Facing a loss of political support in Congress and a drop in compliance from Silicon Valley, censorship industry insiders have devised a new 108-page comprehensive blueprint to reinstate 2020-style election censorship ahead of 2024: work with the European Union to force US platforms to hire a new army of censors, and leverage state governments to…
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University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, a key figure in government-backed election censorship operations during the 2020 and 2022 elections and during the Covid-19 pandemic, remarked that freedom of speech was an idea that should not be “centered” because a “[level] play field is tilted in favor of misinformation,” in comments made during an online…
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The Stanford Internet Observatory’s in-house podcast, Moderated Content, called its first-ever “emergency edition” the week Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. Moderated Content draws its name from the euphemistically named professional field of removing speech off the Internet known as “Content Moderation,” in which “moderation” is the palatable word used to…
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s cybersecurity agency is burying evidence of its prior efforts to encourage the domestic censorship of US citizens online, silently deleting a dystopian video it published in 2021 instructing children to report their own family members to Facebook for “Covid disinformation.” In August 2022, Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) published…
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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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SUMMARY Harvard’s in-house censorship journal published an article declaring the field of “mis- and disinformation studies” to be “too big to fail” and “here to stay.” Citing government funding to academic departments who study how to optimize online censorship, the Harvard magazine embraced language from the 2008 financial crisis language reserved for major banks. The…
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SUMMARY Newly obtained FOIA documents from America First Legal reveal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to produce training videos that get “bystanders” to intervene against “radicalization” of their peers. DHS targeted “suburban Moms” with pro-life beliefs and “old high school friends” who believe in “conspiracies” as examples of radicalized citizens in need of bystander…
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SUMMARY Graphika, a company that monitors online communities for government agencies, began collecting data on social media users sharing “disinformation” about Covid-19 two weeks before the World Health Organization even knew of an outbreak. The private firm, which has received millions in Pentagon grants and contracts, targeted “US right-wing” communities as the top disinfo threat,…
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