The so-called Censorship Industrial Complex first got its start in response to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016. Ever since then, the silencing brigade has been upping the ante by making it increasingly more difficult to share the truth online.
"Many people insist that governments aren't involved in censorship, but they are," says Michael Shellenberger. "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."
One of three investigators from a group called Public, Shellenberger and his colleagues have been digging deep into the Censorship Industrial Complex to unearth the ugly truth about who runs it and what it does. Prominent to the Censorship Industrial Complex is a group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI, the activities of which include:
"... everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques" (Public).
(Related: Check out the top seven organizations helping to engineer the Censorship Industrial Complex.)
CISA makes global censorship possible
Documents made available to both Public and another investigatory group called Racket reveal the "anti-disinformation" league began as a volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans. Over time, it morphed into numerous official projects, including those run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
These documents from the CTI League are special in that they answer key questions that were left unanswered by the Twitter Files and the Facebook Files. Together, they paint a comprehensive picture of the anti-disinformation sector, including how it started and where it is headed.
Overseas, the activities of the Censorship Industrial Complex are "typically" performed by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," the documents reveal. Censorship efforts "against Americans" are conducted by private partners due to the fact that the government does not have the "legal authority" under the Constitution's First Amendment to censor information.
The whistleblower who dropped all this publicly is a "former" British intelligence analyst who was reportedly "in the room" at the Obama White House in 2017 when she was given orders to create a counter-disinformation project in order to stop a "repeat of 2016," referring to Trump's victory in becoming president.
Over the past year, it has further been revealed that the Censorship Industrial Complex is now comprised of a vast network of more than 100 government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that collude with social media platforms to spread propaganda against targeted individuals, topics and entire narratives.
DHS' Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) exists at the center of the Censorship Industrial Complex, receiving funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and several other federal government agencies.
Emails show that CISA is responsible for creating the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which includes the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and numerous other U.S. government contractors.
"EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike," reports The Exposé.
"Despite the overwhelming evidence of government-sponsored censorship, it had yet to be determined where the idea for such mass censorship came from."
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