The Dems' censorship agenda

 National Review:

Michael Shellenberger’s first brush with social-media censorship came in 2020 when he was censored by Facebook for sharing accurate information about climate change.

In the years since, Shellenberger has reported extensively on what he calls the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a network of government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and social-media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials for holding disfavored views.

Shellenberger was “shocked” by the internal Twitter documents that Elon Musk shared with him and a handful of other independent journalists, including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. The documents, which served as the basis for their Twitter Files reporting series, revealed examples of U.S. intelligence and security organizations, including the Department of Defense, working with the platform to censor information.

“I sort of knew that was happening, but I think I was shocked to see the involvement of so many government agencies,” he said in an interview with National Review.

Among the most egregious examples: White House officials demanding that Facebook censor accurate information on vaccine side effects, the swift censorship of the Covid-19 lab-leak origin theory, and efforts to restrict users from sharing the New York Post‘s reporting on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, including in direct messages to other users.

Shellenberger recently testified before the House subcommittee investigating the weaponization of the federal government and said his most recent reporting has revealed that its “scope, power and lawbreaking” are even worse than he first realized.

Late last month, Shellenberger published a batch of internal files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League showing U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to “both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American people.”

The whistleblower who gave Shellenberger and his colleagues the CTIL Files said its leader, a former British intelligence analyst, was “in the room at the Obama White House in 2017” when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to “stop a repeat of 2016.”

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role,” Shellenberger testified.

CISA created the election integrity partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory and other U.S. government contractors, emails show.

EIP urged Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to censor posts and reported a 75 percent response rate from the platforms. Thirty-five percent of URLS they reported were censored.

Shellenberger said social-media platforms and government agencies are “justifying censorship of accurate information in order to prevent people from coming to conclusions that they think are the wrong conclusions.”
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Censorship is not that unusual during war, but this looks like more of a war against the truth.  They were censoring truthful information about COVID-19 and the pandemic.  This is particularly dangerous because doing so makes it harder to correct the situation.  They were not only censoring information about the origin of COVID-19 but also the efficacy of the vaccine that was supposed to prevent the disease.   My wife and I along with many other Americans who got vaccinated against the disease still came down with Covid-19.