NewsGuard, the for-profit company backed by $750,000 in Pentagon funding that purports to rate the credibility of thousands of news sites by assigning them “news nutrition labels,” claims to be a politically neutral guide to the vast online news ecosystem, guiding users on the reliability of news sites. Its real purpose is blacklisting. Low NewsGuard…
Read article
NewsGuard, a private for-profit company that purports to assign “news nutrition labels” to thousands of news sites by unilaterally deeming them to be credible or not using ratings scores, has emerged as perhaps the top sentinel of the censorship industry. Low NewsGuard credibility rating scores are intended to financially deprive targeted websites of up to…
Read article
In 2023, Elon Musk metamorphosed X into, perhaps, the formidable opponent of the censorship industry since its birth in 2016. Musk, who named himself a “free speech absolutist” as he completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, has made good in myriad respects on his promise to roll back speech suppression on the platform.…
Read article
In a recently published report from the Center for Democracy and Technology entitled “Seismic Shifts: How Economic, Technological, and Political Trends are Challenging Independent Counter-Election-Disinformation Initiatives in the United States,” the censorship industry identified growing threats to itself, including increased public scrutiny, pressure from lawsuits, and Silicon Valley’s growing skepticism of censorship. Dean Jackson, a co-author…
Read article
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…
Read article
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…
Read article
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…
Read article
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…
Read article
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,…
Read article
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…
Read article