Thread by @MikeBenzCyber

Since NED is the epicenter of the Censorship Industrial Complex, & after Trump's 2016 win NED began hiring officers & directors for their specialty in censorship work, here's a 🧵 on the Censorship Industrial Complex activities of Rep. Joaquin Castro, on NED's board since 2023:

https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/2016403556887134406

2: Since Castro is on both the House Intelligence Cmte & Foreign Affairs, he's uniquely privy to & influential on CIA, State Dept, USAID & NED matters, which those committees oversee. 2017-2018, Castro led the intelligence crusade that "Russian disinfo" online helped Trump win.

3: As the 2020 election approached, Castro demanded the FBI take action on "right-wing misinformation" on social media that might get Latino voters to vote Trump. That demand held weight as Castro both oversaw the FBI in Congress & also chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

4. 2 weeks before the 2020 election, Castro & his Intelligence Committee used that role — which oversees CIA ops overseas — to focus on domestic "misinformation" coming from Trump supporters & Covid critics, pressuring social media to pre-censor mail-in ballot fraud claims.

5) Castro's Intelligence Cmte emphasis on forcing social platforms to pre-censor skepticism of mail-in ballots (to kill legitimacy challenges if Biden won the next day by mail-ins) matches exactly what DHS's CISA censorship op, EIP, was doing at that time

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1951876685789348150

6) If you want to see exactly how DHS & its disinfo flaggers executed what Castro implied should be done — the pre-censorship of millions of Americans questioning mail-in ballots by coercing platforms to adopt a "delegitimization" TOS policy — watch here

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1666925704334950402

7) And wouldn't you know it, one of Castro's expert witnesses for his "Misinformation, Conspiracy Theories & Infodemics: Stopping the Spread Online” Oct 2020 hearing was from Graphika, who at that very moment was anchoring DHS/EIP's election censorship op

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1605288809436008467

8) A telling moment in the 2020 intelligence hearing was Castro egging on Joan Donovan (don't get me started), who ran Harvard's Misinformation Review, to get her to suggest as an expert that the government needed to do more to regulate social media, to force content moderation

9) In that exchange between Castro and Donovan — at an Intelligence Committee supposed to hold the CIA to account not push censorship of Americans — you have a a NED Sandwich. Castro would join NED's board. Donovan would publish censorship proposals in NED's in-house journal.

10) You'll notice in the above NED article authored by Castro's expert witness Joan Donovan in 2021, she pushed what they called the "middleware" solution to force social media censorship while getting around the First Amendment's constraint on government

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1686397475446538242

11) You'll also notice NED board member Joaquin Castro's expert witness, NED journal author Joan Donovan, cites in her NED paper the need to implement the censorship proposals pitched by Francis Fukuyama. For context on that, this vid & 🧵lays it all out

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1718812214281314763

12) After using his Intelligence Committee perch to pressure the FBI to ban election speech & preen for government power to regulate speech, now NED board member Castro led what was then a NED obsession: making sure Spanish-language censorship matched English-language censorship

13) "Spanish-language disinfo" would become Castro's club after the 3 big censorship predicates ("Russian disinfo," Covid misinfo, 2020 election misinfo) ran out of juice. When Elon fired X's Trust & Safety team, Castro demanded the censors be re-hired, citing Spanish disinfo

14) For more on how Castro’s Spanish-language censorship quest complemented the Censorship Industrial Complex’s Spanish-language censorship plan (implemented thru NED), take Meedan and NDI. Meedan develops Spanish-language censorship tech. NDI, NED's DNC branch, then deploys it.

15) I don't know if you caught that, but as I've illustrated with thousands of receipts, NED was created by the CIA, and thru NDI, NED's DNC arm, the CIA wing of the Democrat party directly partners with a censorship tech firm that censors US elections

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/2011903127625351660

16) While NED's censorship tech developer Meedan was censoring US elections, it received nearly $6 million in tax dollars from the Biden admin to censor "misinformation" and build a "claims and memes database" to pre-censor the sharing of memes on social media & in private chats

17) NED's journal stressed the need for a more robust Spanish-language Censorship Industrial Complex, since from 2016-2020 most censors only spoke English & lacked the funds and ability to censor Spanish too. Spanish posts needed to be censored to rig elections in South America.

18) As NED was leading the coordinated attack on social media companies in these LatAm countries to force them to censor any speech supportive of a gov't or movement there Biden's CIA opposed, in stepped NED board member Castro from Congress to push more censorship funding there

19) And lo and behold, the same heat map of Spanish-speaking countries NED targeted for censorship ops were lobbied by Castro to pump censorship funds into. In all the below countries on Castro's censorship hit list, the targets were Trump-aligned movements or gov'ts at the time

20) You'll notice that NED board member Castro, in his House Intelligence Committee bill, cites to Congress that the Atlantic Council DFR Lab is the ultimate independent expert to defer to on mis/disinformation. Well, the boss of the DFR Lab is the President & CEO of NED.

21) NED's President & CEO Damon Wilson was the boss of the Atlantic Council DFR Lab as it directly, literally, led the biggest election censorship operation in the history of humanity: the throttling of millions of posts & accts ahead of the 2020 election

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1951882808378474623

22) So once again, Castro's bill for Congress to up censorship funds & push gov't agencies to increase censorship ops was a NED Sandwich. Castro (NED board) pushes, DFR Lab (NED President-run) implements, flaggers like Comprova (NED-funded) get the money.

https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1829403391149363485

23) So I hope that explains how someone like Castro is on NED’s board. NED recruited him after 6 years of his censorship advocacy, then he sponsored bills in Congress as a NED director to pump more money into NED’s global censorship projects. A case study of how the scam works.