Thread by @SystemUpdate_

The Washington Post’s latest “disinformation study” – sponsored by the EU with an Omidyar-funded group that accuses Twitter of failing to censor "Russian propaganda" – is another in a long line of fraudulent attempts to justify censorship with pro-censorship demands.

Looking at the underlying study makes the fraud here manifest: the same type of fraud on which the newly emerged "disinformation industry" depends.

The EU-led study insisted that Elon Musk’s new Twitter policies, and those of other Big Tech platforms, help spread Russian propaganda –– by which they mean that Musk's reduction of political censorship on the site, and the "failure" of Big Tech generally to censor upon command, is "dangerous."

.@ggreenwald “I know we're all trying to think of the EU as these nice, soft Democrats with a small D, but in the name of prosecuting this war, in the name of their powers on COVID and just in general, they are really aggressively seeking to prevent dissent on the internet in exactly the kind of authoritarian and totalitarian way we are always trained to believe is done by our enemies.”

.@ggreenwald “These people constantly march under the banner of “saving democracy” and “pro-democracy” and “saving the West from authoritarianism” when in reality their central project is to eliminate free speech in the digital age, because of fears of what free speech will enable the populations to do –– meaning people will think freely outside of their control, and might therefore vote in ways different than they want them to.”

By the definition of the Washington Post’s article, “propaganda” boils down to “anything that speaks out against the neoliberal regime,” a narrative intensifying now that more and more people are growing tired of the Ukraine-Russia war.

@ggreenwald .@ggreenwald “Propaganda, that word, is like terrorism. It means whatever the wielders of the term wanted to mean, same with hate speech, same with disinformation.”

@ggreenwald Thanks to the lax definition of “propaganda,” anyone can be in league with the Kremlin. All you’d have to do is openly express doubts about the Ukraine war, which, by the EU’s standards, makes you a Russian propagandist.

.@ggreenwald “Simply by opposing the U.S. war in Ukraine, or questioning the false claims of the United States and its media about the war, you will be counted as a pro-Russian propagandist who should be censored from the Internet under EU law because you have quote, ‘ideological alignment with the Russian state.’”

@ggreenwald These liberal U.S.-centered agencies are currently outsourcing their censorial dirty work to ones in the EU, because while U.S.-based censorship is heavily restricted thanks to the First Amendment, the EU has no such protections.

@ggreenwald Censorship attempts — like the current EU study — are our most dangerous threat. If we aren’t free to express anything that deviates from the policies dictated by Western governments and billionaires, then we might as well forfeit all other political rights.

.@ggreenwald “Hearing Germans and German politicians talk about the need for unity, and achieving that through suppression of dissent, because of the need to win glorious war over Russia by attacking it through Ukraine, has such obvious historical relationships to these kind of very traumatic themes that I'm amazed that more people don't see those and react that way.”

@ggreenwald Full episode: rumble.com/v3ffei8-system…