Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Real Clear Investigations ^ | 5/31/24 | Ben Weingarten

[CFW]

This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps "the most massive attack against free speech" ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.

The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News' new "Censorship Files" series, and continuing installments of the "Twitter Files" series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous........

[snip]

An RCI review of the nearly 400 of those tickets produced to the House Homeland Security Committee found that government agencies – including entities within the FBI, DHS (CISA), and State Department (GEC) – involved themselves in nearly a quarter of the censorship tickets. Those tickets almost uniformly covered domestic speech, and from the political right; in dozens of instances, the project made "recommendations" to social media companies to take action.

[CFW]

A long indepth look at the censorship by government agencies and other institutions. Long but well worth the read.

[CFW]

“Karma is a bitch. You get the government you vote for, indeed.”

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Yep. Indeed.

I can’t help but remember how quickly they had the Patriot Act drawn up just a few days after 9/11. It allowed for more intrusion and surveillance of American citizens. Foreign actors, not so much.

[P.O.E.]

Years ago, some historian was griping he could not get his review of a book on the Vietnam war onto Amazon (one of the historical personages was named “Phuc” and the algorithm kept kicking it out).

His main complaint was that there was no recourse - writing to Amazon just generated form letters in return, there was no-one to call, etc.

We’ve come a long way from such accidental/incidental censorship to full-blown Orwell.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

People who search on google on a phone for trump trial get NBC articles saying the GOP is unfair to Hogan.

[cgbg]

Leftists love free speech until they seize power.

Then they become fanatical censors.

[faithhopecharity]

thank you,
this article is a definite must read....
and we’re forwarding it to as many people as possible

[Regulator]

The article makes you think that Stanford and Harvard are staunch supporters of free speech and intelligent critique.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

[CFW]

“thank you,
this article is a definite must read....
and we’re forwarding it to as many people as possible”

—

So many people do not realize how intertwined the government, tech businesses, and colleges, are in censoring the American people. If you mention it they assume government is stopping “misinformation” and it’s a good thing. Which is a bad interpretation of the First Amendment.

[faithhopecharity]

“The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.

James Madison