Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/11/24 Alan MacLeod on X’s Ban of Several Large Israel Critics

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Alan MacLeod of Mintpress News joined Scott to talk about how he and several other prominent critics of Israel’s war in Gaza had their X accounts banned last week without notice. The accounts have since been restored, with Elon Musk promising to investigate, but Scott and MacLeod point out that the suppression of voices critical of Washington’s preferred geopolitical narrative is nothing new. Discussed on the show: Alan MacLeod Ken Klippenstein Rob Rousseau True Anon Podcast @Zei_Squrill “Several Large Accounts That Criticized Israel and Musk Banned from X” (Libertarian Institute) Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. Follow him on Twitter @AlanRMacLeod. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot for you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show okay everybody next on the show is allan mccloud from mint press news and uh well first of all welcome the show and welcome back to the land of twitter How are you? Thank you very much.

I'm good to be back. Yes, for those who don't know, I was mysteriously banned, along with a load of people a little while ago, and then almost as mysteriously reinstated very quickly. Yeah, and so what was interesting about that was, it was a pretty high-profile people, and it's true that pretty high-profile people have been banned in the past. I guess the one that was really surprising me was Ken Klippenstein,

because he's a good guy. But he's very, like, you know, not offensive. Some of you guys go really hard. He doesn't go really hard, right? He does good journalism, but he's not like a, like, sharp-edged, sort of a commentating, you know, like guy that the bad guys would fear. I wouldn't think. No offense, Ken.

I love you, man. I, you know, I think you understand maybe what I mean. But a lot of you guys, like the squirrel guy or a girl, I guess lady, I think it is. I don't know. And you and some others. we can imagine what it was that they went after you guys for but we don't know exactly who is they but it seemed like obviously some kind of very coordinated event and i wonder if you're getting any kind of answers about how this could have happened actually and especially like all on the same day

and especially when elon musk seemed to not know what was going on and said well i'll look into it and that kind of thing sure well first of all i thought i was the sort of inoffensive guy on Twitter. I do try, at least, I do try and try not to get involved in too many he said, she said comments or, you know, name calling or anything. I'm very careful when I think about things like algorithms to not use curse words, to not use openly offensive or derogatory language to people. And that's a choice I've made basically to try and stay clear of the censorship brigade. But yeah, Ken, Ken Clippenstein from The Intercept is, I don't want to say he's a mainstream journalist, but he's a very sort of a very nice, thoughtful person, somebody who publishes a lot of leaks, who does great work, and seems to try and be quite inoffensive on Twitter, just cracks jokes and the same. He doesn't seem to really go after people or anything like that. So it was a real shock to see that both himself and myself were taken down from Twitter. little while ago. As to what happened, well, I found out about it pretty much the same way the

other guys found out about it, which was people started sending me messages on WhatsApp and signals saying, hey, what's happened to your account? Have you been taken down? And sure enough, when I went to my Twitter, I saw that I now had zero followers and one message from Twitter support saying that we have suspended your account and check your inbox for a reason. But like the other people, when I did check my inbox, there was absolutely nothing there. And so I was totally none the wiser. And I believe that really the only reason that I got back on Twitter was that so many people, so many anti-war figures kicked up a stink to say what on earth is going on here, to the extent that Elon Musk himself personally started to intervene because enough people

were adding him enough well-known figures. As to what happened after that, My account almost without any mention was just reinstated, and I got a message a little while later in my inbox from X, which goes as follows. Hello, we are writing to let you know that we've unsuspended your account. We're sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see you back on X soon. Thanks, X support. So one sentence in general. And so really we can't go off too much about why this happened. It does seem that Mr. Elon Musk wasn't really any of the wiser.

He certainly played the fool anyway. I think that was genuine. Ultimately, though, I think this reflects the fact that people who are radicals, who are outsiders, who are critical of the establishment, the military industrial complex, corporations, the permanent war economy, the U.S. military and U.S. foreign policy more generally, are not treated very nicely by the people who design and upkeep the algorithms on social media. This happens constantly to so many figures, whether there are Palestinians on Instagram having their accounts suspended at periods of high drama or whether there are Nicaraguans using Facebook

at a time out of election and they have their accounts suspended then as well when the US government was to try and interfere with that election. This happens constantly to the point where we now know that if you challenge power online, because these huge social media companies, are now so close to the military industrial complex and Washington more generally, they really act as an arm of the national security state and will zap anyone with inconvenient opinions. Yeah. Or in your case, inconvenient reporting. And yeah, when I said you go hard, I didn't mean you're insulting the way I am. I just meant you do some really cutting-edge stuff. And so that's my next question. Would you ever publish that they might object to?

Oh, damn, listen, if you check my social media, I'm sure... How about let's narrow it down recently? Oh, darn, well, listen, in the last few months, I've been going pretty hard on the media coverage of Israel and Palestine, how constantly we're told that this is, frankly, a war, when it's not a war, it's a slaughter, how big media companies are refusing to use words like killed or murdered or slaughtered or assassinated, and suddenly, Palestinians just mysteriously die all of a sudden, according to the headlines, or how corporate media are just simply not covering things like the trial, the genocide trial of Israel that's going on right now. All of this sort of stuff really is not conducive to advertisers or Twitter's bottom line, ultimately, because they rely on these big corporations for funding, and they are very close to the, national security state, as I've detailed in a lot of my reporting. And so, yeah, ultimately, pretty much everything I post on there is not welcome, I would say, by the sort of people who run Silicon Valley. And so that is ultimately why I think generally people who are critical of the establishment

are put on certain lists, demoted, der-ranked, delisted, and in my case, for a few days, anyway, deleted. And that's what happens. I mean, I'm thinking specifically about a list that we were both put on that was the prop or not list back in 2017, I think it was, when this very shady organization, prop or not, came out with their list of outlets which constantly sponsor or we host Russian disinformation. And when you look at that list, there certainly were a bunch of crazy websites on there, but also on there were left-wing websites like truth out or Mint Press News where I work, more libertarian ventures like the Rompaul Institute or anti-war.com.

And yeah, it seems absolutely clear that they were essentially making a list of outlets that were, that did not toll the line that were critical of the US government and US foreign policy. And lo and behold, a little bit, a little while later, it turns out that this crazy list proper or not was actually very likely ridden by an organization with deep, deep ties and very close ties to NATO itself. And so we're now living in this very dystopian reality where the state is coming in and trying to censor outlets on the grounds

of keeping us all safe from foreign interference. And imagine, seriously, in our media. A German-funded organization putting out propaganda falsely accusing Americans of being members of the pro-Russian Bund. And like what in the world mirror universe are we living in? Yeah, it really is incredible. You know, we are living in a, I mean, a dystopian time really doesn't do it justice, really, quite frankly.

But yeah, another thing about this group, which we're talking about the Atlantic Council, which is very close to NATO, it's putting out some of the most unhinged propaganda itself, talking about how pretty much every political party. party in Europe, which doesn't toe their line on mainstream economics, is somehow enthralled to Putin as part of Putin's puppets. They published a long series of reports called the Kremlin's Trojan horses, which went through how pretty much every party in Europe from Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party to Podemos in Spain to the Golden Dawn in Greece and the five-star movement in Italy world secretly, basically the black dogs of the Kremlin. of this was really sourced with any kind of proper evidence or anything. But when you're

that powerful, it really doesn't matter. You lean on the journalists you have in high positions to get this out. And suddenly the public is terrified that, you know, everything they read that is not coming straight from Hillary Clinton's mouth is actually Vladimir Putin's words hidden. It's just an absolutely crazy time we live in. Yeah, it is. It's completely nuts. And especially and so many major lies and themes in the media

in a row. It's just odd how anyone can accept it anymore. Well, this is what we all believe, I heard, but what about the last 10 things that turned out not to be right, you know? Remember how important it was

that we back al-Qaeda suicide bombers in Syria? And again, because that was what Israel wanted because they hate the Shiites more? What in the world? You know, I am really concerned about fake news. Fake news is a genuine problem, but we have to go beyond thinking about fake news as something that, you know, Macedonian teens blogging on some website and putting it on Facebook do.

It's a much deeper problem. If we talk about the kind of fake reporting and false stories that have really caused the most damage to society over the last, say, 20 years, what would we look at? We would look at things like the weapons of mass destruction hoax, or we would look at the stories telling us that Muammar al-Qadhafi was on the verge of committing genocide against the Libyan people. These sorts of stories, these sorts of lies, got the United States into wars, which killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions more. And where did they come from? Did they come from, you know, an average Joe on Facebook spreading some sort of weird story? No, they came from the government itself, and they were mainstreamed by outlets like CNN,

the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Fox News. These were the sorts of mainstream outlets which pushed the biggest and most deleterious fake news of the 21st century. But that's not how we're thought, that's not how we're trained to think about fake news, right? We like to think of it as something people on the fringes do, but actually the more powerful and more organized and more influential an organization and news organization is, the more chance that anything they would publish that is false really goes on to harm the public more generally. And so I think we really have to start casting a bit more scrutiny over big corporate outlets like the New York Times or CNN or whoever, who very often get a fake

pass in this fake news debate. And actually very often are the ones that are allowed to control the parameters of debate and set themselves up as the fact checkers that will decide what is true and what is false for all of us. Yeah, of course. Hey, you guys, did you know that I don't just write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director, so yeah. 13 of them now, including my four. We published five more in 2023.

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They know it's true, even if it's the most preposterous lie in the world. All right, now, so can you tell us a little bit more about some of the other accounts that were suspended? Because as long as you guys are being oppressed, then we ought to do the opposite of that and promote them a little bit here. Tell us about ZEI Squirrel. Do you know much? Yeah, Zay Squirrel is one of the most interesting and best accounts on Twitter, in my opinion. They post a ton of stuff from an anti-war perspective, just an absolute load of videos. Really a throwback to the older days of the internet where we had genuine anonymous accounts being funny or being incisive or being in some way useful to people.

And say squirrel is one of those people constantly, as I said, putting up old videos blasts from the past, mind-blowing videos of politicians saying stuff or figures are really going after the military industrial complex, U.S. foreign policy. Absolutely great follow and a great gold mine of stuff there. There was also Rob Russo, the podcaster, who hosts The Insurgents podcast, another very interesting podcast, very critical of the establishment too. Steyne is often on that podcast as well. We talked about him before, The Intercept journalist. Who else was on there? The True On On podcast was on there, which is a podcast which takes a sideways look at conspiracy theories in a very interesting and very funny way. Generally, these people,

I would say, would be grouped on the sort of anti-war left spectrum of the political sphere. And the fact that we were all kicked off within minutes of each other really suggests that there was some sort of mass dragnet going on where the algorithm just kicked us all off. And I don't even know if that was deliberate or not. I suspect it probably wasn't deliberate. But the fact that that happened goes to show you that algorithms are not this kind of neutral thing that exists in the ether. These things are written by people and they are written to promote certain places and demote certain algorithms. other people. Yeah. Well, my speculation is a bit different. I think that there was a coordinated campaign from the outside to target you guys and they were able to complain about you enough

on, you know, block and report under sock puppet accounts and claim that you guys committed whichever sins and then figured out the, they figured out the algorithm how to game the system to make it work this way. Something like that probably is more likely to me. Yeah, that's very interesting. The reality is that it's kind of like crimes in your own country. Everybody commits some sort of crime that could be punishable, whether it's jaywalking or, you know, not filling out your taxes perfectly or, you know, speeding or something. We've all done something that could be considered against the rules. And I guess if you do have a coordinated campaign, you can go after people just trying to find any little rule that it might have broken and just

trying to cause as much as a stink as possible. There was another theory going around that the billionaire Bill Ackman might have been involved because a couple of the accounts were making fun of him and his scandal that's going on particularly with his wife and the plagiarism scandal. Yeah, I was going to ask you whether

that had been one of your keywords or not. Well, I actually was not following the whole Bill Ackman thing before, and I certainly hadn't tweeted about it. I had to just quickly refresh my memory on who he was, actually. when somebody asked me about that.

So I'm pretty sure it's not to do with him in my case, but certainly other people were talking about this to a great extent. And so perhaps Bill Ackman was involved, perhaps he wasn't. But the fact that everybody seems to think that that's quite possible really tells us a lot about how we understand how social media works, that we do actually innately understand that powerful people, or powerful organizations do have backdoors into these social media platforms and can influence our public sphere, our public fairs like that. And that's a really dangerous thing to have

when the powerful can actually try to affect the means of communication for billions of people all around the world. Well, you know, my guy Kyle at the Institute in anti-war.com, Kyle Anzalone, he wrote a piece, you know, first thing in the morning as soon as he found out about this, we posted that on Twitter and, you know, Greenwald and a lot of other big shot Twitter accounts were saying, hey, this isn't fair. And, you know, it was pretty clear it was going to get resolved pretty soon. But a lot of the responses said, yeah, but this is my third account. The only reason anyone's sticking up for these guys is because they're already kind of big shots, but I can't get my account restored and I didn't do anything. And I

I've noticed this too. I don't know how widespread this is, but I saw someone say, yeah, and videos from Gaza all of a sudden won't play. And I had had that problem with a couple myself. I don't know again how anecdotal that is, but

that's the thing of it is there's a lot of regular Joe's who don't get to have their say at all because they get squashed by the algorithm and mostly for no good reason. You know, I see a lot of times there would be like invisible replies to my tweets

and I say well show more and reveal that one and oh this one might be offensive go ahead and show me anyway and then it's a perfectly reasonable comment by a perfectly reasonable gentleman he's not even doing anything wrong at all you know that kind of thing goes on a lot oh most definitely

and I completely sympathize with the people saying that and the reality is is that if I if you go back a few years when I had like 500 followers and this happened to me yeah nobody would stuck up for me because nobody would have heard of me. And so ultimately, that is a huge problem that we've got right now where it's only really people who have enough connections and can cause and kick up enough of a stink if they've got, you know, celebrity, political friends who can do tweets for them are actually going

to get their accounts back. But as you said, this is a huge problem where you talk to anybody who is on a political Twitter and they'll tell you the same thing that they've had their account suspended, they've They've been silenced. They've been censored. This goes on constantly. Twitter is an absolute cluster F for this, as are all the other big social media platforms as well. You know, again, we, you know, Gaza's in the news right now. You talk to any Palestinian about how they post online and pretty much all of them have the same story about having their accounts taken away from them or suspended or stuff not showing or, you know, their relatives or friends saying,

You know, we can't play your videos, as you said. So this has been going on for years and years and years. And it really makes a mockery of this whole idea that the online platform is truly, you know, a venue for free speech. Because as we see, free speech isn't free. And if you don't have that sort of following, you are not given it. And even if you do have a following, you might still be, you know, deranked and demoted. If you're the sort of speech that you're participating in is not conducive to those at the top and they're in. interests. Yeah. And I don't know, man. I was raised with this as just a basic truism, right? It's why you have

fair trials for bad people and stuff is, you know, if the people you disagree with or even are guilty of crimes or whatever it is, they don't have their rights protected, then you'll end up without your rights protected. So if you want to just be completely self-interested about the thing, you have to care whether other people get to choose. where they go to church, what they want to print and sell, or what they want to tweet out to the world, or whether it should be up to somebody else, because if it's up to somebody else, they're going to decide for you. Come on. Who's got to be taught that over the age of eight years old? A hundred percent, 100 percent. They always say that you have to stick up for the rights

of people's speech, even if you find their views abhorrent. You still have to stick up for them because the next time it might be you that's being silenced. Ultimately, though, I think a lot of people who are in the sort of political center do actually innately realize that it's not going to be them that are going to be silenced. And so we're now seeing quite a dangerous trend of a lot of people supporting the banning or the silencing of speech online. And that's going to have a really negative effect over society because if these ideas are not being actually talked out in the open, they go underground.

and a lot of the time that can actually cause more harm than good. Aren't you guys? That is Alan McLeod. He is at Mint Press News. And Alan, what's your handle on Twitter? Well, thankfully, I'm back on there, so you can find me. It's Alan R. MacLeod. So that's at A-L-A-N-R-M-A-C-L-E-O-D.

Right on. And there's a reason I've interviewed you a couple of dozen times so far so, is because you do great work. And I'm very glad you're back and hopefully you don't get banished again. Thanks for time. Thank you very much. Scott, it was a pleasure of speaking with you.

Thank you guys. That's Alan McLeod. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.