Friends —Michael Shellenberger says the Department of Homeland Security is building a censorship industrial complex:
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 9, 2023
"It's not a slippery slope. It's an immediate leap into a terrifying mechanism that we only see in totalitarian societies."@ShellenbergerMD pic.twitter.com/rWp9JzBiaZ
Over the last three months, a small group of independent journalists, including Leighton and I, have, thanks to the Twitter Files, exposed the ways in which social media platforms have, under pressure from U.S. government agencies, censored ordinary Americans and spread disinformation.
Today, at 10 am ET, journalist Matt Taibbi and I will testify before Congress and reveal the existence of a secret censorship-industrial complex in the United States.
Our findings are shocking. A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it.
We and others have already reported on some of the actions of this complex, including its disinformation campaigns. But the extent of its censorship was unknown to us until very recently. And, as importantly, we now understand the ways in which this complex simultaneously spreads disinformation and demands censorship.