A lawyer representing Google admitted to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) that President Joe Biden and his officials pressured the search giant to censor disfavored voices on YouTube. Google said in the letter that the Biden administration’s pressure was “unacceptable and wrong” The letter reveals that the Biden administration pressured YouTube to censor…
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SUMMARY The Knight Foundation has a long history of bankrolling online censorship using the pretext of combating “disinformation,” including efforts targeted at swing states in 2024 to “fortify the election.” The Knight-Georgetown Institute has become a hub for big names in the disinformation industry, including James Baker, the FBI’s Russiagate lawyer and formerly chief counsel…
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Emails obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that despite knowing that COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and side-effects were still an open question, CDC officials under the previous administration were still determined to paint concerns about the jab as “misinformation” as late as 2024. In a virtual meeting on January 9, 2024, CDC public…
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Editor’s note – following publication of this report, a representative of the Carnegie Endowment reached out to confirm that their senior fellow, Rachel Kleinfeld, had been falsely quoted by Reuters as attributing the assassin’s motivations to the far-right or groypers. Reuters has now acknowledged the error, removed the false quote, and issued a correction at…
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SUMMARY The United Kingdom’s Online Safety act went into effect on July 25th. X has warned that the OSA, which allows the UK to fine American companies at 10 percent of their annual global revenue, threatens free speech worldwide. The OSA’s provisions allow the UK government to force a company’s business partners, including advertisers and…
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The UK’s Online Safety Act mandates that platforms like X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Meta, and others proactively identify and restrict access to content deemed “harmful.” This includes not just illegal material but vaguely defined “legal but harmful” categories such as misinformation, hate speech, or anything that might cause “psychological harm.” Platforms face fines up to…
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The European Union is on the verge of enacting one of the most sweeping surveillance regimes in the West, under the benign-sounding pretext of child protection. The legislation—dubbed Chat Control by critics—would force messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram to scan every private message sent on their platforms, destroying the concept of encryption and…
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SUMMARY In late April, a “disinformation” summit was held at the University of Cambridge in the UK, attracting well-known figures from the international censorship industry. One UK politician boasted of his regional legislature’s plans to weaponize the judicial system to ban political candidates from running for office if they violate online censorship laws. Another panelist…
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SUMMARY A 2022 memo prepared for the State Department advises rolling out “media literacy” and “digital literacy” lessons in schools to combat disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech. The report shows that children’s online safety was not the original motivation of the US federal government’s push for media and digital literacy curricula — it was the…
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SUMMARY A British media agency is at the center of a diplomatic row after allegations of election interference from the Slovakian government, under the pretext of “countering disinformation.” The agency, Zinc Network, has received over $12 million from the UK Foreign Office and over $13.7 million from USAID, the U.S. Department of State, and the…
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