The lab is one of the most established and influential full-time censorship institutions in the world.17 Atlantic Council DFR Lab created the foreign-facing DisinfoPortal in June 2018, working directly with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 23 organizations to censor election narratives leading up to the 2019 elections in Europe.18 In 2018, Facebook named Atlantic Council, an official partner in “countering disinformation” worldwide.19 US taxpayer funding to the Atlantic Council comes from the Defense Department, the US Marines, the US Air Force, the US Navy, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as energy companies and weapons manufacturers.
It is unclear from the charging documents what exactly the French authorities’ argument is regarding Durov’s culpability, and French President Emmanuel Macron defensively took to X (formerly Twitter) to assure the public that the arrest wasn’t “political.” Nonetheless, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Durov’s arrest is unconnected to Durov’s well-known refusals to cooperate with intelligence agencies’ censorship and law enforcement requests.
Durov, who is the CEO and founder of popular messaging app Telegram, faces a number of serious charges from French authorities ranging from drug offenses to child sexual exploitation offenses.
As though it’s not suspicious enough that the Atlantic Council is funded by US government intelligence agencies, the Atlantic Council was also infamously funded by notorious Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk (more on this below).
Of course, none of these charges have anything to do with Durov directly but rather refer to activity that allegedly occurred on Telegram, Durov’s privacy-focused messaging app that boasts nearly 1 billion active users.
Indeed, just two months ago, the Atlantic Council’s “disinformation censorship” arm, DFR Lab, put out a video singling out Telegram for criticism.
The Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab is a major censorship arm of the US regime, whose censorship activities were prominently featured in the recently released Twitter Files, as well as the associated testimony of Shellenberger to the Judiciary Committee.
No comments:
Post a Comment