Matthew Masterson, currently Microsoft’s “director of information integrity,” is a deep state alumni, serving in a variety of roles across the Federal government including Senior Cybersecurity Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security (focused on “election security”), as well as the Election Assistance Commission. Hired by Microsoft in January 2022, he also previously worked at…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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