Pentagon-Funded Censorship Firm Graphika Began Monitoring Covid “Disinfo” On Dec. 16, 2019 – Two Weeks Before WHO Knew Covid Existed
By Mike Benz
SUMMARY
- Graphika, a company that monitors online communities for government agencies, began collecting data on social media users sharing “disinformation” about Covid-19 two weeks before the World Health Organization even knew of an outbreak.
- The private firm, which has received millions in Pentagon grants and contracts, targeted “US right-wing” communities as the top disinfo threat, right at Covid’s outset.
- Graphika is staffed by former DOD, CIA and NSA officials, and played a key role in censoring the pandemic via the Virality Project, partnered with the federal government.
Graphika, Inc., a small but influential social media monitoring and censorship firm that has received nearly $7 million in grants and contracts from the US Department of Defense (DOD), began tracking online “conspiracy theories” about Covid-19 on December 16, 2019 – just four days after the first patients reported symptoms in Wuhan, China, and two weeks before the World Health Organization (WHO) was even informed about the virus outrbreak.
As revealed by Graphika’s 35-page public report released in April 2020, Graphika began “data collection” of “global conversations” containing “conspiracy theories” about Covid origins on December 16, 2019:
The official CDC.gov timeline shows the first cluster of patients in Wuhan, China began to experience an atypical pneumonia-like illness on December 12, 2019 — meaning Graphika’s social media “disinfo data collection” work began just four days later. WHO was not informed of Wuhan’s outbreak until December 31, 2019 – a full two weeks after Graphika had already being monitoring social media conspiracy theories about the atypical virus:
Chinese authorities in Wuhan did not even identify that the pneumonia-like symptoms of the hospital patients in Wuhan were rather a novel coronavirus until January 7, 2020:
The WHO did not even name the virus “Covid-19” until February 11, 2020, and did not officially declare a pandemic until March 11, 2020. Yet predating all these events, Graphika was closely surveilling and working to neutralize what obscure Twitter and Facebook communities were saying online about the virus’s origins – all while categorizing citizen accounts by political affiliation, ostensibly to monitor their potential for political mobilization on the basis of shared beliefs.
The disinfo firm used the data they collected on US citizens and voices around the world to create a “network map” of “the global online conversation surrounding the coronavirus pandemic.”
Graphika repeatedly identifies “right-wing” accounts (54 times in total, four on the summary page alone) as primarily responsible for “propagate[ing] polarizing and at times blatantly false narratives.”
Lest there be any doubt about Graphika’s political bias, the report lists “U.S. Right Wing” as its own specific disinformation group, whereas the report mentions “left-wing media,” “Resist” and “anti-Trump” groups as predominately involved in driving “positive online communications.”
Graphika also takes special care to track how Bill Gates and George Soros contextualized by so-called “U.S. Right Wing” disinformation:
What exactly lands someone in the category of spreading “Covid disinformation,” according to Graphika? For prominent Chinese human rights activist Jennifer Zeng, it was “frequently shar[ing] Epoch Times articles.” For exiled Chinese billionaire and political activist Guo Wengui, it was questioning the Chinese Communist Party’s virus death toll figures. Both Zeng and Wengui land in Graphika’s “conspiracy community” of “anti-CCP activists.”
But the April 2020 report wasn’t nearly the end of Graphika’s Covid censorship work. As Twitter Files reporting from Matt Taibbi revealed, Graphika wrote a subsequent report sent to Twitter encouraging them to take action to throttle or ban the alleged misinformation and disinformation. There, the DOD-funded disinfo firm sought to shield Anthony Fauci from criticism in much the same way it had done earlier to shield Bill Gates and George Soros:
“This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices,” Graphika wrote, “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”
In other words, much of the information cited by Graphika as misinformation and disinformation wasn’t actually false, but they believed it was “too challenging” for people to discern between true and untrue information – and so the self-appointed arbiters of truth should decide what content to allow and what to censor.