The 2022 deplatforming
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John Kiriakou hosted a programme carried by Sputnik News, the Russian state broadcaster. He is careful about what that did and did not involve: "they've never ever asked me to say anything or to not say anything. I've never been asked to change an opinion or to squelch my own opinion." He prefaces his analysis of the war with an unambiguous position: "I oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine unreservedly. The Russians were wrong to cross that border. This is a violation of international law ... and they should get out immediately." He adds that Vladimir Putin "has committed grave crimes by ordering and leading this invasion", while arguing that Russian fears about NATO expansion were legitimate and that Bill Clinton had personally guaranteed in the early 1990s that NATO would not expand eastward.

The prelude

Kiriakou says the removal had been building. His programme carried a weekly half-hour segment called Criminal Injustice, made with the journalist Kevin Gosztola and Paul Wright, director of the Human Rights Defense Center and publisher of Prison Legal News, covering prison conditions, solitary confinement, the food served to prisoners and medical care.

"The Washington Post ran an article about that segment, and it said that by broadcasting that segment I was weakening our democracy. If you can imagine such a thing, I was weakening our democracy by talking about the US prison system." The Center for Strategic and International Studies then published a paper saying the segment "showed the propaganda lengths that Vladimir Putin will go to, to try to weaken our democratic system."

His objection is that neither disputed the substance: "nobody, none of them, denied that anything I said was true. I have first-hand experience with the American prison system. We should be ashamed of our prison system compared to our European allies, at least." He calls it "so rich that they would declare that any criticism of the United States is automatically Russian propaganda, like I talk to Vladimir Putin every day and plan out the show and how we're going to get the best propaganda benefit from the show. It's ridiculous."

The removals

"Once the Russians crossed the Ukrainian frontier, we were just deplatformed everywhere." He lists the sequence: thrown off Spreaker, Spotify, iTunes and iHeartRadio three weeks earlier, TuneIn the previous week, and YouTube the day before the interview. "The only place where we appear now is Rumble. It's crazy that Rumble, which was set up as the right-wing alternative to YouTube, is the only place where people can really exercise their freedom of speech."

He locates the danger in the private sector rather than in the state: "the real threat to democracy is this privatised censorship." Told by his host that merely booking him raised a fear of demonetisation, Kiriakou's answer was that this is the point, "I think that's exactly what they want."

Checking his own profile daily

Kiriakou describes going to his own Twitter profile every day in the spring of 2022 to see whether he had yet been tagged as an official mouthpiece of the Russian government. Two cases showed him how indiscriminate the process was: George Galloway had been tagged despite no longer being connected to RT, and Ed Schultz had been tagged four years after his death.

His reaction to what had been done to Lee Camp, a decade of work, thousands of video clips and thousands of hours simply gone, was that it was criminal and should never happen in the United States, and that he was not overusing the word when he called it heartbreaking. The conclusion he drew was constructive rather than despairing: that the answer was to build a place that fixed everything everyone complains about on the existing platforms, which is what drew him to Panquake.

What had gone by mid-2022

Kiriakou''s account of the period is a list of things that had stopped being reachable rather than a single ban. He described checking daily for a state-affiliated media label on his own account, and then the wider loss: "so much of what I used to be interested in is banned. You can''t see, you can''t find teleSUR, you can''t find RT or Sputnik, anything that I''m interested in that has to do with prison reform, for example, is deemed to be anti-American. And so all of a sudden I just can''t read the news any more." His verdict on the two platforms was comparative: "Facebook''s even worse. Facebook beat Twitter to the punch, they''re even worse."

"Weakening our democracy"

Asked where he can still get on the air, Kiriakou names Sputnik and notes that the choice is then used against him. The instance he gives is a Washington Post judgement on his own show: "Washington Post listened to my show and said that I was weakening our democracy."

The subject of the offending broadcast, on his account, was a Pennsylvania judge who "took bribes to send children to for-profit prison" and who had been convicted and sentenced to 22 years. "I was saying it's terrible to have crooked judges. And the Washington Post said you were weakening our democracy."

He sets the paper's position against its own history, the Washington Post that printed the Pentagon Papers against the one that would not defend Julian Assange, a publisher Daniel Ellsberg had placed "directly in line" with what he himself had done.

The awkward position

Kiriakou describes the war as having closed the space for anyone with an intelligence background or a position on the left. "If you say anything right now that's not directly in the mainstream, you're dismissed. You're dismissed as an apologist for the Russians, as pro-Putin, as someone who hates America, or doesn't know what he's talking about. You really can't have an alternative view."

The enforcement he describes is platform-level and then editorial: "if you publish that view, you're easily banned from Facebook, from Twitter, from any number of different platforms", and the same discipline reached the outlets he might otherwise have expected to be safe. "If you have anything to do now with the media, including the progressive media, you have to toe the line on this war or you're silenced."

Two accounts of the same charge

Kiriakou has attributed the Washington Post's judgement that his show was weakening American democracy to two different broadcasts, and the corpus preserves both rather than choosing between them.

In 2022 and again in 2023 he traces it to a segment on a Pennsylvania judge who "took bribes to send children to for-profit prison" and was convicted and sentenced to 22 years, "I was saying it's terrible to have crooked judges. And the Washington Post said you were weakening our democracy."

In 2025 he traces it instead to Syria: having argued on air that "whether you like his politics or not, Bashar al-Assad is the only thing standing between the Christian community in Syria and complete annihilation," he says "the Washington Post then had somebody listening to the show, and they said that I was a threat to our democracy because I was raising these issues."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's Russian media work
- Kiriakou on mass incarceration
