This has several drastic implications. Government-led censorship appears to be more widespread than even cynics could imagine. Let’s pray for reform of the bureaucratic behemoth of the U.S. government and that constitutional principles of free speech will permeate every agency and department,
From Mercola. Over the past three months, a small group of independent journalists, including Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, have sifted through Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, exposing the many ways in which social media platforms have censored Americans at the behest of the U.S. government, and spread fabricated propaganda intended to “debunk” truthful stories. …
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As it turns out, a long list of government agencies has special departments or teams whose duty it is to manage public censorship, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, which they swore an oath to uphold. In short, there’s a secret “censorship-industrial complex” in the U.S., to use Shellenberger’s term, and they are actively engaged in all-out information warfare against the American public. …
Shellenberger’s Testimony to Congress
Shellenberger’s testimony before Congress is 68 pages long, so I cannot review all the details here. You can download and/or read it on his Substack. Here’s an excerpt from his opening remarks:
“The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues …
‘If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship,’ notes George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, ‘it raises serious First Amendment questions. It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.’ …
It is important to understand how these groups function … they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists …
The government no longer needs a predicate of calling you a terrorist or extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity. The only predicate it needs is simply the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”
Disinformation Superspreaders
Shellenberger’s full testimony reviews the roles of key organizations and individuals within the government’s censorship network and provides specific examples disinformation campaigns created and propagated by this network, including the Trump-Russian collusion conspiracy theory, the delegitimization of the COVID lab leak theory, and the Hunter Biden laptop conspiracy theory.
In the case of the Hunter Biden laptop, the FBI initiated the plot to quench the story. In collaboration with Twitter, Facebook and the Aspen Institute, the FBI held a tabletop exercise to practice the shaping of the media’s coverage of a potential “hack and dump” operation involving Hunter Biden material, several weeks before the New York Post broke the story (which was subsequently censored everywhere).
Shellenberger also details how Renee DiResta, who is part of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — the nongovernmental side of the censorship network — helped derail Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore’s campaign in 2017 by launching thousands of fake bots against him on Facebook and Twitter. …
While CISA, which is a sub-department of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was originally tasked with defending the U.S. against foreign cybersecurity threats, it quickly morphed into a government entity focused almost solely on domestic censorship. …
Why Democrats Demand Censorship
In a more recent Substack article, Shellenberger shares his thoughts on why the Democratic Party are so supportive of and insistent on censorship. He believes it was triggered by “two seismic challenges to the postwar liberal order of 2016: Brexit in June and the election of Donald Trump as president in November.”
“The two events shocked and frightened national security leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Many openly said that the political threat to NATO and the Western Alliance was bigger than any security threat, a conclusion dramatically reinforced by the election of Trump in 2016, who had repeatedly criticized NATO and hinted at withdrawing the U.S. from it …
Elites spent the following six years reacting to this blow to their control over the media discourse and, thus, their ability to manufacture consent. In January 2017, The Department of Homeland Security DHS quietly expanded its mission from cybersecurity to cybercensorship by arguing that ‘misinformation’ is a ‘cyberattack’ on US critical infrastructure. …
So, the DHS basically justified censorship by placing “misinformation” on par with a “cyberattack” on critical infrastructure, which makes it a threat to national security. …
When censorship of COVID information first became apparent, I warned that it wouldn’t stop there, and it hasn’t. Denying manmade climate change is now an offense that will get you axed, and as reported by Shellenberger, CISA in June 2022 “announced that it would also demand censorship of information relating to the financial world.” …
Domestic Censorship Superweapons
We must also open up a conversation about the use of artificial intelligence and quantum technologies to improve and automate censorship capabilities, because that’s precisely what the National Science Foundation (NSF) is doing — and this work is being funded by the U.S. government. As reported by the Foundation for Freedom Online:
“In the promo video below, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant project WiseDex explains how the federal government is funding it to provide social media platforms with ‘fast, comprehensive and consistent’ censorship solutions. …
‘Course Correct’ — Another Censorship Superweapon
Another NSF censorship superweapon under development is called Course Correct. According to the promo video (above), they are:
“… building the core machine learning data science and artificial intelligence technology to identify misinformation, using logistics, network science, and temporal behavior, so that we can very accurately identify what misinformation, where misinformation is spreading, who is consuming the misinformation, and what is the reach of the misinformation …
Basically, what they’ve discovered is that the most effective way to shut down an undesirable counternarrative is to strike it down when it first appears. If the first instance is deleted, then the idea can’t “gain legs.”
This means that the primary “enemies of the state” are thought-leaders, people who share ideas, positions or viewpoints that differ from the official narrative. …
And, as disturbing as all of that is already, WiseDex and Course Correct are just two of about a dozen or so censorship tools being developed by the NSF with government funding! …
Twitter Files Have Opened a Can That Cannot Be Closed
The Twitter Files have really opened a huge window into the U.S. government’s illegal censorship of American citizens, and the extent of this censorship network is far greater than anyone previously suspected. Is this really the government we want? Should the DOD be allowed to use military-grade social engineering and propaganda tools against the American public? …
How are you praying against censorship? Share this article to encourage others to pray.
(Excerpt from Mercola. Photo Credit: Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash)