Twitter Partners with UK Govt-Backed, CIA-Linked Reuters to Censor Alternative Views


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By Ben Norton – Aug 4, 2021
Twitter is collaborating with Reuters, a CIA-linked media outlet that also participates in a covert UK information warfare program, to censor âmisinformationâ on social media.
Social media giant Twitter has announced that it will work with Reuters and the Associated Press to censor supposed âmisinformationâ on the platform, while actively promoting news stories that they deem to be âcredible.â
Both of these media outlets are reliable mouthpieces of Western governments, but Reuters takes the cozy relationship a step further.
During the first cold war, Reuters was funded by the British governmentto spread anti-Soviet propaganda and to disseminate misinformation that served UK foreign-policy interests in the Middle East and Latin America.
Today, Reuters still works closely with the British government. Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal revealed how the media company has participated in a covert UK Foreign Office information warfare program aimed at creating âattitudinal changeâ in Russian journalists, âweakening Russia,â and advancing NATO geopolitical goals.
It was, in fact, the publication of that factual report that led Twitter to place an unprecedented warning label on all tweets that linked to Blumenthalâs article, warning users that the materials proving Reutersâ collaboration with the British government âmay have been obtained through hacking.â
Remember the time Twitter slapped a warning label on my factual article exposing Reuters as a British intelligence contractor conducting information warfare ops against Russia? https://t.co/ZFvPIrnPE5 https://t.co/C1wkuuIyMX
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 3, 2021
Reutersâ shady activities donât stop there. A top former official who was tasked with âthe responsibility of advancing Thomson Reutersâ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government,â Government Global Business Director Dawn Scalici, had previously served as a CIA agent for at least 33 years.
The AP is also close to Western governments, boasting a long history of echoing their dubious talking points. The newswire published numerous articles in the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq falsely claiming that leader Saddam Hussein had âweapons of mass destructionâ (WMDs). A decade before, it similarly ran fake news stories on supposed Kuwaiti babies being removed from incubators by Iraqi soldiers.
This May, the AP fired its reporter Emily Wilder over her tweets criticizing Israel and her past student activism in support of Palestinian rights.
Twitter announced it is going to work with Reuters to censor so-called "disinformation."
What it of course didn't mention is Reuters is a propaganda outlet that has historically been funded by the British government, and still works with a secret UK information warfare program. https://t.co/hAXUPzdmMz pic.twitter.com/2cJr7YDQst
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 3, 2021
US government uses âdisinformationâ excuse to censor independent media
Twitterâs partnership with these thoroughly compromised institutions is part of a wider trend in which Silicon Valley tech companies align with Western governments to crack down on independent media and alternative sources of information.
Twitterâs top executive responsible for curating Middle East-related content on the platform simultaneously works with the British Armyâs psychological warfare unit, the 77th Brigade, which specializes in information warfare, as Middle East Eye first revealed.
The supposed threat of âdisinformationâ or âmisinformationâ has become a key pretext for censoring independent news outlets. Hawkish, government-funded think tanks in Washington have seized the talking point to justify de-platforming and silencing voices that challenge Western corporate and foreign-policy interests.
Top US government officials and their de facto spokesmen in these think tanks have endlessly reiterated that âdisinformationâ poses a ânational security threat.â
Under FBI orders, social media corporations have removed pages run by alternative media outlets that the US Department of Justice accused, without any evidence, of being foreign state-backed disinformation. The US government has even gone as far as unilaterally seizing their web domain names.
As The Grayzone reported, Twitter partnered with right-wing lobby groups funded by the US and European governments to censor foreign media outlets. US government propaganda organs like CIA-created Voice of America also pay Twitter to spread disinformation against Washingtonâs adversaries.
Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook (which owns Instagram), and Twitter have collaborated with Western governments to censor accounts run by citizen journalists in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, Russia, China, and other countries targeted by Washington for regime change and destabilization.
The transparent hypocrisy of Silicon Valley corporations teaming up with compromised media outlets to censor independent voices was clearly demonstrated when Facebook brought on the neoconservative website The Weekly Standard to serve as a âfact-checker.â
RELATED CONTENT: Twitterâs Attempt to Suppress Grayzone Reporting Backfires as Warning Label Becomes Meme
Founded by pro-war lobbyist Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard was branded the âneocon bibleâ for publishing fake news to sell the Iraq War and advance maximalist US foreign-policy goals. (Another unaccountable Big Tech conglomerate, Wikipedia and its corporate-backed Wikimedia Foundation, lists The Weekly Standard as a âreliableâ source on par with top newspapers, while allowing a coterie of politically motivated editors to blacklist The Grayzone.)
With the backing of increasingly authoritarian Western governments, these Big Tech institutions have waged a systematic war on freedom of press and speech, censoring alternative viewpoints â especially when they challenge Washingtonâs bipartisan foreign-policy consensus.
https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1422288755197726731?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1422288755197726731%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthegrayzone.com%2F2021%2F08%2F04%2Ftwitter-uk-cia-reuters-censorship%2F
UK government funded Reuters to spread cold war propaganda
On August 2, Twitter announced that it âis collaborating with The Associated Press (AP) and Reuters to expand our efforts to identify and elevate credible information.â
The Silicon Valley corporation explained that it has a âCuration teamâ that âsources and elevates relevant context from reliable sourcesâ to âadd reliable context to conversationsâ and âdebunk misinformation.â
The Big Tech giant admitted that it works with large corporate media conglomerates to tweak its algorithm to prevent certain talking points from going viral.
What Twitter did not mention in its press release is that Reuters has a history of receiving direct funding from the United Kingdom to spread propaganda. Reuters itself admitted this fact.

In January 2020, the media outlet published a report acknowledging, âThe British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970sat the behest of an anti-Soviet propaganda unit linked to British intelligence and concealed the funding by using the BBC to make the payments, declassified government documents show.â
âThe money was used to expand Reuters coverage of the Middle East and Latin America and hidden by increased news subscription payments to Reuters from the BBC,â the company wrote.
RELATED CONTENT: Twitter Suspends Incoming Venezuelan Parliament Account
Reuters received money from the Information Research Department (IRD), which it described as a âBritish anti-Soviet propaganda unit with close ties to British intelligence.â
An internal document shows London knew it was getting its moneyâs worth: âHMGâs [Her Majestyâs Governmentâs] interests should be well served by the new arrangement,â it said, adding that Reuters âcould and would provideâ what London wanted.
And this is not Reutersâ only link to Western spy agencies. Reuters also has close ties to the CIA.
Senior @Reuters director Dawn Scalici was a CIA officer for 33 years. Her job now is "advancing Thomson Reutersâ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government".
Fair and balanced! đ¤đhttps://t.co/SbkoPpNxJm pic.twitter.com/01y78RCAL3
— Asa Winstanley (@AsaWinstanley) December 21, 2020
From 2015 to 2018, Reuters employed longtime CIA agent Dawn Scalicias âthe companyâs first Government Global Business Director.â
Reuters said Scalici was âcharged with the responsibility of advancing Thomson Reutersâ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government,â adding that âshe develops strategic relationships with government sector constituents and key decision-makers, develops campaigns to promote Thomson Reutersâ business growth, and works with the companyâs senior executives to determine relevant strategic goals and plans.â
The media outlet continued: âPrior to joining Thomson Reuters, Ms. Scalici served 33 years with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In her last federal assignment, she served as the National Intelligence Manager for the Western Hemisphere within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). In this role, she was responsible for overseeing national intelligence for an area of responsibility spanning from the Arctic to the tip of South America, including the US Homeland.â
In 2019, Scalici moved on to CIA contractor McKinsey & Company, where she currently serves as âHead of Diligence.â
Reuters helps run secret UK Foreign Office information warfare operation
When it announced its formal partnership with Reuters and the AP, Twitter listed a series of tools that it has in its information curation arsenal. One of these is the use of âlabelsâ to tag content it dubs âmisinformationâ or claims needs âinformative context.â
Ironically, the world saw exactly how this new form of soft-censorship-by-label works when The Grayzone reported on Reutersâ secret work with the British government.
In February 2021, The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal published an investigation titled âReuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to âweaken Russia,â leaked docs reveal.â
Leaked files show Reuters' & the BBCâs role in covert British Foreign Office programs to effect âattitudinal changeâ & âweaken the Russian stateâs influence"
They were joined by intel contractors and outlets like Bellingcat.@MaxBlumenthal investigates https://t.co/EguVEHA3xV
— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) February 20, 2021
Leaked internal documents from the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, published by a group calling itself Anonymous, showed how Reuters and the other media outlets are instruments in a British information warfare operation explicitly aimed to âweaken the Russian Stateâs influence.â
The documents revealed that the Thomson Reuters Foundation âwas in constant communication with the British Embassy in Moscow, to assess levels of risk, including reputational risk to the embassy.â
As part of its agreement with London, Reuters helped to create and manage a network of anti-government reporters and media activists inside Russia. The program sought to create âattitudinal change in the participants,â while also promoting a âpositive impactâ on their âperception of the UK.â
In response to The Grayzoneâs factual reporting, Twitter decided for the first time ever to put a warning label on all tweets that link to Blumenthalâs article, claiming âThese materials may have been obtained through hacking.â
The censorial warning label triggered a mini-scandal on Twitter, and inadvertently transformed into a meme. Hundreds of users have posted the article with unrelated images, comically labeling them potentially hacked materials.
Twitterâs burgeoning relationship with the subjects of the Grayzone investigation it soft censored, however, is no laughing matter.
He is real and he is coming https://t.co/EVL8FfcOD1 pic.twitter.com/rC5FgxfGES
— Things That Changed The Internet (@ShapedInternet) June 24, 2021
Featured image: File Photo

Benjamin Norton is the founder and editor of the independent news website Multipolarista, where he does original reporting in both English and Spanish. Benjamin has reported from numerous countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and more. His journalistic work has been published in dozens of media outlets, and he has done interviews on Sky News, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, El Financiero Bloomberg, Al Mayadeen teleSUR, RT, TRT World, CGTN, Press TV, HispanTV, Sin Censura, and various TV channels in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Benjamin writes a regular column for Al Mayadeen (in English and Spanish). He was formerly a reporter with the investigative journalism website The Grayzone, and previously produced the political podcast and video show Moderate Rebels. His personal website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.