Censorship by the U.S. government dominated Wednesday’s U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing on the censorship-industrial complex Wednesday.
The often-contentious hearing featured testimony by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, who released documents as part of the “Twitter Files” that revealed the government’s efforts to censor online speech, including narratives that contradicted official government policy on COVID-19.
Taibbi and Shellenberger’s testimony, and that of Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya of The Free Press, also focused on the global encroachment of the censorship-industrial complex and the Trump administration’s efforts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID, which is accused of funding censorship-related efforts globally.
“USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine” which uses “think tanks, research, fact-checking, anti-disinformation, commercial media scoring and … straight up censorship” to “transform the free press into [a] consensus machine,” Taibbi said.
Shellenberger suggested the “censorship-industrial complex is on the defensive” today, but that “it’s also clear that many governing and media elites worldwide view expanding censorship of online platforms as a must have, not a nice to have feature of global governance.”
Hellbound and Down 