Better in their words…

Friends, Last month, I warned European lawmakers about an effort by both Europeans and Americans to censor us all. The article is an edited and abridged version of that speech. — Michael

On March 15th, 2021, an anonymous Twitter user asked Harvard Medical professor Martin Kulldorff a question. “Do you think younger age groups and or people who have already had the virus need to be vaccinated?”

Who is Martin Kulldorff? He’s a Harvard Medical School professor for 21 years, a well-known Swedish biostatistician who developed widely used software for disease mapping, the co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration on how to deal with the COVID pandemic, and an advisor to the world’s leading health organizations.

What he said was that “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should get COVID. Vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it, nor do children.”

Natural immunity. Is it a myth — a “conspiracy theory” — that once you have been sick from a virus, then you won’t get sick, or as sick, again?

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In fact, we’ve known for 2,500 years that natural immunity is real. “The same man was never attacked twice, never at least fatally,” wrote Thucydides, describing the plague of Athens. He observed that recovered individuals could safely nurse the sick without falling ill themselves.

And yet Twitter censored Martin Kulldorff’s tweet. “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine,” read a warning that Twitter employees put on it. For most people, the Tweet cannot be replied to, shared or liked. In other words, Twitter had decided that this professor at Harvard Medical School was wrong, and that natural immunity wasn’t really something that could protect you from COVID.

Jay Bhattacharya, who’s currently our Director of the National Institutes of Health, and thus one of the highest-ranking public health officials in the world, was a Stanford epidemiologist before that. Twitter put him on a “Trends Blacklist.” Not long before we discovered this, we were told that shadow-banning was a conspiracy theory, because Twitter had said it didn’t shadow-ban.

Now the European Commission is trying to censor the entire global internet. They want to put a 140 million Euro fine on X. They want to end anonymity, which was what allowed that question of Kulldorff to be asked. They want to use a “Democracy Shield” program to shield the Commission from democracy. And the Commission wants to impose “chat control” so they can read your private messages. It just gets worse and worse. Unsubstantiated and likely false claims of Russian government election interference through TikTok and social media were made in Romania and in the Czech Republic.

Truth is not something that anybody holds as a possession and rather emerges through dialogue. We’ve known that since Plato and Socrates. We need free speech for science, public health, and national security. It’s essential to journalism, democracy, and human freedom. Free speech enabled civilization; censorship threatens it. This is the only political cause that I would die for.

And yet there is currently an active coordination between Stanford, Brazil, Australia, and others to impose what I think we can call, without exaggeration, global totalitarianism. They’re pushing for digital identification that will end anonymity online.

Why is that? Why are these guys behaving in this way?

When Elon Musk took over Twitter on October 28th, 2022, unprecedented insight into multiple secret government mass censorship efforts emerged from this exploration. We had unlimited access to Twitter files. They revealed that the mainstream news reporters, who don’t deserve the name, were demanding censorship. No true journalist demands censorship of his fellow journalists.

What emerged from this was an understanding of something we call the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” which directly grew out of the military industrial complex and was run by active or former intelligence community officials who often operate under that banner.

It led to multiple congressional investigations and hearings, and it spread across every social media platform. So we now know the censorship that occurred, not just at Twitter, but at YouTube, at Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms.

What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isn’t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call “researchers” to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct “fact checks” to serve as “trusted flaggers.” These “trusted flaggers” demand censorship by social media platforms. It’s all done in secret.

They’re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the “Virality Project,” they said they wanted to censor “true stories” of vaccine side effects.

 

Why? Because it might “fuel hesitancy.” In other words, they want to control your behavior. They don’t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine.

If that isn’t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I don’t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that would’ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these “researcher” censors.

I’m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong.

Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. They’re really not interested in censoring “misinformation.’ They’re very interested in censoring true information.

The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, it’s more protective than the vaccine.

But the censors flagged somebody’s Google Drive. “See the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.” Google then removed that content from that person’s Google Drive. You don’t control your Google Drive.

Contrary to Stanford’s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanford’s “Virality Project” flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children.

The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didn’t exist.

The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate.

They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. It’s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter.

Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them “Bu alumni.” They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.

Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI — arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and can’t do — resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role.

Isn’t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? This email popped up when we were going through Twitter files and it really jumped out at us.

It’s from the director of policy at Twitter. “We have seen a sustained if uncoordinated” — supposedly — “effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. They’re probing and pushing everywhere they can.

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The Hunter Biden laptop censorship occurred later that year. The FBI and the intelligence community discredited accurate, factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both before and after the New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14th, 2020.

How could the FBI spread false information about something that nobody knew about?

Because the FBI had Hunter Biden’s laptop, which showed his family’s massive influence peddling scheme. It consisted of accepting tens of millions of dollars, including from the Chinese government. The FBI had been sitting on that laptop since December of 2019. They had been given it by the computer repair store owner, who had been given the laptop by Hunter Biden, likely because he dropped it in his bathtub or in the pool, when he was on one of his many crack and alcohol benders.

The government strategy is always the same: spread disinformation first, then demand censorship of accurate information on the basis of it

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“The FBI came to us in the summer of 2020,” Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan two years later, “and they were like, ‘Hey, you should be on the alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016. There’s about to be some kind of dump.’”

In the summer of 2020, the New York Post had not published the story about the Hunter Biden laptop. It would only come out in October.

We see something very interesting show up in the Twitter files: the Aspen Institute, an intermediary between the intelligence community and the public. It’s known as a Davos-style gab fest in the United States. It’s also the place where intelligence community operations are run.

They hosted a workshop to train reporters and all of the social media’s top censorship officials, known as “trust and safety officials,” how to deal with a story they would hear in the future relating to Hunter Biden and Barisma.

A few months earlier, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center had published a report attacking what we in the United States call the Pentagon Papers Principle. The Pentagon Papers Principle says that if a government official gives me, a journalist, a bunch of Pentagon documents showing that we’re losing the war in Vietnam, I, as a journalist, can publish them, and not risk prison. That was decided in a famous Supreme Court case in 1971.

Stanford argued that, really, we should get rid of that principle, which may be the most important investigative journalism principle in the United States, and said, “You should cover the person who leaked the materials, not the leaked emails.”

In other words, you should cover and expose the whistleblower. The person who exposed the Pentagon Papers is the real bad guy, not the DOD, CIA, and presidents who had lied to us for over a decade.

Stanford was training the journalists and the social media trust and safety officers in how to cover a story that had not yet come out. This is known as “pre-bunking,” and it’s also part of the European Union strategy to shield themselves from democracy.

When the Hunter Biden story appeared October 22nd, Twitter’s trust and safety censorship official said it didn’t violate its terms of service. There’s nothing illegal about any of this. The Supreme Court has made it very clear that you’re allowed to report on information that’s been leaked to you.

At that moment, the former FBI general counsel, Jim Baker, argued vigorously that Twitter really needed to censor it. Baker won and they censored the story.

It’s not that we didn’t hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story when it came out. I certainly did. But we had the impression that there was something wrong with it, that it was not really the whole story. And so many of us dismissed it.

What they had done was a psyop on this major story. They had changed our perception of the story. And it worked. It worked on me, it worked on everybody I knew.

What is the role of the intelligence community of social media companies? The former CIA people are the head of elections at Meta, and Google’s head of trust and safety. Former and current CIA officers have a history of spreading misinformation and promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

We now know that between 2018 and 2023, there were 36 people from the CIA 68 from the FBI 44, from the National Security Administration and 68 from the Department of Homeland Security who had moved to work at the social media platforms.

This is not unique to the United States. My colleague Cecilia Jilková, the daughter of famous Czech dissidents, discovered that European Union officials claimed, days before the European elections in 2024, that a “pro-Kremlin website” was spreading propaganda and were paying off European politicians.

That was the headline in Politico. We wrote to them and asked, “Where’s the evidence of this? Just go ahead and share the evidence to support your accusation days before the European parliamentary elections.” Nobody was arrested. They never produced the evidence. The former Czech president, Václav Klaus, who was accused of this, said, “We don’t even know what the ‘Voice of Europe’ is.”

Another Czech politician said, “How could I have known it would be a security threat? At the time I gave the interview, they weren’t on any list.”

Another said, “If they’re such a big threat, why did the European Parliament let the Voice of Europe’s journalists inside?”

Nobody responded. Nobody talked to us. This was a disinformation campaign carried by Politico, which, in my view, is a suspect publication.

In the spring of 2022, Barack Obama went to Stanford to give a speech at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center run by Michael McFaul, his former ambassador to Russia. Obama said misinformation harms democracy and urged support for legislation in Congress that would empower government-appointed researchers to serve as “trusted flaggers.”

Six days later, the Department of Homeland Security rolled out their Disinformation Governance Board. What a coincidence that they got Obama to frame the issue for them.

Facebook in 2021 censored accurate vaccine information so the White House would help it to get data from Europe. In addition to removing vaccine misinformation, wrote Facebook to the White House, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.

White House said jump, and Facebook said how high? Why did they do it? Why would they voluntarily censor?

This also emerged from the Facebook files. Nick Clegg on the left wrote an email to his colleagues. He said, “My sense is that given we’ve got bigger fish, we have to fry with the administration, e.g., data flows, it doesn’t seem like a great place for us to be.”

“Data flows.” What’s he talking about? He’s talking about billions of dollars worth of business that he has to, that they would have to pay the European Commission for if they didn’t have the support from the Biden administration to lean on the European Commission.

In other words, this was a shakedown by the White House of Facebook and it worked in France, the country of Liberté. Turns out it has a special role.

“President Macron wants to text Jack,” said a Twitter executive. Who’s Jack? Jack Dorsey is the founder of Twitter. “President Macron’s team has been asking me again for Jack’s number because the president wants to text him some supporting words.”

Turns out the French government was using judicial intimidation to demand censorship. Wrote the Twitter executive, “This case is largely about painting Twitter as a dangerous actor in the press.” The request for Dorsey’s Number coincided with a lawsuit by four French government-linked NGOs against Twitter.

“We were sued back in the spring by four NGOs claiming that we’re not doing enough to address hate speech in France,” wrote an Associate Director of Litigation at Twitter. “They seek to have an expert appointed to examine our reporting enforcement systems.”

The Twitter attorney didn’t think the goal of the NGOs was to win the lawsuit, which was without merit. Rather, she said, this case was about “painting Twitter as a bad actor in the press.”

They were fake NGOs. They are controlled by the French government and funded by the French government or by the European government. Their very name as a non-governmental organization is disinformation. It’s a lie.

Once again, we see the government acting through front groups, which is the classic intelligence community strategy that the CIA and every intelligence agency in history has used. You never try to overthrow a foreign government by saying, “We’re the CIA here to overthrow your government.” You say, “We’re the labor union, we’re the NGO, we’re the feminist group, we’re the student group, we’re journalists.”

The sad truth is that France invented the Censorship Industrial Complex. It passed a law in 1972 in response to concerns over mass migration, and ostensibly aimed at combating racism. It criminalized incitement to hatred and empowered state accredited and partially funded state NGOs to act as private prosecutors. So here you can see the seed of the Censorship Industrial Complex’s “trusted flagger” program.

This is how we get to a single global system of digital totalitarianism.

The CIA and the intelligence community have controlled or sought to control the media discourse for the last 80 years. In 1977, Carl Bernstein, the famous Washington Post reporter who uncovered Watergate, discovered that 400 reporters had been secretly working for the CIA. A previous congressional investigation had only found 50 of them. In truth, there could have been many more.

“It’s only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work,” said Suzanne Spalding, the former assistant General Counsel for the CIA in an email to her colleague.

During the height of the censorship industrial complex, there was a very clever operation by supposedly former CIA people through In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. They attempted to take over Twitter’s entire content moderation or censorship system. Their strategy was to sell them on the risk of foreign influence. They boasted of all of their excellent foreign language capacities and their deep bench in the intelligence community.

And it was a radical effort. Their plan was not just to censor but also to get PayPal, Amazon Web Services and GoDaddy to deplatform people, demonetize people, and essentially erase people from the entire internet who violate CIA narratives.

They’re not going to stop demanding more censorship. Look at the World Economic Forum. What do they say is the number one risk? Misinformation and disinformation.

The elites view censorship as a “must-have” not “nice to have” tool. Why is that? Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, but one of the good guys, wrote a brilliant book called The Revolt of the Public, which anticipated what is happening. He notes that authority, in the olden days, was derived from monopoly. The problem now is that if the Times of London, the New York Times, and Le Monde lie to you, you can discover the truth on social media. That’s devastating to the credibility of and trust in the mainstream news media.

 

Consider how the mainstream news media gaslit the American people for several years, telling us, “Joe Biden is fine. There’s no cognitive impairment at all.” But we were all watching videos of Joe Biden on social media. The media can’t recover from that. And so they are trying to censor monopoly power to decide the truth.

We know that the vast majority of Europeans are unhappy about immigration, that the government’s been handling it badly

The censorship demands continue. Stanford officials got together with top EU officials, UK officials, Brazil officials, Australia officials to plot a strategy for how to censor the entire global internet at a meeting called, “Compliance and enforcement in a rapidly evolving landscape.

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The good news is that we have tools at our disposal. One is the Westminster Declaration against censorship. Another is sunlight, the best disinfectant. We need to expose these guys and make them famous. And we Americans and Europeans need to work together to fight censorship. We were able to shut down at least one of the Stanford censorship think tanks by shaming it out of existence.

Thank you for hosting me, and keep in mind that the good guys of history are never the ones demanding censorship, and censorship is always about maintaining power and never about finding the truth.