PropOrNot – Setting Up the Atlantic Council for Lawsuits

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Yves here. PropOrNot is a sore subject with us. See:

We Demand That The Washington Post Retract Its Propaganda Story Defaming Naked Capitalism and Other Sites and Issue an Apology

Washington Post Refuses to Retract Article Defaming Naked Capitalism and Other Sites

Site Behind Washington Post’s McCarthyite Blacklist Appears To Be Linked to Ukrainian Fascists and CIA Spies

Originally published at George Washington’s blog

By George Eliason, an American reporter living in Ukraine.

Preface by Washington’s Blog: Prop Or Not has defamed this website and many other respected American websites by falsely labeling them “Russian propaganda”. The owner of this website is an American citizen who was born in the US, lived in the US his whole life, and is loyal to the U.S. constitution and the national security of the United States.

We believe that it is those who would subvert American values and promote propaganda who are the traitors. 

In addition, a leading cybersecurity expert has publicly said that Mr. Eliason’s research as presented in this article and previous articles does not violate the law. 

Washington’s Blog does not express an opinion about whether or not the claims set forth in this article are accurate or not. Make up your own mind.


Early in 2018, I pulled back the veil Propornot hid behind and disclosed the groups behind the smear site. Propornot is a product of the Atlantic Council’s backers. It is a symptom of the ongoing Information War. People in the groups behind it are waging to destroy Press Freedom in the US by branding dissenting voices as objects of ridicule at best and enemies of the state at the worst. Below, you’ll see the results of yet another website scan, as well as circumstantial evidence showing the InterpreterMag and the Atlantic Council, are responsible for Propornot. The lawsuits are starting and because of the damage Propornot’s lists have done, will trickle down to the InterpreterMag staff,  the Atlantic Council, and their backers at some point.

For those that don’t know, the Atlantic Council is brought to you by the Central and Eastern European Coalition (CEEC), the Ukrainian Congressional Committee of America (UCCA), and the Ukrainian World Congress(UWC). Between these three organizations, there is a constituency of 20 million voting ultranationalist (politically Bandera era nationalists), as well as constituencies across governments in Central and Eastern Europe today.

There are also Levant region US-based Diaspora governments including Oriental Promethean, Syrian, and Gulenite groups that often financially contribute to politicians and gain huge amounts of political backing because all the Diasporas work together in a large bloc when it suits their needs.

The long game behind all of this is to normalize extreme nationalism in the US. If they can get people on all sides of the political spectrum so divided through pure politics people demand a forced normalization, what’s offered will be the new US nationalism.

This is done continuously to develop the will and the means to provoke legal action and civil lawsuits AGAINST these same commentary and news websites that make up the Propornot blacklist. It doesn’t matter how small a deal Propornot are in reality. Propornot plagiarized their blacklist from spies for hire groups.

This same list is the handout for every war mongering, democracy-hating group in America and across the world. Whatever extraordinary means they need to use, they are determined to force offending websites to get in line or suffer a costly closedown.  This latest partnership Facebook has formed with the Atlantic Council is another trial move to a forced normal where news and information are spoon fed.

This is part of a much, much, larger story that starts with Propornot and goes through InterpreterMag to their parents at the @DFRLab of the Atlantic Council. The groups that identify emerging threats and disinformation for Google are the same group members of the Atlantic Council that Facebook will employ. Google has well over $100 million invested in these groups so using them to determine Search Engine Results Pages(SERPs) is simple economics. These core groups supply the fact checking and relevance check for Google. They have the means to take a monopoly on information and deem truth to be whatever the hell they want or get paid for it to be.

All of this starts with the bottom rung at sites like Propornot. For the January article I scanned the website using Iron Wasp. It is one of the best application security scanners available today and is used by hackers and penetration testers worldwide to test for vulnerabilities of a website(web application). What this means is that within a very tiny margin of false positives, scanners like this deliver verifiable, documentable information that can be used in a court of law.

That scan could be replicated by any person, at any time. I didn’t reveal the vulnerability scanner I used because it shouldn’t matter. If more scans were done by other people using a variety of scanners, it would hammer home the fact Michael Weiss and company are the people behind Propornot everyone was looking for.

The problem remains that the natural curiosity affected parties should feel because they have been damaged is still replaced with inertia. For many news and commentary platform owners, the last few years have overloaded their senses with the shock value of being called a tool for a foreign government and having their reputations called into question or destroyed.

Instead of taking a sober and critical look by doing the scans themselves or interviewing subject matter experts, this inertia has maintained my single scan as the only one that exists publicly for Propornot. It is the only serious effort and scan I’ve been able to find. Recently, I set up an online snare that InterperterMag’s Michael Weiss, Catherine Fitzgerald, and their bit players had the choice to either step in or ignore entirely. The whole thing hinged on him and them not being as bright as I thought they were. I’m glad I didn’t bet on that. I’ll get to that in part 2.

New Scan Results for Propornot

What I didn’t say when I published the January Propornot expose was I counted on inertia setting in with damaged website owners even as I wrote the first Propornot article. Inertia  has taken the level of proof from having enough confidence to sue Mikey D. Weiss and all the nationalist bastards working to reinterpret and destroy the 1st amendment and civil rights turned it into- “The alleged scans that allegedly resemble easily spoofed screenshots allegedly done by the alleged American allegedly living in Donbass….” Yeah,  after four months everyone is comfortable with that one.

Needless to say, this wasn’t the only scan I did. I didn’t mention that before though, did I? I did three other scans over the last 10 months using various vulnerability scanners set very light and the results were the same. The 3rd time is the charm and 2nd and 3rd were the scans in January. The problem with Michael Weiss denying Propornot is a part of InterpreterMag is it should never have shown up on any scan in the first place. Why them?

For Propornot to come out consistently in every scan as part of InterpreterMag is outrageous.  The two source rule of journalism states that two verifiable independent sources constitute a fact. This separates journalism from rumor mill news. The three source rule was developed by the Washington Post during its coverage of the contentious Watergate scandal. This verifies politically hot facts or scandalous information. How about four sources?

For this 4th scan of Propornot, I needed them to know someone was there. I used Vega. According to the InfoSec Institute, Vega is one of the top 5 web application security scanners in the world today. That means it’s a favorite tool for hackers everywhere and you can have confidence it produces evidence quality results, just like Iron Wasp did. Guess what happened?

I set the scan a little louder and was caught red-handed. Propornot canceled my scan and that was that. Or was it? The great thing about a top 5 scanner is they are very efficient. If you look at the top left underneath the web address for Propornot, who’s name do you see?


Between this scan and the January scan image, you can see three of the scans that were done. The results from all 4 scans completed are the same regarding InterpreterMag. The results from four scans show InterpreterMag in a relationship position BEFORE Propornot links to any websites listed on the webpage. This last scan was done AFTER the Atlantic Council should have tightened up the website security.

We have four separate verifiable sources stating the same obvious fact with 3 shown. Does anybody with a respectable pay grade at the Atlantic Council have any last words? This case is closed.

When the facts are tallied, I am still all for letting the courts decide because of the damage Propornot has done. And rest assured that is starting to happen. This clearly shows lawsuits against Propornot, the Atlantic Council, and the spies for hire are not only possible, but if you aren’t willing to protect yourself now, there may not be anything left to get recourse against later.

Let The Lawsuits Begin

The first large lawsuit is by three of the Netherlands larger newspapers against East StratCom for false accusations that they were spreading propaganda. The accusation published in East StratCom’s Disinfo Review was challenged and East StratCom was forced to back down. But, it didn’t back down far enough. On February 24th they changed terminology from calling the Dutch Media “disinformation outlets” to “outlet where the disinformation appeared.”The response by the newspapers and Dutch politicians says it all.

The Mreast.dk website adds “For the Dutch media TPO, which was listed for editorial coverage of a Ukraine debate, a Dutch media expert said that East StratCom and their collaborators were “a propaganda club  with amateuristic working methods and added that “if you look at their database, There is no substructure [of facts] “ .The chief editor of the second largest newspaper in the Netherlands, General Dagblad, stated that“with East StratCom as a fake news-fighting, we did not need fake news at all” and that the best excuse for the group was that they had a “translation problem” in relative to the Dutch coverage.

Going further,  A parliamentarian from the Socialist Party has demanded that the Dutch Interior Minister raise the matter and stop financing the unit, which in his opinion threatens the freedom of the press by listing coverage of a Ukraine-critical meeting as “fake news”. Therefore, East StratCom has been forced to retreat and change the labeling of their propaganda listings.” This move wasn’t enough and the lawsuit is going forward on March 14th on the grounds that “In a free society it is up to court to judge the matter , not governments or a supreme government.”

Here’s the fun part. Where does East StratCom get its list of propagandists from? Go back to the top. The people at propornot, the Hamilton 68 Dashboard including former Homeland Security Czar Michael Chertoff, Aaron Weisburd, and Clint Watts, among others are the lists providers will eventually be sued.

This lawsuit is the first of its kind that I know of.  I’d love to say my previous articles were part of what’s behind it because of the timing of the lawsuits. They were filed after I started publishing this series showing what was going on and filing lawsuits is the only way for news and commentary publications to protect themselves. I feel immense satisfaction because publications are suing the European Union for labeling them Russian propaganda outlets. Many thanks to Petri Krohn for sharing the above article link.

If your news or commentary website was damaged because of Propornot, Hamilton 68, or any of the associated spies for hire like Aaron Weisburd, Joel Harding, Clint Watts, etc, you can now see that recourse isn’t just possible, it’s either you or them. Make sure it’s them.

Over the last 4 years, I’ve researched and written many stories that are still breaking in other media today. I’ve written stories from the front lines in Ukraine as well as showing snapshots of what life is like here.  I broke the story about Russian trolls and what would lead to Propornot in 2015.

If you want to support investigative research with a lot of depth, please support my Patreon  page. You can also support my work through PayPal as we expand in new directions over the coming year. For the last 4 years it’s been almost entirely self supportive effort which is something when you consider I live in Donbass.

This ad will reflect articles that are coming up. A lot of detailed information doesn’t make it into articles just because of the sheer volume of webpages it adds or even continuity with the current subject matter.

I’ll be adding lots of information as well as a first glimpse of work coming up as we wind our way up from Propornot to Finding Fancy Bear in the near future as well as the Mueller Probes. I will be continuing my focus on Donbass and looking into the politics in play globally.

Next up– A circumstantial evidence article tying Michael Weiss and his crew of “misfits” to Propornot. I baited the trap and waited. Of course he bit.

Thank you for supporting a proven effort that’s working.

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30 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    Yeah, Propornot. I remember when they came out on a Thanksgiving, guaranteeing that most newsies were away from their desks. That is one turkey that was unexpected. I thought that they had died and gone away in embarrassment but it looks like that they are still out there. No matter. That just means that the damages part of the lawsuit will be larger as they are ongoing.
    This is just a minor player in a general front. It is not enough that the deep state never let a crisis go to waste. Now they are manufacturing a crisis to justify their agendas. In this case, the whole bs Russia-stole-the-election story is being used to have people accept a sort of corporate censorship where people have to go to the New York Times and the Washington Post to get the approved ‘real’ news. People would do better getting their news off the back of a Corn Flakes box. Propornot is just trying to discredit and cause damage to those who do not toe the line but the real threat is what is happening with sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
    There are the typical bad actors in the background of Propornot such as the Atlantic Council, Interpretermag and the Ukrainians. No real surprises there. These are just manifestations of what can be called the deep state which expresses their ideas and policies in a plethora of think tanks and publications. They have not given up their work as they are now partnering with Facebook and it remains to be seen how this will work out in the lead-up to the US 2020 election.
    Now for a few tin-foil hat predictions. A lot of people that are into politics may find their Facebook pages temporarily suspended or restricted then so if I was them, I would be lining up alternate lines of communications before this year. The 2018 midterms would be an ideal time to test this backup system out. Wouldn’t be surprised if weird things happen with people’s Twitter accounts as well in 2020. Something to think about.
    Oh, and Propornot? The courts will get around to them sooner or later. As seen in this article, they can run but they can’t hide.

  2. Oregoncharles

    Judging the validity is way beyond my pay grade – I assume some of our more technical commenters will have something to say. But assuming his technology is what he claims, he’s got ’em. NC might be up for a whole new suit of clothes, assuming the Atlantic Council types have any money.

    I didn’t get the connection with the EU – does somebody understand that?

    1. George Eliason

      Propornot provided the list of Russian troll news sites that the Dutch sites were listed with.

  3. JCC

    I couldn’t sleep tonight (2:00AM here on the West Coast with 30mph and higher desert wind gusts rattling everything) so I spent a few minutes looking up background on Michael Weiss, InterpreterMag and a few other references made in this article.

    At first thought maybe some of the above article rated as over-the-top, but after a short 90 minutes or so of skimming through articles through my own searches on DuckDuckGo, it’s pretty apparent that the PropOrNot crapola is just the tip of the NeoCon Iceberg that is out to destroy any speech/article/person it doesn’t agree with, doesn’t praise Ukraine, or doesn’t paint Russia as the One and True Evil War Monger, and feel the sooner that this Epitome Of All That Is Evil – Russia – is bombed out of existence, the safer we all be.

    It’s unfortunate that the classic Usenet Newsgroup truism, “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it” is too often just that, true.

    Fighting against these nut cases is a big task. Keep fighting the Good Fight, Yves, Lambert, and all.

    1. JCC

      I should have added an example of one article I came across by Robert Parry and one of the [not-so-well-hidden] groups behind PropOrNot.

      One of the lead organizations revving up these military adventures and also counting on a big boost in military spending under President Clinton-45 is the Atlantic Council, a think tank associated with NATO that has been pushing for a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

      Considering Trump’s campaign promise of attempting some sort of rapprochement with Russia in regards to terrorism in the ME and the War in Syria and how that has worked out, maybe HRC won after all.

      1. xformbykr

        by Robert Parry and one of the [not-so-well-hidden] groups behind PropOrNot.

        do you mean “by Robert Parry ON one of “not-so-well-hidden] groups behind PropOrNot” ??

  4. ObjectiveFunction

    Wow. The scum always floats to the top of the swamp.

    But seeking monetary damages from a group whose lineage of murderous paramilitaries extends back to the Forest Brothers, SS Brigade Ruthenia, OUN-B, Anton Denikin and, for all we know, to the Black Hundreds, might well be some curious *new* definition of the word “Quixotic” of which I was previously unaware (apologies to Douglas Adams). Go directly to the Katyusha rockets.

  5. Carolinian

    My understanding of the PropOrNot story was that the Washington Post was the real villain by giving them visibility and respectability. The silly MSM articles about Facebook being a Russian propaganda organ are doubtless driving Zuckerberg to embrace the Post/NYT’s Atlantic Council favorites. If one is going to “catapult the propaganda” it helps to have a national newspaper catapult.

    Polls show distrust of the mainstream press is at an all time high and justifiably so. Once Russiagate finally crashes and burns that can only further weaken MSM credibility. It’s doubtful these censorship attempts will work unless they can succeed in blocking links via ISPs and not just search engines (unfortunately this is happening at some commercial WiFi locations).

    1. Amfortas the Hippie

      i have encountered such isp filtering at the few places i use the phone as a web interface…usually waiting for mom at the grocery store or a doctors office.
      NC, consortium, BAR, Jacobin and even alternet are blocked…but(as a test) breitbart, american thinker(sic) and even the daily stormer, are not.
      I don’t understand most of what this author said…just the barest outlines…and I haven’t a clue how much of any of this stuff works(look, a magic box!), but like with the oft mentioned crapification of google search, something is afoot…and I don’t like it one bit.
      my home isp is the phone coop, and I’ve been a member for 23 years…so when they were apparently blocking RT and Al Jazeera, circa the last Bush administration, I called and chewed them out…and although they denied any censorship, the issue was fixed the next day.
      “Eternal Vigilance”, and all.
      Thanks for keeping up the fight, but it would be way cool if someone could hack together a translation for us luddites.

  6. Matthew G. Saroff

    I got kind of lost in the scanning bit.

    What was he scanning for and what did he find?

    1. Eric

      My understanding is that he was scanning for ownership and/or operation of the website. If you can read the fuzzy images, the left-hand column of the first and third images show the folder tree of the website. That’s what you would see if you were logged into your website as an admin, or through an FTP program. I can’t read the second image, so I don’t know what it’s showing.

      The subfolders (what comes after the .com part of the original url) are as follows: /InterpreterMag, /admin/InterpreterMag, and /uploads/InterpreterMag

      I’m not a web-designer, but have dabbled in html-coding for fun (mostly to try and learn it, and to find image links in source code when they are blocked from downloading by javascript or whatever.) Find the “View Source” function on your browser, and you’ll see how a webpage is coded.

      My guess on how the scanning software works is that it either tricks the page into thinking it’s an FTP program, or it simply ‘guesses’ through typical subfolder names (“admin”, “uploads”, “images”…) and then opens the folders to scan deeper for more content. How it gets past admin passwords, I don’t know, but would also guess many of those are more simplistic than what a password-generator creates.

    2. George Eliason

      Think of the scanning as reverse lookup with your telephone. You provide a number and reverse lookup provides a name and address. I did the same thing.

  7. Andrew Watts

    Yawn. I don’t take legal advice or threats from a dullard on television seriously and neither should anybody else. The FBI would have to be more interested in policing political opinion and thus far haven’t shown any inclination to do so. They’re more worried about the protection of private property and any ideological group thinking about undertaking violent action. Over the course of imperial decline the state often becomes more tyrannical but they are increasingly incapable of enforcing their will.

    The facf of the matter is that the American people have little to no effect on our country’s foreign policy. The main issue is more a matter of the corporate media, most of whom are owned by military contractors, need an external enemy to terrorize the populace with to justify their war profiteering. This will only be effective if they are believed.

    Which doesn’t mean the internet isn’t filled with bull—- that serves the interests of individuals, groups, and/or nation-states. But hey, that’s the internet.

    That scan could be replicated by any person, at any time. I didn’t reveal the vulnerability scanner I used because it shouldn’t matter. If more scans were done by other people using a variety of scanners, it would hammer home the fact Michael Weiss and company are the people behind Propornot everyone was looking for.

    I have no idea what he’s talking about you guys… seriously.

    1. Carolinian

      The “fake news” gambit doesn’t seem to have panned out very well for the MSM and in fact Trump then immediately started calling them fake news.

      But it’s not harmless. As I said in my above comment it gives privately run networks like business and store wifi the excuse to block sites–including this one–with filters like Sonic Wall. Pushback is needed or we may have creeping Chinese style internet.

      And he’s talking about an earlier story where he used analysis tools to presumably trace PropOrNot back to some actionable sources. Indeed the post is confusingly written.

      1. Andrew Watts

        The “fake news” gambit doesn’t seem to have panned out very well for the MSM and in fact Trump then immediately started calling them fake news.

        Right. Which is why these attempts at suppressing alternative views are only going to continue to backfire. Weiss and some other guy, whose name I can’t remember, repeatedly got dunked on over Syria. These passive-aggressive attempts at striking back are pathetic.

        There’s no shortage of Soviet/Russian “experts” who need a racket to run at the federal government’s expense. It’s even better if they’re shaking down think tanks supported by foreign powers or interests.

        But it’s not harmless. As I said in my above comment it gives privately run networks like business and store wifi the excuse to block sites–including this one–with filters like Sonic Wall. Pushback is needed or we may have creeping Chinese style internet.

        If Google and/or Facebook want to drag their reputation(s) through the mud and squander public goodwill on behalf of private interests or the state. Who cares? There isn’t any proof that the alleged Russian propaganda on Facebook made an impact. It was merely clickbait imo that didn’t change a thing.

        The difference between China and the US is that the sun is setting in the west and rising in the east. Hence the reason why I wrote the “Over the course of imperial decline…” part.

    2. Eric

      What it means is that this one kind of scanner is now ‘tagged’ by the scannee, or InterpreterMag. As they were able to shut down his scan that means they can detect it from their side somehow (firewall software maybe?) If they can detect it, then it is now vulnerable and unusable. Thus, better scanners set to better security levels are needed in its place. He intentionally did that to see if they were paying attention, and they were, but only at security levels that appear to be minimal.

      More scans showing the folder-tree of the PropOrNot site will reveal “InterpreterMag” just as the 1st and 3rd fuzzy images above do (it’s not that hard to read, even with drugstore reading glasses, like mine.) I can only guess that these programs can scan even deeper than what has so far been revealed. There’s a lot of information inside of webpage coding that never gets onto the page, because it’s just commentary or instructions, or whatever. Maybe there’s more to be revealed from all of that which will further incriminate InterpreterMag and company.

    3. Andrew Watts

      @Carolinian & @Eric

      I forgot the /sarc or *wink* tag or something. The legality of such an action is ambiguous at best and the courts aren’t exactly knowledgeable about the internet. Just sayin’.

    4. Yves Smith Post author

      You really do not get it. If you think propaganda does not work, you are ignoring a big part of the history of the last 100 years, starting with the Creel Committee.

      And if you think stuff like this does not hurt the freedom of the press, you are a fool. Google has downgraded tons of non-MSM sites as a result of the anti Russia campaigning. If you use a neutral search engine, NC stories will be page one on many topics. Never happens on US search engines.

      1. Andrew Watts

        I never said that propaganda doesn’t ever work. As far as the Creel Committee is concerned I’ve previously made the point that the tens of thousands of raids on anti-war Americans that took place during the war and the thousands of indictments under the Espionage Act probably had a greater chilling effect then the advent of Liberty Cabbage. Propaganda never trumps the reality people are living with. It’s why the confidence and trust in our institutions is falling so rapidly.

        The author also made the case that our first amendment rights are under threat and implied that we’re all under a dark cloud of legal prosecution for exercising the freedom of speech to which I disagree. Insofar as the freedom of the press is concerned private monopolies like Google are under no obligation to enforce it. Particularly when Democrats are working so hard to search for scapegoats for their electoral humiliation.

        To the extent that these circumstances harms Naked Capitalism and other sites is regrettable. I didn’t mean to marginalize or diminish it with an insensitive remark like “who cares?” above. But in all honesty I’m not inclined to worry about something I don’t have any control over.

        1. tegnost

          I actually know a lot of people who think everything is great and trump won the election because russia russia russia did i mention russia, the same people think obama was the greatest president of their lifetimes ( his policies made them so many shit tons of money, after all, and their insurance is cheaper (now that poorer people subsidize their healthcare by paying for insurance they can’t use, because it’s too expensive)). They also think they know better and should be able to control the things the lower classes know or are told, because as lower classes they’re obviously too stupid to tie their shoes Our first amendment, as well as all our other rights, are under both implied and explicit threat. It’s not regrettable that NC can be throttled to expand the reach of the party line. It’s not democracy. It’s not civil. It’s not justifiable in an open society. Just because you have become accustomed to it doesn’t mean that it’s not wrong, it means as you’ve said you’re not going to worry about things that you can’t control and if someone has cornered the market you’re not going to try to stop them because they have the market cornered so that would be stupid because they have the market cornered. Civil society is not like your personal life where you just don your duck feathers and let it all roll off so you can get through the day. Your rights are something you actually do have control over, unless you give the control to someone else, and allowing someone else to control the message you hear is ceding control. Archer Daniels would never feed me bad food, I saw their commercial in the lead up to the news hour,it was all green and stuff… the NYT told me we need to invade iraq because yellow cake and wmd, and everyone knows they’re liberals so wow must be true… Your hand waving and nothing to see here is naive, imnsho. You do realize that everything about you is in the amazon cloud and that r*t b*st*rd is selling it to whoever will pay, but you can’t do anything about it so I wouldn’t worry, if I were you…

      2. JCC

        I couldn’t agree with you more on this particular issue.

        Mr. Eliason is not the only one to delve into discovering,and proving, who is behind PropOrNot and the consensus is that it is Michael D. Weiss, the Chief Editor of the The Interpreter which is a direct publishing arm of the Atlantic Council. It claims to be an

        “online journal set out with the modest goal of translating articles from the Russian press, the better to lower the language barrier that separates journalists, analysts, policymakers, diplomats and interested laymen in the English-speaking world from events taking place inside the Russian Federation.”

        but in fact translates only articles written by Russian Dissenters. That would be fine if they did not claim otherwise.

        But the worst of this is that we’ve already seen what Google has done and now Facebook announced last week that it is partnering with the Atlantic Council in order to vet Russian Propaganda sites and news. Considering how many people get their news primarily from Facebook, this is very obviously another sort of propaganda and most definitely an attack on Freedom of the Press here in the U.S.

        I’m sure that Mr. Weiss and his crew that are part of the Atlantic Council will take a strong hand in this vetting process, and if Facebook is serious about using them as a vetting partner, then you may expect to see very little posting, and re-posting of articles there from Mr. Weiss’s List of Two Hundred while at the same time FB’ers will see plenty of articles on those super-predator-clever Russians taking over America

        (He is the kind of guy who took great pleasure in publicly Dancing on the Grave of Robert Parry and ConsortiumNews, another on PropOrNot’s hit list)

        And anyone that believes that propaganda never trumps reality only needs to review the death and destruction and financial costs of our ongoing 15 year-old War in Iraq. Propaganda may lose in the long-term “looking back” at history, but in the reality of actions directly taken/allowed at the time of, and because of, the gray and black propaganda campaigns, it trumps reality long enough to destroy lives, let alone entire groups of people (and without going into well-known details, we all know that has happened).

      3. Andrew Watts

        @tegnost & JCC

        Both of you would do well to read Yasha Levine’s Surveillance Valley. The internet is not, and never has been, a venue for freedom or democratic in nature. It is mostly controlled by monopolist interests where first amendment protections have little to no legal standing. It was probably never going to be an important foundation of an open society given it’s origin as a military instrument. The primary function of the internet when it was conceived was to serve as a means of social engineering and control.

  8. Off The Street

    Google has well over $100 million invested in these groups so using them to determine Search Engine Results Pages(SERPs) is simple economics.

    SERP (Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan) is an older acronym.

    Coicidence? Following the money in the PropOrNot saga will prove interesting.

  9. Randy Graham

    In response to Mathew and Andrew, Eliason set out to show that PropOrNot — which is condemning journalists and websites, including NC, as Russian propaganda (pure evil) — is administered directly from the website Interpretermag. That’s what the scanning software revealed on 4 occasions.

    Interpretermag, edited by Michael Weiss, pretends to be an objective website handling Russian translations and analysis, but in reality promotes various CIA/State Department/Neocon darlings. Weiss is on the Atlantic Council, which promotes the New Cold War with Russia at 500 decibels.

    PropOrNot was created to suppress, silence, and marginalize any journalist or website that questions the New Cold War or other Neocon pet projects.

  10. Alex Cox

    I wish that litigation was the answer. But it is extremely expensive and time-consuming. The Washington Post is owned by the world’s richest man and has a massive cohort of lawyers on staff. I would guess the Atlantic Council is not short of funds or lawyers either.

    NC, Counterpunch, BAR, and Consortium News have right on their side. Unfortunately that doesn’t guarantee much when m’learned friends get involved.

  11. RBHoughton

    Interesting that Ukraine is behind the propaganda. Readers will know that the UK has suffered from a collapse in morality amongst the London Editors of national newspapers and in TV news. The collapse was expressed in bribery of police and other civil servants and the use of spy software to read private mail on target computers and phones.

    A 2014 book “Hack Attack” by Nick Davies exposed most of the details and had a fascinating little gem in it. He noted two of the Editors leading the bribery (from a group of six plus) were the children of Ukrainian immigrants who came over to UK after WWII.

    I have a dream that two events might be expected in UK soon – firstly, King Charles III will ascend the throne and secondly, Jeremy Corbyn will become his Prime Minister. This sets the scene for a national recovery of morality as extensive and popular as the one the Prince Regent instituted after the excesses of the Georges and William IV. “Sic Semper Tyrannis” as the Colonel might say

  12. George Eliason

    Thanks to all that are considering supporting the work. There is one more leg to this and then I am going to scoop the world on 3 or 4 major stories that people are wondering about. Generally, I’ve been about 6 months ahead of the headlines.

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