Tag: censorship

EU Targets Elon Musk’s X with Potential $1 Billion Fine Under Censorship Law

When the European Commission goes to war, it doesn’t send tanks. It dispatches compliance officers with angry emails and billion-dollar fines.

The European Union’s eurocrats’s next target is Elon Musk’s social media fixer-upper, X.

According to the New York Times, four anonymous whisperers from inside the EU machine say the bloc is loading up a billion-dollar bazooka aimed squarely at X, citing violations of their shiny new Digital Services Act, the latest attempt to regulate speech by committee. And what better way to showcase the importance of online civility than by dragging the world’s loudest billionaire into court?

The DSA, which was sold to the public as a digital hygiene law to make the internet a kinder, gentler place, has become a blunt instrument in the hands of bureaucrats who never met a control lever they didn’t want to pull. They’ve apparently decided that Musk’s flavor of digital chaos — too many unregulated opinions, not enough “fact-checking,” and a stubborn refusal to grovel — is a clear and present danger to the European project.

Among X’s alleged crimes against the algorithmic gods: refusing to hand over data to “independent researchers” (friendly academics who publish pro-censorship PDFs no one reads), hiding the secrets behind those little blue check marks, and failing to spill the tea on who’s advertising to whom.

Naturally, this has prompted Brussels to threaten a fine that could “top $1 billion,” a figure clearly pulled from the same place all government fines originate — an angry dartboard. One idea floating through the regulatory fog? That if X itself can’t pay up, maybe SpaceX can. Because when you’re short on jurisdiction, why not go fishing in another company’s wallet?

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New Info on How the Feds Helped Censor a Bombshell

The US House Judiciary Committee has released internal chat logs, that show the FBI moved into cover-up mode the very day the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story, on October 14, 2020.

The logs, first reported about by journalists Michael Shellenberger and Catherine Herridge, reveal that the FBI employees were immediately instructed “not to discuss the Biden matter,” while an intelligence analyst who, during a call with Twitter, accidentally confirmed that the story, i.e., the laptop, was real, was placed under a “gag order.”

The reason the analyst, who was with the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, was able to so quickly confirm the reporting was based on credible information was the fact the FBI had seized and authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop several months earlier.

Big Tech platforms – notably Twitter and Facebook – then started censoring the article, branding it falsely “Russian disinformation.” By maintaining the “no comment” policy instead of confirming that the laptop was real and under investigation, the FBI was in effect tacitly promoting the false narrative about foreign interference.

These moves originated from the Foreign Influence Task Force, which was shut down earlier this year for its activities related to censorship through pressure on social platforms.

The laptop scandal was unfolding during a crucial time in the 2020 campaign and represents one of the most egregious publicly known examples of political censorship of free speech and media orchestrated by government agencies.

The chat logs that have now been published reveal that one of the FBI staff involved in the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was Bradley Benavides.

Only weeks prior, Benavides featured in another controversy: that time in what appeared to be a smear campaign against Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley, who were allegedly “advancing Russian disinformation.”

At the time, the senators just so happened to be investigating Hunter Biden’s financial connections to foreign governments.

A letter the Judiciary Committee sent Benavides in June 2023, shows that he had by that time gone through the Big Tech-Big Government “revolving door” – and was senior risk manager at Amazon.

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Democrats, Former Disinfo Board Chief, Defend Government-Big Tech Ties, Dismiss Censorship-Industrial Complex at House Hearing on First Amendment Safeguards

Nina Jankowicz – former head of the disbanded Disinformation Governance Board and CEO of the American Sunlight Project – and Democrats who this week spoke during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, continued to deny and defend the Big Tech-government censorship collusion.

The hearing – “Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department” – also saw Jankowicz, who appeared as a witness, and Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democrat, attempt to paint the actions taken by the new Trump White House as worse that what was happening during the previous US administration.

Both Jankowicz and Kamlager-Dove referred to the system known as the Censorship-Industrial Complex, and its elements, as “fiction,” “lies,” “tall tales,” and, “a conspiracy theory,” with Jankowicz trying to frame the new government’s moves as “an assault on the First Amendment” and “suppressing speech.”

Despite the fact these are some of the key accusations against the Biden administration – and at this point, fairly well backed up by batches of internal documents, but also testimonies from Big Tech execs – Jankowicz chose to call it “the imagined actions of the Biden administration.”

As for her own role in this “imagined” system – namely, the brief stint at the helm of the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board (that was part of the Department of Homeland Security) – Jankowicz maintained that it was not meant to be a censorship body.

Instead, Jankowicz would have the Committee and the public believe the Board was true to its mission statement, which was “to protect civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment.”

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After Trump’s Election, Several NSF-Funded Censorship Tools Go Missing

The National Science Foundation (NSF) claims to be the place “where discoveries begin” — but it funded programs where free speech ends. When The Federalist asked if it still funds anti-“misinformation” tools, a representative simply pointed to its public grants database, which lists censorship projects funded during the Biden administration.

The public-interest law firm Alliance Defending Freedom sent NSF records requests in February to uncover any coordination between the federal agency and internet communications monopolies such as Google and Facebook.

NSF funds one-quarter of all federally funded academic fundamental research projects at U.S. higher education institutions, and funds technology development at approximately 400 “small businesses” each year. It has an annual budget of $8.5 billion. It also funds programs that exclude recipients based on race, according to an NSF factsheet.

The NSF’s “Convergence Accelerator,” which funds special research projects, launched a “cohort track” in 2021 for “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems.” Recipients developed software to control online speech labeled “misinformation” about politically sensitive topics including Covid-19 treatments and election integrity.

Twelve “teams” were selected for “phase 1” of the project, according to the House Judiciary Committee, and six were selected for “phase 2” funding at $5 million each. In total, the NSF awarded $39 million total to projects in this “track” of the program.

The NSF-funded projects include the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT), Co-Designing for Trust, Co:Cast, Co-Insights, CommuniTies, CourseCorrect, Expert Voices Together, Search Lit, TrustFinder, and WiseDex. Projects had ties to infamous pro-censorship organizations including Google, Meta, Snopes, Wikimedia, the World Economic Forum, and the World Health Organization.

The Federalist asked NSF how much total funding each project received from the agency, and if there have been any “cohorts dedicated to developing anti-misinformation projects since ‘track F.’” An NSF spokesman replied that, “in recent years,” Congress asked NSF to “identify and address issues of safety, ethics and adversarial influence online” through funding bills and the IOGAN Act. So the Convergence Accelerator “initiated Track F.”

“This program has not made an award since 2021 and will not be making any awards in the future,” the representative said. “NSF invests in research, innovation, and workforce development that accelerates the development, testing, and understanding of technology. NSF plays no role in content policies nor content regulations.”

The Federalist again asked “how much total NSF funding each project received” and “whether NSF helped develop other anti-misinformation projects aside from Track F.” The spokesman simply pointed to the agency’s “award search page,” and said, “[o]ther than that, I don’t have anything else to add.” A search for active NSF awards regarding “misinformation” yields more than 100 results.

ADF also filed public records requests for documents regarding the NSF Convergence Accelerator, as The Federalist previously reported. Mathew Hoffman, legal counsel for ADF’s Center for Free Speech, said at the time the group was investigating “where our tax dollars are being spent to fund censorship” — and “if anyone’s rights have been violated by the censorship-industrial complex, that litigation will certainly be an option.”

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“Content Agnostic”: EU Official Denies Anti-Free Speech Policies In Bizarre Letter To Congress

After returning recently from speaking at the World Forum in Berlin, I testified in the Senate Judiciary Committee and warned about the building threat to free speech from the use of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has taken up the issue and received a letter from the EU’s Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen. The letter is both evasive and deceptive.

In my book, The Indispensable Right, I detail how the DSA has been used to allow for sweeping speech investigations and prosecutions. In direct contradiction to past statements by the EU, Virkkunen denied any effort to regulate speech or enforce the DSA outside of Europe.

What is particularly maddening is the false claim that the EU remains “deeply committed to protecting and promoting free speech.” Many in the free speech community view the EU and the DSA as the greatest threats to free speech in the West.

In his letter, Jordan correctly raised the concern that the DSA could “limit or restrict Americans” constitutionally protected speech in the United States by compelling platforms to crack down on what the EU considers “misleading or deceptive” speech.

In her response, Virkkunen bizarrely describes the DSA as “content-agnostic” while insisting that the DSA “applies exclusively within the European Union.”

That is not what EU officials previously said or what the law itself allows. Articles 34 and 35 of the DSA require all sites to identify, assess, and mitigate “systemic risks” posed by content, including any threats to “civic discourse”, “electoral processes,” and “public health.” It is up to the EU to define and judge such categories in terms of compliance.

The act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager celebrated its passage by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore, that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”

Some in this country have turned to the EU to force the censorship of their fellow citizens. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled most of the company’s censorship program, many on the left went bonkers. That fury only increased when Musk released the “Twitter files,” confirming the long-denied coordination and support by the government in targeting and suppressing speech.

In response, Hillary Clinton and other Democratic figures turned to Europe and called upon them to use their Digital Services Act to force censorship against Americans. (Clinton spoke at the World Forum and lashed out at the failure to control disinformation).

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German Dystopia: Friedrich Merz’s and Olaf Scholz’s Incoming Coalition To Turn Censorship Into Overdrive, Crack Down on Social Media and ‘Ban Lies’

If one thinks that de-industrialized and immigrant-flooded Germany was in a poor state, we just have to wait until the new incoming coalition is in place to see how bad things are about to become.

German tabloid BILD has had access to documents from the negotiators of the ‘black-red coalition’ (Friedrich Merz’s CDU and Olaf Scholz’s SPD). And what it found is quite disturbing: they want to take hard action ‘against lies’ – i.e. they are about to double down on censorship and propaganda.

These plans emerge from the negotiation paper ‘Culture and Media’ working group, predicting that the pressure on social media is to be considerably expanded and whatever they deem to call ‘fake news’ is to be severely restricted.

BILD reported:

“The exploratory paper already stated that ‘disinformation and fake news’ threatened democracy. The negotiating paper now even states: ‘The deliberate dissemination of false factual allegations is not covered by freedom of expression’.

The consequence: ‘Therefore, the media supervisory authority, which is independent of the state, must be able to take action against information manipulation as well as hatred and incitement on the basis of clear legal requirements, while preserving freedom of expression’.”

Pressure on platforms like X is expected to increase, and certain ‘false statements’ are to be ‘prevented’, i.e., CENSORED.

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Key Nodes of Federal Government Censorship

Over the past three weeks, anyone interested in free speech (or not) has been on the receiving end of a non-consensual firehouse of flood-the-zone information warfare. Every man and his DOGE has chimed in, capturing via screenshot a score of Osama bin Laden of censorship hideouts – “It’s USAID!” “It’s NED!” “It’s NIH”!

USAID in particular has been made responsible for everything, from funding chemtrails in Naples to biting your own cheek. It’s a shame the word misinformation is of so little use anymore.

USAID is important, but the censorship happens via a system comprising hundreds, possibly thousands, of organisations, small and large. Is there a secret bunker? I don’t know, it isn’t impossible, but the approach is cartoonish. There are key nodes, organisations, and networks that are more important than others, particularly those that hand out money. In fact “complex” was the term that quickly gained favour during the Twitter files, precisely because it captured the system’s complexity – it’s what made it work and minimised public scrutiny.

Over the past couple of months, liber-net has built a database of almost 1,000 federal government awards from 2016-2024 that went towards countering “misinformation” and other similar censorship pretexts. That work aims to complement the mapping of the Censorship Industrial Complex we did for Matt Taibbi. That work looked partly at government funding but focused more on the leading censorship organisations and their often public and private support.

Not all of the 1,000 grants logged are dubious, but many are. We’ve been going through each by hand – reading their project pages, papers, and reports to find out how big a problem they are. Can AI help? Yes to a degree but from what we’ve tried, AI can’t yet really understand why one grant is horrible and the next one is just a bit meh.

The map above is a sketch of where we think the funds have come from to date based on the analysis we’ve been able to do. I emphasise sketch because out of the almost 1,000 awards, I still have another 300-400 to review. Of the 500+ I have looked at so far, around 200 are highly problematic, and another 100 are extremely dubious.

Keep in mind we are looking only at grants that could be considered “censorship” so anything that looked at “misinformation,” “hate speech,” “information integrity,” “information operations,” “content moderation,” “fact-checking” et al. We aren’t looking at grants for dubious woke culture war projects that have set the internet aflame the past couple of weeks.

To give you an idea, the grants include NSF money to Meedan (one of Twitter’s four go-to organisations for Covid “misinformation”) to develop AI to spy on encrypted private messaging groups to weed out so-called “misinformation,” including to create and scale “tip lines” “to millions of users” – aka snitching on a mass scale.

Or more NSF money to the University of Illinois to “track locations, people, and organizational affiliations of dubious COVID-19 information” based on whether they questioned CDC guidance.

Once we’ve finalised reviewing the remaining grants we’ll produce a much more accurate map and systemic analysis of how much each agency was funding censorship, and who they were paying to do it. This teaser is because I have a bee in my bonnet about the dynamite fishing I am seeing where a net, if not a rod, would be more useful.

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Documents Reveal Government-Backed Censorship Network Involving GEC, USAID, and Private Media Firms

America First Legal (AFL) has unveiled a trove of revealing documents obtained through litigation against the US Department of State’s now-defunct Global Engagement Center (GEC).

These documents expose a sweeping censorship network orchestrated by government agencies under the guise of combating “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The findings implicate not only the GEC but also the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), and various media monitoring organizations in a coordinated effort to control public discourse and suppress speech.

We make the documents searchable for you here.

The GEC was initially established to counteract foreign disinformation, yet recently released documents demonstrate that it became a vehicle for state-sponsored propaganda. AFL’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have uncovered evidence of the GEC’s collaboration with private media firms, leveraging their influence to censor narratives deemed unfavorable. The lawsuit against the GEC further revealed that USAID developed an internal “Disinformation Primer,” endorsing censorship strategies employed by private companies and advocating for their expansion.

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USAID Censorship Scheme Exposed; Global Engagement Center Worked With UK Government And Media Firms To Deploy AI Tools

On Thursday, America First Legal (AFL) released explosive new documents obtained through ongoing litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), exposing a vast, government-backed censorship operation to silence Americans under the guise of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” The documents reveal a disturbing alliance between the GEC, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, Development Office (FCDO), and media censorship organizations, all working in lock-step to manipulate public discourse, control media narratives, and suppress free speech.

The GEC, which was forced to shut down in December 2024, was designed to “combat foreign disinformation abroad.” However, through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, AFL uncovered that the GEC engaged in state-sponsored propaganda, repeatedly using willing participants from private media organizations. Further, AFL’s lawsuit against the GEC revealed that USAID had created an internal “Disinformation Primer” that explicitly praised private sector censorship strategies and recommended further censorship tactics.

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