Robert Bridge | The “bureaucratic monster” that has just fined X €120 million is wrapping its tentacles around free speech | The EU has once again strayed beyond acceptable boundaries, slapping Elon Musk’s social media platform X with harsh penalties for being in violation of new draconian EU digital laws that many say are code for censorship. ■ On Friday, the European Commission unleashed the billionaire tech mogul’s wrath after it fined X €120 million (about $140 million) for “breaching its transparency obligations” under the 2022 Digital Services Act, which sets standards for accountability and content moderation. The ruling by the 27-nation bloc called the platform’s blue checkmark system ‘deceptive’ and accused it of weak advertising transparency and failing to provide required data access. ■ In response, Musk had his own ‘X-it’ moment when he called for the abolition of the EU and the return of national sovereignty to its 450 million subjects. In a series of blistering posts on the weekend, Musk argued that “EU bureaucracy is slowly smothering Europe to death.”

[...] What does the future of social media look like in such a hostile and unpredictable environment? At the very least, holding innovators personally responsible for potential abuse of their tools would discourage the development of new technologies in the first place. At worst, it could spell jail time and other extreme penalties for those brave holdouts who fail to toe the state-sponsored line. In other words, we are facing very dark times for the world of social media, which threatens to be silenced into oblivion, that is, unless Mr. Musk gets his wish and the “bureaucratic monster” of the 27-member EU is rendered obsolete once and for all.

George Galloway has been elected to parliament seven times, and on many issues is one of the most conservative politicians in the U.K. But when he criticized the Ukraine war, he was detained by British police and had his property confiscated. He’s now in exile.

The Israeli military has launched a major AI project, known as Morpheus, to prevent its forces from posting evidence of war crimes on social media. | The new system has been basically designed to prevent military forces from unintentionally disclosing sensitive information to the enemy on their social media, the ‘Zionism Observer’ said in a post on its X account. ● AI-driven Morpheus will monitor social media accounts of Israeli forces and determine if any videos, texts, or images they post breach information security protocols. It has been operating in a pilot phase with 45,000 personnel over the past few months, resulting in thousands of instances in which troops have had to remove information from their networks. ● The launch of Morpheus underscores Israel’s growing concern over the legal risks posed by soldiers’ online activity, which could be used as evidence in international courts. ● Earlier this month, the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) submitted a criminal complaint to the Czech Republic’s Supreme Public Prosecutor’s Office concerning an Israeli soldier’s involvement in the Gaza genocide.

Kirill Dmitriev noted that the corporation’s new leadership would likely make more effort to avoid being caught in overt distortions of facts | The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) continues to be managed by a government that supports war-mongering, mass migration, and digital passports, even after its leadership change, special presidential envoy and Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) CEO Kirill Dmitriev said.

Dmitriev added that the corporation’s new leadership would likely make more effort to avoid being caught in overt distortions of facts. Earlier, BBC Director General Tim Davie resigned amid the scandal over editing a speech by US President Donald Trump. Along with Davie, BBC CEO of New Deborah Turness also resigned.

■ Trump accuses BBC of election meddling (RT)

Italy’s Nova news agency confirmed it let reporter Gabriele Nunziati go for asking a European official about Israel at a press conference | The move, which was first reported by the Italian news website Fanpage, came after he asked Paula Pinho, the European Commission’s chief spokesperson, about Gaza’s reconstruction on October 13.

Nunziati said that he received two “tense” phone calls from his superiors at Nova in the two weeks between his question and the notice that his contract would end, but declined to comment further. ● Francesco Civita, a spokesperson for Nova, confirmed that the news agency had ended its relationship with Nunziati over his Gaza question. Civita said that Nunziati had been let go for asking a question that was “technically incorrect” because Russia had invaded a sovereign country unprovoked, whereas Israel was responding to an attack. [sic]

Exclusive: Former IDF chief of staff met with Britain’s top journalists to promote Israel’s war on Gaza. | The meetings took place with Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times. ● Further meetings were due to be held with Sky News chairman David Rhodes at the Israeli embassy, and then shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, between 7 and 9 November 2023, according to Kohavi’s itinerary. ● By this time, Israeli forces had killed over 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and Israeli officials had made several public statements of genocidal intent. Kohavi had only stepped down from running Israel’s military months earlier.

■ More and more information about IDF aircraft being refueled by British air tankers from Qatar (en.topwar.ru)

Kit Klarenberg | Leaked documents reveal how a shadowy BBC unit is “embedding” staff in foreign media outlets to “contest the information space” and generate “behaviour change” in favor of London’s geopolitical objectives. | Though BBC Media Action (BBCMA) portrays itself as the “international charity” of the British state broadcaster, files show the group frequently carries out politically-charged projects overseas with government funding. Furthermore, the group consistently trades upon the BBC’s reputation and its intimate “links” with the British state broadcaster when pitching for contracts with donors, including the Foreign Office, which operates in tandem with MI6. ■ The leaks reveal that BBCMA’s work is explicitly “driven by a social and behaviour change communication approach.” The organization’s “project design” is informed by “psychology, social psychology, sociology, education and communication,” and consideration of “the specific factors that can be influenced by media and communication that could lead to changes in behaviours, social norms and systems” in foreign countries. Which is to say, BBCMA is concerned with psychological warfare, warping perceptions and driving action among target audiences.

JOHN McEVOY | Exclusive: Documents seen by Declassified reveal serious concerns within the UK government and MI5 about proscribing Palestine Action. | The UK government was secretly advised that Palestine Action is “highly unlikely” to advocate for violence while officials struggled to produce evidence the group posed a national security threat, it can be revealed. Despite this, the activist group was banned earlier this month when Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed it under terrorism legislation. It is the first time in British history that a direct-action group has been branded a terrorist organisation. ● Only 26 MPs voted against the ban, which provoked a wave of civil disobedience across Britain, with protesters holding placards saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”. ● Over 100 people have now been arrested under the Terrorism Act for allegedly showing support for the group, including an 83-year-old priest and a man holding a Private Eye cartoon. ● Declassified has now seen documents which detail why, how, and when the decision to proscribe Palestine Action was made. They form part of the material relied upon in the group’s High Court challenge to the ban.

■ This is the “I am Spartacus” moment. Please stand up (07/18/25)

Sean M. Brooks, Ph.D. | Canadian, Kenneth Paulin, AKA Kenan SonOfEnos, is behind bars for noticing. | I first came across Kenneth Paulin on Gab, during the Canadian trucker fiasco, and through the COVID lie previously. Much like many Canadians, freedom of speech does not exist, and there are many Communists who not only run that country, but seek to ruin individuals lives for speaking the truth and sharing that truth with their fellow citizens. I have met many Canadians in this fight for free speech, and SonOfEnos is one of them. ● Much like Canadian, Christine Loughead, who was also charged for making posts online about illegal immigration and the invasion in Canada and other countries, the Canadian law enforcement is one-sided and they are slaves to those who want natural born citizens wiped out.

Larry Ellison and a constellation of billionaires will finally get their way, buying the very app they wanted to kill a year ago for being too 'pro-Palestinian' | A year ago, powerful critics in Congress and the tech world were complaining that TikTok was promoting anti-Israel messaging and were suggesting it needed to be shut down. ● Turns out it didn't need to be eliminated. TikTok is a message force multiplier after all, and only requires, apparently, the right people to own it. Like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the second richest man in the world and the single biggest private donor of the Israeli Defense Forces, who has referred to the state of Israel as his own. He has direct stakes in a head spinning galaxy of news, television and Hollywood media companies, mainly through the recent Paramount Skydance Corporation takeover, a mega conglomerate now run by his son David Ellison (who is reportedly on the cusp of making vigilantly pro-Israel journalist Bari Weiss a top exec at newly-acquired CBS). Ellison the elder also is a major stakeholder in X and Tesla.

Simplicius | Democracy is blue-in-the-face and cold-to-the-touch in the moribund EuroCircus. | Elections at this point are merely procedural pageantries for crowning of the pre-selected ‘winner’. As stated earlier, the closer things get to the edge for this rotting organ, the more “mask-off” its corrupt politburo must go to preserve power. Anyone who opposes the totalitarian EU regime’s “party line” is merely removed from participating in “democracy”.

 ■ Europe is preparing to occupy Moldova | [...] It seems that such plans of totalitarian-liberal European regimes are dictated by their desire to demonstrate their “courage and determination” against the backlog of plans to place the troops of the “coal of those” in the territory controlled by the Kiev regime. Frightened by a direct clash with a large Russia, the Europeans intend to recoup on little Moldova. Self-affirmation at the expense of the weak has always been an integral part of European colonialism.

Kathmandu has been forced to reverse a restriction it had imposed on websites such as X, YouTube, and Facebook | The Nepalese government has reversed its decision to ban social media sites, following violent protests that resulted in 19 deaths and over 400 injuries. The protests, led by people mostly in their late teens and early 20s, broke out on Monday after several major social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, and X, were banned. These sites were among 26 that were blocked for failing to register under new regulations, which local media reports said censored free speech. ● Clashes intensified when demonstrators broke through barbed wire barriers and attempted to enter a restricted zone near parliament, prompting police to fire live rounds and tear gas, and deploy water cannons and batons, according to a Hindustan Times report. ● After the protests, Nepal’s home minister resigned at a cabinet meeting on Monday evening. Protesters set fire to the private residence of the information and communication minister, according to local reports.

■ Nepal’s main government building set ablaze (VIDEO) (RT)
■ Unrest In Nepal: What's Known So Far (Sputnik)

After the start of the Russian special military operation, Google – operating under the patronage of US intelligence agencies – intensified its work aimed at destabilizing Russia. | What’s rarely discussed in the Big Tech-national security debate is how early Google’s Jigsaw tech incubator embedded itself in Ukraine’s info space, Zach Vorhies, former senior software engineer at YouTube and Google-turned-whistleblower, told Sputnik. ● He recalled that during the 2014 Euromaidan protests, Jigsaw launched the so-called Project Shield to keep Ukrainian media online and ensure platforms such as Facebook* and Twitter remained functional for organizing demonstrations. ● After the 2014 coup in Ukraine, Jigsaw didn’t pull back – it scaled up. By 2016, it was using AI to “enhance civic discourse,” effectively shaping narratives, according to the whistleblower. ● On the whole, he added, tools like Google Maps and Earth can track infrastructure and troop movements, while Google Cache servers offer deep access to local networks – potentially serving as forward cyber outposts

Martin Williams | Revealed: Media agency Zinc Network has contract to recruit social media influencers across Europe. | The UK government is secretly paying foreign YouTube stars to publish “propaganda” videos, Declassified can reveal. A three-year investigation has found that online influencers are made to sign legal contracts banning them from disclosing the government’s involvement. ■ Whitehall officials give “feedback” on each video before the influencers are allowed to publish them. The work is coordinated by a London-based media agency, Zinc Network Ltd, on behalf of the Foreign Office in a deal worth nearly £10m of public money. Co-founded by a former Conservative Party spin doctor, the company has won lucrative contracts from the UK, US and Australian governments, becoming a major player in Western influence operations.

■ How the Israel lobby got Keir Starmer to ban Palestine Action (Declassified)(VIDEO)
✅ The UK's Crackdown On Pro-Palestine Activists Has Reached New Orwellian Levels (The Dissident)

House raids over speech violations are becoming commonplace across Germany, even as violent crime explodes | On Wednesday morning at 6 a.m., a large-scale police operation was launched across Germany, targeting hundreds of individuals suspected of insulting politicians or spreading “hate and incitement” online. ● The massive crackdown saw police launch morning raids against 170 individuals, which saw police seize computers, cell phones, and tablets, and conduct searches in multiple locations across the country. ● The action, which was conducted by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), uses the new Criminal Code Paragraph 188 to target individuals accused of racism and hate speech.

💬 "You know very well, and the stupid Americans know equally well, that we control their government, irrespective of who sits in the White House. You see, I know it and you know it that no American president can be in a position to challenge us even if we do the unthinkable. What can they (Americans) do to us? We control congress, we control the media, we control show biz, and we control everything in America. In America you can criticize God, but you can’t criticize Israel…" (Israeli spokeswoman, Tzipora Menache)

Finding: In 684 matched articles on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, CNN gave over twice as much coverage to Israeli military and government voices than to Palestinian perspectives.

The Guardian gave 80% more space, and the BBC gave just over double.

(1/4) 🧵 pic.twitter.com/qJbYzkWZhD

— NewsCord (@newscord_org) June 1, 2025

Leo Hohmann | Army says it's part of a plan to tap commercial technology resources that will increase 'efficiencies' on the battlefields (i.e. killing fields) of the future. | Top executives from tech giants Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI are being sworn into the Army Reserves at the rank of lieutenant colonel. That’s an officer’s rank typically reserved for someone who has served for years and has led thousands of men into combat. Known as Detachment 201, the new “Executive Innovation Corps” will be responsible for the military’s tech transformation, integrating new technologies such as AI-powered drones and humanoid robots, the Army announced on June 13. Patrick Wood, editor in chief of Technocracy.News and an expert on the global technocracy movement, said the move is unprecedented.

✅ The Key Nuclear Allegation that started the Iran-Israeli War was Coaxed from a Palantir Counter-Intelligence Algorithm (Alastair Crooke)

Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) confronts Richard Burgess, the BBC's Executive News Editor, about their coverage of the Gaza genocide and the data revealed by @cfmmuk at the Houses of Parliament.

Burgess's response: "I'm not an expert on the Middle East". pic.twitter.com/WpwjrW4T0q

— NewsCord (@newscord_org) June 18, 2025

🔴 Jonathan Cook | Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting. | Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour. ● Here are a few key statistical findings from the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report on BBC coverage of Gaza over the year following 7 October 2023:

■ The BBC ran more than 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians.
■ The BBC interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians.
■ The BBC asked 38 of its guests to condemn Hamas. It asked no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools.
■ Only 0.5% of BBC articles mentioned Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – only 14 times in news articles when providing context to the events of 7 October 2023. That amounted to 0.3% of articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing from the coverage.
■ The BBC described Israeli captives as “hostages”, while Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge, were called “prisoners”. During one major hostage exchange in which 90 Palestinians were swapped for three Israelis, 70% of BBC articles focused on those three Israelis.
■ The BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza in the time period, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russia ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
■ In coverage, Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered” – and the author of the violence was named, even though, as we have seen, the Hannibal directive clouded the picture in at least some of those cases.

The image of a letter purportedly revealing Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s resignation has surfaced on social media. The post is being widely shared by X users with the claim that Pezeshkian has resigned amid the Israel-Iran conflict and the United States’ bombing of Iran. | Is the letter true? The letter has been dismissed as a “fake document” by Shayan Sardaizadeh, a senior journalist at BBC Verify. Sardaizadeh wrote on X, “Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has not resigned and this is a completely fake document claiming to show his resignation letter to the supreme leader.”

🇮🇷 Pezeshkian: Iran seeks peace but will make aggressors regret their actions (Monday, 23 June 2025 7:44 AM)

■ Caught on Flightradar: Did China secretly send weapons to Iran? 3 mysterious cargo planes spark global alarm (msn)

Simplicius | Many items here. All worthy of consideration. | Western officials are fear-mongering their citizens that if they don’t give up more of their tax dollars to the military industrial complex, they will soon have to learn to speak Russian. It follows in concert with a new propaganda drive in the British press. [...] Putin says unlike Russia and the US, Europe is defenseless against ballistic missiles, and European leaders should understand this.

Israel's defense minister took credit for the attack, which came after he threatened the 'residents of Tehran' would 'pay a price' for Iran's counterattacks | On Monday, an Israeli airstrike hit Iran’s national TV station, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), during a live broadcast, and footage captured the moment when the Israeli bomb hit. ● A loud blast could be heard, and smoke filled the room as the news anchor fled the scene, and then the broadcast went dark. Casualties have been reported, but according to Iran’s news agency IRNA, it’s unclear how many employees of the TV station were wounded or killed. ● Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz confirmed that the IDF was behind the attack on the TV station, a clear civilian target. “The propaganda and incitement broadcasting authority of the Iranian regime was attacked by the IDF after a widespread evacuation of nearby residents,” he wrote on X. “Strike the Iranian dictator everywhere.”

✅ Pascal Lottaz | The Collective West insists that Israel's attack on Iran is covered by its limitless right to self-defence. | For a brief moment in 2022, it looked as if the West had rediscovered the inviolability of state borders and the inadmissibility of foreign interventions when Russian troops started pouring into Ukraine. Luckily, we can all rest assured that that moment is over again. Yesterday, western leaders from Ursula von der Leyen all the way to the UN Security Council representative of Greece, and of course the US President have confirmed that Israel’s blatant attack on Iran is not, in fact, a breach of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force, but that it constitutes part of Israel’s limitless “right to self-defense”.

■ Iran live: Israeli strike damages Iranian hospital, patients wounded (MEE)
■ Israel Kills Senior Iranian Official Who Wanted a Nuclear Deal With the US (Antiwar.com)
■ Iranian Health Ministry: Israeli Strikes on Iran Have Killed 224 Since Friday (Antiwar.com)
✅ The Illegal Attack on Iran (Vijay Prashad)

US president demands, referring to contracts for Active Social Engineering and Large Scale Social Deception | Department of Defense (DoD) contracts with the Thomson Reuters news agency to develop automated defenses against social engineering attacks were railed against Thursday by President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk. “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception,’” Musk wrote on X. “They’re a total scam.” Many, including Musk, were in outrage at the contracts awarded to Reuters that were labeled as Active Social Engineering and Large Scale Social Deception (LSD) in DoD contracts.

🚨HORRIBLE: Israeli forces assassinated journalist Hassan Esleih @hassaneslayeh in a strike on the burns unit inside the reception building of Nasser Medical Complex, as he was receiving treatment from a previous Israeli attack.

Hassan was a legend a symbol of honest, fast… pic.twitter.com/UqIcIzJqVm

— Nour Naim| نُور (@NourNaim88) May 13, 2025

The killing of Palestinian journalist Hassan Eslaih inside Nasser Hospital underscores "Israel's" systematic targeting of the press, sparking global outrage and urgent demands for accountability.
Listen | In the early hours of Tuesday, Israeli occupation forces bombed the burn unit of Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, killing several Palestinians, including renowned journalist Hassan Eslaih, whose powerful and unflinching photography has brought global attention to the harrowing massacres committed since the onset of the Israeli genocide. ● Eslaih had been undergoing treatment for injuries sustained in a prior Israeli airstrike that targeted a tent housing multiple journalists, making his assassination a stark symbol of the ongoing targeting of media professionals in the Strip. ● Eslaih’s killing adds to the growing toll of journalists killed in Gaza, underlining the high risks facing media workers amid the ongoing Israeli genocide.

■ Israeli strike kills Palestinian journalist receiving treatment in Gaza hospital (MEE)

HAMZA YUSUF | Journalists from five British media outlets have criticised the way their own organisations cover Israel-Palestine | Journalists working at Britain’s most prestigious newspapers and TV channels have expressed concern at pro-Israel bias inside their organisations. Speaking exclusively to Declassified, half a dozen current and former staff at the BBC, Sky, ITN, the Guardian and the Times have disclosed the extent of anti-Palestinian prejudice in their newsrooms. ■ All of the journalists requested anonymity for fear of professional reprisals. Despite working for a range of outlets from across the political spectrum, they painted a consistent picture of the obstacles faced by reporters who want to humanise Palestinians or scrutinise Israeli government narratives.