Following a report released to regulatory bodies, the Pentagon had to admit that it began tracking online “conspiracy theories” about Covid-19 on December 16, 2019, two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed about the virus outbreak and even just four days after the first patients reported symptoms in Wuhan, China.
Graphika Inc is a small but influential social media monitoring and censorship company that works exclusively with the Pentagon, receiving nearly US$7 million in grants and contracts from the US Department of Defense (DOD).
Three years later, a 35-page report Graphika had to show regulators in April 2020 was made public, where it admits that “data collection” of “global conversations” containing “conspiracy theories” about Covid’s origins began on December 16, 2019.
The official CDC.gov timeline shows that the first group of patients in Wuhan, China, began experiencing an atypical pneumonia-like illness on December 12, 2019, meaning that Graphika’s social media “disinformation data collection” work began only four days later when neither the Chinese Communist regime nor the WHO knew of the existence of a virus other than common SARS, nor had they yet named “Covid-19.”
The WHO was not informed of the Wuhan outbreak until December 31, 2019, two weeks after Graphika had already been monitoring social media conspiracy theories about the atypical virus.
Chinese authorities in Wuhan had not yet identified that the pneumonia-like symptoms of the hospital patients in Wuhan were a new coronavirus until January 7, 2020.
WHO did not name the disease “Covid-19” until February 11, 2020, and did not officially declare a pandemic until March 11, 2020.
However, as if from the future, Graphika was keeping a close eye on the word “Covid-19” and was working to tell the Pentagon all the accounts and posts to delete on Twitter and Facebook.
As it became known after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, the White House, unbeknownst to Trump, was working with the social network directly to remove all discussions about the virus’s origins.
They were even sorting citizens’ accounts by political affiliation to monitor their potential for political mobilization based on shared beliefs.
The company that provides “disinformation monitoring” services to the Pentagon used the data they collected on US citizens and voices from around the world to create a “network map” of “the global online conversation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.”
Even in the December 16, 2019 report, the company collected information on famous conservative personalities in the US, Canada, and the UK who could be considered “anti-vaccine activists,” even though the vaccines were not developed until a year later.
Graphika repeatedly identifies “right-wing” accounts (54 times in total, four on the summary page alone) as primarily responsible for “propagating polarizing and sometimes blatantly false narratives.”
Lest there be any doubt about Graphika’s political bias, the report lists the “US right-wing” as a specific disinformation g. In contrast, the same report mentions “left-wing media,” “resist,” and “anti-Trump” political groups as predominantly involved in pushing “truth” and “positive online communications.”
The report even mentions the importance of promoting the hashtag #FlattenTheCurve, a concept pushed by the WHO to justify draconian quarantines that violated human rights worldwide.
But it is important to clarify that the fact of “flattening the curve” did not emerge until February or March 2020, so somehow, the Graphika firm knew what the hashtag to use was going to be when even China did not yet know the virus outbreak was going to become a pandemic.
The report was not nearly the end of Graphika’s Covid censorship work.
As Matt Taibbi’s Twitter Files report revealed, Graphika wrote a report that was sent to Twitter in the following months, encouraging them to take action to speed up or ban the alleged misinformation and disinformation.
There, the Defense Department-funded disinformation firm suggested protecting Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, and George Soros from criticism on social media.
“This ongoing process of sowing doubt and uncertainty into authoritative voices,” Graphika wrote, “leads to a society that finds it too difficult to identify what is true or false.”
In other words, much of the information cited by Graphika as misinformation and disinformation was not false. Still, they believed it was “too difficult” for people to discern between true and false information, so the self-appointed arbiters of truth should decide what content to allow and what to censor.
With information from La Derecha Diario