Elon Musk has condemned forthcoming hate speech laws in one EU country as being a “massive attack against freedom of speech”. Source
Tech
Pinkerton: Bringing the War on Terror Home to Target Americans for ‘Disinformation’
The U.S. government took the information techniques it learned after 9/11 and has turned them on Americans. America may have lost the Great War on Terror, but our technocratic elites could still win their war against American liberty. Source
Pinkerton: Bringing the War on Terror Home to Target Americans for ‘Disinformation’
The U.S. government took the information techniques it learned after 9/11 and has turned them on Americans. America may have lost the Great War on Terror, but our technocratic elites could still win their war against American liberty. Source
EU Announces Stricter Content Moderation Rules for Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Other Tech Platforms

The European Commission announced on Tuesday a slew of social media platforms and other Big Tech websites that will come under stricter content moderation surrounding so-called hate speech and disinformation by the summer.
Under the European Union’s recently adopted Digital Services Act (DSA), which the bloc has described as providing “an unprecedented level of public oversight” on the internet, the European Commission will place at least 19 online platforms under its strictest level of censorship by August 25th.
Announcing the measure, European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said: “With great scale comes great responsibility,” adding: “They will not be able to act as if they are too big to care.”
So far, the Commission has identified Alibaba AliExpress, Amazon Store, Apple AppStore, Bing, Booking.com, Facebook, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Shopping, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Zalando as those in need of stricter ‘content moderation’.
The Digital Services Act specifies that websites or online platforms with at least 45 million users within the EU will come under more regulatory scrutiny, under the premise that they hold a special responsibility to police the internet and provide “safety” for their user base, with the legislation greatly expanding the ability of Brussels to police so-called ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’.
Those that fail to comply with the censorship law by February of 2024 will face fines from the EU of up to six per cent of their global revenue as well as face a potential ban from Europe entirely.
With great scale comes great responsibility 🇺
Extra #DSA obligations as of 25 August for:
AliExpress
Amazon Store
AppStore
Bing
Booking
Google Maps
Google Play
Google Search
Google Shopping
Snapchat
TikTok
Wikipedia
YouTube
Zalando pic.twitter.com/CVmDuzkKe9— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) April 25, 2023
The driving force behind the legislation, Thierry Breton, a former French tech executive, has previously warned new Twitter boss Elon Musk that the microblogging site could run the risk of being banned in the European Union should it restore the free speech roots of the company.
Although the bill claims to try to protect free speech, Breton himself has backed Big Tech taking censorship into their own hands, seemingly expressing support for Twitter’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump in 2021, saying that tech companies “have recognised their responsibility, duty and means to prevent the spread of illegal viral content”.
The announcement on Tuesday is just the latest challenge facing Twitter since Elon Musk took over the platform. Earlier this month, prosecutors in Berlin announced that they have opened up legal action against the platform under Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) for failing to purge “illegal” content such as hate speech and insults. Should the case be successful the Silicon Valley giant could face a fine of up to €50 million.
While Twitter chief Elon Musk has expressed a desire to facilitate free speech on his platform, he has also said that Twitter will abide by local laws of governments around the world such as in the EU, where there are not robust First Ammendment-style protections for speech like in the United States.
Twitter could be banned from the EU if Elon Musk continues with his free speech reforms, a senior official within the bloc has reportedly said. https://t.co/M79DWZKc1f
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) December 3, 2022
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
Nolte: Far-Left Buzzfeed Cuts 15% of Staff, Closes BuzzFeed News
After more than a decade of failure, far-left BuzzFeed News is finally shutting down.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s memo announcing the mercy killing Thursday morning and the memo was tweeted out by a media reporter* for the far-left New York Times.
In part, the memo read:
Additionally, I made the decision to overinvest[**] in BuzzFeed News[***] because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism[****] for social media.
…
Just as we reduced our footprint in NYC last year, we will be reducing our real estate in Los Angeles from four buildings to one[.]
…
HuffPost and BuzzFeed Dot Com have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of BuzzFeed News
…
As part of today’s changes, both our CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO Christian Bressler have made the decision to exit the company.
Overall, BuzzFeed will cut 15 percent of its 1200-person staff.
To give you an idea of BuzzFeed’s ongoing failure, the left-wing company’s stock is currently at 75 cents. That’s down from $9.61 in December of 2021.
The reason BuzzFeed News is closing is because BuzzFeed News sucks. BuzzFeed News has always sucked. Ben Smith***** launched this debacle over a decade ago, and it has never made money.

File/BuzzFeed News Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith talks with colleagues in the newsroom at BuzzFeed headquarters, December 11, 2018 in New York City. (Drew Angerer/Getty)
In its early days, BuzzFeed News made a cottage industry out of attacking Breitbart News with lies and gossip. You see, they were angry about us telling the truth about them. But the whole thing was biased and dull and doomed from the start. Then, eight or nine years ago, BuzzFeed News fell off the radar entirely until Ben Smith violated every journalistic protocol ever written to publish the Deep State’s phony Russia dossier on Donald Trump.
Then everyone forgot about BuzzFeed News again. Then Ben Smith left to do business with the Nazis in China, and now it’s finally over.
Gee, how will America muster on without headlines like these:
Yes, You Can Overdose On Weed. Here’s What To Do If You Overdo It.
Madison Beer [who?] Revealed She Attempted Suicide After Her Nude Videos Were Leaked Online Without Her Consent When She Was 15
David Choe’s Casting On “Beef” Is Hollywood Nepotism At Its Worst
The Family Of A 19-Year-Old Who Was Left At A Hospital Barely Breathing Is Speaking Out After Officials Said Much Of The Outrage About The Case Is Based On Misinformation
Travis Barker’s Ex-Wife Shanna Moakler Dragged Kourtney Kardashian After Her Son Said She “Filled The Empty Spot” In His Heart And It Looks Like Things Are Getting Seriously Messy
I guess no one taught the BuzzFeed News staff about the difference between a headline and a poorly written paragraph.
Here’s a real beauty…
Three People Were Charged With Murder In Connection To The Shooting At A Sweet 16 Party That Killed 4
Does BuzzFeed think a Sweet 16 Party killed four people?

Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti poses for a portrait at Buzzfeed’s New York Headquarters on December 14, 2018 in New York City. (Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)
Granted, people with grammar as bad as mine shouldn’t point and laugh, but that’s what we old folks call a real wing-ding.
Anyway, another left-wing media outlet is dead, and… Breitbart News is hiring.
P.S. BuzzFeed News is such a failure it didn’t even break the Big Media News about BuzzFeed News shutting down.
*fake reporter
**ya think?
***fake news
****fake journalism
*****he now bathes in that sweet, sweet China money
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Nolte: Far-Left Buzzfeed Cuts 15% of Staff, Closes BuzzFeed News
After more than a decade of failure, far-left BuzzFeed News is finally shutting down.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s memo announcing the mercy killing Thursday morning and the memo was tweeted out by a media reporter* for the far-left New York Times.
In part, the memo read:
Additionally, I made the decision to overinvest[**] in BuzzFeed News[***] because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism**** for social media.
…
Just as we reduced our footprint in NYC last year, we will be reducing our real estate in Los Angeles from four buildings to one[.]
…
HuffPost and BuzzFeed Dot Com have signaled that they will open a number of select roles for members of BuzzFeed News
…
As part of today’s changes, both our CRO Edgar Hernandez and COO Christian Bressler have made the decision to exit the company.
Overall, BuzzFeed will cut 15 percent of its 1200-person staff.
To give you an idea of BuzzFeed’s ongoing failure, the left-wing company’s stock is currently at 75 cents. That’s down from $9.61 in December of 2021.
The reason BuzzFeed News is closing is because BuzzFeed News sucks. BuzzFeed News has always sucked. Ben Smith***** launched this debacle over a decade ago, and it has never made money.

File/BuzzFeed News Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith talks with colleagues in the newsroom at BuzzFeed headquarters, December 11, 2018 in New York City. (Drew Angerer/Getty)
In its early days, BuzzFeed News made a cottage industry out of attacking Breitbart News with lies and gossip. You see, they were angry about us telling the truth about them. But the whole thing was biased and dull and doomed from the start. Then, eight or nine years ago, BuzzFeed News fell off the radar entirely until Ben Smith violated every journalistic protocol ever written to publish the Deep State’s phony Russia dossier on Donald Trump.
Then everyone forgot about BuzzFeed News again. Then Ben Smith left to do business with the Nazis in China, and now it’s finally over.
Gee, how will America muster on without headlines like these:
Yes, You Can Overdose On Weed. Here’s What To Do If You Overdo It.
Madison Beer [who?] Revealed She Attempted Suicide After Her Nude Videos Were Leaked Online Without Her Consent When She Was 15
David Choe’s Casting On “Beef” Is Hollywood Nepotism At Its Worst
The Family Of A 19-Year-Old Who Was Left At A Hospital Barely Breathing Is Speaking Out After Officials Said Much Of The Outrage About The Case Is Based On Misinformation
Travis Barker’s Ex-Wife Shanna Moakler Dragged Kourtney Kardashian After Her Son Said She “Filled The Empty Spot” In His Heart And It Looks Like Things Are Getting Seriously Messy
I guess no one taught the BuzzFeed News staff about the difference between a headline and a poorly written paragraph.
Here’s a real beauty…
Three People Were Charged With Murder In Connection To The Shooting At A Sweet 16 Party That Killed 4
Does BuzzFeed think a Sweet 16 Party killed four people?

Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti poses for a portrait at Buzzfeed’s New York Headquarters on December 14, 2018 in New York City. (Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images)
Granted, people with grammar as bad as mine shouldn’t point and laugh, but that’s what we old folks call a real wing-ding.
Anyway, another left-wing media outlet is dead, and… Breitbart News is hiring.
P.S. BuzzFeed News is such a failure it didn’t even break the Big Media News about BuzzFeed News shutting down.
*fake reporter
**ya think?
***fake news
****fake journalism
*****he now bathes in that sweet, sweet China money
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Everything You Need to Know About the Alleged Pentagon Leaks

The FBI arrested alleged Pentagon leaker Jack Douglas Teixeira on Thursday, closing the first chapter of an ongoing story that still has many questions to answer – including whether the classified documents Teixeira posted online are accurate or not and how he came to possess them.
Here are the known facts of the case, as of Friday.
Who is the “leaker?” The suspect in custody is Jack Douglas Teixeira, a 21-year-old resident of North Dighton, Massachusetts. Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Thursday he was detained as part of “an investigation into alleged unauthorized removal, retention, and transmission of classified national defense information.”
FBI agents arrested Teixeira without incident at his mother’s home. The FBI said its agents were heavily armed because they had reason to believe Teixeira owned multiple weapons.
“Since late last week the FBI has aggressively pursued investigative leads, and today’s arrest exemplifies our continued commitment to identifying, pursuing, and holding accountable those who betray our country’s trust and put our national security at risk,” the FBI said after the arrest.
Teixeira is an Airman First Class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, which is located at Joint Base Cape Cod in the eastern Massachusetts town of Bourne, about 50 miles from where the Teixeira family lives. His stepfather retired after serving in the same unit.
The 102nd Intelligence Wing is tasked with providing “worldwide precision intelligence and command and control along with trained and experienced airmen for expeditionary combat support and homeland security.” Among other duties, its personnel process data from reconnaissance planes and drones.
According to the BBC, Teixeira enlisted in 2019 and currently holds the position of Cyber Transport Systems journeyman, which means he works on the Air Force global communications network. He was on active duty at the time he allegedly exposed classified materials and may be punished more harshly as a result. He will probably face at least ten years in prison.
Teixeira would have needed to pass a background check to take the job, since it involves accessing classified information, although most observers of the case are puzzled about how Teixeira managed to obtain documents that were classified at such a high level.
The UK Daily Mail on Friday quoted a sworn statement from an FBI agent that said Teixeira “had held a top secret security clearance since 2021, and that he also maintained sensitive compartmented access to other highly classified programs.”
The suspect’s mother has worked for veterans’ non-profit organizations and posts family photos each year on Veterans Day. His stepfather is retired with 34 years of military service. Teixeira’s mother proudly charted her son’s progress in the Air National Guard with Facebook posts. When he graduated from tech school in June 2021, she posted a photo of a patriotic balloon tied to the family mailbox to welcome him home.
Neighbors told the BBC that Jack Teixeira was a “good kid, not a troublemaker,” had a “good head on his shoulders,” and was enthusiastic about joining the military.
What did he allegedly do? Teixeira is allegedly a video game enthusiast who created a group called “Thug Shaker Central” on a video, voice, and text platform called Discord during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020.
Gamers commonly use Discord to talk to each other while playing games, but it also offers chat groups and forums, where photos and videos can be shared along with typed messages. It is very easy to install and use – it can even be run within a web browser without installing any software – and basic accounts are free.
According to friends interviewed by the Washington Post, Teixeira created Thug Shaker Central under the user name “OG,” one of several accounts he maintained, to discuss his interests in guns, Catholicism, libertarian politics, and games. As with many people, his outspoken persona online was reportedly very different from the modest way he conducted himself in person.
Teixeira’s Discord group was fairly small, accepting new members by invitation only. It had about 30 members at its peak, including a number of teenage boys, who enjoyed telling politically incorrect jokes – the name of the group was borrowed from a gay pornography video – and egging each other on to greater heights of verbal transgression. Some frankly racist comments were made in the forum. The Washington Post summarized the bulk of the content posted by the group as “memes, offensive jokes, and idle chitchat.”
Some of them created fictitious identities for themselves, including a member living in Kentucky who pretended he was a Russian naval officer, a ruse that apparently prompted early suspicions that Teixeira’s group was created or infiltrated by foreign intelligence agents. The members who spoke to the Washington Post insisted they were just a rowdy crew of young people looking for online companionship during the lockdowns. A great deal of steam was blown off, but in addition to the trash talk, some members conducted serious discussions of the Ukraine war and prayed together online.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Teixeira began posting what he described as classified material on the forum. At first, he retyped what he claimed to have seen on these documents, but later he included photographic images of the originals. According to other group members, he switched to photos of the documents when he grew frustrated with the amount of work needed to retype them, and the inability of other members to understand military and intelligence jargon.
Teixeira is accused of ultimately leaking over a hundred purportedly classified documents, many of them pertaining to the Ukraine war. According to reports, he often presented these documents as evidence that every government involved in the conflict is lying to its citizens about the progress of the war. He also allegedly posted materials related to other news stories discussed in the Thug Shaker Central forum, including foreign interference in U.S. elections, U.S. interference in foreign governments, and the Chinese spy balloon saga.
Why did he allegedly post classified documents? Teixeira’s friends told reporters he does not view himself as a “whistleblower” in the vein of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who claimed his exposure of classified materials was conducted to defend privacy rights and expose government surveillance overreach.
Instead, Teixeira evidently posted these documents because he wanted to impress and educate other members of his Discord group, especially the younger members, who he viewed as proteges. The poster identified in reports as Teixeira escalated his activities when he did not think the others were paying enough attention to his opinions and the material he was exposing.
“He’s a smart person. He knew what he was doing when he posted these documents, of course. These weren’t accidental leaks of any kind,” a teenage member of Thug Shaker Central told the Washington Post.
“He got upset, and he said on multiple occasions, if you guys aren’t going to interact with them, I’m going to stop sending them,” another said of the shared documents.
One of his friends said Teixeira saw his Discord forum as a means of “keeping kids informed about real-world issues.”
The leaker swore other group members to secrecy about the materials he was posting – a promise they kept with surprising fidelity, all things considered. Some of them told the media it took them a while to accept that he was posting genuine classified material, instead of fabrications he boastfully invented to make himself look important.
Several group members have told the media their forum was thick with “irony” and sarcasm, so it was difficult to tell exactly where Teixeira was coming from. He appears to have crafted a persona as a fiery libertarian individualist, an “anti-war Christian” who distrusted the U.S. government and had serious qualms about its Ukraine policy.
One forum member said Teixeira came to regret joining the military because he concluded it was “run by the elite politicians” and threatened to “kick [his] ass if I thought about joining.”
How did he get caught? The code of silence on Thug Shaker Central held remarkably firm until last month, at which time some of the members began sharing “OG’s” posts and classified documents in other Discord groups, apparently because they wanted to impress other users or win arguments with them.
This brought the alleged document leak to the attention of the media, generating a few big headline news stories and sparking an intense media manhunt for the original leaker. Open-source investigation website Bellingcat reported on Sunday that the New York Times (NYT) began digging into the story after five documents related to the Ukraine invasion were shared in Russian channels on the messaging platform Telegram.
Some of Teixeira’s docs were also posted on the notoriously rambunctious 4chan system, where one poster employed a classified document to win a petty argument with the message, “Source this dick, at least my piece of paper is more credible than hearsay.”
Bellingcat found another exposure of classified material in a March 4 Discord feud between players of the Minecraft computer game that concluded with one of them saying, “Here, have some leaked documents.” The accompanying images were of ten documents concerning the Ukraine war, some of them visibly stamped “Top Secret.”
These heated comments from 4chan and Discord users perfectly capture the overall tenor of the most embarrassing national security breach since Edward Snowden.
Bellingcat also found documents posted on a Discord channel dedicated to a Filipino YouTube celebrity. The investigators considered these “bizarre” venues for such potentially explosive disclosures, so they kept looking for the original source of the documents and eventually found the Thug Shaker Central group. It then took the Washington Post about a week to hunt Teixeira down.
According to the Associated Press (AP), Teixeira knew he was in trouble after the NYT story on his documents was published last week. He then held a video conference call with other Thug Shaker Central members to apologize for the consequences that might fall on them.
“Basically what he said was, ‘I’m sorry, guys, I prayed every single day that this wouldn’t happen.’ I prayed, and I prayed, and now it’s only up to God what happens next,’” another group member told the AP.
How did he get so much sensitive information? This is perhaps the biggest lingering question of the Teixeira story. If the documents are not all fakes, then how did a young, low-ranking member of the Air National Guard get access to them?
Bellingcat noted that once Teixeira began sharing images of the classified material, they appeared to be photos of hard-copy documents, not scans or computer-generated images. Some of the photos appear to have been digitally manipulated when they were passed along by other users, especially the Russians on Telegram, but it was not clear if any of the original copies posted by Teixeira are manipulations or fakes.
“When asked how such a young service member could have had access to highly sensitive documents, the Pentagon spokesman, Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, said it was the nature of the military to trust its very young service members with high and sometimes grave levels of responsibility, including high levels of security clearance,” the AP reported on Thursday.
“We entrust our members with a lot of responsibility at a very early age. Think about a young combat platoon sergeant, and the responsibility and trust that we put into those individuals to lead troops into combat,” Ryder said.
“National security is our foremost priority and any attempt to undermine it compromises our values and degrades trust among our members, the public, allies and partners,” said the National Guard.
The NYT described Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as “struggling” to explain how his department did not know about the leaks until they spread across the Internet and caught the attention of reporters.
“Well, they were somewhere in the web. And where exactly and who had access at that point, we don’t know. We simply don’t know at this point,” Austin said. The NYT archly observed that even more classified documents were being discovered online by media outlets while Austin was speaking.
According to the NYT, the Joint Chiefs of Staff acted last Friday to implement “procedures to limit the distribution of highly sensitive briefing documents and restrict attendance at meetings where briefing books containing paper copies of the documents were available.”
States’ Lawsuit Reveals Feds Pushed Censorship Tools to Big Tech
Disclosures brought about by Missouri and Louisiana’s tech First Amendment lawsuit against the federal government reveal that the U.S. State Department actively marketed government-funded online censorship tools to Big Tech companies.
As reported by the Federalist, an official at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, or GEC, sent an email to the popular business networking platform LinkedIn advertising the so-called “disinfo cloud,” a GEC-funded project that sought to identify “disinformation” online.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., speaks during the virtual Meta Connect event in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
GEC senior advisor Samaruddin Stewart first wrote to LinkedIn in February 2020, requesting a meeting, saying he had been “tasked with building relationships with technology companies,” and that he was reaching out to companies interested in “countering disinformation.”
In another email to LinkedIn employees following the meeting, Stewart advertised the GEC’s censorship tool.
“I’ll send information… about gaining access to Disinfo Cloud — which is a GEC funded platform that offers stakeholders an opportunity to discover companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation,” said Stewart.
The Disinfo Cloud was advertised to firms as a “one-stop shop” for a tech company to “identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation.”
In addition to funding the Disinfo Cloud, the GEC also helped fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), an organization that sought to blacklist conservative media as spreaders of misinformation, financially attacking them by spreading the smear to advertisers.
This is just the latest explosive revelation brought about by the lawsuit, brought by state attorney general Jeff Landry of Louisiana, and former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt, who is now a U.S. Senator.
The lawsuit alleges the Biden Administration infringed the First Amendment by colluding with tech companies to censor Americans, and has revealed more information about that collusion as time has gone on.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.