Corporate Corruption News Articles

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Facebook knew that teen girls on Instagram reported in large numbers that the app was hurting their body image and mental health. It knew that its content moderation systems suffered from an indefensible double standard in which celebrities were treated far differently than the average user. It knew that a 2018 change to its news feed software, intended to promote "meaningful interactions," ended up promoting outrageous and divisive political content. Facebook knew all of those things because they were findings from its own internal research teams. But it didn't tell anyone. In some cases, its executives even made public statements at odds with the findings. The world's largest social network employs teams of people to study its own ugly underbelly, only to ignore, downplay and suppress the results of their research when it proves awkward or troubling. A pattern has emerged in which findings that implicate core Facebook features or systems, or which would require costly or politically dicey interventions, are reportedly brushed aside by top executives, and come out only when leaked to the media by frustrated employees or former employees. For instance, the New York Times reported in 2018 that Facebook's security team had uncovered evidence of Russian interference ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, but that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan had opted to keep it secret for fear of the political fallout.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

Interviews with more than two dozen experts on pesticide regulation – including 14 who worked at the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, or OPP – described a federal environmental agency that is often unable to stand up to the intense pressures from powerful agrochemical companies, which spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying each year and employ many former EPA scientists once they leave the agency. The enormous corporate influence has weakened and, in some cases, shut down the meaningful regulation of pesticides in the U.S. and left the country's residents exposed to levels of dangerous chemicals not tolerated in many other nations. This reporting has brought to light several instances in which the overlooking, burying, or scuttling of science has had direct consequences for human health. The alarming discoveries include an EPA report warning about the link between the pesticide glyphosate and cancer that never saw the light of day; the failure to consider evidence that a neonicotinoid pesticide causes brain damage; the refusal to investigate evidence that another pesticide that is an ingredient in Roundup may cause cancer ... and the agency's waiving of the vast majority of toxicity tests at the request of industry. The scientists who have identified these hazards described immense pressure from within the agency to overlook the risks they found. And several said they faced retribution for calling attention to the dangers of pesticides.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, pleaded guilty Tuesday to three federal criminal charges related to the company's role in creating the nation's opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma board chairman Steve Miller pleaded guilty on behalf of the company during a virtual federal court hearing in front of US District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo. The counts include one of dual-object conspiracy to defraud the United States and to violate the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and two counts of conspiracy to violate the Federal Anti-Kickback Statute. The plea deal announced in October includes the largest penalties ever levied against a pharmaceutical manufacturer, including a criminal fine of $3.544 billion and an additional $2 billion in criminal forfeiture, according to a Department of Justice press release. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 70,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2018, just one year of the opioid crisis, and about 70% of those deaths were caused by prescription or illicit opioids like OxyContin. Several civil lawsuits against Purdue Pharma related to the opioid crisis are still ongoing as the company undergoes bankruptcy proceedings. The Plaintiffs' Executive Committee in the National Prescription Opiate Litigation Multi-District Litigation called Purdue Pharma's guilty plea "long overdue." "Their illegal and profit-seeking actions were egregious. It is important to note, however, that they are just one company in one part of the larger opioid supply chain," [the plaintiffs'] attorneys ... said.

Note: The company pays huge fines for the deaths of countless thousands, yet the CEO and others responsible face no legal charges. Where is the deterrent for this egregious behavior? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

The percentage of national income that is absorbed by health care has grown over the past half-century, from 5% in 1960 to 18% in 2017, reducing what is available for anything else from 95% in 1960 to 82% today. The costs of health care contribute to the long-term stagnation in wages; to fewer good jobs, especially for less educated workers; and to rising income inequality. American health care is the most expensive in the world, and yet American health is among the worst among rich countries. The U.S. has lower life expectancy than the other wealthy countries but vastly higher expenditures per person. In 2017, the Swiss lived 5.1 years longer than Americans but spent 30% less per person; other countries achieved a similar length of life for still fewer health dollars. How is it possible that Americans pay so much and get so little? The money is certainly going somewhere. What is waste to a patient is income to a provider. The industry is not very good at promoting health, but it excels at promoting wealth among health care providers. Employer-based coverage is a huge barrier to reform. So is the way that the health care industry is protected in Washington by its lobbyistsfive for every member of Congress. Our government is complicit in an extortion that is an important contributor to income inequality. Through pharma companies that get rich by addicting people, and through excessive costs that lower wages and eliminate good jobs, the industry that is supposed to improve our health is undermining it.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources.

Purdue Pharma has agreed to pay $270 million to settle a historic lawsuit brought by the Oklahoma attorney general, who accused the OxyContin maker of aggressively marketing the opioid painkiller and fueling a drug epidemic that left thousands dead in the state. The settlement comes after Purdue [sought] to delay the start of the trial, which is scheduled for May 28. Attorney General Mike Hunter said ... that $102.5 million of the settlement would be used to help establish a national addiction treatment and research center at Oklahoma State University. The company will also provide $20 million of addiction treatment and opioid rescue medications to the center. A remaining $12.5 million from the settlement will be used directly to help cities and counties with the opioid crisis. The Sackler family, who founded and own Purdue Pharma, will also contribute $75 million over the next five years to the treatment and research center. The lawsuit was brought by Hunter against some of the nation's leading makers of opioid pain medications, alleging that deceptive marketing over the past decade fueled the epidemic in the state. Hunter has said the defendants - Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Allergan and others - deceived the public into believing that opioids were safe for extended use. The settlement was only with Purdue Pharma, and the other defendants are still scheduled to go to trial. Thirty-six states have brought cases against Purdue and other opioid drugmakers.

Note: Many doctors also profited from excessive prescribing of dangerous opioids. And according to a former DEA agent, Congress helped drug companies fuel the opioid epidemic. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

A national inquiry into Australia's scandal-plagued financial sector has proposed sweeping changes in an attempt to end rampant industry misconduct. The Royal Commission spent 12 months investigating wrongdoing by some of the nation's biggest institutions. Prominent scandals included the charging of fees for no service - sometimes to dead customers. The government said it would act on all 76 recommendations made by the inquiry. The Royal Commission - Australia's highest form of public inquiry - came after a decade of scandals that shook confidence in the country's largest industry. After the report was made public on Monday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the public had paid an "immense" price for the misconduct. "It's a scathing assessment of conduct driven by greed and behaviour that was in breach of existing law and fell well below community expectations," he said. The Royal Commission received more than 10,000 public submissions. It interviewed over 130 witnesses in public hearings. The report made 76 recommendations for reform, including: More than 20 unidentified cases to be referred on to regulators, resulting in possible criminal or civil prosecutions; There should be an overhaul of the sector's sales culture to reduce conflicts of interest; Regulators need to more regularly prosecute breaches, or lose some of their powers. The government has been criticised for initially resisting the probe, which it later described as "regrettable but necessary" action to restore public trust.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing banking corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times ... reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day. These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. Businesses say their interest is in the patterns, not the identities, that the data reveals. They note that the information apps collect is tied not to someone’s name or phone number but to a unique ID. But those with access to the raw data — including employees or clients — could still identify a person without consent. They could follow someone they knew, by pinpointing a phone that regularly spent time at that person’s home address. More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code from such companies. Google’s Android system was found to have about 1,200 apps with such code, compared with about 200 on Apple’s iOS.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing privacy news articles from reliable major media sources.

When nurse Meleney Gallagher was told to line up with her colleagues on the renal ward at Sunderland Royal Hospital, for her swine flu vaccination, she had no idea the injection she was about to have had not gone through the usual testing process. It had been rushed into circulation after the swine flu virus had swept across the globe in 2009. Gallagher was one of thousands of NHS staff vaccinated with Pandemrix, a vaccine made by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Eight years later, her career in the NHS is a memory and she's living with incurable, debilitating narcolepsy and suffers from cataplexy, a sudden, uncontrollable loss of muscle tone that can cause her to collapse without warning. Because of her condition, she can no longer work or drive. People with narcolepsy experience chronic fatigue and difficulty sleeping at night. They can have night terrors, hallucinations, and a range of mental health problems. Gallagher is not alone. More than a dozen frontline NHS staff are among around 1,000 adults and children across Europe who are believed to have developed narcolepsy after being given Pandemrix. Gallagher and four other NHS professionals – two nurses, a community midwife, and a junior doctor – have told how they felt pressured into receiving the vaccine, were given misleading information, and ultimately lost their careers. They are all suing GlaxoSmithKline seeking compensation for what they believe was a faulty drug that has left them with lifelong consequences.

Note: Yet the media and big Pharma continually tout the safety of their vaccines. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on vaccines from reliable major media sources.

The latest study to look at the long-term effects of Roundup, a popular weed killer developed by Monsanto in the 1970s, raises questions about the herbicide's possible contributions to poor health in certain communities. The study, published Tuesday in JAMA, tracked people over the age of 50 in southern California from 1993-1996 to 2014-2016, with researchers periodically collecting urine samples during that time. The percentage of people who tested positive for a chemical called glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, shot up by 500% in that time period. The levels of glyphosate also spiked by 1208% during that time. One trial from the UK, in which rats were fed low levels of glyphosate throughout their lives, found that the chemical contributed to a higher risk of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition in which fat accumulates in the liver and contributes to inflammation and scarring of the tissue. [Researcher Paul] Mills says that the levels of glyphosate documented in the people in his study were 100-fold greater than those in the rats. While Roundup was developed to eliminate most weeds from genetically modified crops – and thus reduce the amount of pesticides sprayed on them – recent studies have found that many weeds are now resistant to Roundup. That means growers are using more Roundup, which could only exacerbate potential negative health effects on people who consume those products.

Note: Bayer recently agreed to a $10 billion settlement over claims that its glyphosate-containing product RoundUp causes cancer. Meanwhile, Mexico is banning glyphosate and GMO corn. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and GMOs from reliable major media sources.

Each time you see a targeted ad, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called "real-time bidding" (RTB). This process does more than deliver ads–it fuels government surveillance, poses national security risks, and gives data brokers easy access to your online activity. RTB might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you've never heard of. The moment you visit a website or app with ad space, it asks a company that runs ad auctions to determine which ads it will display for you. This involves sending information about you and the content you're viewing to the ad auction company. The ad auction company packages all the information they can gather about you into a "bid request" and broadcasts it to thousands of potential advertisers. The bid request may contain personal information like your unique advertising ID, location, IP address, device details, interests, and demographic information. The information in bid requests is called "bidstream data" and can easily be linked to real people. Advertisers, and their ad buying platforms, can store the personal data in the bid request regardless of whether or not they bid on ad space. RTB is regularly exploited for government surveillance. The privacy and security dangers of RTB are inherent to its design. The process broadcasts torrents of our personal data to thousands of companies, hundreds of times per day.

Note: Clearview AI scraped billions of faces off of social media without consent and at least 600 law enforcement agencies tapped into its database. During this time, Clearview was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked to hackers. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

Within Meta's Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations team, [Hannah] Byrne helped craft one of the most powerful and secretive censorship policies in internet history. She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world's most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in "glorification," "support," or "representation" of anyone on the list. As an armed white supremacist group with credible allegations of human rights violations hanging over it, Azov [Battalion] had landed on the Dangerous Organizations list. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta not only moved swiftly to allow users to cheer on the Azov Battalion, but also loosened its rules around incitement, hate speech, and gory imagery so Ukrainian civilians could share images of the suffering around them. Within weeks, Byrne found the moral universe around her inverted: The heavily armed hate group sanctioned by Congress since 2018 were now freedom fighters resisting occupation, not terroristic racists. It seems most galling for Byrne to compare how malleable Meta's Dangerous Organizations policy was for Ukraine, and how draconian it has felt for those protesting the war in Gaza. "I know the U.S. government is in constant contact with Facebook employees," she said. Meta's censorship systems are "basically an extension of the government," Byrne said. "You want military, Department of State, CIA people enforcing free speech? That is what is concerning."

Note: Read more about Facebook's secret blacklist, and how Facebook censored reporting of war crimes in Gaza but allowed praise for the neo-Nazi Azov Brigade on its platform. Going deeper, click here if you want to know the real history behind the Russia-Ukraine war. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on censorship and Big Tech.

Ask "is the British tax system fair", and Google cites a quote ... arguing that indeed it is. Ask "is the British tax system unfair", and Google's Featured Snippet explains how UK taxes benefit the rich and promote inequality. "What Google has done is they've pulled bits out of the text based on what people are searching for and fed them what they want to read," [Digital marketing director at Dragon Metrics Sarah] Presch says. "It's one big bias machine." The vast majority of internet traffic begins with a Google Search, and people rarely click on anything beyond the first five links. The system that orders the links on Google Search has colossal power over our experience of the world. You might choose to engage with information that keeps you trapped in your filter bubble, "but there's only a certain bouquet of messages that are put in front of you to choose from in the first place", says [professor] Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick. A recent US anti-trust case against Google uncovered internal company documents where employees discuss some of the techniques the search engine uses to answer your questions. "We do not understand documents – we fake it," an engineer wrote in a slideshow used during a 2016 presentation. "A billion times a day, people ask us to find documents relevant to a query… We hardly look at documents. We look at people. If a document gets a positive reaction, we figure it is good. If the reaction is negative, it is probably bad. Grossly simplified, this is the source of Google's magic. That is how we serve the next person, keep the induction rolling, and sustain the illusion that we understand." In other words, Google watches to see what people click on when they enter a given search term. When people seem satisfied by a certain type of information, it's more likely that Google will promote that kind of search result for similar queries in the future.

Note: For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of revealing news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

The pharmaceutical industry, as a whole and by its nature, is conflicted and significantly driven by the mighty dollar, rather than altruism. A 2020 peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association outlines the extent of the problem. The group studied both the type of illegal activity and financial penalties imposed on pharma companies between the years 2003 and 2016. Of the companies studied, 85 percent (22 of 26) had received financial penalties for illegal activities with a total combined dollar value of $33 billion. The illegal activities included manufacturing and distributing adulterated drugs, misleading marketing, failure to disclose negative information about a product (i.e. significant side effects including death), bribery to foreign officials, fraudulently delaying market entry of competitors, pricing and financial violations, and kickbacks. The highest penalties were awarded to Schering-Plough, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Allergan, and Wyeth. The biggest overall fines have been paid by GSK (almost $10 billion), Pfizer ($2.9 billion), Johnson & Johnson ($2.6 billion), and other familiar names including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Merck, Eli Lilly, Schering-Plough, Sanofi Aventis, and Wyeth. Five US states – Texas, Kansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Utah – are taking Pfizer to court for withholding information, and misleading and deceiving the public through statements made in marketing its Covid-19 injection.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.

In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy was built is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based largely in Silicon Valley. This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land ... the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based. A monopolist in the 20th century would have loved to control a country's supply of, say, refrigerators. But the Big Tech monopolists of the 21st century go a step further and control all of the digital infrastructure needed to buy those fridges – from the internet itself to the software, cloud hosting, apps, payment systems, and even the delivery service. These corporate neo-feudal lords don't just dominate a single market or a few related ones; they control the marketplace. They can create and destroy entire markets. Their monopolistic control extends well beyond just one country, to almost the entire world. If a competitor does manage to create a product, US Big Tech monopolies can make it disappear. Imagine you are an entrepreneur. You develop a product, make a website, and offer to sell it online. But then you search for it on Google, and it does not show up. Instead, Google promotes another, similar product in the search results. This is not a hypothetical; this already happens.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

Surveillance technologies have evolved at a rapid clip over the last two decades – as has the government's willingness to use them in ways that are genuinely incompatible with a free society. The intelligence failures that allowed for the attacks on September 11 poured the concrete of the surveillance state foundation. The gradual but dramatic construction of this surveillance state is something that Republicans and Democrats alike are responsible for. Our country cannot build and expand a surveillance superstructure and expect that it will not be turned against the people it is meant to protect. The data that's being collected reflect intimate details about our closely held beliefs, our biology and health, daily activities, physical location, movement patterns, and more. Facial recognition, DNA collection, and location tracking represent three of the most pressing areas of concern and are ripe for exploitation. Data brokers can use tens of thousands of data points to develop a detailed dossier on you that they can sell to the government (and others). Essentially, the data broker loophole allows a law enforcement agency or other government agency such as the NSA or Department of Defense to give a third party data broker money to hand over the data from your phone – rather than get a warrant. When pressed by the intelligence community and administration, policymakers on both sides of the aisle failed to draw upon the lessons of history.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.

If you appeared in a photo on Facebook any time between 2011 and 2021, it is likely your biometric information was fed into DeepFace – the company's controversial deep-learning facial recognition system that tracked the face scan data of at least a billion users. That's where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton comes in. His office secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over its alleged violation of a Texas law that bars the capture of biometric data without consent. Meta is on the hook to pay $275 million within the next 30 days and the rest over the next four years. Why did Paxton wait until 2022 – a year after Meta announced it would suspend its facial recognition technology and delete its database – to go up against the tech giant? If our AG truly prioritized privacy, he'd focus on the lesser-known companies that law enforcement agencies here in Texas are paying to scour and store our biometric data. In 2017, [Clearview AI] launched a facial recognition app that ... could identify strangers from a photo by searching a database of faces scraped without consent from social media. In 2020, news broke that at least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into a database of 3 billion facial images. Clearview was hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. That same year, the company was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.

If you rent your home, there's a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it's something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once called price-fixing the "supreme evil" of antitrust law. Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine. Property owners feed RealPage's "property management software" their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm–which also knows what competitors are charging–spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel: lockstep price increases instead of price competition, no secret handshake or clandestine meeting needed. Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it. In more than 40 housing markets across the United States, 30 to 60 percent of multifamily-building units are priced using RealPage. The plaintiffs suing RealPage, including the Arizona and Washington, D.C., attorneys general, argue that this has enabled a critical mass of landlords to raise rents in concert, making an existing housing-affordability crisis even worse. The lawsuits also argue that RealPage pressures landlords to comply with its pricing suggestions.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.

Across the world, over 800 million people spend their days hungry. More than 2 billion have limited access to food. Yet today's global food system produces enough to feed every person on the planet. To account for these trends, we need to look at market concentration, and how a small number of very big companies have come to dominate the production and supply of the food we all eat. The global food system has become much more concentrated in recent years, partly through an increase in mergers and acquisitions, where large firms buy up rival companies until they completely dominate key areas. High levels of market concentration mean less transparency, weaker competition, and more power in the hands of fewer firms. And our research reveals that a rise in the number of mergers and acquisitions is taking place at all stages of the global food system – from seeds and fertilisers to machinery and manufacturing. This is all part of food being increasingly seen as a source not only of human sustenance, but as a profitable investment – or what is known as the "financialisation of food". Just four firms control 44% of the global farm machinery market, two companies control 40% of the global seed market, and four businesses control 62% of the global agrochemicals market. This trend is matched in food retail, with four firms – Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons – estimated to control over 64% of the UK grocery market.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the food system and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

Toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" used in lithium ion batteries essential to the clean energy transition present a dangerous source of chemical pollution that new research finds threatens the environment and human health. The multipronged, peer-reviewed study zeroed in on a little-researched and unregulated subclass of PFAS called bis-FASI that are used in lithium ion batteries. Researchers found alarming levels of the chemicals in the environment near manufacturing plants, noted their presence in remote areas around the world, found they appear to be toxic to living organisms, and discovered that waste from batteries disposed of in landfills was a major pollution source. PFAS are a class of about 16,000 human-made compounds most often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The paper notes that few end-of-life standards for PFAS battery waste exist, and the vast majority ends up in municipal dumps where it can leach into waterways, accumulate locally or be transported long distances. It looked at the presence of the chemicals in historical leachate samples and found none in those from prior to the mid-1990s, when the chemical class was commercialized.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.

After government officials like former White House advisers Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt repeatedly harangued platforms such as Facebook to censor Americans who contested the government's narrative on COVID-19 vaccines, Missouri and Louisiana sued. They claimed that the practice violates the First Amendment. Following years of litigation, the Supreme Court threw cold water on their efforts, ruling in Murthy v. Missouri that states and the individual plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government for its actions. The government often disguised its censorship requests by coordinating with ostensibly "private" civil society groups to pressure tech companies to remove or shadow ban targeted content. According to the U.S. House Weaponization Committee's November 2023 interim report, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency requested that the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory create a public-private partnership to counter election "misinformation" in 2020. This consortium of government and private entities took the form of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). EIP's "private" civil society partners then forwarded the flagged content to Big Tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter. These "private" groups ... receive millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Science Foundation, the State Department and the U.S Department of Justice. Legislation like the COLLUDE Act would ... clarify that Section 230 does not apply when platforms censor legal speech "as a result of a communication" from a "governmental entity" or from an non-profit "acting at the request or behest of a governmental entity."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and government corruption from reliable sources.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.