SUMMARY The popularity of private messaging channels such as WhatsApp to share news and political opinions is a major obstacle for the censorship industry, which cannot easily monitor such channels. These private networks are particularly popular in non-English speaking demographics, a growing cause of concern for online censors. In response, top censorship organizations have turned…
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SUMMARY The censorship industry is concerned by Latino voters’ growing sympathies for populism and Donald Trump. The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), a purportedly nonpartisan nonprofit established by a Congressional charter, launched the Algorithmic Transparency Institute (ATI), which pioneered efforts to monitor and censor Spanish online speech. ATI targets speech that has “ill effects,” regardless…
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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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SUMMARY The National Institute for Justice (NIJ), the Department of Justice’s research and development agency, is funding ‘mis-, dis-, and mal- information’ (MDM) studies and “research on effective technologies and tools for identification, moderation, and/or removal of extremist content.” A $1 million NIJ grant will be used to create a dashboard equipped with an ‘MDM…
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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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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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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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