The Censorship Industrial Complex: What Are Trump And Musk Trying To Fight?

On 6 November 2023 — exactly one year before the recent US presidential election — an important document was released that completely flew under the radar.

The information within this document provides much-needed context to statements about the “censorship cartel” and exactly what US President-elect Donald Trump means when he says that a “sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people.”

This document will also provide context into whom the others in his team like Elon Musk are referring to when he says “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC” and “Stamos (obviously) runs a propaganda shop”.

Who are these people and entities? Why are they important?

This document by the Committee on the Judiciary and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government - US House of Representatives, titled “THE WEAPONIZATION OF “DISINFORMATION” PSEUDO-EXPERTS AND BUREAUCRATS: HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PARTNERED WITH UNIVERSITIES TO CENSOR AMERICANS’ POLITICAL SPEECH” details the inner workings of the “censorship industrial complex” and how it was used to sway elections, particularly the 2020 US presidential elections.

Even today, most claims of election interference through censorship on social media are called conspiracy theories.

In this article, I will go through what was revealed in the document and how it relates to today’s political discussions. I apologise for the many acronyms but note that this reflects the way the whole operation was obfuscated by layers of agencies.

The document begins by explaining how after the 2016 US presidential election, the left-wing began pushing claims against Donald Trump’s victory, attributing it to a result of foreign “disinformation” campaigns — especially over social media. Using this as an excuse, various “Disinformation” think tanks, government task forces, and university centres were created to prevent this from happening in the future.

It sounds great in theory. However, what the Committee and Select Subcommittee were able to find shows how this same system was weaponised to censor their own citizens.

The US Constitution’s First Amendment in The Bill of Rights states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This limits the government’s role in monitoring and censoring the speech of American citizens, but disinformation researchers outside the government, though often taxpayer-funded, are not strictly bound by these guardrails — presenting a loophole for the censorship-industrial complex.

As a result, an “autonomous” body called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was created in 2020 at the request of The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — a component of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) originally.

This happened unnoticed during the pandemic lockdowns and a few months prior to the elections. Led by academics at Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and working with the DHS and the Global Engagement Center (GEC — a multi-agency entity within the US Department of State), the EIP “provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”

Other institutions involved in the EIP were the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP), Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s investigation revealed that secret “Misinformation” EIP reports which were “accessible only to select parties, including federal agencies, universities, and Big Tech” were only obtained from Stanford University under the threat of Contempt of Congress.

These reports outlined how the government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, and political opinions. However, this pressure always benefitted one side of the political spectrum. Even factual information from Republicans was labelled as “misinformation” while false information by Democrats was largely unreported and untouched.

The reports also revealed that “external stakeholders” including federal agencies and government-funded organisations submitted misinformation reports directly to the EIP. The EIP analysts would then search the internet for additional examples to censor, going across social media platforms and compiling lists which they would send to Big Tech with recommendations on how to censor these posts, including reducing discoverability, suspending an account’s ability to continue tweeting, monitoring retweets, and removing thousands of Americans’ posts.

These agencies and experts try to justify their censorship as a way of combating foreign actors attempting to undermine American elections. Though foreign attempts at election interference are undeniably a real threat, further investigations by the Committee and Select Subcommittee reveal that the EIP’s “election integrity” work was primarily targeting American citizens.

The document includes the following names as examples of people censored:

“President Donald J Trump, Senator Thom Tillis, Speaker Newt Gingrich, Governor Mike Huckabee, Congressman Thomas Massie, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Newsmax, The Babylon Bee, Sean Hannity, Mollie Hemingway, Harmeet Dhillon, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Jack Posobiec, Tom Fitton, James O’Keefe, Benny Johnson, Michelle Malkin, Sean Davis, Dave Rubin, Paul Sperry, Tracy Beanz, Chanel Rion, an untold number of everyday Americans of all political affiliations” and the content material that was censored was “True information, Jokes and satire, Political opinions.”

Unsurprisingly, the EIP wasn’t the CISA’s first attempt at censorship.

Though formed less than two years before the EIP, CISA was “directly or indirectly involved with the operation or consideration of at least three other 'misinformation' reporting channels" — Switchboarding, EI-ISAC, and a 'Misinformation Reporting Portal.'

CISA was actually formed during the first Trump administration. However, as he explained in his interview with Joe Rogan (JRE #2219), since he was new to the DC ecosystem, fresh out of the private sector, he trusted the system and as a result was blindsided by the deep state operatives around him.

1. ‘Switchboarding’ is the federal government’s ‘practice of referring requests for the removal of content on social media from state and local election officials to the relevant platforms.’ Documents obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee show that the CISA knew the serious legal and constitutional concerns that were implicated by switchboarding but this didn’t stop anything.

In fact, switchboarding had been used prior to the creation of CISA. “Former CISA Director Christopher Krebs testified in a transcribed interview with the Committee and Select Subcommittee that CISA’s predecessor, the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), engaged in switchboarding prior to the creation of CISA” and continued to be used till even after the 2020 election.

In each email from CISA to the social media companies, they would include a disclaimer at the end. Over time, this disclaimer was changed and fine-tuned bit by bit to make it clear to the lawyers of the social media companies that the DHS (and eventually specifically CISA) “affirms that it neither has nor seeks the ability to remove what information is made available on social media platforms” and “will not take any action, favorable or unfavorable, toward social media companies based on decisions about how or whether to use this information” but left open the possibility that “information may also be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies,” including agencies like the FBI who wouldn’t be bound by any such statements and may choose to act as they see fit.

In other words, it was a threat. This was amplified by the fact the FBI would inform the social media companies that CISA had provided them with a “misinformation” report.

According to CISA personnel involved in switchboarding, it’s a resource-intensive process. The fact that it went on so long despite the obvious legal and constitutional issues is a clear signal of its effectiveness.

Despite all the evidence, in 2023, DHS Secretary Mayorkas testified to the House Committee that “what it amounted to was serving as an intermediary between election officials and social media companies; we were not making a judgment.”

2. The Center for Internet Security (CIS) — a non-profit organisation based in New York — was established in partnership with CISA. The Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC) — operated by the CIS — is “an information-sharing channel used by state and local election officials to report alleged “mis- and disinformation” to social media platforms.”

Similar to switchboarding, the EI-ISAC acted as an intermediary (proxy) for election officials and social media companies and offered a more centralised reporting platform for alleged misinformation and it was widely used.

The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s document states that “During the 2018 midterm election cycle, all fifty states were participating in the EI-ISAC. Moreover, according to witness testimony to the Committee and Select Subcommittee, EI-ISAC employees are considered CIS employees.”

3. Despite switchboaridng and the EI-ISAC, CIS with the support of CISA had reached out to the FBI with an email in January 2020 which stated “CIS is working with DHS on a misinformation reporting portal. The intent is to build a web portal to manage the reporting of election infrastructure misinformation from local and state election officials to social media platforms. We are working with our partners at the National Association of Secretaries of States (NASS), the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), and DHS to vet this idea. We are currently building a prototype and will have something to show by the first week of February.”

The document has many such emails showing discussions and gradual development of a “Misinformation Reporting Portal” not only between the CIS, CISA, FBI and other agencies but also discussions with social media companies. This portal wasn’t ever established but a few months after these discussions, the EIP was, and it served the same purpose. So, the plan did get carried out with a different name.

By early 2020, after operating or considering these avenues, CISA had dropped any pretence of focusing only on foreign disinformation, openly discussing how to best monitor/censor the speech of American citizens.

At this stage, the Covid-19 pandemic had opened up CISA to more active social media surveillance and censorship. Former CISA director Chris Krebs in his testimony before the Committee, stated unequivocally on multiple occasions that CISA did not treat content on social media differently based on its domestic or foreign origin. In other words, the threat of foreign interference was just an excuse.

It is clear that EIP was formed when CISA enlisted Stanford to launder its censorship operation. On 9 July 2020, Alex Stamos (director of the SIO and former Chief Security Officer at Facebook) in a meeting to present the concept of EIP (at that time called the “Election Misinformation Project”) to CISA, brought together Brian Scully (future head of CISA’s Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation [MDM] team), Geoff Hale (director of CISA’s Election Security Initiative), and Matt Masterson (then-Senior Cybersecurity Advisor at CISA) amongst others.

The EIP grew over time to nearly 100 employees and “was led by well-known figures in the censorship-industrial complex, such as Alex Stamos, SIO Research Manager Renee DiResta, and Vice President and Senior Director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) Graham Brookie. The EIP also collaborated closely with senior CISA officials, including Brian Scully, the head of CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF)”

There were also at least four university students who were CISA employees during the operation of the EIP as well as people who were in charge of EIP to CISA communications. This active involvement in the creation and operation of the EIP by CISA is shown in The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s document through various emails including emails saying “The EIP, CISA, and CIS went through a detailed discussion of the workflow this afternoon. We feel ready to start promoting this to election officials as a way to report misinformation” and “EIP anticipates increased cadence of regionally-specific misinformation incidents, so nailing down these processes soon would be ideal... I am more than happy to provide additional resources on the CISA side to route requests if that would help.”

The layered system then upped its game. The EIP’s flagging and reporting techniques were not sufficient for their purpose, since they were initially targeting individual posts. Instead, they began targeting “narratives” for censorship. However, there were still individual posts being targeted, with some misinformation reports containing over 500 individual links. The EIP was searching for a way to mass report undesirable content. They chose to use a software called Jira by Atlassian, an Australian software company, which allowed for real-time collaboration between members of the EIP, the government and other partners.

These reports were getting more and more alarming with instances like “a report from the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office—led at the time by Katie Hobbs, a Democrat—to CISA, the EIP, and Facebook” which was reporting a post on a private page.

In fact, Secretary Hobbs “expended her office’s limited resources to flag content on social media regarding a Republican candidate’s speech. But even more alarming, Hobbs’s staff was apparently trawling through private Facebook pages to identify dissent and “misinformation” for removal.

According to public reporting, Hobbs’s office continued flagging social media posts well after the election, into January 2021. In some cases, Hobbs’s staff emailed the social media platforms directly, requesting that posts criticizing her be censored.”

Unlike CISA’s claim of little to no involvement, the EIP openly admitted the involvement of the GEC. In fact, according to the EIP’s final report of the 2020 election cycle, the GEC was one of the most frequently tagged organisations in the EIP’s Jira system.

CISA and GEC weren’t the only government entities in on it. The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s document states “Stamos testified that the SIO briefed several other government agencies about the EIP, including the National Security Agency (NSA) and Cyber Command.

Stamos further testified that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent Elvis Chan, who was the primary liaison between the FBI and Silicon Valley and was involved in the suppression of news about information damaging to the Biden family found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, arranged the SIONSA briefing”.

In other words, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop contents is no conspiracy theory.

The EIP in their own report admitted that they were “not a fact-checking organization.” The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s investigation found that “EIP analysts were unable to identify a single external source to support its designation of a particular post or narrative as ‘mis- or disinformation’ in a majority of posts it flagged” and thus states “the fact that the EIP could not find even a single fact-checker, biased or not, before flagging content to social media in a majority of cases and was willing to publicly admit to that fact, is indicative of a brazen and megalomaniacal approach to censorship, unbothered by the truth or maintaining even the appearance of political neutrality.”

Even in 2023, the EIP maintained that “EIP did not make recommendations to the platforms about what actions they should take” despite the overwhelming proof that they did through the Jira tickets. For example, “We recommend you label or reduce the discoverability of the post.” (EIP-581), “We recommend that this tweet, as well as the tweets with the original video, should be removed or labelled as misleading.” (EIP-680), “This has circulated in pro-Trump conservative groups and sub-communities... We recommend that you all flag as false, or remove the posts below.” (EIP-378)

After the 2020 election, but before Biden was sworn in, the CISA Director Chris Krebs was fired by Donald Trump due to his involvement with widespread election fraud. Trump tweeted “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud,” following up shortly after with another tweet saying “Effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”

However, what everyone was told by mainstream media was that Trump fired him due to personal differences in opinion and chalked up his claims of any election interference to ‘conspiracy theories.’ For example, CNN reporters said, “he is firing this official because he is contradicting the president’s baseless conspiracy theories that the president has been spreading around.”

In 2021, Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos created the Krebs Stamos Group while Matt Masterson left CISA and took a position as a non-research fellow with Stanford, working with the SIO and its Virality Project (the new form of EIP, focused on an ‘understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis’).

After the inauguration of President Joe Biden, the government censorship was amplified. The Committee and Select Subcommittee’s investigation revealed that “At CISA, the CFITF team dropped any pretense of a ‘foreign-focus’ and relabeled itself as the ‘MDM team’ that would focus on foreign and domestic speech that the government considered misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation.

Throughout 2021, the Biden White House engaged in a pressure campaign against Facebook and other social media companies to censor anti-vaccine content, even if it was true.”

The document then goes on to say “Internal Facebook documents showed that the Biden White House in particular wanted true information and satire censored at a rate even Big Tech found objectionable.” Now, who would have imagined that?

In August 2024, this was publicly admitted by the co-founder and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg in his letter to Congress saying “Senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree.”

With all of this context in mind, here’s a segment from Donald Trump’s video announcing his Free Speech Plan even prior to being re-elected. This is a bit long but worth the read as it makes sense of his statements after re-election:

“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organisation, business, or person to censor, limit, categorise, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or disinformation and I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship directly or indirectly, whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health & Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.

“We need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called myths and disinformation. The federal government should immediately stop funding all nonprofits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any US university is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities, or election interferences in the past, such as flagging social media content for removal of blacklisting, those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years and maybe more.

“We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end run around the constitution and deprive Americans of their first, fourth and fifth amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote… The time has finally come for Congress to pass a digital Bill of Rights. This should include a right to digital due process. In other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.

“Furthermore, when users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadowbanned, or otherwise restricted, no matter what name they use, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why, and the right to a timely appeal. In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt out of content moderation and curation entirely and receive an unmanipulated stream of information if they so choose. The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America.”

Elon Musk has also been repeatedly saying things such as “Stanford is damaging its name by allowing its use by the SIO propaganda machine, ‘misinformation’ is indeed the Trojan horse for censorship, and The best way to fight misinformation is to respond with accurate information, not censorship.”

Now that you know the long story and Trump’s own description of his plans, many of the actions of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and Trump himself will hopefully make much more sense, even if you do not necessarily agree with them.

Although this article is about the industrial scale censorship and disinformation done in the US context, be clear that these techniques are being used worldwide by the same cabal.

For example, Wikipedia is no longer a neutral source of crowd-sourced information but a platform that is carefully curated by a closed group of nebulous editors who decide what is credible or not.

We do not know whether or not President Trump and his team will be able to tame the system in the US, but citizens of all countries need to be wary of the multi-tentacled beast that now controls the channels of information.