Twitter Suspends Researcher Who Exposed Antifa-Journalist Connections

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By Allum Bokhari

Twitter has suspended the account of Eoin Lenihan, a researcher who mapped out connections between mainstream journalists and the violent far-left Antifa movement on Twitter, following a mass-reporting campaign by left-wing activists.

Lenihan published the results of his research at Quillette, where he explained the twofold objective of his project — first, to discover the journalists who were most closely linked to Antifa via social media. Second, to discover if those journalists covered the extremist movement favorably or negatively.

via Quillette:

In October 2018, my research partner and I decided to investigate the truth of this impression by using a mix of network mapping and linguistic analysis to see which prominent journalists who covered Antifa also were closely connected to leading Antifa figures on social media. We then inspected the Antifa-related stories these journalists had written.

We created a data set of 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts based on the follows of 16 verified Antifa seed accounts. Using a software tool that analyzed the number and nature of connections associated with each individual account, we winnowed the 58,254 Antifa or Antifa-associated Twitter accounts down to 962 accounts. This represents a core group of Twitter users who are connected in overlapping ways to the most influential and widely followed Antifa figures. Of these 962 accounts, 22 were found to be verified—of which 15 were journalists who work regularly with national-level news outlets.

The journalists included contributors to The Guardian, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.

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Unsurprisingly, Lenihan’s analysis of the journalists who mingle with Antifa on Twitter found that none of them covered the movement critically:

That correlation turned out to be quite pronounced: Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.

Since he published his findings, Lenihan has had his account mass-reported on Twitter. Mass-reporting is when an account is swarmed by trolls who abuse the “report” button with the hopes of tricking a tech platform’s algorithms into automatically suspending them. Of course, with much of Silicon Valley now categorizing ordinary conservative speech as violations of their terms of service, this is an increasingly easy task. Lenihan’s account has now been suspended by Twitter for more than two days.

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Breitbart News has previously covered the mainstream media’s sympathy for Antifa (see CNN: Antifa’s Violence Against ‘Bigots’ is ‘Right’ and New York Times Glorifies Antifa With Style Guide, Tactical Advice) as well as the violent movement’s allies in Silicon Valley (see Wikipedia Editors Seek To Downplay Antifa Violence and Far-left Ideology and Damore Lawsuit Highlights Google’s Links to ‘Antifa’ Domestic Terrorists).

Breitbart News has reached out to Twitter for comment.

Buzzfeed Attacks A 14-Year Old Girl, Tries To Get Her Banned From YouTube For Hurting Their Feelings

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In just another day for the dumpster fire that is Buzzfeed “News,” activist “journalist” Joe Bernstein wrote up an article targeting a 14-year old girl who makes YouTube videos for the crime of having right-wing political views.

The article, titled “YouTube’s Newest Far-Right, Foul-Mouthed, Red-Pilling Star Is A 14-Year-Old Girl,” desribes a YouTuber going by the name “Soph,” who makes videos with social commentary about current events and culture, often filled with vulgar language one wouldn’t expect to come from a 14-year old girl.

Bernstein quickly makes his reason for publishing the article clear, seeming to make a call for her removal from the platform in his sub-title, writing: “‘Soph’ has nearly a million followers on the giant video platform. The site’s executives only have themselves to blame.”

The majority of his article is targeting one video in particular, where the YouTube star wears an Islamic chador and makes a joking apology for comments she made about Islam.

WATCH BELOW (WARNING, VULGAR LANGUAGE):

In the video, Soph uses absurdist comedy in her commentary about Islam, where she does touch on a lot of issues prevalent in radical Islam.

Starting off the video, she declares that she has “become a devout follower of the Prophet Muhammad,” describing it as mostly being a “f*** ton of fun,” despite having to be raped by her 40-year old husband.

She also discusses Muslim rape gangs, which are a very real thing in the Islamic world.

For doing this, Bernstein believes that YouTube should shut her down.

He claims that the platform is exploiting children by allowing them to have right-wing views on the platform, writing:

“Users — and more importantly to YouTube, advertisers — have over the past year started to hold the platform accountable for enabling the exploitation of children and exposing them to disturbing content. But this video reveals an entirely different way the platform is harming kids: by letting them express extreme views in front of the entire world. This is what indoctrination looks like when it’s reflected back by the indoctrinated.”

Since the release of the article, Soph appears to have begun facing targeting from YouTube, being temporarily blocked from uploading  on the platform.

Along with trying to get her shut down, Bernstein called her father to try to get comment for the story, something Sophia Levin, the former New Yorker journalist who was fired after lying about an ICE agent being a Nazi did as well.

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The targeting of Soph is almost certainly due to her massive reach online.

She has amassed a massive audience of over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube, along with bringing in over $1,400 a month from monthly donors on Patreon.

Her  popularity can likely be credited to a growing resentment for the “social justice warrior” culture among young people growing up in the Internet age. With free access to information, many young people in Generation Z, or what Soph would call “Zoomers,” are finding themselves latching onto more conservative viewpoints in rebellion to the status quo of the previous Millennial generation.

This seems to be a clear attack on Soph for her beliefs, as they have in the past written glowing articles defending young kids who hold left-leaning views.

Just three days before Bernstein’s article, Buzzfeed wrote up an article defending an 11-year old “drag queen” who was reported to child protective services. That same child was spotted dancing on stage at an adult gay club while throngs of adult men showered him with money.

Bernstein, who has long targeted those holding anti-social justice warrior views, by evidence of his similar targeting of former Adult Swim star Sam Hyde, was also exposed by journalist Nick Monroe for holding his own extremist views.

In a Tweet, Bernstein once said “KILL a straight white man on your way to work tomorrow”.

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So this is the left in 2019. Targeting 14-year old girl for holding opinions they don’t like.

Facebook, Google Pour Big Money into Lobbying Congress While Blacklisting Conservatives

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By Sean Moran

Facebook and Google increasingly influence Congress as the social media giants censor conservative and alternative voices, dominate the Internet, and violate Americans’ privacy.

Facebook announced on Thursday that they have banned several conservative personalities such as Infowars host Alex Jones, Infowars contributor and YouTube personality Paul Joseph Watson, journalist and activist Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannopoulus. The social media giant also banned Louis Farrakhan from its platforms.

Facebook said that they banned these personalities because they were “dangerous.”

Amid calls for greater regulation of social media companies’ potential anticompetitive behavior, censorship of conservative and alternative voices, and privacy violations, Facebook and Google have remained at the top of Open Secret’s database of top spenders lobbying Congress.

So far in 2019, Facebook spent $3,400,000 and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, $3,530,00 in lobbying Congress. Alphabet also ranked as the eighth total highest spender in lobbying in 2018, spending $21,740,000, while Facebook spent $12,620,000.

Facebook’s influence has continued to rise over the years. In the early years of President Barack Obama, Facebook spent below one million dollars in 2008 and 2009. From 2011 to 2018, Facebook’s lobbying spending skyrocketed and reached historic highs in 2018, when they spent $12.6 million.

In 2019, Facebook lobbied heavily on H.R. 1644, the Save the Internet Act, a Democrat bill which would restore the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission (FCC) net neutrality regulations, which arose as the result of Google’s heavy lobbying of the Obama administration. In 2019, Google also lobbied on the Save the Internet Act.

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In 2018, one of Facebook’s bills on which they lobbied Congress was H.R. 2520, the Browser Act, sponsored by then Rep. and now Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), which would require social media companies such as Facebook and Google to obtain explicit permission from users for collecting their private data. The Browser Act would also stipulate that these social media companies cannot deny services to users who do not opt-in to these companies’ collection of their private data. In 2017, the Browser Act was the most important issue on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Blackburn said that her legislation would establish one set of rules that would balance the relationship between ISPs and Facebook and Google. The legislation would also prevent the social media giants from unfairly profiting off of Americans’ private data without their explicit consent.

“We need one set of rules for the entire internet ecosystem with the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] as the cop on the beat,” said Senator Blackburn. “The FTC has the flexibility to keep up with changes in technology and its principal mission is consumer protection. The BROWSER Act will enable consumers to make more educated decisions regarding the nature of their relationship with tech companies.”

In contrast, Alphabet’s most prominent issues in Congress in 2019 and 2018 related to labor and antitrust, as well as telecommunications and technology.

Facebook and Google’s dominance on the Internet has become increasingly apparent as Google has approximately 90 percent of web search traffic, whereas in digital advertising, Google and Facebook amount to nearly two-thirds of American digital ad spending, with Amazon at a “distant third” at under nine percent.

In 2018, Google lobbied Congress fourteen separate times on multiple pieces of legislation that would have increased liability for companies that enabled sex trafficking.

Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress extends to its trade group, the Internet Association. In the fourth quarter of 2018, the Internet Association spent $840,000. In total, the social media giants spent $2.6 million in 2018 for lobbying. In 2019, the association has spent $690,000 so far. Over the last two years, the Internet Association has focused on the Save the Internet Act as well as on legislation that would increase edge providers’ liability for hosting content that enables sex trafficking.

Facebook and Google influence political elections as well. During the 2018 election cycle, Alphabet donated:

  1. $223,269 to former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a prominent critic of Silicon Valley censorship.

  2. $149,741 to Rep. Jacky Rosen’s Senate campaign (D-NV) to unseat Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV).

  3. $135,625 to Rep. Josh Harder’s congressional campaign.

  4. $124,508 to former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s unsuccessful re-election campaign.

  5. $97, 364 to former Sen. Claire McCaskill’s failed re-election campaign.

During the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook donated:

  1. $75,005 to O’Rourke’s Senate campaign.

  2. $37,954 to Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) 2017 special Senate election against former Alabama judge Roy Moore.

  3. $34,534 to Heitkamp’s Senate election.

  4. $31,326 to McCaskill’s Senate campaign.

  5. $29,387 to Rosen’s successful campaign to unseat Heller.

As Facebook and Google and other social media giants continue to increasingly censor and blacklist conservative and alternative voices, more and more conservative voices have called for addressing the social media giants’ dominance of the Internet. Facebook and Google’s influence in Congress also relates to political confrontations; during a hearing in December 2018, the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee delivered a sharp rebuke of Republican accusations of Google’s political bias affecting its search engines, even though Google was his top donor.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said  he envisions three potential remedies for big tech’s violation of free speech and dominance on the Internet.

Cruz’s three solutions include:

  1. Amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act
  2. Antitrust measures to address big tech’s dominant status on the Internet.
  3. Addressing potential cases of fraud and deception.

“No one wants to see the federal government regulating what is allowed to be said, but there are at least three potential remedies that can be considered by Congress or the administration or both,” Cruz said.

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COLLUSION: Liberal Media Was Tipped Off About Paul Joseph Watson Being Banned by Facebook Before He Was

 

As reported earlier today, Facebook announced that it had banned several high-profile conservative personalities from their platform for good, including an incoming ban on the Facebook-owned Instagram.

Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, and all accounts related to Alex Jones or Infowars (including Paul Joseph Watson) were the main targets of Facebook’s latest purge and were labeled ‘dangerous’ by the social media giant.

To draw away from criticism about only banning pro-Trump figures, Facebook also claimed to be taking action against Louis Farrakhan, the Hitler-loving Nation of Islam leader.

The company alleges that all individuals or accounts engaged in the following behaviors, according to a statement given to pro-censorship CNN reporter Oliver Darcy.

The Facebook spokesperson said such factors include whether the person or organization has ever called for violence against individuals based on race, ethnicity, or national origin; whether the person has been identified with a hateful ideology; whether they use hate speech or slurs in their about section on their social media profiles; and whether they have had pages or groups removed from Facebook for violating hate speech rules.

Darcy, who himself has been personally involved in lobbying digital platforms to ban his political enemies, also claims that the company may end up banning accounts that share content related to any of the banned individuals.

Facebook tipped off the liberal media before they notified Paul Joseph Watson of his account being banned. Watson was banned — not because of his content — but because he works for Inforwars.

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Paul tweeted out earlier.

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Not likely.

Paul Joseph Watson’s YouTube videos and writings at Infowars are exceptional.
He has never come under fire for hate speech.
The Republican Party continues to be AWOL.

CENSORSHIP WAR: The Koch Brothers Fight To Silence Independent Voices

By Patrick Howley

The globalist Koch political network headed by billionaire Charles Koch is waging a war to silence independent journalists on the Internet.

The nonsense Koch group Americans For Prosperity is lobbying Judiciary Committee members to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up America’s innovative tech companies,” circulating a petition under the disingenuous header “Government Shouldn’t Pick Winners and Losers on the Internet.”

Government already picks winners and losers on the Internet by allowing Silicon Valley to ban independent truth-tellers like Alex Jones, Milo, Laura Loomer, and Roger Stone and shadowban many good American patriots who simply want to share information about Deep State corruption that won’t get picked up by the mainstream media. Just ask Gab about how hard it is to build a competitor social media platform in this current monopolized landscape.

Big League Politics links were banned from Reddit after my investigative reporting series exposing how a recent employee of the George Soros-funded Atlantic Council, now a top Reddit executive, was leading a “Ban Out” effort to suppress the free speech of President Donald Trump’s supporters. In protest, some Reddit users now post screenshots of Big League Politics articles onto the Reddit platform.

Now, the Koch-funded Daily Caller is actually partnering with Facebook to censor its competitors on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform. The outlet, which received nearly a million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2017 through their “Daily Caller News Foundation” content machine, is one of the “fact checker” organs for Zuckerberg to determine whether news sites get their reach throttled down. That gives the Caller an opportunity to shadowban their competitor sites on the Right and wage censorship war against the America First writers who are openly despised by Caller management (Tucker Carlson is no longer affiliated with the Daily Caller in any way).

To give you a sense of the kind of people who are tasked with “fact checking” competitors, look at Daily Caller editor-in-chief Geoff Ingersoll’s disgusting rant against populist nationalist reporter Cassandra Fairbanks, whom Ingersoll accused of being a Russian puppet.

“Still better than eating Putin’s cock bacon for breakfast, you hapless harlot,” Ingersoll ranted at Fairbanks. “By the way, maybe cut down. You’re blowing up.”

With many of the New Right accounts from the 2016 election — including the loud and proud Pepe the Frog shitposters — now virtually banned from the Internet, the Kochs are clearly hoping that they can suppress anyone who strays from the 2-D Narrative and control the conservative movement with their establishment “Blue Check” aggregators, many of whom sprang to force-fed prominence after Trump’s election to disparage America First people and constantly virtue-signal to the mainstream media mob.

Fortunately, independent journalists are not taking this laying down.

I broke the news:

Investigative journalist Laura Loomer filed a lawsuit Thursday against Twitter following her ban from the platform for comments about Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.

Loomer is also suing the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which reportedly“complained to Twitter” about Loomer’s work on the platform prior to her ban. Loomer, renowned for ambush video interviews of Democrat politicians, amassed more than 250,000 followers on Twitter. She was first suspended without clear explanation in the days leading up to the 2018 midterm election, and later banned outright from the social media platform after the election in November during her efforts to expose voter fraud in Florida.

“Ilhan is pro Sharia Ilhan is pro- FGM Under Sharia homosexuals are oppressed & killed. Women are abused & forced to wear the hijab. Ilhan is anti Jewish,” Loomer tweeted, referring to forced genital mutilation (FGM). That tweet was cited as the reason for her ban.

Loomer and her company Illoominate Media are being represented by attorney Ronald Coleman of the New Jersey-based law firm Mandelbaum Salsburg. Loomer’s legal defense fund can be found at FreeLoomer.com.

Loomer’s lawsuit can be READ HERE.

  1. This is an action for breach of contract, tortious interference with an advantageous business relationship, restraint of trade in violation of Fla. Stat. § 542.18, civil conspiracy and violation of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, Fla. Stat. § 501.201, et seq. for which plaintiff seeks and is entitled to damages in excess of Fifteen Thousand Dollars ($15,000) exclusive of interest, special damages, costs or attorney fees.
  2. Plaintiff is a journalist and activist. In order to suppress plaintiff’s views regarding certain controversial political topics – in particular, the role of radical Islam and its proponents American public life and policy – defendants CAIR Florida, Inc. and CAIR Foundation, which have been established by the U.S. government and adjudicated as essentially American branches of the Mideast terrorist group Hamas, have acted in concert and conspired with defendant Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter”) to cause her to be banned, and prevented her from making a living through the use of, the majority of social media platforms.
  3. These include not only Twitter and the blog platform Medium.com, but also major payment processors PayPal.com and Venmo, ride-sharing systems Uber (including Uber Eats) and Lyft, crowdfunding website GoFundMe, online custom merchandise platform Teespring.
  4. Twitter claims that Ms. Loomer was banned because she violated Twitter’s Terms of Service (“TOS”). But, as set forth below, this claim is implausible, because the TOS provide essentially no substantive guidance to all but the most extreme users regarding whether they will or will not be censored on Twitter.
  5. The reason for this is that the TOS are not only vague but are applied with so selectively and in such bad faith that they are meaningless except for purposes of providing Twitter with a pretext for wrongful, bad faith conduct such as is alleged here.
  6. Moreover, innumerable Twitter users, ranging from little-known or anonymous users with a handful of followers to major media organizations, non-governmental human rights and social activist organizations and popular commentators and celebrities, have made the same statements as Ms. Loomer at various times – and in many cases, repeatedly – without adverse action by Twitter.
  7. This conduct by Twitter demonstrates that its pretext for banning Ms. Loomer – because her tweets violated the TOS – is false, and that Twitter’s ban on her as well as Twitter’s explanation of it were made in bad faith.
  8. In fact, there is little serious debate that the Twitter TOS are mere window-dressing, pretexts for employing censorship policies that are either arbitrary and capricious or, far more frequently, and in the facts set forth here, driven by ideology or in coordination with favored or commercially influential advocacy groups, or both.
  9. Rather than being the result of a TOS violation, Ms. Loomer’s ban from Twitter was, upon information and belief, proximately caused by defendants CAIR Florida, organization the Federal Bureau of Investigation has identified as the U.S. “face” of the Mideast terrorist group Hamas, and CAIR National (collectively, “CAIR” or “CAIR / Hamas”), which on information and belief acted in concert with Twitter to procure her elimination as a voice in opposition to them and their favored politicians and causes.
  10. As alleged further herein, the TOS are merely a pretext to place a “progressive” and positive gloss on Twitter’s bad faith, unjustified and unprivileged elimination of plaintiffs’ predominant publishing and fundraising platform, in concert with and at the behest of CAIR Florida and CAIR National, acting with or on behalf of their affiliate Hamas and their financial sponsor the Kingdom of Qatar and, on information, other parties not presently known to plaintiff, thereby effectively silencing Ms. Loomer, eliminating a vigorous and courageous journalistic and investigatory adversary from the public square, enabling defendants to benefit unfairly thereby and causing Ms. Loomer and Illoominate the harm set forth herein”….

Loomer’s February protest at Twitter’s New York City headquarters, where she handcuffed herself to the front door, resulted in Loomer trending #1 on Twitter despite being banned.

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