{"id":235213,"date":"2023-05-15T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=235213"},"modified":"2023-05-11T04:40:54","modified_gmt":"2023-05-11T03:40:54","slug":"report-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex-the-top-50-organizations-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-complex-the-top-50-organizations-to-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Citizen’s Starter Kit to Understanding the New Global Information Cartel<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration by mrmooremedia.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Introduction by Matt Taibbi<\/strong><\/p>\n

On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history<\/a>. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who\u2019d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.<\/p>\n

Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This \u201cconjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,\u201d he said, adding:<\/p>\n

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes\u2026 Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was the direst of warnings, but the address has tended in the popular press to be ignored. After sixty-plus years, most of America \u2013 including most of the American left, which traditionally focused the most on this issue \u2013 has lost its fear that our arms industry might conquer democracy from within.<\/p>\n

Now, however, we\u2019ve unfortunately found cause to reconsider Eisenhower\u2019s warning.<\/p>\n

While the civilian population only in recent years began haggling over \u201cde-platforming\u201d incidents involving figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos, government agencies had already long been advancing a new theory of international conflict, in which the informational landscape is more importantly understood as a battlefield than a forum for exchanging ideas. In this view, \u201cspammy\u201d ads, \u201cjunk\u201d news, and the sharing of work from \u201cdisinformation agents<\/a>\u201d like Jones aren\u2019t inevitable features of a free Internet, but sorties in a new form of conflict called \u201chybrid warfare.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1996, just as the Internet was becoming part of daily life in America, the U.S. Army published \u201cField Manual 100-6<\/a>,\u201d which spoke of \u201can expanding information domain termed the Global Information Environment\u201d that contains \u201cinformation processes and systems that are beyond the direct influence of the military.\u201d Military commanders needed to understand that \u201cinformation dominance\u201d in the \u201cGIE\u201d would henceforth be a crucial element for \u201coperating effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll often see it implied that \u201cinformation operations\u201d are only practiced by America\u2019s enemies, because only America\u2019s enemies are low enough, and deprived enough of real firepower, to require the use of such tactics, needing as they do to \u201covercome military limitations<\/a>.\u201d We rarely hear about America\u2019s own lengthy history with \u201cactive measures<\/a>\u201d and \u201cinformation operations<\/a>,\u201d but popular media gives us space to read about the desperate tactics of the Asiatic enemy, perennially described as something like an incurable trans-continental golf cheat.<\/p>\n

Indeed, part of the new mania surrounding \u201chybrid warfare\u201d is the idea that while the American human being is accustomed to living in clear states of \u201cwar\u201d or \u201cpeace,\u201d the Russian, Chinese, or Iranian citizen is born into a state of constant conflict, where war is always ongoing, whether declared or not. In the face of such adversaries, America\u2019s \u201copen\u201d information landscape is little more than military weakness.<\/p>\n

In March of 2017, in a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee on hybrid war, chairman Mac Thornberry opened the session with ominous remarks<\/a>, suggesting that in the wider context of history, an America built on constitutional principles of decentralized power might have been badly designed:<\/p>\n

Americans are used to thinking of a binary state of either war or peace<\/strong>. That is the way our organizations, doctrine, and approaches are geared. Other countries, including Russia, China, and Iran, use a wider array of centrally controlled, or at least centrally directed, instruments of national power and influence to achieve their objectives\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Whether it is contributing to foreign political parties, targeted assassinations of opponents, infiltrating non-uniformed personnel such as the little green men, traditional media and social media<\/strong>, influence operations, or cyber-connected activity, all of these tactics and more are used to advance their national interests and most often to damage American national interests\u2026\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The historical records suggest that hybrid warfare in one form or another may well be the norm for human conflict, rather than the exception.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Around that same time, i.e. shortly after the election of Donald Trump, it was becoming gospel among the future leaders of the \u201cCensorship-Industrial Complex\u201d that interference by \u201cmalign foreign threat actors\u201d and the vicissitudes of Western domestic politics must be linked.\u00a0Everything, from John Podesta\u2019s emails to Trump\u2019s Rust Belt primary victories to Brexit, were to be understood first and foremost as hybrid war events.<\/p>\n

This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn\u2019t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping \u201cmis-, dis-, and malinformation<\/a>,\u201d while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with \u201cinformation warfare\u201d missions.<\/p>\n

The \u201cCensorship-Industrial Complex\u201d is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the \u201chybrid warfare\u201d age.<\/p>\n

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the \u201cdefense\u201d sector, the \u201canti-disinformation\u201d complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have \u201cmilitary limitations.\u201d The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign \u201cdisinformation.\u201d It\u2019s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy\u2019s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like \u201ctoxicity monitoring<\/a>,\u201d replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a \u201cnose for news\u201d with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like \u201cnewsworthy claim extraction<\/a>,\u201d and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the \u201credirect method,\u201d which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward \u201cconstructive alternative messages<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a \u201cshared vocabulary<\/a>\u201d of information disorder, or \u201ccredibility,\u201d or \u201cmedia literacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building \u201cresilience<\/a>\u201d to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the \u201cmarketplace of ideas\u201d (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated<\/a>), but in the traditional capitalist sense. In the Twitter Files we repeatedly find documents like this unsigned \u201cSphere of Influence\u201d review circulated by the Carnegie Endowment that wonders aloud if tech companies really need to be competing to \u201cget it right\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In place of competition, the groups we\u2019ve been tracking favor the concept of the \u201cshared endeavor\u201d (one British group has even started a \u201cShared Endeavour\u201d program<\/a>), in which key \u201cstakeholders\u201d hash out their disagreements in private, but present a unified front.<\/p>\n

Who are the leaders of these messaging campaigns? If you care to ask, the groups below are a good place to start.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Top 50 List\u201d is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the \u201cCensorship-Industrial Complex.\u201d Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same \u201chate-mapping,\u201d guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons. There is even a tendency to use what one Twitter Files source described as the same \u201chairball\u201d graphs.<\/p>\n

Where they compete, often, is in the area of gibberish verbiage describing their respective analytical methods. My favorite came from the Public Good Projects, which in a display of predictive skills reminiscent of the \u201cunsinkable Titanic\u201d described itself as the \u201cBuzzfeed <\/a><\/em>of public health<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Together, these groups are fast achieving what Eisenhower feared: the elimination of \u201cbalance\u201d between the democratic need for liberalizing laws and institutions, and the vigilance required for military preparation. Democratic society requires the nourishment of free debate, disagreement, and intellectual tension, but the groups below seek instead that \u201cshared vocabulary\u201d to deploy on the hybrid battlefield. They propose to serve as the guardians of that \u201cvocabulary,\u201d which sounds very like the scenario Ike outlined in 1961, in which \u201cpublic policy could itself become the captive of a scientific and technological elite.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without further ado, an introduction to the main players in this \u201cCIC\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u200b1.\u200b\u00a0Information Futures Lab (IFL) at Brown University (formerly, First Draft):<\/strong><\/p>\n

Link<\/strong>: https:\/\/sites.brown.edu\/informationfutures\/<\/a> \/ https:\/\/First Draftnews.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Type<\/strong>: A university institute, housed within the School of Public Health, to combat \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201coutdated communications practices.\u201d The successor to First Draft<\/a>, one of the earliest and more prominent \u201canti-disinformation\u201d outfits.<\/p>\n

You may have read about them when<\/strong>: You first heard the terms Mis-, dis-, and malinformation<\/em>. The term was coined by FD Director Claire Wardle. IFL\/FD are also the only academic\/non-profit organization involved in the Trusted News Initiative<\/a>, a large-scale legacy media consortium established to control debate around the pandemic response. Wardle was Twitter executives\u2019 first pick for a signal group of anti-misinformation advisors it put together. She also participated in the Aspen Institute\u2019s Hunter Biden laptop tabletop in August 2020 (before the laptop story broke). IFL\u2019s co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff<\/a> serves on the White House Covid-19 Response Team. First Draft staffers were also revealed in the #TwitterFiles to be frequent and trusted partners to a leading public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, Renee DiResta, now of Stanford University<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What we know about funding<\/strong>: First Draft was funded by a huge number of entities including Craig Newmark, Rockefeller, the National Science Foundation, Facebook, the Ford Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Open Society Foundations, and more. Funding for the IFL includes the Rockefeller Foundation for a \u201cbuilding vaccine demand<\/a>\u201d initiative.<\/p>\n

What they do\/What they are selling<\/strong>: IFL\/First Draft position themselves as the vanguard of disinformation studies, acting as key advisors to media, technology, and public health consortiums, bringing together a wide range of academic skill sets.<\/p>\n

Characteristic\/worldview quotes<\/strong>: High use of terms like coordinated inauthentic behavior<\/em>, information pollution<\/em>, the future Homeland Security catchwords mis-, dis-, <\/em>and malinformation<\/em>, and information disorder.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gibberish verbiage<\/strong>: \u201cThe most accessible inoculation technique is prebunking \u2014 the process of debunking lies, tactics or sources before they strike<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the #TwitterFiles: <\/strong>First Draft is featured extensively in the files. They were the first proposed name<\/a> when Twitter decided to assemble a small group of \u201ctrusted people to come together to talk about what they\u2019re seeing,\u201d were part of the Aspen Institute\u2019s Burisma tabletop<\/a>, and appeared in multiple emails with Pentagon officials<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TO READ FULL REPORT Go to Original – racket.news<\/a><\/p>\n

_______________________________________-<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
Authors: Matt Taibbi<\/a>, Susan Schmidt<\/a>, Andrew Lowenthal<\/a>, Tom Wyatt<\/a>, Techno Fog<\/a>, Matt Orfalea<\/a>, and The Hunt for Tom Clancy<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

10 May 2023 – The Citizen’s Starter Kit to Understanding the New Global Information Cartel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":119682,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[2267,1785,2847,378,234,2618,1006,3016],"class_list":["post-235213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-cartels","tag-censorship","tag-disinformation","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-misinformation","tag-social-media","tag-twitter-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235213"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":235218,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235213\/revisions\/235218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/119682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}