Save Democracy From Informed Citizens: Vote Censorship!

Media Matters/New York Times partners with Washington Post/CCDH in last-minute, double tag-team campaign blitz to silence Kamala Harris critics.

9 minute read

Nico Grant of the New York Times rode shotgun with Media Matters of America on an agenda driven stagecouch to shoot down 30 conservative broadcasters as unfit to appear on YouTube:

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has prided itself on connecting viewers with “authoritative information” about elections. But in this presidential contest, it acted as a megaphone for conspiracy theories…

Kayla Gogarty, a research director at Media Matters who led the analysis, said that “YouTube is allowing these right-wing accounts and channels to undermine the 2024 results.”

Grant’s story garnered huge pre-buzz thanks to conservative targets pre-empting his “scoop” with colorful early responses. “I do hope.. you’ll note that I told you to fuck off,” was the acid reply of Tucker Carlson, accused of participating in one of “286 videos containing election misinformation” reaching “more than 47 million views.” Ben Shapiro ripped Grant’s exposé as a campaign “October surprise,” saying the purpose was to “pressure YouTube to demonetize and penalize any and all conservatives” a week from Election Day.

As Grant’s story roared across social media, eliciting outrage from Democrats and Republicans alike, a trio of Washington Post reporters published a similar piece: “Elon Musk says X users fight falsehoods. The falsehoods are winning.” Instead of a Media Matters report, the Post worked off new “analysis” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Labour-connected advocacy group featured last week in Racket and The Disinformation Chronicle.

Musk created “Community Notes” on X/Twitter as a way to control misinformation, but CCDH was not happy with the results:

X is poised to play a prominent role in the U.S. presidential election, a race in which Musk is a major backer of Republican nominee Donald Trump and spreading unfounded claims of voter fraud — most of which go unchallenged by his fact-checking program… The CCDH’s analysis… tracked how Community Notes responded to 283 posts that contained election claims identified as false or misleading by independent fact-checking organizations.

CCDH’s annual priority this year is “Kill Musk’s Twitter” through “Advertising focus” to drive away X’s corporate advertising revenue, the chief weapon being shrieking reports claiming “hate’ proliferates on the platform. Once hidden, CCDH’s now-exposed contempt for Musk and free speech was evident in the pre-ordained conclusions:

The Times/MMA “studied” 286 videos, while the Post/CCDH analyzed 283 Notes. Yet each outlet used a format so common in the “anti-disinformation” era, it reads more like spam or clip-art now than journalism. A DNC-aligned group produces a “report” documenting a sciencey-sounding quantity of “misinformation” incidents, then passes the scare report to a politically willing mainstream news outlet, which trumpets the new “facts” while publicly and privately pressuring platforms to remove the offending material. Welcome to the new “accountability journalism.”