Over the last three months, a small group of us have, thanks to the Twitter Files, exposed the ways in which social media platforms have, under pressure from U.S. government agencies, censored ordinary Americans and spread disinformation.
At 10 am ET, @mtaibbi & I will testify before Congress to share shocking new findings: a highly-organized network of government agencies and contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it.
We have already reported on some of the actions by this complex.
But the extent of its censorship was unknown to us until very recently.
And, as importantly, we now understand the ways in which this complex simultaneously spreads disinformation and demands censorship.
My 68-page testimony to Congress lays out an effort by U.S. government intelligence and security agencies to wage “information warfare” against the American people.
I do not doubt that some people will try to justify the behaviors we have documented. They will say such censorship is necessary for “fighting disinformation.”
But there is no moral or legal justification for the acts of state-sponsored censorship we document, much less for the fundamentally unAmerican censorship-industrial complex.
I believe that any reasonable person reading our report, no matter their politics, will be horrified by what is taking place and demand an end to it.
With our testimony, we are calling on Congress to defund and dismantle the censorship-industrial complex immediately.
Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Both are under attack.
The Censorship-Industrial Complex
My verbal testimony to Congress
by Michael Shellenberger
In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower feared that the size and power of the “complex,” or cluster, of government contractors and the Department of Defense… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
How? Through “domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.” He feared public policy would “become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Eisenhower’s fears were well-founded. Today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy.
I am grateful for the opportunity to offer this testimony and sound the alarm over the shocking and disturbing emergence of state-sponsored censorship in the United States of America.
There is 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.
I offer some cautions. I do not know how much of the censorship is coordinated beyond what we have been able to document, and I will not speculate. I recognize that the law allows Facebook, Twitter, and other private companies to moderate content on their platforms. And I support… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
But government officials have been caught repeatedly pushing social media platforms to censor disfavored users and content. Often, these acts of censorship threaten the legal protection social media companies need to exist, Section 230.
“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… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
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 not publicly engaging with their opponents in an open exchange of ideas. They aren’t asking for a national debate over the limits of the First Amendment.
Rather, 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.
Who are the censors? They are a familiar type. Overly confident in their ability to discern truth from falsity, good intention from bad intention, the instinct of these hall monitor-types is to complain to the teacher — and, if the teacher doesn’t comply, to go above them, to the… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Such an approach might work in middle school and many elite universities, but it is anathema to freedom and is an abuse of power.
These organizations and others are also running their own influence operations, often under the guise of “fact-checking.”
The intellectual leaders of the censorship complex have convinced journalists and social media executives that accurate information is disinformation, that valid hypotheses are conspiracy theories, and that greater self-censorship results in more accurate reporting.
In many instances, censorship, such as labeling social media posts, is part of the influence operation aimed at discrediting factual information.
The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
The complex’s leaders are driven by the fear that the Internet and social media platforms empower populist, alternative, and fringe personalities and views, which they regard as destabilizing.
Federal government officials, agencies, and contractors have gone from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and deplatforming ordinary Americans and disfavored public figures.
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.
These efforts extend to influencing and even directing conventional news media organizations. Since 1971, when the Washington Post and New York Times elected to publish classified Pentagon papers about the war in Vietnam, journalists understood that we have a professional… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
And yet, in 2020, the Aspen Institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center urged journalists to “Break the Pentagon Papers principle” and not cover leaked information to prevent the spread of “disinformation.”
Government-funded censors frequently invoke the prevention of real-world harm to justify their demands for censorship, but the censors define harm far more expansively than the Supreme Court does.
The censors have defined harm so broadly, in fact, that they have justified Facebook censoring accurate information about COVID vaccines, for example, to prevent “vaccine hesitancy.”
Their goal, clearly, is not protecting the truth but rather persuading the public. That is the purpose of open debate and the free exchange of ideas.
And, increasingly, the censors say their goal is to restrict information that “delegitimizes” governmental, industrial, and news media organizations. That mandate is so sweeping that it could easily censor criticism of any part of the status quo, from elected officials to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Congress should immediately cut off funding to the censors and investigate their activities. Second, it should mandate instant reporting of all conversations between social media executives, government employees, and contractors concerning content moderation. Third, Congress… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Whatever Congress does, it is incumbent upon the American people to wake up to the threat of government censorship. “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Eisenhower noted, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
All of the above is just a summary
To read the full, 68-page report/testimony, please visit Public
The website of NYC mayoral frontrunner says he'll "shift the tax burden" to "whiter neighborhoods." When asked about his openly racist agenda, @ZohranKMamdani insists it's not a proposal at all but rather "a description of what we see right now." That's next-level gaslighting.😬
This guy's ability to lie so calmly while smiling should send chills up the spines of every New Yorker.
He could have taken it down and said, "You know, I regret that the website said that and so I deleted it, because it doesn't express what I believe."
Instead, he's just asked millions of New Yorkers to believe his own obviously flagrant lie rather than their own eyes. That's creepy and wrong.
Everyone can see for themselves that he used a gratuitous racial reference regarding a tax proposal. We don't tax people on race. So why use it? Because he and his campaign wanted to introduce race.
And it's not the first time. @ZohranKMamdani should delete his flagrantly racist tweets and web site language, apologize, and promise to never invoke racism in these ways again.
The audacity of @ZohranKMamdani to cite Dr. Martin Luther King should make your skin crawl. King adamantly rejected anti-white racism.
Mamdani’s call for higher taxes on white neighborhoods should shock New Yorkers. If they elect him as Mayor then they will have no excuses. He’s made clear that he will advance a racist agenda and then demand that people believe his lies.
The idea that former Intelligence Community officials are working with European leaders to censor the Internet sounds like a conspiracy theory, but over the last two days, Obama’s CIA Director plotted with UK, EU, and Irish officials in Dublin to do precisely that.
These people are a direct and imminent threat to free speech and democracy worldwide. They are dangerous and out of control:
Former CIA Director John Brennan helped initiate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. He used foreign spies to help trigger the FBI investigation of of the Trump campaign. And he manipulated the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment to falsely claim the Russians favored Trump over Clinton.
Niamh Hodnett, Ireland’s “Online Safety Commissioner,” leads Ireland’s censorship regime under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, which mirrors EU and U.S.-backed models shaped by intelligence-linked NGOs.
Aine Kerr, a Former Facebook Policy Manager, helped manage Facebook’s public policy as it partnered with U.S. intelligence agencies post-2016, then co-founded Kinzen, which received support from EU and transatlantic institutions focused on content surveillance. Her work connects platform moderation with state-funded narrative monitoring.
Nóirín O’Sullivan, a Former Garda (Irish police) Commissioner and EUROPOL Official, who went from leading Ireland’s national police to a senior role at EUROPOL, which works closely with intelligence and security services across Europe. She advocates for integrating security principles into online content governance.
Claire Loftus, Ireland’s Former Director of Public Prosecutions, oversaw prosecutions during a period of expanding legal efforts to criminalize online expression and misinformation. Her presence signals an effort to align the judiciary with state-backed censorship.
Robyn Simcox, the UK Commissioner for Countering Extremism,
operates within the UK Home Office, a department with direct ties to MI5 and GCHQ. She frames conspiracy theories and misinformation as forms of radicalization and demands surveillance and preemptive regulation. Her office channels intelligence priorities into speech policing under the banner of counter-extremism.
Brazil has been banning and censoring journalists and politicians for years. But now it is taking steps to ban X entirely. It’s time for @SecRubio to block President Lula, Justice Moraes, and their criminal accomplices from entering the US.
President Trump and Secretary Rubio must not let these tin pot dictators censor speech and ban the world’s most important social media company.
Everybody in L.A. knows there aren't enough police officers. It has little more than half as many per capita as Chicago. And yet @GavinNewsom @MayorOfLA @KamalaHarris and *every single* Democratic governor opposed calling out the National Guard.
California has half the population as Germany and a bigger economy. We pay the highest taxes by far. And yet, not only does LA have nearly half the police per capita as Chicago, Mayor @KarenBassLA wants to lay-off 400 police officers.
@KarenBassLA They're not going to be satisfied until the rest of LA burns down.
There's no shortage of police in L.A., said @GavinNewsom a few hours ago. In fact, L.A. has far fewer police per capita than other big cities. And now, the protesters have overrun the police and blocked the highway. Video: @AnthonyCabassa_
L.A.'s lack of police has been one of the biggest crime stories in California for a decade. As such, @GavinNewsom is either lying or even more in a bubble than we knew. And now, naturally, LA's radical-Left mayor and city council want to cut 400 more police officers.
@GavinNewsom Kamala Harris did more than anyone to pass the initiative that decriminalized open air drug dealing and shoplifting. She’s pro-crime because she’s against civilization — at least for poor and working class people, not her and her neighbors.