NewsGuard, a private for-profit company that purports to assign “news nutrition labels” to thousands of news sites by unilaterally deeming them to be credible or not using ratings scores, has emerged as perhaps the top sentinel of the censorship industry. Low NewsGuard credibility rating scores are intended to financially deprive targeted websites of up to…
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The Stanford Internet Observatory’s in-house podcast, Moderated Content, called its first-ever “emergency edition” the week Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. Moderated Content draws its name from the euphemistically named professional field of removing speech off the Internet known as “Content Moderation,” in which “moderation” is the palatable word used to…
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s cybersecurity agency is burying evidence of its prior efforts to encourage the domestic censorship of US citizens online, silently deleting a dystopian video it published in 2021 instructing children to report their own family members to Facebook for “Covid disinformation.” In August 2022, Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) published…
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The concept of “prebunking” is gaining traction among censorship industry insiders, but its core mechanics are not widely understood by the public at large. A growing group of disinformation career professionals believe that prebunking’s use for “psychological inoculation,” or a “vaccine against misinformation,” can secure the perpetual dominance of official narratives. And they have Google,…
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In the summer of 2020, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) pre-declared mail-in ballots to be a “safe and reliable” form of voting, and CISA embarked on a months-long campaign on pre-censor all social media chatter ahead of election day that might cause “delegitimization” of a forthcoming…
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Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, has had several high-profile speaking engagements in the past weeks (see here, here and here), alongside other prominent censorship industry insiders. Roth, whose team played the key role in speech control for the 2020 US presidential election cycle, recently spoke at UCLA’s School of Law, where he…
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“Twitter 2.0 is putting the pieces in place for a potentially monstrous censorship regime ahead of 2024 — similar bad-looking policies, similar bad-looking personnel as 2020,” Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, told the DCNF. “So the infrastructure is in place for the worst case scenario to manifest itself months from…
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CEO Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, a London group with two affiliated American nonprofit organizations Republicans have argued is engaged in “censorship” while pocketing U.S. government money, is listed as the trainer for an online class in September on the “economics of disinformation,” according to an application link posted in July. The module is being offered by a little-known project composed…
Read article“X is seeking job applicants for two positions on its threat disruption team who are “passionate about protecting users from global disinformation” and “helping people find credible information online” in the context of elections. “Team leader Aaron Rodericks not only touts his profile on X rival BlueSky in his X bio, but is actively recruiting applicants through a subscription newsletter on…
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Democratic Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs requested the social media website formerly known as Twitter to censor critics of her tweet that compared supporters of former President Donald Trump to Nazis. In August 2017, while serving in the Arizona state legislature, Hobbs attacked Trump in a tweet, when she compared the former president’s voter base to neo-Nazis. “[Trump] has…
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