News Round-Up: CIA's Efforts to Deny Covid's Lab Origin, Violent Crimes in France and Meta's Threads Restricts Freedom of Expression
News Round-Up: CIA's Efforts to Deny Covid's Lab Origin, Violent Crimes in France and Meta's Threads Restricts Freedom of Expression
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Whistleblower: CIA paid analysts money to deny Covid's lab origin.
Immigration-related violence is on the rise in France, but the authorities are threatening to jail those protesting against an exceptionally brutal rape.
Threads, the platform created by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to compete with Elon Musk's X, continues to censor Covid topics.
US Court of Appeals: the Biden administration imposed social media censorship.
Novak Djokovic and the "Moderna shot of the day".
Whistleblower: CIA paid money to analysts to deny Covid's lab origin
The staff of The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and The Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the US House of Representatives heard testimony from a whistleblower that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offered significant sums of money to six analysts to change their views on the origin of Covid-19. The Committee's press release states that the whistleblower, a highly credible senior-level CIA official, claims that of the seven members of the CIA team tasked with analysing the origin of Covid-19, six concluded that the virus probably originated in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan. The CIA allegedly offered the six experts financial incentives to change their conclusion and say that the virus was of a zoonotic origin.
The Republican leaders of the committees, Brad Wenstrup and Mike Turner, noted in a statement that six of the seven members of the investigative team felt there was sufficient intelligence and scientific data to confirm the laboratory origin of the virus with 'low confidence'. "The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position," the chairs wrote.
In the past, the FBI and the Department of Energy have considered laboratory origin likely. However, several interest groups have ridiculed the possibility of a laboratory origin and have suggested the Huanan market in Wuhan as the origin of the pandemic instead of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has a history of experimenting with coronaviruses. We've written more about the debate on the origins of Covid-19 here.
Immigration-related violence is on the rise in France, but the authorities are threatening to jail those protesting against an exceptionally brutal rape
In Cherbourg, France, a protest of a few dozen people took place on September 9 at the residence of an immigrant accused of rape, 18-year-old Oumar N., Remix News reports. In August, Oumar N. attacked a 29-year-old Mégane in an extremely brutal way and allegedly raped her with a broomstick. The woman's injuries were so serious that she was in a coma for a month and it is not clear whether she will survive. The article notes that emergency workers, including hospital staff, reportedly broke down in tears while dealing with the woman's injuries, and some needed psychological counselling.
Oumar N. is now in pre-trial detention, while the Argos group's protest is motivated by the fact that the state is failing to protect its citizens from violence. For example, the same Oumar, by any logic, should have been in prison a long time ago, as he has a long record of violent crimes and has been arrested several times for them, including the rape of his younger sister.
Yet the French authorities decided to arrest 12 protesters and detained them for 48 hours. The prosecutor now charges them with “unauthorized gathering” and “promoting self-defense”. They could potentially face up to 5 years in prison. "You are appearing for having, through speeches made at an undeclared demonstration, incited willful harm to a person’s integrity by calling for self-defense,” stated Pierre-Yves Marot, the public prosecutor. In particular, as the protesters were drawing attention to the problem, they were holding up a photo of Oumar N. and a sign that read "The state doesn’t defend us, get ready".
The protesters' detention is also because the group organising the protest is the successor of another group which, because of uncontrolled immigration and the state's inability to deal with it, called for civil disobedience. The French authorities banned the predecessor – a group called Génération Identitaire – in 2021.
However, both this particular protest and the activities of such groups are triggered by the state's broader inability to deal with and protect people from violent crimes committed by immigrants, of which there are many examples.
In June this year, a Syrian who had arrived in the country last year attacked children with a knife in a playground in the town of Annecy in south-eastern France. Four children and two adults were injured in the attack.
Last week, a 61-year-old drunk Algerian attacked a 21-year-old pregnant French woman, trying to kiss her in the street and grabbing her breasts. He was an illegal immigrant. The court ordered him to leave the country and let him go. However, only 0.2% of Algerians who are deported by a court order leave.
According to crime statistics, two out of every three crimes committed in France are committed by people with an immigrant background.
Threads, the text platform created by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta to compete with Elon Musk's X, continues Covid censorship
Threads, a social networking site launched in July by Facebook founder and owner Mark Zuckerberg's holding company Meta, is receiving criticism for preventing people from searching for information related to the Covid pandemic, writes The Washington Post (quoted by The Epoch Times). The platform, which resembles X (formerly Twitter), got its search function last week, but some queries just don't work. If you search for something under the keywords "covid" or "vaccines", you get a blank screen and a pop-up that redirects you to the CDC website. The Washington Post's tests showed that the blocked terms included the words “sex”, “nude”, “gore”, “porn”, “coronavirus”, “vaccines” and “vaccination”.
Meta confirmed its search policy restrictions in a press statement, saying that the text platform is for now blocking users from searching for words that could bring up “sensitive” posts.
Zuckerberg himself has acknowledged and regretted that the government wanted Facebook to censor factually accurate Covid posts during the pandemic. However, this regret has not made any significant difference, as Facebook continues to exercise a marked degree of censorship on Covid and vaccines.
Meta's new network Threads received a lot of press attention in the summer after its launch and was dubbed the Twitter killer. Many users immediately went on to try it out, and within a few days, 100 million people had downloaded the app to their phones. However, interest has now plummeted and the app's usage has fallen by 85%.
US Court of Appeals: Biden administration imposed social media censorship
In early July, US Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty issued an injunction prohibiting various agencies and several individual officials of President Joe Biden's administration from communicating with social media companies on issues related to the so-called fight against misinformation. The judge's decision was based on the fact that the White House had been working with social media companies under the guise of fighting "false information" to restrict the freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Censorship was used in a particularly notable way in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, restricting posts of truthful information – e.g. blocking discussion of a possible laboratory origin of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, information and speech critical of the lockdown policy used to contain the virus, and anything that cast a negative light on Covid vaccines, including talk of vaccine damage by its victims. Other issues were also suppressed, e.g. ahead of the 2020 presidential election, on the instruction of the authorities, social media platforms blocked sharing any articles by The New York Post that exposed the corrupt business practices of Barack Obama's then vice-president and a Presidential candidate at the time, Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. Postings about possible election fraud in the 2020 presidential election were also deemed inadmissible.
The lawsuit had been initiated by the attorneys general of two states, Missouri and Louisiana, in May 2022. In the autumn of 2022, five individuals were added to the same lawsuit as plaintiffs who had either been directly censored, had their accounts deleted or their posts covertly blocked by social media companies under pressure from government officials. These included Stanford University medical professor Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff, authors of the Great Barrington Declaration which called for a sensible Covid policy back in autumn 2020. Joining the lawsuit were also a censored psychiatrist Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, founder of The Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, and Jill Hines, one of the leaders of the consumer and human rights group Health Freedom Louisiana.
Judge Doughty's decision to prohibit the communication reflected his assessment of the lawsuit – he considered it very well-reasoned and promising, and hence blocked further communication between the government and social media platforms. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”,'" he wrote in a 155-page explanation accompanying the injunction. The Biden administration appealed the injunction to the higher court.
On September 8th, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Biden's White House, top health care officials, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were likely to have violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The three-judge unanimous decision stated that the White House "coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences". In other words, undue influence was used to get tech companies to remove or restrict the circulation of posts about, for example, the coronavirus or the election.
At the same time, the ruling limited the scope of the injunction issued by Judge Doughty by removing some of the authorities that were in the original injunction. The White House, the Surgeon General's Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the FBI remained. The scope of the ban was also limited, but it was stated that it is prohibited to “coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech.”
Despite the limitations compared to the previous injunction, the decision confirmed the government's unacceptable behavior in restricting freedom of expression and is therefore of exceptional importance in protecting it. One of the plaintiffs, Dr. Bhattacharya, admitted in his commentary that he was overcome with emotion upon reading the decision. "That is because the victory is not just for me but for every American who felt the oppressive force of this censorship industrial complex during the pandemic. It is a vindication for parents who advocated for some semblance of normal life for their children but found their Facebook groups suppressed. It is a vindication for vaccine-injured patients who sought the company and counsel of fellow patients online but found themselves gaslit by social media companies and the government into thinking their personal experience of harm was all in their heads," Bhattacharya noted.
However, the dispute continues and Biden's Justice Department on Thursday requested the US Supreme Court to put the injunction on hold. In a brief order, Chief Justice Samuel Alito said he was issuing a stop-gap pause on the ruling until September 22.
Novak Djokovic and the "Moderna shot of the day"
Tennis star Novak Djokovic, who triumphed at the US Open tennis championships last Sunday, deserves credit not only for his phenomenal 24 Grand Slam titles, equalling an all-time record, but also for his determination to stay true to his principles during the Covid pandemic.
Had it not been for the unreasonable rules of the Covid regime preventing Djokovic from competing, he would have probably beaten the all-time Grand Salm record some time ago.
In early 2022, he was mocked in Australia. At the time, the country only allowed entry to vaccinated individuals, but Djokovic as an unvaccinated player was initially granted an exemption. On his arrival, his visa was cancelled, and the world number one was forced into a 'quarantine hotel' and later expelled from the country.
He was also denied entry to the US Open last year by Joe Biden's government, which also required him to be vaccinated before entering the country.
This year, however, Djokovic came and won. Ironically one of the major sponsors of the US Open is the vaccine manufacturer Moderna. The tournament's tennis experts pick the best shot of the day which is then called the 'Moderna shot of the day'. Naturally, it was Djokovic who took the honours for the best shot in the final – his winning shot. All the former harassment and mockery of the top athlete was due to his refusal to accept an injection – a shot – from Moderna or any other vaccine manufacturer. And now Moderna awarded him for a more natural kind of shot during the competition.
Djokovic has said that he has never been against vaccination as such, but has always supported the freedom to decide what to inject into one's body. "Because the principles of decision making on my body are more important than any title or anything else. I'm trying to be in tune with my body as much as I possibly can," explained Djokovic.