Reports

Black Box: Global Censorship Hub NED Reached Agreement with State Department to Conceal Government Grants from the Public
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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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British Nonprofit Worked With State Department, White House, And Former Intelligence Officials to Censor Americans
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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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Microsoft Backed AI ‘Deepfake’ Watchdog Includes Election Integrity Partnership Alumni
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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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Censorship Industry: GARM Members Receive Billions in Federal Contracts
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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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The Advertising Industry’s Deepening Role in Online Censorship
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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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Cambridge ‘Psychological Inoculation’ Lab Claims Conservatives, Millennials, Gen Z More Susceptible to ‘Misinformation’
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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…

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Digital Services Act (DSA)
The Digital Services Act: A Brief Guide to The EU’s Censorship Superweapon
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SUMMARY The Digital Services Act (DSA) creates a unified framework for government-directed content moderation across the European Union.  Each EU member state now has a “digital services coordinator,” with the power to penalize online platforms if they fail to adequately address “systemic risks,” including hate speech and misinformation. These official speech commissars can deputize third…

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‘Media Literacy’ and ‘Digital Citizenship’: Smuggling Censorship and Indoctrination Into Schools
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Some of the censorship industry’s leading organizations are using public concern over kids’ online browsing habits to install themselves as gatekeepers to the minds of America’s K-12 students, determining what sources and viewpoints they should be exposed to, and what should be hidden from view.  Screen usage among kids and adolescents is at an all-time…

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