“Many people insist that governments aren’t involved in censorship,” tweeted Michael Shellenberger on Tuesday, “but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance.”
Because much of recent years’ censorship has occurred on corporate-owned-and-run social media platforms, like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (now X), some have claimed “it’s not censorship” and, because private, is immune to legal prosecution. This quasi-libertarian argument was most vociferously marshaled by leftists and centrists, who’ve found in the libertarian “private property is sacred” ideal a handy excuse for the censorship they love.
They love it because of what they hate: Fox News, most specifically, and alternative media based on podcasting and vlogging platforms, more generally. These media outlets have bucked the foreign policy establishment as well as the new racism of Critical Race Theory, and official narratives about COVID.
So they must be squelched — as “disinformation.”
This is all made more clear in what Shellenberger calls “The CTIL Files.”
The leaked documents “describe the activities of an ‘anti-disinformation’ group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which “officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security.’’
While government operatives and contractors organized, at first, to avoid constitutional and legislative limitations to conducting propaganda and psychological warfare against Americans, the plan was, from the beginning (says the source), “to become part of the federal government.”
In the end, “the military and intelligence agencies” got involved, along with “civil society organizations and commercial media.” Methods used include burner phones, plausible deniability, and “sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.”
You can watch today’s hearing (10:00 AM EST) of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, featuring Shellenberger, Rupa Subramanya, and Matt Taibbi.
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This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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