News/Commentary

Russell Brand speaks out on Big Tech, legacy media ‘collaboration’ to ‘shut down independent media’

September 24, 2023 | | Print Article

Russell Brand is once again going on the offense following a slew of sexual assault allegations that appear to many as a blatant attempt by Big Tech and the British government to silence his influential voice.

In a video posted on Friday night, Brand blasted “legacy media organizations” for colluding with Big Tech “to target, patrol, choke, and shut down independent media organizations” such as his own, now-suspended YouTube channels.


As previously reported, the alleged incidents occurred between 2006 and 2013 and were exposed in a joint investigation by the Times of London, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4 Dispatches.

Brand’s accusers include one woman who claims the comedian raped her in his Los Angeles home in 2012 (she reportedly provided medical records confirming that she had been treated at a rape crisis center), and another woman who claimed Brand forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was just 16 year old.

The “Get Him to the Greek” star got ahead of the story, admitting in a video that his life has included a “time of promiscuity,” but insisting any encounters he may have had during that time were “always consensual.”

Despite a complete lack of due process or a conviction, YouTube suspended Brand from its platform for allegedly violating its “creator responsibility policy.”

In his latest video, Brand said “it’s been an extraordinary and distressing week” and thanked his supporters “for questioning the information that you’ve been presented with.”

“By now, you’re probably aware that the British government has asked Big Tech platforms to censor our online content and some online platforms have complied with that request,” he said. “What you may not know is that this happens in the context of the Online Safety Bill which is a piece of UK legislation that grants sweeping surveillance and censorship powers and it’s a law that’s already been passed.”

“I also don’t imagine that you’ve heard of the Trusted News Initiative,” he continued, “and now, as often is the case when a word like ‘trusted’ is used as part of an acronym to describe an unelected body, trust is the last thing you should be offering.”

Brand explained:

The Trusted News Initiative is a collaboration between Big Tech and legacy media organizations to target, patrol, choke, and shut down independent media organizations, like this one. We’ll be talking about that on our show on Monday on Rumble but just to give you an idea on what the TNI is, this is a quote from one of their spokespeople:

‘Because actually the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and… digital platforms.’

It’s clear that these organizations collaborate in constructing narratives, whether that’s around the war or the pandemic, and of course, there are other examples. And it’s very clear to me that we have to be very, very cautious indeed. 

According to its website, the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is “a partnership, founded by the BBC, that includes organisations from around the globe including; AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, NHK – Japan.”

“TNI members work together to build audience trust and to find solutions to tackle challenges of disinformation,” it states. “By including media organisations and social media platforms, it is the only forum in the world of its kind designed to take on disinformation in real time.”

Disinformation being a subjective quality, of course.

“TNI initiatives include creating an ‘early warning system’ that lets organizations ‘alert each other rapidly when they discover disinformation which threatens human life or disrupts democracy during elections,’ creating a ‘media education campaign,’ providing information to voters, and sharing learning, especially around ‘high-profile elections,'” Influence Watch reports.

It is “a coalition of left-of-center media, social media, and technology companies created by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2019 with the ‘specific aims of flagging disinformation during elections,’ and to also censor what the initiative deems is misinformation.”

Influence Watch continues:

The Trusted News Initiative changed its focus to “combatting the spread of harmful vaccine disinformation” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic in December 2020. The change of focus meant partners of TNI alert each other to “disinformation which poses an immediate threat to life.” During the announcement of its change in focus, TNI stated that examples of harmful anti-vaccine disinformation included widely shared memes, suggestions of an ulterior motive for the creation of the vaccine and downplaying the effects of coronavirus. 

During its announcement of its change of focus, TNI noted its successes running a rapid alert system during the 2019 UK general election and 2020 elections in Myanmar, Taiwan, and the U.S. 

Six months after it changed its mission to focus on COVID-19 misinformation, journalists accused TNI of censorship and fearmongering.

COVID, authoritarianism, Big Tech, and the “military-industrial complex” are all frequent topics of Brand’s wildly popular podcasts.

And he has no intention of backing down now.

“That’s why I’m asking you to follow me on Rumble,” he told viewers. “Rumble have made a clear commitment to free speech, and Rumble is the primary platform that we will be streaming from.”

Brand vowed:

We’ll be back, this Monday, and as usual, we’ll be talking about deep state and corporate collusion and how ordinary democracy is anathema now, how it’s shut down, ignored, and avoided. We’ll be talking about a military-industrial complex, that is able to facilitate and start wars that sometimes seem little more than money laundering operations and that’s with all respect to the hundreds of thousands of victims of numerous ongoing wars in the world at the moment.

We’ll be talking about the role of Big Pharma and how Big Pharma have been able to influence government policy around the world and how they’ve been able to evade due liability and necessary scrutiny, how they’ve been able to avoid media investigation or perhaps, be due them.

And of course, we’ll be talking about media corruption and censorship, so please, follow me on Rumble because that’s the only way that we can keep our voice. You can go to RB.Rumble.com to support me directly and keep me and our channel independent. And I need your support now more than ever, more than I ever imagined I would. So follow me, support our channel if you can, if it’s within your means but more important than any of that, is that you please, if you can, stay free.

Staying free, however, is getting more challenging by the day.

While TNI may not be able to silence Brand entirely, Rumble is now reportedly under attack for providing him with a platform.

According to The News Movement, “Massive brands including Burger King, ASOS, London’s Barbican centre and Hello Fresh have pulled advertising from Russell Brand’s Rumble channel.”

“Burger King has paused all advertising on the channel while investigations into the allegations are ongoing,” the fast-food chain said in a statement.

“ASOS declined to comment but TNM understands the company removed their ads this week,” The News Movement reports, adding:

Hello Fresh said: “Thanks for pointing this out to us. We have manually removed our ads from Rumble.”

The Barbican said: “We have now asked our media agency to exclude this site from where our ads appear.”

“When a UK Parliamentary committee asked Rumble if it would do the same as YouTube,” TNM reports, “Rumble said ‘We don’t agree with the behaviour of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalise them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.'”

 

 

Melissa Fine
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