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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Online censorship continues to proliferate in government agencies, using hidden meanings for everyday terms in order to spread a paradigm of distrust that turns censorship tools against US citizens.
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The public-private domestic censorship operation coordinated by the federal government has quietly been organized to quell the online opinions of everyday Americans.
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For years, Renée DiResta has been one of the most prominent thought leaders, ubiquitous media voices, and influential “disinfo experts” in the emergent field of professional social media censorship (i.e. the “content moderation” vocation associated with “counter-disinformation” work).
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Before we describe the “Science of Censorship” federal grant program that is the focus of this report, perhaps the most disturbing introduction is to watch how grantees of your tax dollars describe themselves.
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