The FBI visited my house today for free speech acts they knew were not crimes.

You can see the shame on their faces.

This is the Democratic regime manifest.

You might still think about Eric Schmidt as a “(big) tech guy” and businessman, but his passion for (geo)politics was always evident, even while he served as Google’s CEO.

These days, Schmidt is the chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a think tank that would like to position itself as a reference point to a military alliance, NATO, and get it to “monitor disinformation in real-time.”

SCSP’s ambition is no less than to help craft new national security strategies, always with an eye on the alleged attempts to increase disinformation (here AI is to blame) – but also ways to combat that, and here, SCSP says (the US) must strengthen its “AI competitiveness.”

The goal is to “win” what’s referred to as the techno-economic competition by 2030 – there’s that deadline, favored by many a controversial globalist initiative.

Here, the group would like NATO and its members to fight against what is described as AI disinformation, that new chapter in information warfare.

Schm

America First Legal (AFL) has disclosed documents obtained through a lawsuit against the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ), accusing them of concealing federal records that detail government-sponsored censorship by the Biden-Harris administration before the 2022 midterm elections.

The documents revealed that the FBI’s National Election Command Post (NECP) had compiled lists of social media accounts posting what they considered “misinformation,” extending from New York to San Francisco. This included the Right Side Broadcasting Network, cited by Matt Taibbi as targeted for “additional action” by the FBI.

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Elon Musk has suggested that the European Union attempted to coerce him with an underhanded deal to secretly implement censorship within his platform. Musk further added that EU-designed negotiations were accepted by other online platforms. However, he outrightly rejected the concealed deal.

On Friday, the EU made strides in evidencing the potency of its fresh Digital Services Act (DSA) by launching an attack on X, which is owned by Musk.

The group accused X of being in violation of specific EU regulations and threatened the platform with punitive fines. In response to this, Musk was quick to counter-attack by criticizing the DSA as a “canned misinformation” source. He further revealed that the EU had solicited a clandestine deal with him for entering into censorship pertaining to the EU’s directives.

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The Japanese chair of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has come out with a report calling for the US and Japan to team up on “combating disinformation.”

Christopher B. Johnstone also wants the two countries to engage in several censorship techniques, such as removing content (“false narratives” – regular censorship) but also a considerably more dystopian one known as “prebunking.”

That would be, suppressing narratives by revealing them as “misinformation” before they become public, thus eroding the very perception of their trustworthiness, while equating this as introducing “mental antibodies” into a population, and other outlandish language has been used in the past to justify the tactic.

CSIS mentions in a press release announcing the report that Johnstone had a meeting with Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director of Public Diplomacy Strategy Division

Canada’s government has decided to spend some $146.6 million (CAD 200 million) and employ, full-time, 330 more people to be able to implement the Online Harms Act (Bill C-63).

That is the monetary cost of bureaucratic red tape necessary to make this bill, which has moved for a second reading in Canada’s House of Commons, eventually happen.

At the same time, the cost to the country’s democracy could be immeasurable – given some of this sweeping censorship legislation’s more draconian provisions, primarily focused on what the authorities choose to consider to be “hate speech.”

Some of those provisions could land people under house arrest, and have their internet access cut simply for “fear” they could, going forward, commit “hat

A new report from the House Judiciary Committee released on Wednesday, and confirming our previous reporting, casts the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) under scrutiny, suggesting potential violations of federal antitrust laws due to its outsized influence in the advertising sector.

We obtained a copy of the report for you here.

Established in 2019 by Rob Rakowitz and the World Federation of Advertisers, GARM has been accused of leveraging this influence to systematically restrict certain viewpoints online and sideline platforms advocating divergent views.

The organization, initially conceived to manage the surge of free speech online, is reported to coordinate

Another week, another controversy involving the conduct of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

Grant’s job officially is to direct efforts against misinformation and other online harms – but her actions have earned her the pejorative “titles” of the country’s “chief censor” and “censorship czar.”

The latest round of criticism aimed Grant’s way has to do with her role around last year’s failed Indigenous Voice referendum, when, according to newly unearthed documents (the result of the Institute of Public Affairs, IPA, FOIA requests) this official in fact contributed to spreading misinformation, rather than combating it –

Barbara McQuade, who was in 2017 dismissed from her job as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, has in the meantime turned into quite something of a “misinformation warrior.”

Earlier this year McQuade – who in the past also worked as co-chair of the Terrorism and National Security Subcommittee of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee in the Obama Administration – published a book, “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America.”

Now, she herself is attacking the First Amendment as standing in the way of censorship (“content moderation”) and advocating in favor of essentially finding ways to bypass it. Opponents might see this as particularly disheartening, coming from somebody who used to hold such a high judicial office.

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Even the New York Times looks like it’s treading somewhat lightly while publishing articles aimed at dismantling the very concept of the First Amendment.

An opinion piece penned by an Obama and Biden administration adviser, Tim Wu, is therefore labeled as a “guest essay.” But was it the author, or the newspaper, who decided on the title? Because it is quite scandalous.

“The First Amendment is Out of Control” – that’s the title.

Meanwhile, many believe that attacks on this speech-protecting constitutional amendment are what’s actually out of control these days.

Wu takes a somewhat innovative route to argue against free speech: he painstakingly frames it as concern that the universally mistrusted Big Tech might be abusing it, with the latest Supreme Court ruling regarding Texas and Florida laws, (ab)used as an example.

When the government colludes with mi

The EU Council has managed to nestle fighting “disinformation and hate speech” between such issues as the Middle East, Ukraine, and migration – not to mention while at the same time appointing a new set of “apparatchiks,” in the wake of the European Parliament elections.

This proceeds from the Council’s 2024-2029 strategic agenda, adopted on June 27. This document represents a “five-year plan” to guide the bloc’s policy and goals.

Under the heading, “A free and democratic Europe,” the document addresses different ways in which “European values” will be upheld going forward. The Council’s conclusions state that in order to strengthen the EU’s “democratic resilience,” what it decides is disinformation and hate speech will have to be countered.

These categories of speech are infamously arbitrarily defined, even in legislation, and habitually used as a tool of censorship – but

Given how X has gone out of its way to reveal the depth and breadth of online censorship via the Twitter Files, this makes for an awkward reunion: the company has decided to rejoin the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).

It’s a pro-censorship, World Economic Forum-affiliated advertisers’ group, that achieves its objectives through the “brand safety” route (i.e., the censorship “brand” here would be demonetization). And last summer, it was scrutinized by the US Congress.

GARM is one of those outfits whose roots are very entangled (comes in handy when somebody tries to [probe your activities, though](https://web.archive.org/web/20240705113856/htt

Corporate legacy media are trying to keep key social platforms “in check” by running stories about them complying – or being complicit, or compatible with – some of the currently most notorious anti-free speech legislation.

Meta’s Oversight Board is thus said to be working to adhere to the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) – but perhaps not as efficiently as it should.

Yet before any entity can execute censorship, it must be funded, since it all eventually, one way or another, comes down to money. In this case, Meta has apparently been increasingly less enthusiastic about providing that money.

But now, the Board appears to be looking at the DSA as an avenue to get the money, so that “the missi

Correct, in spades. Believers in democracy have always faced those who favor the benefits of autocracy, with the support of autocractic military and police, and, not least legislators and lawyers and other professions regulated by themselves (lawyers and judges) or by the state. Voting by the populace was intended to give final say to to the citizenry but that openness was gradually supplanted by political parties themselves autocractic modeled after the legacy of top down rulers ostensibly blessed by deity or deities with aboriginal autocracy headed by the Top Dog with absolute power. This struggle between the populace and centralized power periodically erupts into revolution but not often, instead coups prevail as autocrats wage internecine combat with one another. The US may be seen as one revolution that succeeded where so many others failed, but then set up an authoritarian government modeled on predecessors, the makers seemingly unable to originate a wholly democratic governance

We now live in a world where “fact-checkers” organize “annual meetings” – one is happening just this week in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

These censorship-overseers for other companies (most notably massive social platforms like Facebook, etc.) have not only converged onto Sarajevo but have issued a “statement” that includes the town’s name.

The Poynter Institute is a major player in this space, and its International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) serves to coordinate censorship for Meta, among others.

It was up to IFCN now to issue the “Sarajevo statement” on behalf of 130 groups in the “fact-checking” business, a burgeoning industry at this point spreading its tentacles to at least 80 countries – that is how many are behind the said statement.

No surprise, these “fact-che

The United Nations has unveiled the latest in a series of censorship initiatives, this one dubbed, the Global Principles for Information Integrity.

Neither the problems nor the solutions, as identified by the principles, are anything new; rather, they sound like regurgitated narratives heard from various nation-states, only this time lent the supposed clout of the UN and its chief, Antonio Guterres.

The topic is, “harm from misinformation and disinformation, and hate speech” – and this is presented with a sense of urgency, calling for immediate action from, once again, the usual group of entities that are supposed to execute censorship: governments, tech companies, media, advertisers, PR firms.

They are at once asked not to use or amplify “disinformation and hate speech” and then also combat it with some tried-and-tested tools: essentially alg

The US Supreme Court has ruled in the hotly-awaited decision for the Murthy v. Missouri case, reinforcing the government's ability to engage with social media companies concerning the removal of speech about COVID-19 and more. This decision reverses the findings of two lower courts that these actions infringe upon First Amendment rights.

The opinion, decided by a 6-3 vote, found that the plaintiffs, lacked the standing to sue the Biden administration. The dissenting opinions came from conservative justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

John Vecchione, Senior Litigation Counsel at [NCLA](https://web.archive.org/web/20240627213819/https://reclaimthenet.org/ncla-as

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a UK think tank that was in 2021 awarded a grant by the US State Department and got involved in censoring Americans, has come up with a “research project” that criticizes YouTube.

The target is the platform’s recommendation algorithms, and, according to ISD – which calls itself an extremism researching non-profit – there is a “pattern of recommending right-leaning and Christian videos.”

According to ISD, this is true even if users had not previously watched this type of content.

YouTube’s recommendation system has long been a thorn in the side of similar liberal-oriented groups and media, as apparently that one segment of the giant site that’s not yet “properly” controlled and censored.

With that in mind, it is no surprise that ISD is now producing a four-part “study” and offering its own “rec

Amazon has been accused of censoring books criticizing vaccines and pharmaceutical practices, following direct pressure from the Biden administration, according to documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Representative Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, disclosed these actions as part of an investigation into what he describes as “unconstitutional government censorship.”

Internal communications from Amazon have surfaced showing the creation of a new category titled “Do Not Promote,” where over 40 titles, including children’s books and scientific critiques, were placed to minimize their exposure.

This move came after criticisms from the Biden administration concerning the prominent placement of sensitive content on Amazon’s platform. Books in this category addressed controversial topics, such as

Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, recently shocked the nation with a proposal reminiscent of social credit systems for the United Kingdom. The plan suggested restricting access to essential modern conveniences, like cars and financial services, for young individuals refusing to participate in National Service.

During a Thursday night national television forum, electoral party heads fielded audience questions on a BBC-hosted program.

Sunak found himself defending a novel electoral promise – the introduction of mandatory national service for British youths if he could retain his seat. Despite bleak poll evaluations and mounting public pressure, Sunak refused to accept the possibility of defeat.

The Prime Minister utilized the case of a volunteer ambulance service to illustrate potential forms of obligated volunteering. Nonetheless, the public’s worry and debates have predominantly revolved around the compulsory military aspect of National Service.

Sunak, however, sidestepped e