The tide stared to turn around 2011, with the explosion of the Arab Spring and the popular upturning of a number of regimes throughout the Middle East. Then came the Occupy Movement, which targeted social and economic inequality worldwide and marked the beginning of a new era of social unrest.

Even if the initial protests eventually faded away, the rise of the so-called Fifth Estate and its impact on the public opinion was unstoppable. A new climax was reached in late 2016, when Donald Trump won the US elections after openly exposing “a small handful of global special interests rigging the system” in his presidential campaign.

The Deep State or ‘New World Order’ conspiracy theory is not a new one: already back in 1916, president Wilson publicly stated that America had become “controlled by its system of credit”, so that “all our activities are in the hands of a few men”. He talked of “a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive” that people in the know would think twice before even nominating, let alone criticizing it.

In the 1930’s none-less than Adolf Hitler was ranting against the global finance lobby running western democracies behind the scenes, “a small, ruthless international clique that is turning the people against each other, that does not want them to have peace”. Some decades later it was the turn of John F. Kennedy, who uncovered “a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence”, and while some argue that he was only referring to the Soviet Union, others suspect an allusion to something much larger. Since then, anyone talking about the subject was appointed by the CIA’s PR team with the derogatory label of “conspiracy theorist”, a concept which has been constanty ridiculed by the mainstream media in a concerted attempt to discredit the legitimacy of the whole idea. But the conspiracy meme became nonetheless immensely popular, and the internet is now buzzing with all sorts of conspiracy theories, ranging from alien bloodlines to sophisticated mind-control schemes, with 50% of Americans citizens reportedly believing in at least one of them.

But the one underlying assumption in the overwhelming majority of them is the existence of a secret agenda, perpetrated by an extremely powerful global elite against the rest of the population, aiming to achieve something akin to “absolute world domination”.

What to make of it all?

Is this for real, or it’s just a “crazy conspiracy theory”?

The hardest thing for honest truth-seeker today is how to dig out the fragments of truth scattered in sea of bullshit. If this infamous conspiracy gang actually exists, and even if it is only 10% as powerful and organized as some people claim, it has surely seen this coming and ain’t standing still. Alternative news is a direct threat to the establishment’s monopoly on information, and since good old censorship just doesn’t work on the world wide web, the elites have started to update their game.

The new strategy is called disinformation: defined as “the dissemination of false information with the intention to deceive public opinion”, disinformation is designed to manipulate audiences at a rational level either by defaming contrarian voices or by supporting misleading conclusions.

“Common tactics are to mix some true observations with some false conclusions, or to reveal part of the truth while presenting it as the whole. Since online information channels cannot be completely closed, they are rendered useless by flooding them with disinformation, effectively lowering their signal-to-noise-ratio and discrediting the opposition by association with many easily disproved false claims.”

As exposed back in 2013, a secret mass-surveillance program had long been set up by government agencies to prevent the truth from leaking online. With plan A failing quite miserably, plan B quickly came into play, with armies of state-sponsored hackers, trolls and social media influencers waging an all-out information war on the free internet, in order to undermine its credibility.

The result is a big mess. The major victim is truth, hidden under a thick fog of lies and hysteria. People feel increasingly angry, betrayed, confused. And of course this is the ideal scenario for wannabe dictators (usually controlled opposition controlled by the same elites they attack), who inevitably profit from the general mayhem and impose themselves with populist rhetoric.

So far the establishment’s official reaction was to blame all the fault on the alternative media, in their words responsible for spreading “fake news” and “Russian propaganda”.

Some mainstream media outlets in the US went so far as to advocate the creation of a “Ministry of Truth”, managed by the media conglomerates themselves and enforced online by Google, Facebook and other service providers. Once these pro-government outlets get to decide what the acceptable “truth” is, questioning that narrative would immediately earn you a ban from the online community, with your content either outright eliminated from the major search engines or selectively marked down to warn readers not to believe what you say, almost a creepy Star of David for the Internet age.

Many alternative news activists claim that the purge has already started. With the excuse of combating “hate speech” or “extremist content”, it appears that many social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter have suddenly started to delete, without notice or explanation given, accounts belonging to wide range of activists and organizations who happened to criticize the mainstream narrative. As Matt Agorist of the Free Thought Project explains, “this new censorship appears to go after anyone who challenges the establishment. Disagreeing with the status quo is the new hate speech.”

The trend is worringly reminiscient of what’s happening in China, where the government has set up a social credit score which rewards loyal citizens while silencing any dissenting voice. Even if the western version of Big Brother is less blunt and more cunning, the aim is the same: centrally controlling the narrative. And this is, in our view, totally unacceptable. It represents an outrageous offence against everything our grandfathers fought for, an insult against the universal human rights of free-thought and expression, and at this point it can only backfire by increasing popular mistrust towards the state-sponsored media. In fact, it strikes as a rather desperate move.

What we need is a new, alternative media platform where truth activists from across the world may come together, expose the web of lies that is currently impairing the public discourse, and then act on the findings to change things for good.

Once again, the key is organization. As Aaron Swartz used to remind us, those who want to conceal the truth and keep it for themselves also have an interest in keeping us divided.

“Right now, technologists insist that they’re building neutral platforms for anyone to find data on any issue. Journalists insist that they’re objective observers of the facts. And political types assume they already know the answers and don’t need to investigate further questions. They’re each in their own silo, unable to see the bigger picture.”

In a 2009 essay on transparency, he envisioned a multi-disciplinary collaboration between technology experts, investigative journalists, lawyers and political activists to fight back against the establishment’s propaganda.

“Imagine it: an investigative strike team, taking on every critical issue, uncovering the truth, and pushing for reform.”

The WAM’s Truth Media platform will be constituted of four integrated sections: