Censorship Industrial Complex
Facebook to get rid of fact checkers and promote free speech

It is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems and getting back to our roots about giving people a voice.
Mark Zuckerberg surprised the planet today with the release of a 5 minute video detailing a 5 point plan to pave the way for more free expression on Facebook.
Zuckerberg says his goal has always been to “give people a voice”, but governments and legacy media have been pushing Facebook towards censorship. Now Facebook is going to concentrate on censoring illegal issues, and back off on punishing speech.
The five part plan includes:
- Getting rid of fact checkers in favour of ‘X’ style “Community Notes”
- Simplifying content policies to get rid of restrictions around topics like immigration and gender.
- Focus filters on tackling illegal and ‘high severity violations’ instead of low severity violations.
- Bringing back ‘Civic Content’, so more ‘political’ content will be seen.
- Facebook will move Content Moderation Teams from California to Texas to help erase the ‘bias of our teams’ and work with Donald Trump’s government to help promote free speech around the world.
From Mark Zuckerberg Facebook
It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression. We’re replacing fact checkers with Community Notes, simplifying our policies and focusing on reducing mistakes. Looking forward to this next chapter.
Zuckerberg’s full comments:
Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. I started building social media to give people a voice. I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today. But a lot has happened over the last several years. There’s been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.
Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political, but there’s also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there. Drugs, terrorism, Child exploitation. These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly. So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes. Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts. That’s millions of people. And we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship. The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech. So we’re gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do.
First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to acts starting in the US. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US. So over the next couple of months, we’re going to phase in a more comprehensive community note system.
Second, we’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse. What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas. And it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
Third, we’re changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms. We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations and for lower severity violations. We’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action. The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms. We’re also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. The reality is that this is a tradeoff. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
Fourth, we’re bringing back civic content. For a while, the community asks to see less politics because there’s making people stressed. So we stopped recommending these posts. But it feels like we’re in a new era now and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again. So we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
Fifth, we’re going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams. Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world. Europe has an ever increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there. Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down. China has censor apps from even working in the country.
The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the US government. And that’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship by going after US and other American companies. It has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression and I am excited to take it. It’ll take time to get this right. And these are complex systems. They’re never going to be perfect. There’s also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
But the bottom line is that after. For years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content. It is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems and getting back to our roots about giving people a voice. I’m looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there. And more to come soon
Business
USAID funnelled $472 million into Soros-backed media censorship group: report

From LifeSiteNews
A newly released Wikileaks report has revealed that the beleaguered U.S. Agency for International Development directed almost half a billion dollars to Internews, a left-wing media training non-profit group founded by a self-described Marxist activist.
The controversial U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) directed more than $472 million to an international media non-profit that promotes left-wing narratives and endorses censorship of so-called “disinformation,” according to a recent Wikileaks report.
The Internews Network describes its mission as providing everyone with “trustworthy news and information to make informed decisions,” by “train[ing] journalists and digital rights activists, advanc[ing] internet freedom, and offer[ing] business expertise to help media companies become financially sustainable.” It boasts offices in 30 nations and support for “independent” media in more than 100.
In 2014, NewsBusters reported that Internews was “was founded by a self-described Marxist anti-war protester” and had gotten the vast majority of its revenue from government grants through programs such as USAID, although leftist financier George Soros also donated millions to it.
On February 7, Wikileaks reported that Internews had received $472.6 million from USAID alone as of 2023, that year producing “4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people” through 4,291 different media outlets, as well as training more than 9,000 journalists.
During a 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) panel in Davos, Switzerland, Internews President and CEO Jeanne Bourgault declared that “gendered disinformation” was “one of the most terrifying” types of online “misinformation,” which platforms had a responsibility to police through “content moderation,” and advertisers had an obligation to pressure platforms to restrict in thee name of “help[ing] democracy.”
Bourgault expressed similar sentiments at Davos the following year, arguing that “disinformation makes money and we need to follow that money and we need to work with, in particular, the global advertising industry.” She advocated “exclusion lists or inclusion lists just to really try to … focus their ad dollars toward” what she called the “good news and information.”
“And those are U.S. news sites that operate on social media. And those are U.S. news sites. This is the basis of lawsuits here in the U.S. like Daily Wire and the Federalist suing the State Department because U.S. news sites are in these advertiser blacklists,” cybersecurity expert and Foundation For Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz told podcaster Joe Rogan this week. “This is top-down U.S. government policy from the White House and I’ll show you the documents on that to the White House executive branch agencies like USAID and State.”
The Trump State Department recently issued a 90-day freeze on foreign aid disbursed through USAID, citing millions in waste and ideologically-biased programs. With exceptions for certain food programs and military aid to Israel and Egypt, the pause is meant to give the administration time to conduct a more thorough review of foreign aid to determine what permanent cuts should be made.
While presented in the media as simply a source of basic care for the poor and sick, USAID has long funneled millions to waste, frivolity, LGBT activism, abortion promotion, and even groups tied to terrorism.
The pause is part of a broader review of federal executive-branch spending currently being spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) advisory project. Last weekend, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from putting USAID employees on paid leave, in what critics are calling a particularly extreme case of judicial overreach.
President Donald Trump also signed an executive order directing federal agencies to stop all attempts to pressure private companies to remove content.
armed forces
Trump admin reveals the federal government awarded over $100 million in contracts to Reuters

From LifeSiteNews
The Pentagon gave $9 million to Reuters for program called ‘large scale social deception’
President Donald Trump highlighted this morning the finding that the Department of Defense (DOD) paid the leftist media outlet Reuters $9 million for a program labeled “large scale social deception,” and he has demanded that they return the money.
“DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study ‘large scale social deception.’ GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!” wrote Trump on Truth Social.
Late Wednesday evening, Elon Musk shared a screenshot from USAspending.gov showing that the Department of Defense had indeed dispersed an award to Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC, the parent company of the media group Reuters, for a project labeled “active social engineering defense”(ASED) and “large scale social deception.”
Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for “large scale social deception”.
That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam.
Just wow. https://t.co/GGxoVQSwN8
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 13, 2025
A perusal of USAspending.gov shows that the U.S. government has awarded over $100 million in contracts to Reuters and confirms that the DOD awarded Reuters $9,147,532 under the “description” label ASED and “large scale social deception,” for a time period from 2018 to 2022, part of the period of Trump’s first term.
For comparison, other government contracts to Reuters include the DOD’s awarding of over $12 million under the description “mass effect,” the DHS awarding $5.1 million for “data analysis,” and the Department of Justice (DOJ) giving a few million for “risk mitigation services.”
A more detailed overview of the contract on highergov.com shows the description “SIMULATION TESTING AND MEASUREMENT LARGE SCALE DECEPTION” but does not further expand upon the activities the award intends to fund.
Most of those who commented on Musk’s X post blasted the finding as a straightforward exposure of government deception. One commentator questioned whether the description was purportedly meant to signify defense against “social deception,” as the contract description signified defense against social engineering.
Others pointed out that deception is a standard part of psychological operations, as admitted in an Army field manual, No. 3-13.4, “Army Support to Military Deception”:
Military deception is actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary military, paramilitary, or violent extremist organization decision makers, thereby causing the adversary to take specific actions (or inactions) that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly mission. Deception applies to all levels of warfare, across the range of military operations, and is conducted during all phases of military operations. When properly integrated with operations security and other information-related capabilities, deception can be a decisive tool in altering how the enemy views, analyzes, decides, and acts in response to friendly military operations.
Some commentators highlighted the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has used American news media for propaganda purposes, most notably in a project known as “Operation Mockingbird.” At the time, the CIA admittedly hired at least 400 journalists to serve its aims, in part by writing “fake stories,” according to the journalist who exposed the scandal in 1977.
Stunningly, despite the millions it receives in government contracts, Reuters claims to be an “independent” and “stateless” news organization. It states on its website:
Independence is the essence of our reputation as a “stateless” global news organisation and fundamental to the trust that allows us to report impartially from all sides of a conflict or dispute. It is crucial to our ability to report on companies, institutions and individuals in the financial markets, many of whom are also our customers, without regard for anything other than accuracy, balance and the truth. Our independence stems not only from the structure of Reuters but also from our duty as journalists to avoid conflicts of interest or situations that could give rise to a perception of a conflict.
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