Sharp-eyed readers will have spotted that Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi testified before Congress yesterday about the activities of what they call America’s ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’, i.e., the combination of shadowy state agencies, state-funded NGOs and private companies that since 2016 have been engaged in censoring domestic dissent on social media on a massive scale, particularly when it comes to issues like election fraud, the origins of COVID-19, controversial pharmaceutical treatments of COVID-19, the efficacy and safety of the mRNA Covid vaccines, masking, gender identity ideology, the war in Ukraine and the causes of climate change, as well as energetically spreading misinformation and disinformation about those issues.
The exposure of this complex has been triggered by the release of the Twitter Files, with Shellenberger and Taibbi being among the two most prominent journalists who’ve been given access to those Files and who’ve shared their findings in a number of Twitter threads. Needless to say, we also have a ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ in the UK, as documented by Big Brother Watch in a recent report, which has matched the growth of its American equivalent step-by-step, although unlike in America our political class remains almost completely uninterested in it, with a few notable exceptions, and British citizens are more vulnerable to these attacks on their free speech than their American counterparts because we don’t have a First Amendment.
Michael Shellenberger wrote a post for his Substack yesterday, just before testifying, that tried to sum up what he and Taibbi have been able to discover so far:
Our findings are shocking. A highly-organised network of U.S. Government agencies and Government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it.
We and others have already reported on some of the actions of this complex, including its disinformation campaigns. But the extent of its censorship was unknown to us until very recently. And, as importantly, we now understand the ways in which this complex simultaneously spreads disinformation and demands censorship.
What my 68-page testimony to Congress shows is an effort by U.S. Government intelligence and security agencies to wage “information warfare” against the American people.
I do not doubt that some people will try to justify the behaviours we have documented. They will say such censorship is necessary for “fighting disinformation”.
But there is no moral or legal justification for the acts of state-sponsored censorship we document, much less for the fundamentally un-American censorship-industrial complex.
I believe that any reasonable person reading our report, no matter their politics, will be horrified by what is taking place and demand an end to it.
With our testimony, we are calling on Congress to defund and dismantle the censorship-industrial complex immediately.
Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Both are under attack.
Shellenberger’s piece is worth reading in full, not least because it also contains a transcript of his testimony which he added later.
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It’s significant and frightening how little UK politicians care about free speech and the culture war in general. They’re quite happy to see an unpoliced left wing lynch mob terrorise ordinary people.
We need an absolute free speech Act of Parliament that overrides all ‘hate speech’ laws. There are already plenty of anti-incitement laws. We’re at the point where you can be arrested for speaking at Hyde Park Corner, which proves how far we’ve fallen.
Conservative MPs are now mostly liberal leftists, Conservative in name only. We need a populist party to emerge and kill the Tories off.
Yes, I’m in total agreement. This ‘uniparty’ bullcrap has gone on for too long. At this stage the name ‘Conservative Party’ ought to be had up on trade descriptions!
Yes but Free Speech is dangerous to totalitarians. They need always to control the language to keep themselves in control of the argument. What free people must say is this ———-“I have an education and I own a dictionary and I will choose my own words and sentences, and no government will choose them for me”.
This is Matt Taibbi’s opening statement – worth watching in full, very rousing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEeaVOzqwAY
What was even more fascinating was a Democrat “questioning” Taibbi by spending his entire tine making a polemic about anti-semitic posts increasing since Elon Musk took over Twitter, without asking a single significant question.
His unstated conclusion would seem to be that because some people express racist ideas on a public platform every intelligence agency in the country needs to have a hotline to censor everything that they deem goes against government policy.
Apart from anything else, I find myself wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occurred because bigots among the public expressed their prejudice, or rather because authorities fostered hatred through Jim Crow laws and Goebbels propaganda.
The Democrats have fallen a long way
“Wondering if US racial violence or the holocaust actually occured” ? You absolute disgusting twerp. Did you read nothing? See nothing? Listen to nothing? Manage to not hear every testimony?
Do you wonder about the Gulags, the Great Leap Forward? The Cultural Revolution? The Killing Fields?
Piss off and spew your vomit somewhere else.
It does help to read before you shout.
As Einstein said “There is a difference between intelligence and stupidity, intelligence is limited”
I have often found that the stupidest shout loudest.
I watched the videos of both their testimonies. It does make me wonder about extent of censorship going on in the EU and the UK.
The UK has long had a problem linked to its EU membership. Our system historically has few laws, rigorously enforced, whereas most EU countries have so many regulations, it’s impossible to police them all, so they don’t.
Consequently, the UK has been flooded with EU regulations and is trying to enforce them all rigorously, the way we always have. That’s led us to police state territory and people getting reported on spurious grounds.
I’m often attacked for saying we need to shrink the state, but we do: its tentacles are reaching into every aspect of our lives entirely unnecessarily.
Recently a street preacher was arrested, charged and prosecuted for mis-gendering someone, WTAF!
Ironically, the biggest threat to the first amendment in the US comes from the EU and their own censorship agenda.
Some of us have known for sometime that there is “Science” and then there is “Official Science”. You can certainly fool a lot of the people some of the time but maybe not all of them all of the time. But it seems that enough of the people are being fooled and that is all the is important to the propaganda machine which makes Goebbels look like a total novice.
In Canada the Liberal Trudeau govt is trying to bring the internet under govt control so that the govt, with the social media giants, will control what people can read and what they can upload.
For example, do a Google search and, if passed, these bills will allow the govt to control what you see first..