It’s no secret there are people behind the scenes of social media giants like Twitter and Facebook throwing their influence around in an effort to remove dissenting opinions from the internet. However, after doing research and following the money trail, the truth reads more like a movie plot than something you’d expect from real life.
And yet, here we are. Let me tell you about the former CIA officials, Kamala Harris staffers, activists, and journalists, that form a coalition powerful enough to deplatform presidents and silence anyone from social media platforms forever.
On January 21, 2020, DiscloseTV shared an email they received from a person named Scott, who is a reporter for Adweek.
Although Disclose was kind enough to censor his last name, it didn’t take much to figure out it was Scott Nover, Adweek’s Social Media reporter. I use the term ‘reporter’ loosely here, as he is a thinly-disguised activist that happens to write articles. What can I say? I can be generous from time to time.
In his email to Disclose, Scott mentions Alethea Group: a group I had no heard of until this point, and one that I think everyone needs to know the name of in a hurry, considering its CEO is on the record as saying, “Disinformation is one of the largest threats to the Western liberal order.”
Meet Lisa Kaplan, the founder and CEO of Alethea Group. A graduate of Colby College, formerly employed by PwC and Democratic-leaning Senator Angus King, Kaplan is one of the driving forces behind the current state of censorship we see on the web, and in fact could very well be one of the biggest masterminds behind it all. However, she does not work alone, and surrounds herself with well-connected and equally-liberal individuals that all share the opinion that President Donald Trump and anyone that affiliates with or supports him does not deserve a voice in today’s social media landscape.
Lisa Kaplan founded Alethea Group in 2019 to, “protect organizations from the deliberate spreading of falsehoods, otherwise known as, disinformation.” In a May 2019 article published by CBC, Kaplan discussed how reporting disinformation — and hoping that social media platforms take it down — doesn’t go far enough for an effective strategy.
“What campaigns need to realize is this is a largely unregulated space, so platforms are writing the rules and arbitrating them themselves,” she said. “They should have a strategy and be asking questions like: ‘Who would we call if this happened? How would we respond? What sort of information would we need to make a decision?'”
At first, Kaplan’s questions seemed largely valid, but as the year went on and into 2020, her political leanings and cohorts she surrounded herself with raise a lot more questions. Primarily, Kaplan’s initial concerns were with manipulated videos and deepfakes, which most would argue is incredibly valid and worth paying attention to. But her own political leanings combined with virtually zero bipartisan investigations into misinformation is crucial.
Kaplan regularly cites the thirteen Russians indicted by Robert Mueller and “right-leaning” grifter types like Jacob Wohl as the foundation for far more bold claims, and reasoning for removing conservative voices from platforms altogether.
What began as an expression of concern of how platforms would enforce their own community standards came a slow but steady evolution of those community standards to the vague platitudes we see from the likes of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg today. And influential, but largely unknown groups like Alethea are the machines behind it.
Alethea also aligns itself with groups like Media Matters and the Anti-Defamation League, as evidenced by this seminar held on October 22, 2020.
The ADL in particular has been one of the loudest voices pushing for deplatforming, censorship, and the removal of any website it considers “anti-Semitic,” but has also been caught using made-up Nazi imagery to push its agenda. One of my favorite investigative journalists, Yaacov Appelbaum, wrote an amazing piece on the ADL which you can read here. I highly recommend it.
Pictured below is Yaacov’s stunning discovery that a former Bernie Sanders staffer staged a Nazi flag photo op at a Trump event, and the web of lies surrounding it.
The second-in-command at Alethea is Cindy Otis, the company’s Vice President for Analysis. Otis is a former CIA Analyst who frequents her own fair share of interviews wherein she makes bold claims of violence from the right, citing circulating flyers on social media, among other things.
Otis is a long-time “Russia Russia Russia!” type, who has made her most recent career in circulating narratives about President Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin.
From July 2018.
Cindy also championed for Facebook as they removed posts from Jair Bolsonaro in March, claiming “disinformation” about Covid-19.
From March 2020.
Cindy Otis also spoke with Adam Schiff about internet policing, stating they want to cut “misinformation,” and researchers associated with her and the Alethea Group are demanding data on users who share it from our government.
You can watch that full conversation here. It is truly eye opening.
In particular, most recently, Otis said, “Communities online that either participated in Wednesday’s violence or supported it are threatening that it was only the beginning of what they have long claimed is an inevitable civil war or revolution.”
That post was one of dozens spotted by the Alethea Group, which tracks online threats and disinformation. Various virtual fliers circulating on social media promise an “armed march” on Capitol Hill and in every state capital a few days before the inauguration.
Most frustrating about this, is the flyers that were circulating were identical to flyers created by a far-left group last November for an election night watch party.
I first discovered this on January 15 and immediately shared it on Gab. It took a reverse image search and a few keyword queries in a search engine to find it. It took maybe five minutes.
It begs the question: If an independent researcher could unearth the truth in five minutes, why can’t former CIA staff members who are supposedly the experts at this sort of thing do it?
The answer, put plainly, is it doesn’t serve a purpose.
Otis’s claims of violence at the Capitol and an impending civil war were already made and circulated around in the mainstream media before the truth began to surface. First, came videos of the supposed “insurrection,” and the evidence does not match the claims made by the media and politicians whatsoever.
For example, take a look at this video of the “Q Shaman” and his interactions with Capitol security in the Senate wing.
Polite, wasn’t it?
Then this video also surfaced where Trump supporters beg armed forces to step in and intervene and they do nothing. Where was this reported? Almost nowhere. Didn’t fit the narrative, so it didn’t get the airtime.
Don’t even get me started on the double standard Twitter hold for itself, as more and more stories surface of child porn being shared across the platform as Q accounts were purged. There’s a saying that I like that states, “If the left didn’t have double standards, it would have no standards at all,” and it could truly not be any truer.
So as groups like the ADL and the Alethea Group continue to insist that everyone that doesn’t agree with them is a Nazi, and as former Kamala Harris staffers, Bernie staffers, CIA analysts, etc., continue to throw their lot in with them, it begs the question: How did these people ever get to become the kingmakers of social media?
While disinformation is incredibly harming to any movement, the lopsided enforcement of policies comes down to the hyper-partisan nature of the social media kingmakers themselves. They’ve built themselves up as the de facto leaders of the new rules for the internet, and they now have the power to silence presidents, destroy livelihoods, and make themselves come out appearing to be the good guys.
And as Lisa Kaplan herself said, anyone in opposition to them is a threat to the “Western liberal order.”
Talk soon,
L