Nick Corbishley: Naked Capitalism – Uncomfortable Truths and Dissenting Views in an Age of Rising Censorship

Despite its modest size, NC has twice stood up to the bullying tactics of the Censorship Industrial Complex (2016, the Washington Post; 2024, Google). Please help us to continue our track record of success by giving generously at the Tip Jar. 

The goal of the political leadership in the US, the EU, the UK, and other ostensibly liberal democracies is simple: to gain much greater, more granular control over the information being shared on the internet. As Matt Taibbi told Russell Brand in an interview last year, both the EUçs Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Biden Administration’s proposed RESTRICT Act  (which Yves dissected in April, 2023) are essentially a “wish list that has been passed around” by the transatlantic elite “for some time,” including at a 2021 gathering at the Aspen Institute.

The same goes for the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which Kier Starmer would like nothing better than to beef up. Likewise, Canada has introduced sweeping new internet regulation through its Online News Act, which includes, among other things, a link tax, and Online Streaming Act. So, too, has Australia through a censorship bill that is strikingly similar to the EU’s DSA and even includes a punitive fine of up to 2% of global profits for social media companies that do not comply.

It’s not hard to see why. With economic conditions deteriorating rapidly across the West, after decades of rampant financialisation, kakistocracy, and corporatisation, to the extent that even the United Nations is now one giant private-public partnership, the social contract is, to all intents and purposes, worthless. Even the WEF admits that corporations, its main constituency, have turbocharged inequality. Populism is on the rise just about everywhere and angry and fragmented protest movements have been growing since at least 2019.

Thanks largely to the countervailing information still available on the internet, governments are rapidly losing control of the narrative on key issues, including the war in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Their stock response has been to clamp down on the ability of citizens to use the internet to generate, consume and share important news, dissenting views and uncomfortable truths.

These, I believe, are among Naked Capitalism’s core functions: to share the pressing news of the day from around the world, primarily through its Links and Water Cooler pages; to produce valuable, in-depth analysis of economic, political and geopolitical trends and developments in its original posts; and to raise, and elicit from its commentariat, dissenting views and uncomfortable truths.[1] It is an essential, empowering and edifying service that is arguably in greater need today, in this age of encroaching digital censorship, than at any time since the site’s inception almost two decades ago. To support this independent source of information, analysis, and debate, please go to the Tip Jar and give generously.

Naked Capitalism’s ability to fulfil those functions, however, is likely to face mounting obstacles and challenges in the months and years to come, as (to paraphrase former State Department official Mike Benz) the Blob, spearheaded by the US State Dept, the UK Foreign Office and the military, intelligence and diplomacy arms and assets of NATO, escalates its proxy war against freedom of speech and “all global manifestations of domestic populism.”

But to quote Shakespeare, though Naked Capitalism “be but little, she is fierce.” Despite its modest size, this site has twice stood up to the bullying tactics of the Censorship Industrial Complex. In 2016, NC was one of some 200 independent media websites classified by the CIA-and-Ukraine-ultranationalist-connected PropOrNot blogsite as useful Russian idiots. It was one of the opening salvos against the independent media during the Russiagate madness. When the Bezos-owned Washington Post featured a front-page article amplifying the shady group’s unfounded allegations, NC’s response, through its equally fierce lawyer, was to call for an prompt retraction as well as demand a prominent public apology and an equally prominent opportunity to reply. Readers rallied then to support us; will you have our back again in this fight for open information? Our donation page beckons!

Needless to say, that apology never came and the article stayed up, even as journalists from both independent and mainstream tore it to shreds. Instead, the Post responded to NC’s letter and other lashings by inserting an editor’s note at the top of the article that included this weasel-worded disclaimer: “The Post, which did not name any of the sites, does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet, nor did the article purport to do so.” To which Yves offered this acerbic response:

This is tantamount to an admission that not only did the Washington Post do no fact-checking, but that it also does not consider fact-checking to be part of its job. And it has the temerity to accuse others of engaging in “fake news”?

Naked Capitalism’s second brush with the internet censors came this year when Google threatened to demonetise this site after its algorithms identified 14 posts from 2018 as having committed grievous offences (including ANTI_VACCINATION, HATEFUL_CONTENT, DEMONSTRABLY_FALSE_DEMOCRATIC PROCESS, HARMFUL_HEALTH_CLAIM]. The world’s largest media corp was singling NC out for arguably its most extreme punishment after not voicing a single objection since we started running ads, more than 16 years ago.

“This was a serious ultimatum,” notes Yves. “Even though donations provide a substantial majority of our revenues, the loss of the comparatively small ad revenues would still hurt, particularly since we are now in a tough fundraising environment.” But rather than simply delete the posts, as many owners of small online news websites might have been tempted to do, Yves and Lambert put their combat gear back on.

In a damning post, Yves methodically exposed just how sloppy Google’s Kafkaesque attempt at AI censorship had been:

Given the gravity of Google’s threat, it is shocking that the AI results are plainly and systematically flawed. The algos did not even accurately identify unique posts that had advertising on them, which is presumably the first screen in this process. Google actually fingered only 14 posts in its spreadsheet, and not 16 as shown, for a false positive rate merely on identifying posts accurately, of 12.5%.

Those 14 posts are out of 33,000 over the history of the site and approximately 20,000 over the time frame Google apparently used, 2018 to now. So we are faced with an ad embargo over posts that at best are less than 0.1% of our total content.

And of those 14, Google stated objections for only 8. Of those 8, nearly all, as we will explain, look nonsensical on their face.

The resulting furor drew the attention of many other independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, whose post, Meet the AI-Censored? Naked Capitalism, Yves says, probably helped turn the tide. A month after receiving the ultimatum, our ad agency notified us that Google had cleared all the targeted URLs. Once again, our slate with the tech behemoth was clean. But as Yves, vindicated, wrote in the post announcing Google’s reversal, “we did not remove a single word from any post.”

The moral of this story is that even as the internet becomes an increasingly challenging terrain to navigate, especially for websites like Naked Capitalism that consistently challenge the self-serving narratives peddled by governments and their big corporate allies, NC will stand up to the censorial bullies. Please help! Your donations (remember the Tip Jar!) and other forms of support will help keep this vital enterprise fit and ferocious.

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[1] A few examples that spring to mind of uncomfortable truths discussed and dissected here at Naked Capitalism over the past couple of years:

• The improbability of a BRICS currency, even in BANCOR 2.0 format, emerging in the not-too-distant future, for a whole host of reasons that have been extensively explored by Yves and others. This was not a popular opinion, especially among supporters of the emerging multipolar world order, but recent statements by BRICS leaders suggest it is probably the correct one.
• The inevitable failure of US-EU sanctions on Russia and their likely devastating boomerang effects on Europe’s economy. This is one we called right even before Russia’s Special Military Operation began.
• Western leaders believing impossible things about the war in Russia, their escalating stand-off with China and other tectonic shifts taking place in the world. This formed part of a broader discussion about the current state of leadership in the West, not only in the political arena but in many sectors and spheres.
• The largely ignored role of corporate profiteering in fuelling inflation over the past two years. Most media sites were focusing their (and their readers’) attention on the relationship between spiralling wages and inflation, just as the central banks and their core constituencies would have wanted them to.
• The (again largely ignored) benefits of non-pharmaceutical interventions (ventilation, masking, etc) in combating COVID-19 outbreaks. Over the past four and a half years Lambert has painstakingly documented these vital aspects of public health care and the public health authorities’ arguably criminal and eugenicist disinterest in them.
• The limited and fast-waning benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines against anything but wild type COVID. When a Pfizer executive revealed in testimony to the European Parliament that Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine had never been tested for its ability to prevent the transmission of COVID before being put on the market, it shocked most everyone — but not regular NC readers, who were long aware of this inconvenient truth thanks to the sterling work of NC’s COVID-19 brain trust (h/t in particular to IM-Doc) in dissecting the COVID-19 vaccines trial data and translating it into layman’s terms.
• The (not just widely ignored but massively censored) potential benefits of off-patent drugs and supplements, including, of course, the I-medicine, in treating COVID-19. As Yves wrote in her Jan 2022 article, “COVID: The Narrative Is Crumbling,” the US “should be ashamed that third world countries are doing better by sending diagnosis and treatment kits to citizens, with care packs including thermometers, blood oximeters, test kits, zinc, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, OTC meds for fever and sometimes the I-drug.”
• Michael Hudson’s always-informative podcasts and articles on the way geopolitics and economics intertwine, and sometimes even collide, in today’s increasingly multipolar world.
• How central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) threaten to revolutionise the economy (and just about everything else), a topic that is only now beginning to bleed into the mainstream.
• The risks posed by the digital identity programs being rolled out across the world, from the EU to Russia, to China, Canada and many countries in the so-called Global South.
• Conor Gallagher’s dogged reporting on the German government’s relentless crusade to destroy the German economy, among many other key developments in Europe and the Caucasus.
• Satyajit Das’ fascinating series of in-depth articles on the future of energy and the current quagmire in the Middle East.
• KLG’s fascinating fortnightly essays on the state of science today.

I leave it to the commentariat to add more…