US military contractor Pablo Breuer (left), UK defense researcher Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp (center),
and Chris Krebs, former director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (DHS-CISA)

By Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi
Public.substack.com

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. They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL, that 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 (DHS).

The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the “anti-disinformation” sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex.

RealClearInvestigations.com

In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool. 

In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.

IndependentSentinal.com

The executive director of FFO Freedom, Mike Benz, explains in this clip how The US government decided in 2016 to end free speech on the Internet.

Why 2016 was the birth of the censorship industry.

- The State Dept lost 3 elections in a row
- They were all Internet elections
- The "Rules Based Order" struck back
- Military overtook civilian control of media

w/ @MartyBent: https://t.co/yA7xnWdSQ0 pic.twitter.com/1FDUqLfJNm

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) November 14, 2023

Have you heard of NewsGuard? Its mission is to “counter misinformation on behalf of readers, brands, and democracies.” In other words, it “guards” the news by telling you what you can and cannot trust. Of course, this begs the question: can you trust NewGuard?

RealClearPolitics.com

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.