

“It’s a tragedy because I don’t think the average scientist is prepared for this at all,” he added.

Bhattacharya raised the story of Vioxx, a Merck product marketed to treat chronic pain and inflammation that ended up killing tens of thousands of people — a fact the company knew about but suppressed.

Merck “hired investigators to go and harass academics that were writing papers documenting strokes and heart attacks with Vioxx,” Bhattacharya recalled.

“This is a playbook,” Fang said.

Fang discussed at length his reporting on Moderna’s surveillance operation targeting Bhattacharya, Alex Berenson, Aaron Rodgers, Russell Brand and others. The operation succeeded in getting many of these individuals censored on Twitter.

Bhattacharya praised Fang for his body of work. “If you just keep exposing these things, lifting up the rocks and looking at the beetles … that has to be the very first step in [finding any] solution.”

Watch the podcast here:

New Illusion of Consensus podcast on @X! Recently, journalist @lhfang testified in Congress about how @moderna_tx paid hordes of medical influencers to police online speech criticizing its covid vaccine. I spoke with Lee about his career, free speech & pharma corruption. pic.twitter.com/KakjQsIv19

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) February 12, 2024

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