by Steven Richards
As the 2024 election fast approaches, a former State Department official turned free speech advocate told Just the News that the entrenched censorship regime created to police disinformation and misinformation along ideological lines will take considerable work to reverse.
“The fact is, is the infrastructure will mature to a point where it’s it’s already going to take 10 years of solid, concerted effort to unwind the past eight years of infrastructure, of money, networks of influence, networks of partnerships that have all been established,” Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online Mike Benz said on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show last Monday.
Benz warning comes as the censorship industry has found itself of the defensive recently after scrutiny ramped up on efforts to police nebulously-defined mis- and disinformation online. But, he says, recent victories such as Elon Musk’s efforts to end government-induced censorship on his social media platform are only the beginning of the work that needs to be done.
Recent Biden Administration actions show that the apparatus constructed to control disinformation has not been deterred by recent setbacks and continues to contact U.S. social media companies to police information as the election approaches, Just the News recently reported.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and owner of Meta which owns Facebook and Instagram, recently admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden Administration “pressured” his team for months in 2021 to censor “certain COVID-19 content” and expressed regret over how his platform censored the Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead up to the 2020 election.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
But, Benz says there is another episode Zuckerberg did not mention which may provide a blueprint for how the industry may try to censor content it deems mis- or disinformation in the upcoming election.
“And what he didn’t even mention, but which is extremely important to our conversation, is [the Department of Homeland Security] threatened him as well for censoring all criticism of mail-in ballots,” Benz said.
According to an analysis from his organization, the Foundation For Freedom (FFO), the Election Integrity Partnership, a private entity designed to be the government’s arm of information policing, pressured social media companies ahead of the 2020 election on narratives spreading on their platforms casting doubt on mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and fraud.
After this pressure, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be implementing a new policy targeting skepticism about mail-in ballots. Specifically, the platform said it would remove posts with “clear misinformation.”
“I think it’s important that we start preparing people now,” founder Mark Zuckerberg told CBS’ “This Morning” at the time. “There’s nothing illegitimate about taking a few extra days, or even weeks, in order to make sure that all the votes get counted. In fact, it would be illegitimate if we didn’t make sure that all of the valid votes were counted.”
The same day that Zuckerberg announced this policy, the Election Integrity Partnership began its partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, an FFO report noted.
In the U.S. the Biden Administration has shown no signs of slowing down its efforts despite Zuckerberg’s reversal and apology. The administration recently appointed a new director of the White House Office of Digital Strategy, a nerve center for censorship activities, Just the News previously reported. Andy Volosky, the new official, is an outspoken censorship advocate and praised social platforms’ efforts to block Donald Trump’s accounts.
Supporters of the Biden-Harris administration in this regard are not giving up the near-monopoly they have obtained through political pressure, boycotts and collusion. On September 1, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, a long-time proponent of censorship, penned an Op/Ed for The Guardian, calling on people to boycott Tesla and X and added, “Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.”
Benz said there is another effort by the Biden Administration to spread its censorship activities abroad and may be a warning for things to come in America.
“So in terms of 2024 their main battering ram right now is coming from two sources. One is the pursuit of global censorship laws, and this is what the State Department is doing,” Benz said.
Indeed, the American administration has been joined by Canada, the European Union, and Brazil in efforts to reign in purported disinformation.
In July, European Union Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton threatened to impose fines and “require significant changes” of Elon Musk’s X platform over alleged disinformation on the site. Then, ahead of Musk’s widely-anticipated interview of Donald Trump on the platform in August, Breton warned the owner in a public letter not to spread “harmful content” and reminded X of the “formal proceedings already ongoing against” the company.
Canada also recently expanded its disinformation policing apparatus. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plan to set up a a Digital Safety Commission, Ombudsperson and Office to enforce the proposed Online Harms Act—which has been criticized by those who say the law would criminalize viewpoints.
The Brazilian Supreme Court Friday ruled to make X unavailable in the country, the climax to a long-running legal battle over the platform’s refusal to police disinformation according to the court’s request. Musk previously said that X would cease operating in the country over the court’s “censorship orders.”
Justice Alexandre de Moraes ruled that internet providers would have five days to remove the block the X app and that he would impose daily fines of $8,900 on users using a Virtual Private Network to access the platform. The platform had previously shut down accounts affiliated with former conservative Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro before Musk took over the platform.
Benz believes the free speech vs. censorship issue is on the ballot in 2024 because of the entrenched efforts to control disinformation. “There’s a limited time window to be able to do the necessary action to shut this off, and part of that is going to require, at some point, control over the executive agencies,” he said.
“There’s only so much Congress can do now—-they’re not doing it, which is a whole other story. But you know, what can be done is not being done. And now, some of it has been some of it and some has been very effective, but there’s a five alarm fire right now. And you know, Congress is on vacation. I don’t know how you can take a day off in a moment like this great,” Benz added.
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Steven Richards is an investigative reporter at Just the News.
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