So, basically any site with user content can be fined/blocked at any time at the official's discretion.
While it never will happen, this rule would mean that the BBC should be banned too. It published fake news that started the Iraq war, and one of the famous hosts was a child molester.
Instead they will ban sites that disclose the military propaganda that is published by the government media. Will they now try to block wikileaks and other similar journalism?
My greatest fear is that these waves of censorship are there to remove resistance against a 3rd world war. The US, Israel and UK are currently very aggressive.
Just as an example: Propaganda on Iraq and Venezuela https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7eW4ASIo3I
What? 100,000+ people marched in the street against it[0]. We knew the UK Government stole a student's essay for their "Dodgy Dossier" and tried to re-package it as intelligence before too[1].
We knew full well it was false before invasion. It didn't stop them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
>[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
These just seem to be anti-war protests. I'm not seeing anything that suggests they knew it was false, or that that was the reason for the protests
The "anti-war" thing was just a big-tent message that most of those against the war could agree to (with each group having their own reason for being against it).
What I did think was that even if they did, there were other options on the table and that those had not been pursued to their full extent. Yes Saddam was playing 3-card Monty, but never the less we had time at our disposal we also didn’t pursue corroborating evidence and it all seemed like making up a reason for war rather than an actual casus belli. I mean, so what some known terrorists had passage? It’s not as if Saddam didn’t have his own insurrections to deal with.
There was no nuance. It was all let’s go! Most dissenters were more like, slow down, we’re not there yet, we haven’t exhausted all options yet.
> In January 2003, United Nations weapons inspectors reported that they had found no indication that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons or an active program.
So we knew.
I think mostly it was the establishment (Dems, Repubs, Globalists, etc. m) that wanted Saddam out, no matter what. Only old-style conservatives and leftists and other small constituencies dissented.
The correct information was available, but largely ignored by mass media. For example:
> 13 March 2003
> The Blair Government has known, almost from the day it came to office in 1997, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were almost certainly destroyed following the Gulf War.
> Of all the pro-war propaganda of Blair and Bush, and their current threats giving Saddam Hussein yet another deadline to disarm, what may be their biggest lie is exposed by this revelation.
> Two weeks ago, a transcript of a United Nations debriefing of Iraqi general Hussein Kamel was obtained by the American magazine, Newsweek, and by Cambridge University analyst, Glen Rangwala (who last month revealed that Blair's "intelligence dossier" on Iraq was lifted, word for word, from an American student's thesis).
> General Kamel was the West's "star witness" in its case against Saddam Hussein. He was no ordinary defector. A son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator, he had immense power in Iraq; and when he defected, he took with him crates of secret documents on Iraq's weapons programme.
[...]
> In 1995, General Kamel was debriefed by senior officials of the United Nations inspections team, then known as UNSCOM, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The complete transcript, now disclosed for the first time, contradicts almost everything Bush and Blair have said about the threat of Iraqi weapons.
> For example, General Kamel says categorically: "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed." All that remains, he says, are the blueprints, computer disks and microfiches.
Read the full article: http://johnpilger.com/articles/iraq-s-weapons-of-mass-destru...
Key US/UK claims were debunked by UN weapons inspectors in the same UN hearing where they were presented.
That the “Winnebagos of Mass Destruction” weren't the mobile WMD labs they were portrayed as (and that the US and UK knew because the UK had literally sold them to Iraq) was also also public before the war.
> In the run up to the war, perhaps questioning the sources and information provided by the government would have been labeled fake news
No, worse, it would just be ignored by large masses of the public who would believe the government anyway, and even forget that they'd been given repeated information about how they were being lied to.
Negative on this one.
Everyone knew this was fake beforehand. Colin Powell almost got laughed out of UN for the “evidence” he presented.
Everyone who was paying attention could tell this was 100% a propaganda-piece.
Why should I take him seriously when he acts like an asshole to people on Twitter, calling them AlQuaeda supporters.
https://twitter.com/mollycrabapple/status/104300934636216729... https://twitter.com/charliearchy/status/1112842690255708161
Did he aplogize yet for spreading outrageous lies about Khan-Sheikoun 2017 chemical attack, smearing doctors and first responders? The investigation of that attack is over. It would be appropriate, now that there has been a 2nd aniversary a few days ago.
You may be less excited as a result, about his other claims.
Interestingly, this is the same tactic dictatorships use to quell rebellions.