Foundation For Freedom Online
@FFO_Freedom
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Protecting digital liberties. Telling the story of online censorship. Fighting to win back the Golden Age of the Internet. Posts by @MikeBenzCyber .
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DHS's cyber agency CISA scrubbed its website last week to purge all reference to domestic censorship.
CISA deleted 2 years worth of confessions to getting platforms to stop "domestic disinfo" by US citizens.
The "before" and "after" is here:
Report:
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DHS censorship machine targeted 22 million tweets, used 120 speech flaggers, scrubbed 15 platforms, and throttled dozens of "emerging election narratives" using a chat app.
#DHSLeaks
was just the tip of an iceberg. Full report here:
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Major reports dropping soon.
#DHSLeaks
barely scratched the surface of how extraordinary this DHS censorship scandal is. Strap in.
Musk Twitter teams with US spy service avatars who interfered in 2020 election. Read Mike Benz
@FFO_Freedom
for details.
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2. Here is a highly disturbing fact that is not widely to the American public: The same DHS cyber agency in charge of securing elections is also in charge of censoring elections.
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NEW: Leaked State Dept memo obtained by America First Legal reveals US gov't is producing VIDEO GAMES with taxpayer dollars for “psychological vaccination against fake news.”
Their plan is to stop populism on social media. Full report here:
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5. But CISA had a problem. It's called the First Amendment. The US government is not allowed to sandblast millions of voters off the civilian Internet because of their speech about elections.
CISA needed private sector partners to do dirty work. And that's where EIP stepped in:
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4. In the summer of 2020, CISA pulled off a trick. By classifying "election misinformation" as threat to "election security," its police powers extended from the tech side of elections to anyone simply *talking* about elections.
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3. CISA has kept a very low profile by appearing to the outside world as just a boring cybersecurity bureau. A place where even the professional hackers are tasked with humdrum IT maintenance jobs.
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8. CISA -- your federal government -- is not just partnering with a few zealous individuals. The scale here is institutional. For the 2020 election alone, EIP had 120 people staffed on taking down lawful US citizen speech about an in-process US election:
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6. CISA "lacked the funding and the legal authorizations" to do grand-scale censorship and get away with it. So CISA partnered with EIP, who "filled the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves."
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7. EIP bills itself euphemistically as a "disinfo research” collective, but it's important to understand EIP does more than “research”: they manually flag posts, throttle narratives, and pressure platforms at every level.
That is active censorship, not passive research:
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9. This clip, one week after the 2020 election, shows EIP openly plotting ways to coerce tech platforms to censor additional topics beyond elections. EIP cited their power cards as "huge regulatory pressure" from government insiders and ginning up bad press:
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14. All of EIP's top targets of election censorship, during a hotly contested ongoing election, belonged to the exact same side of the political aisle.
CISA gave them absolute power to censor, so they censored absolutely:
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16. One of the explicit goals of their censorship activities, according to their own formal framework, was to stop people from being mobilized to put up legal challenges:
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10. EIP relies on advanced monitoring AI to map out entire networks of people who spread a narrative they want to ban out of existence. Here you can see a walkthrough of how EIP effectively stalks every chain in an election belief to censor the whole belief system at scale:
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DHS has already created a US Ministry Of Truth. Only it’s not the Disinformation Governance Board — it’s something far more entrenched and disturbing.
We will break down highlights in this thread. See full report here:
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11. In this photo, DHS, EIP and the tech platforms are all coordinating systematic censorship of US citizen speech, in the heat of an election, that voiced concerns about being given sharpie markers to vote.
Look how they secretly clamped a speech ban behind the scenes:
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13. This whole seamless web of censorship was all planned months ahead of the 2020 election.
After partnering with DHS, EIP lined up all the major platforms in advance so EIP could "find disinformation and report it quickly and then collaborate with them on taking it down."
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🚨Report 🚨 NewsGuard Founder Called For Open Borders. Now, NewsGuard Censors News Sites Critiquing Open Borders.
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15. The topics EIP censored on a day-by-day basis tracked perfectly with pre-censorship of challenges to a pending "red mirage, blue shift" scenario.
Right out gate, its
#1
censorship topic was mail-in ballots, then hard-pivoted to censoring ballot counting on Election Day:
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12. Notice the redacted “Government partner” didn't even fully dispel the narrative being throttled for “misinformation.” They actually appear to somewhat confirm concerns about kicked-back ballots, but simply presume poll workers must have followed ideal procedures after that:
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TWITTER FILES 1.0 THREAD: A comprehensive breakdown of the first release 👇
Twitter's election censorship operation is far more extensive than yet reported. Here's how it works:
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14. Even in August 2020 (when TIP published their election crisis blueprint), they were plotting "investigations and possible charges" against Trump and ending the "the tradition of offering legal immunity" to past Presidents.
This was 3 months *before* the 2020 election:
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5. The Twitter Files 1.0 release from
@mtaibbi
show Vijaya Gadde coordinated the censorship of the Hunter Biden Laptop story before the 2020 election.
In 2021, after the election, Gadde was tapped by Biden's DHS to run its censorship advisory committee, alongside Kate Starbird:
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9. NTFEC was a sort of 'sister organization' to a notoriously shady outfit also created at the same time called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP).
TIP spent summer 2020 wargaming how to overturn election results if candidate Trump won the election:
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8. What is lesser known about Jim Baker, and which mainstream news is not currently appreciating, is that in the run-up to the 2020 election, Baker was also leading the National Task Force on Election Crises (NTFEC).
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The US government is directly funding censorship professionals like Kate Starbird, and her disinfo lab partners, to explicitly target one side of an election. This is a profoundly disturbing power that no political apparatus should be able to use taxpayer funds to wield:
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Our director
@MikeBenzCyber
reacts to the censorship policy proposals put forward by Donald Trump today:
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12. Kate Starbird -- first engaged by the gov't as an academic to censor elections, then paid by the gov't to grow her own censorship lab at UW -- was tapped to join the government's censorship advisory team in an official capacity.
She now heads DHS's "Misinfo" task force:
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2. Parents: Your taxes pay for DHS to tell your kids to report you to Facebook for “disinformation” if you dispute gov't Covid statistics:
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2. The first thing to understand is that the Censorship Industry has been constructed using a "Whole-Of-Society" model.
That means censorship is coordinated through the government, the private sector (tech platforms), and civil society (academia, NGOs) working together:
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12. Just so no one misses the fine print, TIP sought to mobilize "racial justice activists" for "a Biden call to take to the streets," probing "the Biden campaign's ability to control these actors" if street muscle was needed to destabilize a Trump election win:
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11. Even more incredibly, Jim Baker's sister network at TIP explicitly plotted to use Black Lives Matters protesters as a battering ram for the Biden faction to force Trump out of office, had Trump won the electoral college on Election Night 2020:
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10. Incredibly, TIP, which shared the same explicit aims and many overlapping members with NTFEC, premeditated a scenario in summer 2020 in which the Biden team would provoke a constitutional crisis on January 6 if Biden lost the election:
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3. DHS formally partnered with a highly partisan "disinformation" specialist group to censor "repeat misinformation spreaders" ahead of the 2020 election.
Every single account DHS's partner targeted happened to be an influential conservative:
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2. The leaked memo shows the US gov't tapping into the virality of Buzzfeed-style cat videos to program young people's political opinions through a new video game called "Cat Park":
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🚨Report 🚨 ‘Civic Listening’: Political Informants and Citizen Spies, Rebranded
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5. DHS was not authorized to do this. It was tasked with countering "foreign" disinformation, then quietly pulled off a "foreign to domestic switcheroo" in the run-up to the 2020 election:
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13. TIP, using the same "securing elections" pretext as Jim Baker's NFTEC, similarly threw off their nonpartisan cloak with inserts about how to stop "Trumpism" after the election.
They specifically plotted how to reduce Trump's access to media to stop him from running again:
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3. Cat Park is the 2nd video game produced by the State Dept's Global Engagement Center (GEC) targeting "political misinformation."
Here is the government promo video for GEC's 1st game, Harmony Square, rolled out just after the 2020 US election:
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🚨 Elon Musk’s Top 10 Free Speech Moments in 2023 🗣️📢
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4. There was no subtlety in DHS's targeting of conservative voices. Their outsourced "disinformation" reporter did a *clean sweep* flagging right-of-center accounts:
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5. The US-gov't developed game "Cat Park" is based on psychological behavior modification research from the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab.
Here, Cambridge's star "disinfo" professor make clear their targets are populist movements in the US and UK:
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It is highly disconcerting that the founder of CISA (the federal agency in charge of both election security and election censorship) appeared with current Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer earlier this year to mutually promote Internet censorship
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4. Ahead of elections around the world, the US gov't plans to roll out its new psychology-manipulating video games like Cat Park as a "disinformation booster-shot," stopping social media and ideological support for populist movements, such as the UK's Brexit movement:
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15. What was Jim Baker, star of Twitter Files 1.0, doing over at NFTEC while TIP was cooking up an election crisis blueprint?
NFTEC was pressuring news media and journalists on *how to cover* election crisis events in the Biden campaign's favor:
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9. Here, the US government's private sector deputy explains how they are moving from a reactive censorship model reliant on "fact-checking" and "debunking" to proactive censorship model built on "cognitive vaccination" and "prebunking."
This is the science of censorship:
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In 2021, Starbird's censorship team received a $2.25 million government grant --- that's taxpayer dollars --- to censor elections in 2022 and 2024, after censoring the 2020 election.
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Important public pledge staked out by
@RepJamesComer
that all members of Congress should step up and support.
Church Committee 2.0. The time is now.
🚨My initial concern was the FBI had a rogue agent or two coordinating with Big Tech to censor Americans online...
Now,
@elonmusk
has proven the FBI had its own Ministry of Propaganda.
This should outrage every single American.
@HouseGOP
will get answers.
@FoxNews
@seanhannity
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6. DHS directs a web of private companies, civil society groups and news outlets in a "whole of society" response against "disinformation".
What this means in practice is every institution in society pushing the same Internet censorship:
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6. This same Cambridge professor, Sander van der Linden, worked closely with the US government's empirical reviewers at Harvard on the "psychological inoculation" games GEC developed:
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3. The "Whole-Of-Society" censorship model was cobbled together after the 2016 election under pretext of fighting "foreign disinformation" on Twitter and Facebook.
But after Russiagate fell apart in summer 2019, the entire infrastructure was shifted to a "domestic" focus:
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7. DHS was teaching election officials to set up "incident response teams" to censor social media posts all over the country for "misinformation":
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THREAD: Biden's National Science Foundation spent $40 million on "misinformation" and "disinformation" grants to US colleges & universities so academics could get paid to help censor social media.
Report:
Big follow-ups this week. Highlights below:👇
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9. Incredibly, every single entity in DHS's "disinformation" partner censoring the 2020 election *for* the US government was receiving millions *from* the US government:
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New report 🚨
DHS Scrubs YouTube Channel of Infamous Censorship Video Encouraging People To Report Family Members For “Disinformation”
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8. Here, watch this star of the US government's new political "thought control" game industry explain his other games controlling the psychological response to Covid-19 policies.
Note how the government's censorship targets are all posts criticizing the government:
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🚨Report 🚨 USAID Internal Documents Reveal Government Plot To Promote Censorship Initiatives
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10. So what was a ***cybersecurity*** agency within DHS doing speech policing what US citizens could say about Covid on social media?
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"CISA now appears to have carte blanche to do something no authority in the US government has done before: take government action against lawful speech by US citizens, without them needing first to be suspected of a crime."
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11. Amazingly, they got away with arguing that "disinformation" is essentially a "cyber threat" against "critical infrastructure" --- and cited elections and healthcare as critical infrastructure:
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6. This is important: the formal framework Starbird and Gadde worked under to censor the 2020 election explicitly set out censorship as a way to stop populists from mobilizing "protests," "legal action" and "mainstream coverage":
Source:
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8. DHS takes great pains to present as though it differentiates between "mis, dis and malinformation" -- but in reality, its own DHS conference calls instructed social media election monitors to just call everything "disinformation":
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7. The Twitter Files 1.0 release focus was on the FBI, and specifically former FBI General Counsel James Baker, who was then hired by Twitter as its Deputy General Counsel.
@JonathanTurley
had an excellent write-up here of Baker's backstory here:
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🚨 Gov’t-Funded Stanford Censors Taunted Elon Musk ‘Bought Himself Into A Hellish Existence,’ Raised Tesla As Vulnerability For Free Speech Twitter
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4. Kate Starbird, head of the UW disinfo lab and major censorship coordinator with both Twitter and the US government, lays out how her hivemind saw the operation here:
Note she explicitly targets "everyday people" and concedes that there wasn't the political will at first:
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With government money in hand, Starbird's team had 40 (!) people monitoring social media in real-time during the 2022 midterms to censor populist opinions before they could trend:
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3. The game is that the government has the money, and civil society has the credibility, so the government gives the money to civil society to do the censorship dirty work:
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7. This same Cambridge professor, Sander van der Linden, did "psychological resistance" testing on US government-produced behavioral modification game Harmony Square (Cat Park's predecessor), which sought to modify people's beliefs in "political misinformation" during elections:
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12. After changing its name from the foreign-focused "Countering Foreign Influence Task Force" to the domestic-focused "Mis, Dis and Malinformation", DHS now has carte blanche to go after any social media narrative that "undermines public trust in government":
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'Disinformation' tracker accused of censorship holds ties to UK government: 'Dark arts'
Read more from
@gekaminsky
:
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11. And here it must be stressed: the Cat Park game is not really about disinformation. It really is just about populism. Virtually single act of "disinformation" in the game is simply an expression of populists airing grievances against government waste, fraud and abuse:
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13. In an oblivious self-realization of George Orwell's novel 1984, at one point in Cat Park, this gov't-made video game to "stop disinformation" labels memes that compare the gov't to 1984 as disinformation:
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Google Jigsaw’s Plan to Vaccinate Your Mind
A deep dive on the mechanics of so-called "prebunking" and its development to control how people perceive narratives in the news
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2. The only policy prescriptions that work are ones that target censorship as an industry:
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Breaking:
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13. But if one simply inserts Bill Gates into DHS’s "Covid disinformation" cartoon, it does not exactly inspire *public trust* in DHS’s pursuit of punishments — like permanent denial of social media access — for citizens disputing Official Truths:
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🚨Kate Starbird: ‘Freedom of Speech’ Should Not Be Centered Because A ‘Level Playing Field’ For Ideas Is ‘Tilted In Favor Of Misinformation’
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Catch up on our recent reports on the censorship industry:
DHS-Born ‘Election Integrity Partnership’ Worked to Censor Images of Ballot Counting Patterns in 2020
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10. The leaked State Dept memo shows that censorship scientists calculate that playing "Cat Park" makes young people "15 percentage points" less likely to share populist opinions online.
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12. State Dept officials plan to embed Cat Park as deeply into civil society as possible. Ambassadors are to play the game with "popular influencers, academics, journalists and government officials."
Youth networks, exchange programs, ministries of education, all roped in:
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6. Recap:
This is why today's announced policy proposals are the most serious and effective solutions to Internet censorship to date:
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14. Other "disinformation headlines" you are forced to apologize for in this government-made video game include complaints that the government is spending too much money on elites and not enough on basic needs like building roads:
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2. The Biden Admin has spent tens of millions of dollars in government grants on censorship and "mis/disinformation" research (forthcoming FFO report will reveal the full raw data):
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4. The need to dismantle the censorship industry goes far beyond the simple throttling of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Here's why:
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15. In our full report, you can see the systematic anti-populist biases of the censorship scientists that the US government has partnered with here:
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5. Government funding is what supports the mercenary army of censors in the private sector, academia and NGO spheres.
If you remove that single Jenga piece, the censorship industry built on top of it will topple over:
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This is a major story whose revelations may ultimately be bigger than what has been revealed so far in the Twitter Files:
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"This seems like a patent attempt to launder in a fake ‘safety’ smokescreen to bring back policies long-hated by users, but long-demanded by advertiser boycott groups"
More from
@MikeBenzCyber
in the
@DailyCaller
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2. Here's a shocking fact: 42 different US colleges and universities all got US taxpayer dollars for the job of censoring US taxpayers.
This is all since the start of 2021. In less than 2 years, the gov't has funded a sprawling constellation of censorship labs:
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4. We have uploaded all 64 government censorship grant descriptions to a downloadable Scribd link here for any interested citizens who want to see the Orwellian thought control work their tax dollars are being spent on:
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6. Here is one shocking example grant that George Washington University received from the federal government. It explicitly takes aim at “populist politicians,” “populist communications,” and targets the former “populist leaders” of four countries — including the United States.
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🚨Report 🚨 Congressionally-Chartered Nonprofit’s Disinformation Dashboard Used to Track Hunter Biden Laptop Story
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This is an extremely important point. We have even more data on federal agency funding of private sector censorship squads in upcoming reports.
I will keep saying it until it comes to an end:
Censorship is an industry. It's big business. And the US federal government is now the censorship industry's biggest paying customer.
You, civilian, are being forced to subsidize your own silence.
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7. To ram home the sham of NSF "science funding" here, the grant to GW explicitly says the gov't goal is “to counter populist narratives.”
That is, point blank, the US gov't using US taxpayer funds to stop the speech of US voters.
Isn’t the government supposed to work for us?
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3. Solutions on social media censorship? Here's an easy one: Defund The Speech Police.
"If you can cut out all the government grants and contracts, you will essentially remove a critical Jenga piece that is underlying the entire economy of the Censorship Industry."
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5. For many universities, being involved in the Censorship Industry is now "Big Business."
Both George Washington University in DC and SUNY in Albany, New York received $4 million or more in government money to help censor topics targeted by the Biden admin:
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10. The other superheavyweight in election censorship is University of Washington's disinfo lab, run by Kate Starbird.
Below, Starbird explains how she targeted conservative activists for social media throttling as "repeat misinformation spreaders" ahead of the 2020 election:
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3. We have compiled the list of those 42 government-funded academic censorship labs in this image below.
This was spread across 64 NSF grants on "social media mis/disinformation". Many college censorship labs received repeat funding.
Citation:
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