Back in the dark days of the Soviet Union, dissidents risked being locked up – but not, officially at least, on the grounds that they had committed a political crime. In the Soviet regime’s imagination, treason and mental illness were often two sides of the same coin. Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia of the…

Big tech is again attempting to define the range of acceptable political discussion on its platforms; this week YouTube announced a number of changes in the face of the global COVID-19 pandemic, chief among those being that automated systems, rather than humans, will predominantly be authorizing or removing content in the foreseeable future. “As COVID-19…

Do you trust the media? Most people don’t. A 2017 study of nine Western countries found that in not one did a majority of people think traditional news or social media sorted fact from fiction well. Trust in media has been falling since the 1970s, and particularly in the last few years, as alternative media…

 This video was produced as part of a MintPress News and Grayzone collaboration. Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded…

Last week BuzzFeed published a front page story, under a “BREAKING” banner, headlined: President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project In the article, Buzzfeed reporters Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier claim to have been told, by two anonymous sources, that Robert Mueller’s “Russiagate” investigation had evidence Donald…

MINNEAPOLIS —  A recently founded venture claiming to be “a news rating agency” is making its big breakout in 2019 by claiming to be an authority at the forefront in the fight against “fake news.” Newsguard — which describes itself as an organization dedicated to “restoring trust and accountability” and using “journalism to fight false…

MINNEAPOLIS — Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful…

I didn’t realize you were still doing your show!” “Why can’t I see your posts anymore?” “I’ve had to re-follow you several times on Facebook.” These are but a few of the various comments and complaints about my Facebook page that I’ve fielded the past two years. With growing regularity and intensity, the cheery blue…

The Venezuelan government has announced the creation of a media-based task force to address fake or misleading international news stories about the Caribbean nation. The ‘Zero Tolerance Media Plan’ was announced by Vice Minister for International Communication William Castillo Monday, and will run through the Foreign Office and its network of embassies and consulates. Castillo…

In a hideous reflection of China’s already-prevalent ‘Social Credit’ system – which is a rating assigned to each citizen based on government data regarding their economic and social status – The Washington Post reports that Facebook has begun to assign its users a reputation score, predicting their trustworthiness on a scale from zero to one. Under the guise of its effort to…

Dear Mr. Sulzberger,  I read with great interest news accounts of your conversation with President Trump, in which you admonished him for his inflammatory characterization of the media as “fake news” and asserted that such polarizing language poses a threat not only to journalists but to American democracy itself. You needn’t be a partisan —…

MINNEAPOLIS – For much of the year, independent media has felt the sting of increased social media censorship, as the “revolving door” between U.S. intelligence agencies and social-media companies has manifested in a crackdown on news that challenges official government narratives. With many notable independent news websites having shut down since then as a result,…