Microsoft has staked a claim in the growing field of “media literacy” and “digital literacy,” which aims to instruct members of the public – especially schoolchildren – in what types of digital media they ought to trust and distrust. As FFO has previously reported, media and digital literacy is the latest in a long string…
Read article
Since its inception, the Foundation for Freedom Online has documented the rise of U.S. government-backed censorship. The large number of government programs and sub-programs matches the number of pretexts used. We find DHS involved in censorship, in the name of both countering “domestic extremism” and protecting “election integrity.” We find HHS, with its focus on…
Read article
SUMMARY The National Endowment for Democracy is a grantmaking organization that receives substantially all of its $300 million annual budget from the State Department’s congressional appropriations. In recent years, investigators and watchdog groups like FFO have faced difficulty locating NED’s grantees and projects, despite NED having a federal mandate to operate openly and share grantee…
Read article
SUMMARY The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British NGO with non-profit status in the US, has been plotting behind closed doors to “Kill Musk’s Twitter,” recently revealed internal emails show. CCDH has close ties with the US government and elected officials, including the State Department’s Global Engagement Center and former House Intelligence Committee…
Read article
TrueMedia, an AI watchdog partnered with Microsoft, claims to be a non-partisan outfit that informs the public and policymakers about the proliferation of AI deepfakes designed to mislead voters during elections. In a glowing New York Times profile earlier this year presenting him as a foremost expert on the topic, University of Washington professor Oren Etzioni warned…
Read article
The 2024 Paris Olympics draw to a close today, one of the most covered and discussed events of the year. Amid the flood of information, media blacklisting platform NewsGuard sought to bolster its image as an authority on “disinformation” and “misinformation” with a series on “false Olympics claims.” In a July 30 edition of its…
Read article
SUMMARY “Media Literacy,” which teaches school children which information sources to trust and which to avoid, is expanding at the state level. Ed-tech platform Newsela, which is used in over 90% of American schools, is a leading provider of media literacy educational material. Newsela makes news articles readable for children of different reading levels, but…
Read article
The federal government is sending billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to four of the big six global advertising agencies, which include some of the leading architects of online censorship. These multinational corporations have spent much of the last decade demanding online censorship of “hate speech,” “disinformation,” and “harmful content” on social media platforms,…
Read article
SUMMARY The advertising industry plays a pivotal role in online censorship through collective boycotts of platforms and websites that host disfavored content. Two organizations that led the way on boycotting and financial blacklisting, Sleeping Giants and NewsGuard, emerged directly from the advertising industry. Brand and advertising agencies typically use the pretext of “brand safety” for…
Read article
The Cambridge Social-Decision Making Lab (CSDMLab) has a Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST) that purports to test people’s susceptibility to so-called “misinformation.” Researchers at the lab have used the results of the test to portray younger people (millennials and Gen Z) and conservatives, who tend to rely less on mainstream media sources for news, as particularly…
Read article