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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Oct 18, 2023 • 15 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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The mainstream media insist that the Censorship Industrial Complex is a conspiracy theory, but it's not. It's real. And, now, 138 artists, journalists, and public intellectuals from around the world, and from Left to Right, are calling on governments to dismantle it. Image
Introducing the Westminster Declaration

One hundred and thirty-eight public intellectuals and journalists demand governments dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex

by @shellenberger @mtaibbi @NAffects @lwoodhouse & @galexybrane
Home page of The Westminster Declaration ()

In March of this year, two of us, Matt and Michael, testified to Congress about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex comprised of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and Big Tech companies working together to suppress disfavored views and disfavored people.

At that hearing and ever since, elected members of Congress, the mainstream news media, and the NGOs have argued that there is no Censorship Complex, just people doing research into and trying to correct misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

But now, a group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have issued a strong call warning the public of the Censorship Industrial Complex and urging governments to dismantle it in the name of the “first liberty,” freedom of speech. It’s called The Westminster Declaration.

How did it come about?
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Please subscribe now to support the free speech movement and to read the rest of the article!






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And please read The Westminster Declaration!

westminsterdeclaration.org
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New York Post

"Whatever your political bent, this new form of speech control is a threat to you. Only by debating freely in a rapidly fragmenting world can we resolve differences without resorting to violence."

Thank you @mirandadevine ! 🌹❤️

nypost.com/2023/10/18/wit…
Times Of London

Rishi Sunak warned over ‘censorship of ordinary people’ on social media

thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-…
Telegraph (Front Page)

Social media firms are silencing free speech with 'disinformation' claims, Sunak told

Over a hundred academics, historians and journalists have warned the PM against censoring free speech, in a statement delivered to No 10

"Their intervention comes after The Telegraph revealed that a secretive government unit was flagging criticism of lockdown as Covid 'disinformation'.

"The Counter Disinformation Unit, which operated out of Whitehall, worked with intelligence agencies to monitor the online posts of journalists and members of the public.

"At least three people whose legitimate opinions about Covid were flagged by government monitors have co-signed the statement sent to Mr Sunak, which warned that labels such as “disinformation” were being abused."

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La Verità: Il manifesto a difesa della libertà di espressione
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La Verità: Il manifesto a difesa della libertà di espressione
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La Verità: "Il manifesto a difesa della libertà di espressione"
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laverita.info/westminster-de…
France-Soir: "DECLARATION POUR LA TRANSPARENCE ET LE DROIT A L'INFORMATION"

francesoir.fr/opinions-tribu…
France-Soir: "DECLARATION POUR LA TRANSPARENCE ET LE DROIT A L'INFORMATION"

francesoir.fr/opinions-tribu…
Welt: Wir kommen von links, rechts und aus der Mitte und sind zutiefst besorgt über die zunehmende Zensur

welt.de/kultur/plus248…

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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 28
In 2022, Obama gave a speech at Stanford Cyber Policy Center advocating sweeping censorship of the Internet. Now, Public has discovered the same Center last month hosted a secret meeting with EU, UK, Brazil, & Australia officials to plot global censorship — including of the US. Image
In the spring of 2022, former President Barack Obama gave a major policy addressat Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, where he laid out a sweeping proposal for government censorship of social media platforms through the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Six days later, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to serve as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth with the clear goal of controlling the information Americans could access online.

At the heart of Obama’s vision for Internet censorship was legislation that would have authorized the US government’s National Science Foundation to authorize and fund supposedly independent NGOs to censor the Internet. The DHS and Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, pioneered this censorship-by-proxy strategy as a way to get around the First Amendment in 2020 with posts raising concerns about the 2020 elections and in 2021 with “narratives” expressing concern about the Covid vaccine.

The 2024 election of President Donald Trump significantly reduced the threat of Obama, DHS, and NSF censoring the American people. Trump defunded much of the Censorship Industrial Complex. The Platform Accountability Act is going nowhere in Congress. Elon Musk fired most of the censorship staff at Twitter and has allowed a significantly wider range of speech on the platform. And even before Trump’s election, Stanford donor Frank McCourt stopped funding the Stanford Internet Observatory after Public, Racket News, and House Weaponization Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan exposed its central role in the DHS censorship-by-proxy scheme.

But now, foreign governments, including Europe, the UK, Brazil, Australia, and others are demanding censorship, including of the American people. The risk is that US tech companies will find it significantly less expensive to have a single global censorship regime and just go along with foreign censorship requests. Facebook complied with Biden administration demands to censor because it needed Biden’s help in dealing with European censorship officials. And the Brazilian government forced Elon Musk to continue censoring the Brazilian people after it froze Starlink’s assets.

And Public has discovered that the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, which is led by Obama’s former ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, is at the heart of a new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.

On September 24, the Cyber Policy Center hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia. The meeting was titled “Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.” Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his “Project Liberty Institute,” (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”

Public emailed all 21 participants and organizers and only heard from four, PLI, the Australian government, the UK government, and the European Union, which declined to comment because, even though Public gave it over 24 hours, a spokesperson said, “We would need several days.”

The UK government said, “The legal framework gives Ofcom power to enforce the duties in the Act which are related to securing protections for people in the UK; it does not give Ofcom powers to enforce under any other legal regimes…. Ofcom has always engaged with various international forums and networks across all of the sectors we regulate, including online safety, spectrum, telecommunications, post, and broadcast and media. Regulators around the world regularly exchange insights, experience, and best practice.”

A spokesperson for PLI said it “has made unrestricted gifts to several academic research programs, including Stanford University” and that “PLI does not receive funding from governments, intergovernmental organizations, or large technology companies.”

But PLI’s own policy “blueprint” reveals that it is demanding a single total global censorship regime and intends to use the EU’s market power, known as the “Brussels effect,” to force big tech companies to comply. The blueprint calls for governments to “Recommit to a Single, Global Internet,” with “regulatory interoperability and oversight, to achieve a single unified market” and use the large size of the EU market to “drive bilateral and multilateral agendas to formally enshrine reciprocal guarantees.”

A spokesperson for the Australian government said, “Whilst in attendance at Stanford for the 2-day conference, some attendees, including trust and safety researchers, industry, civil society, and government representatives, were also invited to attend an informal evening roundtable event organised by Stanford University entitled, ‘Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.’ This roundtable did not involve any discussion of compliance coordination or regulatory information sharing.”

The Australian spokesperson claimed that “eSafety has no role in regulating hate speech or disinformation. eSafety has no remit or interest in regulating the affairs of other nations, nor does it have any role in diplomatic, trade or other government-to-government relations.”

But it also said, “As the internet is global and functions irrespective of national borders, by necessity eSafety collaborates with law enforcement, other government agencies, and non-government partners around the world, including in the United States.”

The leaked agenda’s stated purpose was to “discuss the state of compliance and enforcement” in order to “identify where data, research, and expertise can enable more effective compliance with and enforcement of existing policy.”

Much of the following two days of the public conference were focused on coordinating government censorship (“regulation”) of social media platforms, and the other nations that attended the meeting are all intensively involved in censoring their citizens and US tech companies.

And, the head of Australia’s eSafety, Julie Inman-Grant, who was a keynote speaker at Stanford’s foreign censorship meeting, is also the head of a global government censorship network that serves as forum, she told the World Economic Forum, “to help us coordinate, build capacity and do just that…. We use the tools that we have, and can be effective, but we know we’re going to be, go, much further, when we work together with other like-minded independent statutory authorities around the globe.”

As such, the people who are demanding censorship are once again spreading disinformation about what they are doing.

All of this is happening in a context of global censorship intensifying. The UK government arrests 30 people per day for “offensive” social media posts, is attempting to censor 4Chan, which has no servers in the UK, and will mandate digital IDs for employment, which may give unprecedented control to politicians and bureaucrats to censor. The Brazilian government has, for year,s been censoring journalists and policymakers, incarcerating people for legal social media content, and threatening prosecution of journalists, including this author. And several European nations are censoring and arresting their citizens, preventing opposition political candidates from running for office, and preparing to implement digital IDs.

Why did Stanford Cyber Policy Center hold this meeting, what is its strategy for global censorship? Who leaked the agenda to Public and why? And what can be done to stop Stanford, Brazil, Australia, the EU and others from realizing their totalitarian censorial vision?

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigatie journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!
Here is the leaked agenda from the Stanford Cyber Policy Center's secret foreign censorship meeting on September 24, 2025:Image
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Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 8
Fifty-five percent of people on the Left justify the murder of Trump, five times more liberals than conservatives defend political violence, and not a single high-profile Democrat has called for @jonesjay to drop out. The Left truly can not make its intentions any clearer. Image
Receipts:

networkcontagion.us/wp-content/upl…

today.yougov.com/politics/artic…

x.com/shellenberger/…
The person whose legacy is most being destroyed by this is @BarackObama . He must demand that @jonesjay step down. Now. And he should take extraordinary efforts to demand the Left back down from its utterly crazed support for violence. This building should not open until he does that.Image
Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Oct 8
Mind-blowing. In 2014, VP Biden attacked corrupt developer in Romania who owned land around US embassy. In 2015, Hunter goes to work for the corrupt developer, lobbies US ambassador to pressure Romanians to drop case, then proposes to settle case by cutting in his China client 😳 Image
This appears to have been a straight-up mob-style shakedown by the Biden family done under the auspices of Obama foreign policy and in a way the directly jeopardized US national security.
The lawyers for Hunter’s corrupt developer client first threatened to jeopardize the land upon which the embassy sat, and then proposed a deal whereby prosecutors dropped the case in exchange for the corrupt developer selling nearly half his stake to a state-owned Chinese energy company, that was also Hunter’s client.Image
Read 9 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 28
Good god. The Swiss people just approved digital IDs. Australia implemented them in Dec. UK last week. In all 3 nations, deep state-allied politicians are behind them. This is a digital ID/censorship emergency. Please share and reply below with info about other nations. Image
The deep state swamp creatures know that digital IDs are unpopular and so they are trying to rush them through before anyone realizes what they are doing. The good news is that the more people learn about them the more alarmed they become.

Polling in Switzerland showed 60% backed digital IDs which both houses in parliament had already approved. The final vote was just 50.4%. It almost lost. I hope the Swiss people are carefully scrutinizing the vote count.

Same dynamic in UK. Opposition to digital IDs is low and will rise. Digital IDs can and must be killed.

x.com/shellenberger/…
From a Swiss source: "Palantir and Mercator sponsored the Yes Campaign. Palantir is a member of Digital Switzerland, alongside other tech companies. Digital Switzerland lobbied for the E-ID/digital ID in Switzerland in this vote.Image
Read 10 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 27
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
This article in the left-wing UK magazine @NewStatesman details how Ellison bankrolled Starmer's Digital ID push.

This is not a partisan issue. Freedom lovers on the Left and Right should both aggressivley oppose digital totalitarianism.

Ellison: We need to unify all of the national data. Put it into a database where it's easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like.

Blair: So you're really through the use of this, you're revolutionizing the way government works, right? The services it provides, the way that it operates.

Why bother having democracy at all? Why not just let Ellison and WEF and AI run things? What could possibly go wrong?
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Sep 27
And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.
Stop your creepy totalitarianism @sundarpichai @Google Image
@sundarpichai @Google UK opposition vs support of digital IDs is 45 to 42.

Opponents should be able to drive that opposition number up significantly.

It is absolutely essential that the UK kill two-tier @Keir_Starmer plan for digital IDs before they metastasize across the West. Image
Read 18 tweets

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