In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of a growing “military-industrial complex,” with public policy “the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Yet today, American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship-industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy.
The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits and investigative reporters have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions and private groups that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on subjects including the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change and many other issues.
The law allows Facebook and Twitter and other private companies to moderate the content on their platforms, and I support the right of governments to communicate with the public, including to dispute inaccurate and misleading information.
But government officials have now been caught repeatedly 1) demanding censorship by social-media platforms of disfavored users and content, 2) often while threatening the legal basis for the companies’ existence, Section 230 and 3) financing others to do the same on their behalf.
“If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship,” notes George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, “it raises serious First Amendment questions. It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.”
And indeed the US government has been funding others to “do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.”
The brains of the complex reside in four organizations — the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Graphika, with murky ties to the Department of Defense, the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
They appear to be working with multiple US government agencies to institutionalize censorship research and advocacy within dozens of other universities and think tanks.
These groups aren’t publicly engaging with their opponents.
They aren’t asking for a national debate over the limits to the First Amendment.
Rather, they are creating blacklists of disfavored people and demanding that the social-media platforms censor, deamplify and even ban them.
The censors are a familiar type.
Overly confident in their ability to discern truth from falsity, good intention from bad intention, the instinct of these hall-monitor types is to complain to the teacher.
Such an approach might work in middle school, and a good number of elite universities, but it is anathema to freedom of expression, democracy and the American way.
These organizations and others are also running their own influence operations, which they often call “fact-checking” when they do it and “disinformation” when their opponents do it.
Past influence operations have involved convincing journalists and social-media executives that accurate information is disinformation, that valid hypotheses are conspiracy theories and that greater self-censorship results in more accurate reporting.
The censors are driven by the fear that the internet and social media platforms empower populist leaders and policies, which they view as destabilizing.
For that reason, in a few short years, federal government officials, agencies and contractors have gone from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and deplatforming ordinary Americans and disfavored public figures.
And the censors have stepped up their efforts to influence and even control conventional news-media organizations.
In 2020, two influential organizations (the Aspen Institute and Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center) sought to undermine the ethic set in 1974 by The Washington Post and New York Times when the two papers published classified Pentagon documents, even though they were stolen.
The censors frequently justify their demands as preventing real-world harm, but have defined “harm” so broadly that they have justified Facebook censoring accurate information about COVID vaccines, for example, to prevent “vaccine hesitancy.”
And, increasingly, the censors say their goal is to restrict information that “delegitimizes” governmental, national-security and industrial organizations — a mandate so sweeping that it could easily be used to censor criticism of elected leaders.
Congress should first take immediate action to cut off funding to the censors and investigate their activities.
But it is also incumbent upon the American people to wake up to the threat of perhaps the most un-American thing in the world, government censorship.
“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” Eisenhower noted, “can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Adapted from journalist Michael Shellengberger’s March 9 testimony before the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
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