Know Thy Enemy: Top 50 Players of the Censorship-Industrial Complex Revealed
An in-depth report by journalist Matt Taibbi reveals the extent of a bureaucracy known as the Censorship Industrial Complex, a new system of control in the domain of “hybrid warfare.”
Taibbi is one of the main publishers of the Twitter Files, which revealed how Twitter worked with a constellation of government, corporate, journalistic, and NGO entities to control narratives and information.
In a new report, Taibbi lists in great detail the Top 50 organizations that comprise the Censorship-Industrial Complex (CIC), which include intelligence agencies, top globalist institutions, corporations, far-left think tanks, and liberal “fact-checkers.”
Specifically, the CIC is categorized into seven groups: Government entities, Foundations, Big Tech, For-Profit disinformation companies, Academic Initiatives, Think Tanks, “Fact-Checkers,” and Non-Governmental Organizations.
Taibbi claimed the groundwork for the CIC was laid during the years-long Russia collusion hoax weaponized by the Deep State to destroy Donald Trump.
“This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself,” he wrote.
“What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping ‘mis-, dis-, and malinformation,’ while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with ‘information warfare’ missions.”
He went on to say the social media “de-platforming” of Infowars founder Alex Jones in 2018 was just the tip of the iceberg of the CIC system.
While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over “de-platforming” incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, “spammy” ads, “junk” news, and the sharing of work from “disinformation agents” like Jones aren’t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called “hybrid warfare.”
Taibbi noted the CIC bills itself as a defense sector arm working for the good of the nation, but in reality it’s a “messaging system” meant to control the U.S. population.
The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.
Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.
He pointed out that these censorship and information control groups are fundamentally destroying democracy using “hybrid warfare” techniques to control the flow of information.
Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of “balance” between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that “shared vocabulary” to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that “vocabulary,” which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.”
Taibbi said his list tries to answer “a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology” for “reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition” of the CIC.
