(LifeSiteNews) — With a post on Zerohedge yesterday, journalist Matt Taibbi builds on the revelations of the Twitter Files with an introduction to the Western censorship industry.
Detailing the top 50 companies engaged in narrative control, the report is credited to Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, and 3 others via Racket News.
A comprehensive guide to the forces arrayed against free speech, the report begins with the dire warning of Dwight D Eisenhower against the power of a growing “military-industrial complex,” which would one day destroy democracy.
Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Eisenhower would be proud of Taibbi’s work, who with the Twitter Files has done much to expose just how far these forces have corrupted not only American democracy, but have captured the media of the formerly free world.
As Taibbi says:
The ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the ‘hybrid warfare’ age.
This is the reason he has joined this effort to document and expose the institutions who work to keep you safe from the dangers of free speech.
UPDATE (04/22/23): Twitter has inexplicably removed its ‘government-funded media’ label from Canada’s CBC and NPR, with neither using their accounts despite Elon Musk seeming to backtrack on his decision to promote transparency around their funding.
That means, after what appeared to be a victory, our campaign is far from over.
Please sign and share the petition today!
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UPDATE (04/18/2023): The CBC — Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — is reeling after Elon Musk finally applied the ‘Government-funded Media’ label to its Twitter page on Sunday in a welcome victory for people like you who used LifePetitions.com to call for this transparency.
The CBC, which receives about $1.24 billion in public funding every year, lashed out at the move yesterday, announcing it would ‘pause’ its use of Twitter and insisting that the government provides less than 70% of its funding.
Elon Musk has wryly inserted “69%” beside the “Government-funded Media” Twitter label in response.
Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they’re “less than 70% government-funded”, so we corrected the label pic.twitter.com/lU1EWf76Zu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 18, 2023
The broadcaster denys that the Canadian government wields any influence over its editorial decisions, but this claim may have been undermined by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s remarkably swift and public defense of the CBC in the wake of Twitter’s decision.
Trudeau claimed yesterday that the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) leader Pierre Poilievre was trying to “attack a foundational Canadian institution” when, like you, he petitioned Elon Musk to label the CBC appropriately.
The Prime Minister appeared inconsolable yesterday, which speaks volumes for how useful the CBC was and is to his office.
Thank you for taking part in this LifePetition to Elon Musk – this victory shows once again that people-power matters.
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Elon Musk is taking unprecedented steps for free-speech advocates by exposing state-sponsored media for their lies and agendas — including the BBC and NPR.
The time is NOW while the trend is hot to ask that Elon Musk also label Canada’s CBC for what it is: state-sponsored media and a propaganda machine of the radical left.
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre this week informed Musk that the public broadcaster receives the “vast majority of its funding” from the federal government.
CBC/Radio Canada received a whopping $1.24 billion in government funding in 2021-2022.
Now that Elon Musk is taking massive swings at the leftist mainstream media outlets like BBC and NPR it is time for Canadians to remind him of what’s happening up here.
In fact, Musk just DESTROYED a BBC reporter live on air in a widely televised “Twitter Spaces” interview.
Will Elon Musk also take aim at the CBC? WE MUST LET HIM KNOW THAT THE CBC IS A CORRUPT STATE-SPONSORED ARM OF THE ANTI-FREEDOM TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT.
War has been waged by Elon Musk against the mainstream media — we cannot let Canada’s biggest propaganda machine operate unnoticed!
Look at just some of the headlines in these agenda pieces proudly published by the CBC:
CLIMATE ALARMISM: “Researchers need help to determine which birds are most at risk from climate change.”
PRO LGBT AGENDA: “These kids’ books depicting ‘joyful, queer stories’ are being censored in Hungary and Russia.”
PRO TRANSGENDER AGENDA: “Two-spirit, trans, non-binary, gender diverse people face ‘exceptional barriers to overcome’: Manitoba artist”
ANTI-FREEDOM: “Conservative opposition to mandatory vaccinations is ‘irresponsible’ and ‘dangerous,’ says Trudeau.”
PRO EXPERIMENTAL VACCINE: “Here’s a science-backed approach to timing your next dose.”
AND SO MUCH MORE REPORTED BY LIFESITENEWS!
Now is the time to act — tell Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, to EXPOSE the CBC for the pro-Trudeau agenda-carrying propaganda machine that it is.
***SIGN: TWITTER MUST LABEL THE CBC AS STATE-SPONSORED MEDIA NOW***
A handy guide to the enemies of freedom
The team hopes that this list will help readers, writers and journalists make better informed decisions about the provenance of their information. Taibbi continued:
‘The Top 50 List’ is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’
The list is in a handy magazine format, noting factors such as funding, the type of organization throttling speech, where they come from and how they do it. Taibbi’s remarks also reveal something of the dark arts – how these and other agents isolate and neutralize people who, in their view, have had too much to think.
Of course, these organizations are often presented as providing a service to the public good, keeping them safe from the contamination of unsterilized ideas. They call themselves “anti-disinformation” groups, fighting what the RAND Corporation recently called “truth decay.” How nice of them! Taibbi explains how they go about their selfless and principled work – to keep anyone anywhere from developing a think problem.
Taibbi writes:
Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same ‘hate-mapping,’ guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons.
There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same ‘hairball’ graphs.
The idea of protecting people from free speech is as ridiculous as it is sinister. As Tucker Carlson noted in his recent move to Twitter, without the freedom of speech you have no others.
It is for this reason it is obvious that free speech is a danger to democracy. Democracy, that is, as it is understood by the people who are destroying it – in order to defend it. This is no paranoid flight of fancy. Taibbi continues:
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of ‘balance’ between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation.
Before handing the floor to the fifty foremost agents of information warfare, Taibbi notes an important dimension of the rising power of the censorship industry. In seeking to stigmatize and marginalize any narrative in disagreement with that of the regime and its ideology, it hopes to train the general public to consider free speech a threat.
It is a form of aversion therapy, where the specters of hate, extremism, foreign interference and misinformation are invoked to warn people off anything that the elites do not want you to see.
Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that ‘shared vocabulary’ to deploy on the hybrid battlefield.
They propose to serve as the guardians of that ‘vocabulary,’ which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which ‘public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.’
This report is a welcome addition to the arsenal of freedom, with dystopian censorship bills and legal penalties attached to anything the regime defines as “hate speech.” The march of this capture has not been halted by this report, but its comprehensive nature means it is very likely to remain a stone in the shoe of information suppression for a long time.