A top aide to President Joe Biden wants Big Tech to commence censorship of content that is critical of the costs of so-called green energy and renewable energy.
White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy made rather direct statements during a June 9 online event hosted by Axios and sponsored by 3M conspicuously dubbed The Infodemic Age.
Axios, which headed their promotional article for the event as Watch: A Conversation On Battling Misinformation, described the session as “conversations examining the real world impacts of misinformation on public health and climate action.”
The event featured two Axios reporters, in addition to Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable.
The 32 minute webcast addressed what Axios described as the topic of “efforts from fossil fuel companies to seed doubt about clean energy solutions,” and was transcripted to text only in very small portions.
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On the topic of “misinformation,” McCarthy was quoted as stating that, “We have to get tighter. We have to get better at communicating.”
“And frankly, the tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” she added.
And continued, “That’s what the fossil fuel companies pay for…that’s what they do. We have to be smarter than that and we need the tech companies to really jump in.”
In a secondary June 9 article on the session, Axios paraphrased McCarthy as claiming that “the problem of disinformation has shifted from disputing the reality of climate change to inaccurate claims about the feasibility and benefits of moving away from fossil fuels.”
She was quoted directly as stating that although the online oil industry propaganda campaign she claims is running has “moved from denial,” that “dark money is still there.”
McCarthy elaborated, “The fossil fuel companies are still basically trying their best to make sure that people don’t understand the challenge of climate.”
Proponents of green energy, such as the Biden administration, she added, are facing a question of how they are to “accelerate the solutions we have available to us, the technology improvements that we’ve seen that are most cost-effective, in fact cost-competitive with fossil fuels.”
And this leads to the very problem that she wants Big Tech to take care of as a de facto branch of the government, “What the industry is now doing is seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with that and whether they work or not.”
Bristles up
Not all establishment outlets are on board with the changing winds.
A June 13 article by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board weighed in on McCarthy’s comments, sharing their own experience of how Facebook’s “fact checker”-driven censorship schema has hit home.
“A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party ‘fact checkers’ to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a ‘loophole’ for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds, including by our contributors Bjorn Lomborg and Steven Koonin, that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies,” the statement reads.
The Board minced no words, “The goal was to restrict readership.”
In the process, the Board took aim at McCarthy’s comments on the February of 2021 freak winter storm in Texas that froze wind turbines and natural gas wellheads, leaving thousands who normally live in a sweltering climate without power for days in sub-freezing temperatures.
McCarthy, they stated, claimed that “The first thing we read in the paper was” media outlets picking on wind turbines for having frozen.
“That became the mantra,” she claimed.
The WSJ Board responded, “In fact, most of the media immediately blamed climate change and fossil fuels.”
“We were among the few to point out that wind energy plunged as temperatures dropped and turbines froze. Gas-fired plants couldn’t make up for the wind shortfall despite running all-out, and then some went down too.”
“Ms. McCarthy doesn’t want to admit the inconvenient truth that renewable energy sources are making the grid increasingly unreliable,” they added.
The WSJ is not a black sheep in its complaints on Facebook’s servitude as a censorship arm of the central government.
In a February article, the New York Post shared the following anecdote:
“Here’s something Facebook’s censors deemed unacceptable: I wrote a comment using the latest peer-reviewed research from the medical journal Lancet on deaths caused by heat and cold. The paper is the first to show that globally, every year, half a million people die because temperatures are too hot, while 4.5 million people die because it is too cold.”
“In other words, nine times more people die from the cold than the heat.”
The author explained, “I ran afoul of Facebook’s fact-checkers for noting that over the past 20 years, our higher temperatures, which we would expect from global warming, have increased heat deaths and decreased cold deaths. I calculated the net effect in terms of saved lives every year and was flagged for ‘misinformation.’”
And added, “To avoid social-media censorship of this article, I bizarrely have to cite one of the study’s lead authors instead of putting it in my own words.”
An Indian ‘fact’ farm
In the alternative media sphere, also in February, after Facebook’s censorship division flagged an Instagram post he personally made sharing a screenshot of a Forbes article, editor Raheem Kassam did some research into the group who labeled him for “misinformation.”
Kassam found that the entity, which goes by the moniker The Healthy Indian Project (THIP), was obfuscated from sight by being a node of the International Fact-Checking Network, which runs under the Poynter network’s banner.
“In fact, a lot of THIP’s online presence gives the feel of a chop-shop of people who may or may not exist. Even the so-called ‘Editorial Team’ is a slipshod web page with half names, missing images, and biographies for just four people,” Kassam stated.
In a Substack post backed with screenshots, Kassam added that a man that only went by the name “Nishant” was listed as THIP’s Executive Editor.
“Nishant is alleged to be a ‘seasoned journalist with over 18 years of experience,’ but even a cursory glance at his LinkedIn page shows no such history.”
“Instead, Nishant himself claims to have worked for something called ‘NewsX’ for one year, the ‘Millenium Post’ for less than a year, and THIP for two years and five months. Hardly the 18 years of journalistic experience THIP claims.”
