The era of online censorship was fueled by media-driven panics about “fake news” and “disinformation.” The focus of fear switched many times, from the spy-thriller narrative of Russian agents spreading disinformation intended to undermine U.S. elections, to “conspiracy theorists” questioning the official response to COVID-19 and undermining “election integrity” by raising concerns about mail-in ballot…
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SUMMARY Programmatic advertising, the automated buying and selling of digital ads based on demographic tracking and targeting, is the bedrock of the online economy, providing the majority of revenue for a large number of news websites and social media platforms. Post-2016, the censorship industry manufactured crises for brands by cherry-picking examples of ads next to…
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A recent FFO report revealed the Department of Justice is pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into “research” programs that monitor millions of Americans at scale, labeling them as potential violent extremists. The Justice Department explicitly sought out such programs, through a grant program on “domestic radicalization and violent extremism,” with $4,109,127 in grants awarded so…
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A research project at Youngstown State University in Ohio, funded by a Department of Justice grants program, is scooping up millions of posts from Americans, storing them in a vast database, and analyzing them to identify common patterns of speech that can then be targeted for censorship. Targeted groups include conservative website The Gateway Pundit,…
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NewsGuard, the for-profit company backed by $750,000 in Pentagon funding that purports to rate the credibility of thousands of news sites by assigning them “news nutrition labels,” claims to be a politically neutral guide to the vast online news ecosystem, guiding users on the reliability of news sites. Its real purpose is blacklisting. Low NewsGuard…
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In 2023, Elon Musk metamorphosed X into, perhaps, the formidable opponent of the censorship industry since its birth in 2016. Musk, who named himself a “free speech absolutist” as he completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, has made good in myriad respects on his promise to roll back speech suppression on the platform.…
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In a recently published report from the Center for Democracy and Technology entitled “Seismic Shifts: How Economic, Technological, and Political Trends are Challenging Independent Counter-Election-Disinformation Initiatives in the United States,” the censorship industry identified growing threats to itself, including increased public scrutiny, pressure from lawsuits, and Silicon Valley’s growing skepticism of censorship. Dean Jackson, a co-author…
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Facing a loss of political support in Congress and a drop in compliance from Silicon Valley, censorship industry insiders have devised a new 108-page comprehensive blueprint to reinstate 2020-style election censorship ahead of 2024: work with the European Union to force US platforms to hire a new army of censors, and leverage state governments to…
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University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, a key figure in government-backed election censorship operations during the 2020 and 2022 elections and during the Covid-19 pandemic, remarked that freedom of speech was an idea that should not be “centered” because a “[level] play field is tilted in favor of misinformation,” in comments made during an online…
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