Chicago City Wire

Iconic journalist Seymour Hersh, a Chicago native, is being censored by Facebook. 

Facebook is actively censoring Hersh’s reporting on the pipeline bombings. The Public Substack, run by journalist Michael Shellenberger, recorded a video in which it tried to upload Hersh’s story to Facebook only to be met with a warning that it was “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” The fact-checker is the Norwegian state-owned media company NRK.

“Some amount of censorship, or ‘content moderation,’ is inevitable,” Shellenberger wrote in Public. “The vast majority of Americans would support many forms of content moderation. But censoring a debate over who blew up a pipeline does not meet the threshold of needing to be censored.”

His story alleging the United States was behind a covert sea operation that sabotaged the Nord Stream Pipeline is being censored by Facebook. Hersh’s story claims the U.S. had help from the Norwegian government in blowing up the pipeline on Sept. 26, 2022. The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines connect Russia to Germany through the Baltic Sea and are used to transport natural gas to Europe. The pipelines are owned by Russian energy giant Gazprom. Hersh’s story details the operation which was centered in a deep water diving facility outside Panama City, Florida which he notes “has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago.” 

“The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea,” Hersh wrote. “Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.” 

The CIA and the White House have both denied Hersh’s story.

In testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, fellow journalist Matt Taibbi described the massive censorship project undertaken by intelligence agencies which was greatly expanded under the Biden Administration. 

“American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy,” Shellenberger said in testimony later adapted into a column for the New York Post, according to Sangamon Sun. 

Shellenberger is one of the authors of the Twitter Files detailing such censorship. 

"The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions and private groups that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on subjects including the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change and many other issues,” Shellenberger wrote. 

He said murky groups funded by the nation’s intelligence apparatus have been involved in “creating blacklists of disfavored people and demanding that the social-media platforms censor, deamplify and even ban them.” Oftentimes the censorship is aimed at political conservatives but also targets unbiased journalists who report on items that run counter to the federal government’s narrative. In 2008, Shellenberger was awarded Time Magazine’s Hero of the Environment – Leader and Visionary.

Hersh, 86, grew up on the south side where he worked in his Latvian immigrant family’s dry cleaner shop. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago who began his career in journalism at the City News Bureau of Chicago and later won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1970 for his reporting on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.