March 22, 2023 - Dr. Joseph Mercola
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
Video Link: Twitter Files Reveal Government-led Censorship Network (mercola.com)
- 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
- March 9, 2023, Shellenberger and Taibbi testified before Congress, explaining how “a highly organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans”
- 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
- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security justifies censorship by placing “misinformation” on par with a “cyberattack” on critical infrastructure, which makes it a threat to national security
- Congress must immediately defund and dismantle the censorship-industrial complex in its entirety
- 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.
March 9, 2023, Shellenberger and Taibbi testified before Congress, explaining how "a highly organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans."1 To say that their findings are shocking would be an understatement.
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 and Taibbi are now calling on Congress to defund and dismantle this censorship-industrial complex in its entirety, and to do so immediately. We cannot afford to let this treasonous cancer to grow any further. If we do not put a permanent end to it now, we will lose this republic and all the freedoms we've enjoyed under it.
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.2 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.'
Moreover, we know that the U.S. government has funded organizations that pressure advertisers to boycott news media organizations and social media platforms that a) refuse to censor and/or b) spread disinformation, including alleged conspiracy theories.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika all have inadequately disclosed ties to the Department of Defense, the C.I.A., and other intelligence agencies. They work with multiple U.S. government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks.
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 …
These organizations and others are also running their own influence operations, often under the guise of 'fact-checking' … In many instances, censorship, such as labeling social media posts, is part of the influence operation aimed at discrediting factual information …
Importantly, the bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from 'countering terrorism' to 'countering extremism' to countering simple misinformation.
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
Shallenberger'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,3,4 several weeks before the New York Post broke the story (which was subsequently censored everywhere).
Shallenberger 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.5
DiResta is now a research manager and top lieutenant at the Stanford Internet Observatory, where she's directly connected to the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) censorship directorate. She's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR),6 the goal of which is to bring about a totalitarian one world government.7 DiResta's work history also includes a stint of unknown duration with the CIA.8
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.
Chris Krebs, who oversaw CISA's transformation, was fired by President Donald Trump in mid-November 2020. Krebs then formed the cyber consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group together with Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and former chief of security at Facebook. Krebs and Stamos are also leaders at the Aspen Institute, which was part of the FBI's exercise to train social media on how to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
