Global Organization Attempts to End Free Speech Worldwide

Global Organization Attempts to End Free Speech Worldwide

by Dr. Joseph Mercola
November 22, 2021

 

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

• The International Grand Committee on Disinformation (IGCD) consists of “an international array of legislators, policy advisers, and other experts” who work together “to forge international alliances that bring shared, effective strategies into the battle against online disinformation”
• The founders of the IGCD are four members of the British and Canadian Parliaments, including British MP Damian Collins, who is also on the board of the Centers for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The CCDH fabricates reports that are then used to strip people of their freedom of speech rights
• Logistics for the IGCD are provided by the Reset Initiative (a not-so-subtle reminder that censorship is a requirement for The Great Reset), which is part of The Omidyar Group of philanthropies
• Omidyar funds Whistleblower Aid, the legal counsel for the fake Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, who has testified before U.S., French, British and European Union lawmakers, calling for more censorship
• CCDH chairman Simon Clark also has ties to Arabella Advisors, the most powerful dark money lobbying group in the U.S.

If you suspected censorship was being coordinated on a global scale, you’d be right. The International Grand Committee on Disinformation¹ (IGCD) consists of “an international array of legislators, policy advisers, and other experts” who work together “to forge international alliances that bring shared, effective strategies into the battle against online disinformation.” What could possibly go wrong?

The idea behind the IGCD came from four members of the British and Canadian Parliaments: Damian Collins and Ian Lucas from the U.K., and Bob Zimmer and Nathaniel Erskine-Smith from Canada. The first session of the IGCD took place at the end of November 2018, so they’ve been quietly working in the background for some time already.

Since then, they’ve held meetings in Canada and the U.K. and hosted seminars in the U.S., attended by spiritual leaders, journalists, technology executives, “subject matter experts” and parliamentary leaders from 21 countries (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, St. Lucia, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.)

According to the IGCD, the organization functions as a “forum for information sharing, collaboration and harmonization of policies to … achieve common goals among democratic states. Never mind the fact that democracy cannot exist without freedom of speech.”

Logistics for the group are provided by an initiative called “Reset,”² which feels like a not-so-subtle reminder that censorship is a requirement for The Great Reset. They know people would never go along with the Great Reset plan if allowed to freely discuss the ramifications.

‘Online Safety Bill’ Seeks to Shut Down Counternarratives

The IGCD helps shed light on the technocracy front group known as the Centers for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH),³ seeing how one of the CCDH’s board members, Damian Collins MP, is also one of the founders of the IGCD. Both groups were formed in 2018 and clearly have the same goals and agenda.

One of those goals is to eliminate free speech online, which is what the U.K.’s proposed “Online Safety Bill” would achieve. Not surprisingly, Collins is part of the Online Safety Bill Committee, charged with examining the Bill “line by line to make sure it is fit for purpose.”⁴

In an August 11, 2021, blog post, Collins asked for the public’s help to track down counternarratives, taking screenshots of the offending material and emailing it to him. “Unless harmful content is reported, whether it is terrible images of self-harm, violent or extremist content or anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, it can otherwise be unknowable to regulators and governments,” he said.

It’s impossible to miss the fact that Collins is lumping “anti-vaccine” content in with violent and extremist content that must be censored and, in reality, that’s probably one of the top categories of information this bill seeks to control.

As reported by iNews,⁵ “The Prime Minister [Boris Johnson] has repeatedly insisted the powers contained within the legislation would help crack down on … anti-vaccine disinformation.”

Online Safety Bill Is ‘Catastrophic for Free Speech’

While some might think it’s a good idea to spoon feed people “correct” information about vaccines, it’s important to realize that while vaccines are the issue of today, tomorrow another topic that is near and dear to your heart could be deemed out of bounds for public discussion. So, supporting censorship of any kind is a slippery slope that is bound to come back to bite you when you least expect it.

As reported by BBC News,⁶ the “Legal to Say. Legal to Type” campaign warns that if the Online Safety Bill becomes law, Big Tech firms will be in a position of extraordinary power:

“While the group supports the bill’s aim of ensuring online platforms remove images of child sexual abuse, terrorist material and content which incites racial hatred and violence, it fears other provisions will adversely affect free speech …

Under the bill, Ofcom [the British Office of Communications] will be given the power to block access to sites and fine companies which do not protect users from harmful content up to £18m, or 10% of annual global turnover, whichever is the greater.

Campaigners claim this gives tech firms an incentive to ‘over-censor,’ and ‘effectively outsources internet policing from the police, courts and Parliament to Silicon Valley’ …

Mr. [MP David] Davis described the bill as a ‘censor’s charter.’ He added: ‘Lobby groups will be able to push social networks to take down content they view as not politically correct, even though the content is legal’ …

Campaigners are also concerned that technology companies may use artificial intelligence to identify harmful content. That, they say, may introduce racial biases and will wrongly censor language, ‘especially when it comes to irony-loving Brits.’”

US Democrats Attack Free Speech

Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Health Misinformation Act, introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., would suspend Communications Decency Act Section 230 protections in instances where social media networks are found to boost “anti-vaccine conspiracies,” and hold them liable for such content. In a July 22, 2021, article, Tech Crunch reported:⁷

“The bill would specifically alter Section 230’s language to revoke liability protections in the case of ‘health misinformation that is created or developed through the interactive computer service’ if that misinformation is amplified through an algorithm.

The proposed exception would only kick in during a declared national public health crisis, like the advent of COVID-19, and wouldn’t apply in normal times. The bill would task the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with defining health misinformation.”

As with the British Online Safety Bill, the Health Misinformation Act is an open portal for abuses. Ironically, the Act actually relies on misinformation to make its case. It specifically mentions the CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” report,⁸ which falsely claims a dozen individuals, myself included, are responsible for a majority of the “anti-vax misinformation” being shared on social media platforms.

‘Disinformation Dozen’ Have Negligible Reach

Meanwhile, in an August 18, 2021, statement,^9,10 Facebook’s vice president of content policy, Monika Bickert, stated there’s no evidence to support the CCDH’s claims, and that the people named by the CCDH as being responsible for the vast majority of vaccine misinformation on social media were in fact only responsible for a tiny fraction — 0.05% — of all vaccine content on Facebook. Here’s an excerpt from Bickert’s statement:¹¹

“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …

In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.

The report¹² upon which the faulty narrative is based analyzed only a narrow set of 483 pieces of content over six weeks from only 30 groups, some of which are as small as 2,500 users. They are in no way representative of the hundreds of millions of posts that people have shared about COVID-19 vaccines in the past months on Facebook.

Further, there is no explanation for how the organization behind the report identified the content they describe as ‘anti-vax’ or how they chose the 30 groups they included in their analysis. There is no justification for their claim that their data constitute a ‘representative sample’ of the content shared across our apps.”

It’s quite clear that the CCDH exists to fabricate “evidence” that is then used to destroy the opposition in order to control the information. As such, it’s really nothing more than a front group for the much larger, global IGCD, which aims to shut down free speech across the world.

The ‘Whistleblower’ That Isn’t

One of the dirty tricks used to shut down free speech is to employ fake whistleblowers. Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee turned “whistleblower” who testified before Congress October 5, 2021, accusing her former employer of aiding evildoers, is not an actual whistleblower.

She is being legally represented by a firm called Whistleblower Aid, founded by a national security lawyer, Mark Zaid, who is known for betraying his clients and siding with prosecutors.¹³

Whistleblower Aid is funded by tech billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and the Reset Initiative, which provides logistics for the IGCD, is part of The Omidyar Group of philanthropies.¹⁴ That tells you everything you need to know about the intended purpose behind Haugen’s testimony. As reported by The Gray Zone:¹⁵

“Haugen emphasized in her testimony that she ‘doesn’t want to break up’ Facebook; she was merely looking for increased ‘content moderation’ to root out ‘extremism’ and ‘(mis/dis)information’ … Haugen appears to be little more than a tool in a far-reaching plan to increase the U.S. national security state’s control over one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.”

In short order, Haugen managed what has been impossible for other whistleblowers. She secured audiences with lawmakers in France, the U.K. and the European Union to discuss the need for more censorship.

Dark Money

Over the past year, the CCDH’s fabricated “Disinformation Dozen” report has been repeatedly used as the foundation for calls to strip American citizens of their First Amendment free speech rights. It’s been used by attorneys general and elected politicians, and it’s been cited in all the Big Tech hearings.¹⁶

Aside from being directly tied to the global IGCD (remember, Collins is on the board of both the IGCD and the CCDH), the CCDH is also connected to Arabella Advisors — the most powerful dark money lobbying group in the U.S.¹⁷ — by way of CCDH chairman Simon Clark.¹⁸ (“Dark money” is a term that means the identities of those funding the organization are kept secret.)

Clark is a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress,¹⁹ where he specializes in “right-wing domestic terrorism” (are we to believe there’s no such thing as left-wing terrorism?), which is funded by a liberal Swiss billionaire named Hansjörg Wyss.^20,21

Wyss also funds Arabella Advisors, which runs a large number of temporary front groups that pop in and out of existence as needed for any given campaign.²² Reporter Hayden Ludwig has described the inner workings of Arabella Advisors and the influence of the “dark money” flowing through it:²³

“Arabella’s nonprofits act as the left’s premier pass-through funders for professional activists. Big foundations — including the Gates, Buffett, and Ford Foundations — have laundered billions of dollars through this network, washing their identities from the dollars that go to push radical policies on America.

But the real juice from these nonprofits comes from the vast array of ‘pop-up groups’ they run — called so because they consist almost solely of slick websites that may pop into existence one day and pop out the next, usually once the campaign is through.

We’ve counted over 350 such front groups pushing everything from federal funding of abortion to overhauling Obamacare to packing the Supreme Court. Arabella is as dark as ‘dark money’ gets. It’s also the prime example of liberal hypocrisy over anonymous political spending, operating in nearly total obscurity …

As more of this massive web of groups — responsible for churning out nearly $2.5 billion since its creation — has come into focus, one thing’s become clear: When a special interest donor goes to Arabella, they’re expecting a political payoff.”

You can learn more about Arabella Advisors and its hidden influence over U.S. politics through pop-up front groups in the Capital Research Center series, “Arabella’s Long War Against Trump’s Department of the Interior.”²⁴

An Open War on the Public

We’re now in a situation where asking valid questions about public health measures are equated to acts of domestic terrorism. It’s unbelievable, yet here we are.

Over the past two years, the rhetoric used against those who question the sanity of using unscientific pandemic countermeasures, such as face masks and lockdowns, or share data showing that COVID-19 gene therapies are really bad public health policy, has become increasingly violent.

Dr. Peter Hotez has publicly called for cyberwarfare assaults on American citizens who disagree with official COVID narratives, and this vile rhetoric was published in the prestigious science journal Nature, of all places.²⁵ His article should have set off alarm bells at the CCDH, were the CCDH actually about protecting us from online hate.

But the CCDH is not about protecting the public from hate. In classic Orwellian Doublespeak, it actually exists to foster and create it. Incidentally, the journal Nature also published an article by CCDH founder Imran Ahmed, in which he discusses the need to destroy the “anti-vaxx industry.” How he, who has no medical credentials, managed to meet publication requirements is a mystery, and just goes to show we cannot even trust some of our most esteemed medical journals.

In his article, Ahmed flat out lied, saying he “attended and recorded a private, three-day meeting of the world’s most prominent anti-vaxxers.” Far from being “private,” the meeting in question was actually a public online conference, open to anyone and everyone around the world, with access to the recorded lectures part of the sign-up fee.

The fact that Ahmed lied about such an easily verifiable point tells you everything you need to know about the CCDH — and by extension the IGCD, which it clearly is working with. In the end, lies cannot stand up to the truth, which is precisely why the CCDH and IGCD are working overtime to “harmonize” laws across the democratic world to censor any and all counternarratives.

Like I said before, right now, it’s primarily about silencing questions and inconvenient truths about the COVID shots, but in the future, these laws will allow them to silence discussion on any topic that threatens undemocratic rule by globalists.

To avoid such a fate, we must be relentless in our pursuit and sharing of the truth, and we must relentlessly demand our elected representatives stand up for freedom of speech and other Constitutional rights.

 

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cover image credit: CDD20 / pixabay