So you’ve avoided all the reporting on this?
“they” are a host of government agencies, including the FBI.
Michael Shellenberger’s first brush with social-media censorship came in 2020 when he was censored by Facebook for sharing accurate information about climate change.
In the years since, Shellenberger has reported extensively on what he calls the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a network of government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and social-media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials for holding disfavored views.
Shellenberger was “shocked” by the internal Twitter documents that Elon Musk shared with him and a handful of other independent journalists, including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. The documents, which served as the basis for their Twitter Files reporting series, revealed examples of U.S. intelligence and security organizations, including the Department of Defense, working with the platform to censor information.
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Late last month, Shellenberger published a batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League showing U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to “both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people.”
The whistleblower who gave Shellenberger and his colleagues the CTIL Files said its leader, a former British intelligence analyst, was “in the room at the Obama White House in 2017” when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to “stop a repeat of 2016.”
“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role,” Shellenberger testified.
CISA created the election integrity partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory and other U.S. government contractors, emails show.
EIP urged Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to censor posts and reported a 75 percent response rate from the platforms. Thirty-five percent of URLS they reported were censored.
Shellenberger said social-media platforms and government agencies are “justifying censorship of accurate information in order to prevent people from coming to conclusions that they think are the wrong conclusions.”
This was seen most dramatically with Covid vaccines, as social-media platforms censored information about vaccine side effects over concern the stories would create vaccine hesitancy. They also censored claims about Covid mortality and transmission rates that were later proven to be accurate, or at least closer to accurate than the numbers then being put forward by the CDC and World Health Organization.
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The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling says that the White House likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel of three judges found that the administration “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”
