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Free Speech Advocate Takes Aim at This Fascist Move by Biden Admin

Former State Department official and free speech advocate Mike Benz exposed the nefarious agenda behind the legal assault that the Biden administration is waging against Elon Musk. Benz talked about the censorship industry’s ongoing war with Elon Musk in a June 6 interview on TNT Radio. During the interview, Benz addressed the long train of legal suits that President Joe Biden’s administration has brought against Musk’s companies. He characterized the suits as retribution for Musk implementing free speech policies on X (formerly Twitter). Benz even went so far as to say that the suits were entirely motivated by politics and that they were of a similar nature to the charges brought against President Donald Trump.  “[T]he Biden administration is doing the same thing to Elon in a more diversified albeit smaller scale you could say,” said Benz, comparing Musk’s lawsuits to Trump’s.  Benz went on to list the various government entities coming after Musk. “I think there’s something like seven different regulatory agencies, none of whom were troubling Musk before he acquired Twitter, that have all descended like a pack of vultures trying to feast on the Elon empire carcass, and in order, I think, to twist and capacity-cripple his operations in order to make him more pliable to negotiations around reinstalling censorship on the platform,” Benz said. Benz explained that it was a common tactic of the censorship industry to use coercion in order to achieve its aims. 20 mins of rock ‘em sock ‘em fire on censorship industry origins & updates, media hit I did today👇 https://t.co/rRwzezCuk5 — Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) June 6, 2024 “I think they understand how leverage works. I know they do because they talk about this” Benz said. “ You have to raise the cost of saying ‘no’ in order to make people more agreeable.” Benz also explained that Musk’s commitment to free speech was surprising to the government affiliated censors. He contrasted Musk’s behavior with other tech CEOs who were “running their mouth about how much they believe in free speech” while giving in to pressures to censor. “But then as soon as the bayonets come for them, as soon as the advertiser boycotts show up, as soon as the government threats show up, as soon as the bottom line starts tanking, they become ‘reasonable’ to changing their terms of service,” said Benz.   Other critics have also taken aim at the Biden administration’s targeting of Musk. Brendan Carr, Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, penned a letter of dissent responding to his own agency’s decision to deny an $885 million award to Musk’s Starlink on December 9, 2023.  Carr’s letter noted that the FCC’s decision appeared to be part of a coordinated lawfare waged in tandem with other agencies to target Elon Musk as “Progressive Enemy No.1.” Carr also quoted Joe Biden to indicate that he was the architect of this legal harassment. During a November 9, 2022 press conference, Biden expressed that “there’s a lot of ways” for the government to look into Elon Musk.  “There certainly are,” wrote Carr. “The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Disgraced Disinformation Czar Nina Jankowicz Betrays Marxist Agenda Is a Driver of ‘Disinformation Studies’

Nina “Mary Poppins” Jankowicz, the would-be director of the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, let the cat out of the bag, exposing disinformation studies as a ploy to promote Marxism. The Mary Poppins of disinformation appeared at a panel hosted by The 19th, a Marxist Critical Theory advocacy non-profit, on May 22. The subject of the panel was “Disinformation, Voter Registration, & Obstacles in Democracy.” Jankowicz’s comments during the panel were riddled with references to radical Critical Theory, a Marxist theory that sees all of society in terms of an eternal struggle between the marginalized and a group of entrenched privileged oppressors. She also revealed that her approach to “disinformation studies” is colored by these ideas. “[I]n addition to studying kind of the political side of disinformation, I also study gendered and sexualized disinformation,” said Jankowicz. Jankowicz claimed that people with protected intersectional identities were more likely to be targeted by disinformation campaigns. “We also found that if you were a person of intersectional identity–so if you happen to be a woman and gay or a woman who was black, et cetera–you were subjected to more compounded and vitriolic abuse,” said Jankowicz. “There are plenty of studies that also point to the fact that women who are running for office receive more vitriolic abuse and frankly, gender disinformation narratives, than the men they’re running against.” As an example of what constitutes a “gender disinformation narrative,” Jankowicz referred to common criticisms of Vice President Kamala Harris and her documented relationships with influential political characters like former California Speaker of the State Assembly Willie Brown. Jankowicz also claimed that negative criticism of female politicians was somehow part of a sinister plot to bar females from public life. “And the idea of gendered misinformation is to raise the cost of participation for women and marginalized communities,” Jankowicz said. “It is to keep us out of public life. Often it frequently targets our families.” Jankowicz also touted the claim that men are somehow insulated from scurrilous gossip in a way that women are not. “And frankly, you know, if you start a sexual rumor about a man, that tends to be kind of, oh, a chip off the old block, you know, a nice compliment for him,” Jankowicz said. “If you do the same thing about a woman, it can destroy her career. And we’ve seen that time and time again. These things haven’t gone away.” Jankowicz has been a major driver of censorship and conversations justifying censorship in the United States. For instance, last week Jancowicz was named in journalist Michael Shellenberger’s latest Twitter Files. Shellenberger revealed that Jankowicz was working with an anti-disinformation consulting firm, Alethea, that was advising Twitter on how to more effectively censor dissident voices. In addition, Jankowicz runs the American Sunlight Project, another pro-censorship advocacy organization.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Dorsey Spills on Twitter’s ‘Problematic’ Collusion with Gov’t Censors

Jack Dorsey, the founder and former CEO of Twitter (now X), admitted that Twitter’s relationship with the government was (and potentially still is) “problematic.”  Mike Solana, editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, sat down for an interview with Dorsey, and the pair discussed some of the problems that arise from governments worldwide attempting to censor speech on social media. Since the release of the Twitter Files, there has been much scrutiny surrounding the relationship between Big Tech and the Federal Government. Dorsey called the collusion between these entities “problematic.” However, he also claimed, unbeknownst to the public, that there was some pushback from Twitter employees to the government’s censorship instructions. “I also don't think the people who got called out in the Twitter Files get enough credit for pushing back on government requests,” Dorsey said. “The U.S. is certainly one of them.” The U.S. government was by no means the only government hounding Twitter and now X to censor.    According to Dorsey, Twitter (now X) has traditionally complied with government censorship requests to some extent. However, he alleged that Musk is more willing to ban accounts at the request of foreign governments.  There are certain loopholes, however.  “You can take the content down within the country, but it's still available to the rest of the world,” said Dorsey. “But if someone in that country has a VPN, they can still see it. And I think governments are wise to this now, so today they're asking to take content down in every single market.”  Dorsey cited the recently relevant example of Australia. “But what you saw with Australia recently, is the prime minister asked Twitter and Elon to take some content down everywhere, instead of just within the Australian market,” Dorsey said. “I think you'll see more and more of that stuff.” When asked if there’s a chance social media companies will survive this effort, Dorsey said, “There’s absolutely no way.” He added, “You’ll have phases, but that doesn’t exist forever. Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised. Or something could happen to him, and then what happens to the whole platform?” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Report: DHS Preparing to ‘Protect’ Democracy Ahead of 2024… Sounds Familiar?

USA Today once again raised the specter of election interference to justify the Department of Homeland Security’s latest foray into election meddling in its latest sycophantic interview. On May 8, USA Today’s Josh Meyer released a new “exclusive” interview with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The theme of the interview was how DHS was dealing with an “unprecedented array of election threats.”  He opined, “The right to vote and the integrity of the right to vote – and therefore of the election itself – is a fundamental element of our democracy.” Mayorkas was careful to stress, of course, that the effort was wholly “nonpartisan,” a label that was also applied to the anti-constitutional Disinformation Governance Board (DGB). “This is a nonpartisan effort,” he claimed. “And, in fact, all our efforts across this department are nonpartisan.” Despite Mayorkas’s assertions of nonpartisanship, the USA Today piece paints the initiative as primarily a response to anti-democratic forces on the right.  “Democrats also fear violence from those who would reject election results showing Joe Biden being reelected,” the leftist newspaper reported. Mayorkas stressed that DHS would use its power to combat the “threat of disinformation,” just like the short-lived DGB, infamously known as the Ministry of Truth. According to USA Today, the coordination between the DHS and local election officials has been run out of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). “We’re providing best-practice security guidance to these stakeholders, and that’s where we unpack threats, but also and most importantly provide them with recommendations for what they can actually do to mitigate those threats,” said Cait Conley, senior advisor to CISA director Jen Easterly and leader of the initiative. In order to fight these “threats,” characterized by USA Today as a result of “unsubstantiated claims of election fraud,” CISA launched Protect24, a new website that proliferates materials for local and state election officials. The website has several pages related to “disinformation actors.” One page, titled “Tactics of Disinformation,” identifies common “tactics” used by supposed malactors. “Disinformation actors capitalize on conspiracy theories by generating disinformation narratives that align with the conspiracy theory worldview,” the brochure reads.  The brochure also targets “alternative platforms,” that is, platforms that don’t censor their user base, as tools of subversive elements. “Disinformation actors may seek to take advantage of platforms with fewer user protections, less stringent content moderation policies, and fewer controls to detect and remove inauthentic content and accounts than other social media platforms,” the brochure says. Another page, titled “Election Security Rumor vs. Reality,” tries to debunk concerns around expanded voting procedures like mail-in-balloting and unsupervised ballot drop boxes. Before the 2020 election, CISA also used its power to quash skepticism regarding voting practices such as universal mail-in-ballots. CISA worked through the Election Integrity Partnership, run out of Stanford Internet Observatory, to nudge social media companies to censor accounts that questioned election procedures.  According to Mike Benz, founder of Freedom for Freedom Online, the EIP flagged 27 million tweets to be deleted by social media companies and used DHS infrastructure to do so.  In leaked emails, Alex Stamos, the leader of SIO, described the effort as a way for the federal government to coordinate censorship. “The EIP’s true purpose was to act as a censorship conduit for the federal government,” wrote Stamos in a Nov. 2020 email. In another email to the social media app Nextdoor, Stamos described EIP as “a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for us to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms if necessary.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable

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Australian Federal Judge Weighs in Favor of Free Speech with This Move

An Australian federal judge has swooped in to defend free speech by siding with Elon Musk in the tech billionaire’s latest spat with Australia’s Ministry of Truth. On May 13, Federal Court Justice Geoffrey Kennett blocked the application for the extension of an injunction issued by Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant. The injunction ordered X to censor a video depicting an Australian Bishop being stabbed while delivering Mass in Sydney.  It is expected that the Justice will issue an explanatory statement later in the day, reported SkyNews Australia. Musk responded to news of the ruling by re-expressing his continued commitment to the cause of free speech globally. “Not trying to win anything,” Musk posted on X. “I just don’t think we should be suppressing Australia’s rights to free speech.” Grant issued the injunction on April 16 ordering X to suppress the video even for users outside of the United States. She also threatened the company with a daily fine of $785,000 AUD if it didn’t comply with the order.  X’s Global Government Affairs Team challenged Grant’s authority, citing her lack of jurisdiction over non-Australian users. X’s lawyers also argued before the Justice that the video in question was not overly graphic and, contrary to the Australian Government’s characterization, did not glorify violence or terrorism. Related: WATCH: Bishop’s Powerful Response to Censorship Demands of Stabbing Video On April 28, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, the victim of the vicious stabbing, made a public statement in favor of free speech as a cornerstone of Western civilization and a fundamental natural right.  Musk has faced a lot of pushback and even legal threats for his bold stance in favor of free speech. Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie called for Elon Musk’s arrest. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese singled out X as being so-called uncooperative with the Australian government’s censorship initiatives and claimed that Musk was going against the will of Australians. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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UnHerd, Shellenberger Unmask Censorship Industrial Complex, Reveal Sinister Origins

Journalist/author Michael Shellenberger joined forces with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers and Tablet Magazine Senior Writer Jacob Siegel to discuss the inner workings of censorship in the West. On Thursday, UnHerd released an interview featuring the three men, who discussed the complex web of NGOs and state agencies that make up the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” the origins of the industry and the techniques it uses, as well as the underlying ideology driving the players behind it.    Shellenberger did not hold back in his criticism of these entities, describing their mission as driven primarily by a sense of bigotry and religious zeal.    “But the other one is in this mania to — which I really think is driven by intolerance and dogmatism — censor and disparage different voices, dissident voices, they end up widening the circle too broad,” Shellenberger said. “So you end up censoring people for things that are factually true.” Shellenberger concluded that the drive for “misinformation” really came into being as a way to counter undesirable political ideologies that saw a resurgence in 2016, notably with the election of Donald Trump.  “But when you see all these people working together over time, you get a much clearer picture that this is what we would consider counter-populism,” Shellenberger observed. “This was clearly [an] orchestrated event after the revolutions of 2016 to fight against populism.” According to Sayers, the convoluted nature of the censorship industry makes it very difficult to avoid and leads companies and online advertisers to inadvertently support censorship, such as with the Global Disinformation Index, a non-profit that creates advertising blacklists designed to starve “harmful” news sources and dissident voices of ad revenue. Related: Not So Fast: Biden Signs NDAA Calling Out NewsGuard … Then Issues Disclaimer “I actually corresponded with Elon Musk about it,” Sayers said. “Twitter is apparently using GDI via something called ‘Integral Ad Services,’ which is another one of these ad buyer platforms, and now he was on Twitter saying, ‘GDI should be shut down and the miscreants should be published.’ So you’ve got this weird situation where the heads of these companies don’t even understand the beast that is happening further down.” GDI was exposed last month by UnHerd for placing the outlet on a “dynamic exclusion list” of news sources to be boycotted by advertisers.  GDI’s 2022 report featured a list of “the ten riskiest” online news outlets that exclusively included right-leaning and libertarian news outlets while “the ten lowest-risk” list was filled exclusively with hyper-partisan leftist outlets like Buzzfeed and NPR. According to UnHerd, the GDI is funded by many governments including the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (until 2023), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and Disinfo Cloud, a body created and funded by the U.S. State Department. You May Also Like: A Defiant State Department Threatens to Obstruct Censorship Investigation Responding to external pressures raised by UnHerd’s reporting, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron sent a letter on May 8 to Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch declaring that the UK government will no longer fund the GDI. Cameron wrote, “The FCDO has not funded GDI since 2023, and there are no current plans to do so.”  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable

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Rumble CEO Reacts to Being Banned in Russia, Unveils Pressures against Rumble to Censor

Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski reacted to Rumble being banned from Russia over its adamant free speech stance. On May 7, Pavlovski addressed an X Spaces hosted by social media personality Mario Nawfal. During the Spaces, Pavlovski was asked to explain why his platform was banned from Russia as well as his company’s experiences with other countries demanding censorship. Strikingly, Rumble has been criticized in the past for platforming Russian media and was even forced to leave France after that country demanded that the platform ban Russian news programs.  Similar: Russia Blocks Video Platform for Refusing Censorship “One thing that’s really striking to me right now is if you guys remember back … two years ago, we were banned, well, we left France, they threatened to shut us off at the local level, so we decided to make the decision to leave the country entirely,” Pavlovski said. “And we did it because they wanted us to shut down Russian, news sources that come from Russia, so we denied that request, and we ended up leaving France. And every single paper in the United States and Canada covered how we were allowing Russian news sources on Rumble, and we were, they called me every name in the book.” https://t.co/rgqHcq5wSj — Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 7, 2024 Pavlovski pointed out the bitter irony that Rumble had previously been banned for platforming Russian voices and that the legacy media, previously so critical of Rumble for being “pro-Russia,” is now conspicuously silent on Rumble being banned. “It might have happened a month ago, but we confirmed that Russia has put Rumble on a blocked list, and we are completely inaccessible within  Russia entirely,” Pavlovski explained. “And not a single news source, not a single news source that covered us prior, what we did in France, is covering this situation.” Pavlovski revealed that Rumble was banned after it refused to comply with censorship orders from the Russian government. He mentioned that one of the accounts was banned over a marijuana related issue. “Another account seemed to be some conspiracy channel, but I’m not sure because it was in a different language … and the other channel seemed to be an Arabic channel that was political in the Arabic language,” Pavlovski added. “Those were the types of channels that they wanted us to remove, and we didn’t see that they violated any of our terms of service, so we ignored the orders, and then they shut us off at the IP level.” Pavlovski was also asked if he received similar requests from Western governments. While he denied receiving any direct orders, Pavlovski pointed out that censorship in the West is conducted using an entirely different model from traditionally autocratic countries. “The way the U.S. market tries to impose censorship is by using media organizations to try to do hit jobs on your company,” Pavlovski said. “So they’ll bring up this person or that person or this piece of content, and they’ll write up a whole article about one video that they found on your platform out of millions, so the way censorship moves in America is through using media organizations. The media organizations are the entities that push censorship across all the Big Tech platforms.” He added that “the Big Tech platforms are scared shitless of the media organizations, and that’s what gets them to buckle.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Peterson, Elon Musk Have Choice Words About ‘Most Orwellian’ Law

Clinical psychologist and podcast host Jordan B. Peterson and X owner Elon Musk were flabbergasted by Canada’s latest infringement on civil liberties, anti-hate speech bill C-63. On May 7, Musk and Peterson responded to Canada's proposed “hate” speech bill. The bill, called. “Online Harms Bill C-63,” would implement fines of up to $50,000 on individuals who post “content that foments hatred” or “that, given the context in which it is communicated, is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of such a prohibited ground.”  Musk initially responded to an X post by user Camus, who pointed out that C-63 would enable ex post facto fines for “hate speech” on social media. “This sounds insane if accurate!” wrote Musk. This sounds insane if accurate!@CommunityNotes, please check https://t.co/RB1Ea0upTk — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2024 Jordan Peterson seconded Musk’s sentiments and expressed his alarm over the bill, saying it was reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Mr. Musk@elonmusk It's much much worse than you have been informed: plans to shackle Canadians electronically if accusers fear a "hate crime" might (might) be committed. It's the most Orwellian piece of legislation ever promoted in the West:https://t.co/oSqX3pxiBB — Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) May 7, 2024 “It’s much much worse than you have been informed: plans to shackle Canadians electronically if accusers fear a ‘hate crime’ might (might) be committed,” Peterson posted at Musk. “It’s the most Orwellian piece of legislation ever promoted in the West:” Peterson has previously been very critical of the new bill and even dedicated a nearly two-hour interview with TRIGGERnometry host Konstantin Kisin and Canadian lawyer Bruce Pardy to point out why it is dangerous. “It is the most totalitarian Western bill I’ve ever seen,” said Peterson during the April 22 interview.  C-63 would create a new Digital Safety Commission to maintain compliance with the law by “social media operators” and to work with said companies to develop new regulations that would define government-sanctioned speech.   The bill would mandate that social media operators allow users to flag content as harmful. It would also require operators to designate a “resource person” to process claims against harmful content and “direct users to internal and external resources to address their concerns” including “the [Digital Safety] Commission or a law enforcement agency.” Under the bill, social media companies must create “digital safety plans” to be shared with the Digital Safety Commission. Social media operators that refuse to comply or hinder the Commission would be subject to heavy fines of “not more than 8% of the operator’s gross global revenue or $25 million, whichever is greater…” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable