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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A digital free-speech watchdog is warning that federally funded researchers have captured and examined millions of Twitter posts they deemed to be “misinformation” during the 2020 election and used them to devise new strategies that one day could empower Big Tech to censor or throttle content while keeping the affected users and the public in…
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The founder of a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of speech on the internet is sounding the alarm on government weaponization of “middleware” companies, which he said are essentially shell organizations for government censorship. “The reason that they call it competitive middleware is because they’re trying to create a competitive industry around middleware compliance to…
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Now, it appears the agency may be concealing its efforts to monitor domestic content posted by regular Americans and focusing exclusively on its campaign to combat foreign actors in what some observers say is a move designed to hide government overreach, according to research compiled by Mike Benz, the Foundation for Freedom Online’s executive director.…
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