Censorship-Industrial Complex

History

N.S. Lyons:

"After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton would later put it, social media platforms had fundamentally changed the information environment and “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.”

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the U.S. Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was, as one federal judge later described it, effectively “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the U.S. Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries around the world. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including U.S. companies – to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect,” becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).

American “partners” quickly began setting up a network of structures to force global internet content “moderation” as part of a de facto counter-populist alliance. This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube into signing the “Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online,” which required the “removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours” and ordered them to “remove or disable access to such content.” Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of “trusted reporters,” i.e. a network of ideologically aligned media organizations, often funded by the state. Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalized a vast array of “misinformation,” or the UK’s “Online Safety Act,” which made illegal such vaguely hateful behavior as causing “needless anxiety” and “non-trivial psychological or physical harm.”

This process of regulatory political containment reached its ultimate form in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which began to come into legal force in 2023 and is now fully operational. The DSA’s “main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation,” and it does so by threatening to fine any internet platform anywhere in the world (from social media, to app stores, to travel and accommodation sites) up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down “false” or “harmful” content within a matter of hours. Information fit to be censored is determined by small committees of “experts” chosen by the European Commission. Overall the DSA is, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has rightly put it, “the most comprehensive censorship law ever passed in a Western democracy.”

For a long time, these regulatory methods worked. As revealed by the “Twitter Files” uncovered by reporters like Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, Twitter employees were for example regularly producing enthusiastic reports on the company’s global compliance with Germany’s NetzDG. Overall, Twitter’s legal policy office reported internally that it was “spending 50% or more” of its time “on global regulation” and compliance with foreign censorship demands by 2022.

The construction of this counter-populist system was formalized as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the “Christchurch Call to Action” summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers, and “civil society and partner organizations” to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online.” These commitments were self-described as “wide ranging, covering everything from applying appropriate laws and regulation to specific technical measures, to efforts to address the underlying drivers of terrorism.” (“Underlying drivers” in practice here largely meaning right-populist and anti-establishment political views, quickly expanding to include any dissenting views on COVID-19 and misgovernance during the pandemic.)

Following this, the world saw an explosion of hundreds of “non-governmental” organizations, think tanks, “fact checkers,” and academic misinformation “researchers,” all sprouting up to help coordinate censorship without borders. These organizations provided ready-made “expertise” on which governments and technology platforms could draw when deciding who to target for silencing or worse. Additionally, they could provide cover by giving the whole scheme a sheen of independence and scientific objectivity. They quickly became integral to the counter-populist project. In particular, these outfits became adept at coordinating campaigns to cut off financing for political opponents and ideological adversaries by pressuring advertisers into boycotting dissenting websites, platforms, and media outlets by smearing them as dangerous extremists.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British Labour Party cutout, proved especially effective at this ploy, successfully cutting off ad revenue flowing to perceived right-wing sites. It also managed to drive away many advertisers from Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, with leaked CCDH documents later revealing the outfit had explicitly listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic priority. CCDH did far more than this, however; it worked hand-in-hand with governments to provide enemies lists and custom-made excuses for censoring political opponents. When CCDH published a report labeling 12 influential COVID-19 lockdown skeptics as the dangerous “Disinformation Dozen,” 12 Democratic Party attorney generals in the United States all inexplicably sent a letter on the same day to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook citing the CCDH report and demanding the Disinformation Dozen be deplatformed. It was later revealed that the NGO and the Democratic Party had regularly shared drafts and coordinated their attacks in advance, which was of course precisely the point.

...

CCDH is just one of many such organizations performing a similar role, however, including groups like Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index. Collectively, these organizations have, as an UnHerd investigation found, successfully established a cartel of “invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising” and media “fact checking.” Their purpose has been to distort and control the factual information and narratives reaching the public. In other words, they were established as political weapons.

It is striking that a significant proportion of these organizations and similar outfits, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) are commonly both partially state-funded (often by multiple countries on both sides of the Atlantic) and maintain deep connections to the various agencies of the security state. ASD’s founding board, for example, notably included such figures as John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, Richard Ledgett, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency during the Obama Administration, and Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council for Obama.

This overlap is no coincidence. As the reporter Jacob Siegel has expertly detailed, after 2016 the American security establishment began to turn the tools and tactics of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency warfare, and regime change that it had developed abroad back onto its own people."

(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/vances-real-message-to-europe-give?)