On August 22 Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that they had arbitrarily removed 652 accounts, groups and pages allegedly linked to Russia and Iran for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” by which we’re safe in assuming is meant political information inconvenient for the US power structure and its “Euro-Atlantic” elite allies in Europe and elsewhere.
The purpose pursued and the criteria employed are both explicitly political, focusing especially on federal elections. Facebook boasted of recent successes in this regard in France and Mexico.
There are historically-decisive Senate and Congressional elections this November 6th in the US.
At the beginning of this month several major conservative and libertarian Facebook, YouTube and other social media accounts were closed by the above and other parties in a heavy-handed, coordinated manner. The sites and individuals banned are ones that have urged cooperation between the US and Russia and warned against worsening political and potential military conflict between the world’s two major nuclear powers.
What connects the two unprecedented social media purges is an agreement reached in May of this year between Facebook and the Atlantic Council.
The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 by former Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter to bolster support for NATO. Atlantic Councils were set up in other member states for the same purpose, and at the present time they now number more than 40 in NATO and Partnership for Peace countries. The name is derivative of North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of NATO.
Due to its efforts, NATO has grown from 16 to 29 members since the end of the Cold War and in addition has recruited at least forty military partners throughout the world. With Colombia joining its Partners Across the Globe program earlier this year, NATO now has members and partners on all inhabited continents.
The partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council was described by the Atlantic Council’s president and CEO Fred Kempe as follows:
This partnership will help our security, policy and product teams get real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world. It will also increase the number of ‘eyes and ears’ we have working to spot potential abuse on our service – enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.
The collaboration, like NATO and Facebook themselves, are not only avowedly political but unabashedly global in scale.
In the interim Facebook has announced it’s hired “additional third-party reviewers” for the purpose advancing the aforesaid political censorship and furtherance of NATO’s international agenda.
Failing such methods, there are also those proposed by then-president presumptive Hillary Clinton two years ago: “As president, I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses.”
