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Censorship Industrial Complex

A License to Censor? The Fierce Fight Over the GEC’s Renewal

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19 minute read

By Christina Maas

What happens when an agency meant to protect Americans from foreign propaganda starts tiptoeing over the line into the realm of domestic censorship? Enter the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a charming creation of the US State Department that was originally tasked with combating foreign disinformation. It sounds like something out of a spy novel: shadowy entities sowing chaos through whisper campaigns and disinformation dumps. But now, the real drama lies in how this agency has extended its reach beyond foreign threats and into the murky waters of the internet’s free speech landscape.

Of course, the GEC would prefer to be seen as a benevolent referee, helping social media giants like Facebook and YouTube play the good guys in the battle against digital deception. In theory, this agency is all about countering Russian bots and Iranian trolls. But somehow, along the way, its mission stretched to a point where the average American scrolling through a feed can almost feel the government’s fingers tapping on their shoulder, cautioning them about what’s “trustworthy.” It’s no wonder people are starting to worry.

“Protecting” Free Speech with Blacklists and Bans

Let’s break down how the GEC manages to defend democracy in ways that look suspiciously undemocratic. The agency works directly with social media platforms, advising them on what narratives might be feeding the foreign propaganda machine. Sounds reasonable—until it doesn’t. The GEC has dipped into its federal piggy bank to fund initiatives creating online blacklists and flagging content for removal. Some say it’s about “maintaining integrity” online; others say it looks a lot like censorship on the taxpayer’s dime.

To critics, this looks like the first few moves of a chess game where the GEC is lining up for a checkmate on free expression. And they’re not alone.

Skeptics of the GEC’s approach argue that these actions open the door to a sanitized internet, where only approved opinions make the cut. Who gets to decide what’s misleading or manipulative? Turns out, it’s not entirely clear, and this vagueness is what has civil liberties watchdogs gnashing their teeth.

Paul Nakasone: Former Spy, Current AI Board Member, and GEC’s Biggest Fan

Amid the ruckus, the GEC does have a few high-profile cheerleaders. One of them is none other than Paul Nakasone, a former NSA Director who now sits on the board of OpenAI. He’s come out swinging in favor of the GEC, showering praise on its efforts to shield American audiences from outside influence. For someone who once helmed the NSA, Nakasone knows a thing or two about surveillance, and his endorsement feels like a tacit nod from the intelligence community itself.

But even as he applauds the GEC, some are asking the obvious question: why is a former NSA chief, now positioned at the bleeding edge of AI technology, so invested in this government office’s future? Could it be that he sees a future where government-sponsored “truth” filters bleed into the algorithmic architecture of social media platforms? The GEC’s methods may have started with a noble purpose, but Nakasone’s involvement shines a light on the agency’s proximity to power and influence, making many wonder if the GEC is merely a cudgel for elites to enforce their narrative.

Bipartisan Endorsement: The Ultimate Shield

Then there’s the bipartisan protection the GEC enjoys, courtesy of Senators John Cornyn and Chris Murphy, the Republican-Democrat duo that co-parented the agency into existence back in 2016. In the world of American politics, finding anything both sides agree on is as rare as a unicorn, so when they do align, it’s usually worth a closer look. Cornyn and Murphy are now pushing for the GEC’s reauthorization, hoping to give it another seven-year lease on life. Their logic? Keep the GEC’s scope foreign-focused and off-limits when it comes to domestic politics.

The proposal includes a “strict ban” on US political meddling and tighter financial oversight—measures meant to steer the GEC back toward its original, “noble” mission. Yet, those promises don’t seem to be allaying fears. After all, what constitutes meddling, exactly? And how far does “foreign-focused” go on the internet where “foreign” is about as easy to define as air? If there’s one thing Washington excels at, it’s drawing the line right where it’s convenient, then redrawing it when no one’s looking.

The GEC’s Real Legacy: Democracy or Control?

At its core, the GEC’s story isn’t one of pure villainy or virtue; it’s the all-too-common tale of mission creep. Born to protect, it evolved into a protector so zealous it could become the very thing it claimed to fight. In a landscape where free speech is already under constant siege, the GEC’s growth raises the age-old question: who watches the watchers?

So, here we stand, with two powerful senators asking us to trust that the GEC’s next seven years won’t resemble the questionable track record of the last. Whether you see this as a necessary shield or a potential weapon against dissent, one thing is clear—the GEC’s presence in the digital ecosystem is likely to remain contentious, polarizing, and above all, inescapably tangled in the web of modern-day propaganda wars.

The Global Engagement Center, with its sleek mission of unmasking foreign propaganda, has certainly racked up its share of victories abroad, unearthing disinformation from the usual suspects—Russia, China, and other state-sponsored actors. But back home, it’s a different story. While the GEC might like to see itself as an indispensable line of defense, a growing number of Americans see it as something altogether more insidious: a tool for quashing dissent under the shiny guise of “security.”

The backlash isn’t just coming from the fringes; it’s led by Republican lawmakers who accuse the GEC of overstepping its mandate, straying from a mission to combat foreign influence and dabbling instead in something far more contentious: influencing American political discourse. Conservatives argue that the GEC has a cozy relationship with major social media platforms, where it’s allegedly advising them to tag and downrank content from right-leaning sources, all under the sanctified banner of “disinformation.” In a country already primed to erupt over issues of free speech, it’s an explosive allegation that’s landed the GEC in the crosshairs of national outrage.

The Conservative Media Strikes Back

Fed up and ready to push back, some of the biggest conservative media names have banded together with the state of Texas to launch a lawsuit against the Department of State. Platforms like The Daily Wire and The Federalist are taking aim at what they claim is a calculated attempt by the GEC to label their content as “disinformation,” a charge they argue has made them radioactive for advertisers and throttled their visibility on social media.

Their argument is simple but searing: a federal agency is directly infringing on the First Amendment by blocking or burying conservative viewpoints in the very same channels it was established to keep open. This accusation has given conservatives a rallying cry, a David-vs-Goliath scenario where state-backed censors go after political speech under the flimsiest pretexts.

Leading the legal crusade is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s never one to mince words. Paxton has openly accused the GEC of being on a crusade of its own—one aimed not at safeguarding democracy, but at suffocating it. In Paxton’s view, the GEC has gone rogue, turning from a shield against foreign interference to a battering ram against American freedoms.

Enter Congress: The Great Reassessment

The uproar has made its way to Capitol Hill, where figures like Rep. Darrell Issa are pounding the drum for a major reassessment of the GEC’s practices. Issa, along with a cadre of similarly concerned lawmakers, has raised the alarm about how far the GEC’s operations have expanded. It’s one thing to combat the well-oiled disinformation machines of Moscow or Beijing. But it’s something else entirely to be monitoring, blacklisting, and deplatforming opinions within US borders under the same disinformation protocols.

For Issa, this isn’t just mission creep; it’s an outright defiance of the GEC’s mandate. The agency, he contends, has blurred the line between legitimate counter-disinformation efforts and outright censorship, especially when that censorship just so happens to lean in one political direction. Issa and others argue that under the pretext of fighting foreign influence, the GEC is developing an appetite for policing thought—a role Congress never intended it to fill.

Reform or Dismantle: The Fight Over the GEC’s Future

And now, Washington is embroiled in a growing debate over what to do with the GEC. On one side are those who argue that the center just needs a tighter leash, and a few accountability measures to ensure it sticks to foreign threats and foreign threats only. On the other side are those who say the GEC’s existence is a danger to American principles — perhaps a well-intentioned experiment gone horribly wrong. They’re pushing for its complete dismantling, arguing that no amount of reform can protect an agency with such sweeping power from abusing it.

In an ironic twist, the very tools created to protect democracy now stand accused of eroding it, launching a bitter tug-of-war over the American ideal of free speech versus the unquantifiable need to “protect” citizens from supposedly dangerous ideas. Are we safer for it? Or are we on a slow slide into a digital age where the government, deciding what counts as legitimate speech, becomes the very propagandist it claims to fight?

At the least, the GEC seems to have lost its way, now accused of extending its mission to target domestic media—particularly conservative voices. Its partnerships with organizations like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) have turned into a flashpoint for accusations of bias, with critics arguing that these alliances are driving the GEC’s work right into partisan territory.

The GDI, a non-profit that presents itself as an impartial watchdog against misinformation, has its own critics, many of whom argue that its “disinformation” classifications are less about protecting the public and more about ensuring the “right” voices dominate the information landscape.

Conservative media outlets have consistently found themselves on the wrong end of these classifications, flagged as threats to the sanctity of truth while more progressive-leaning sources, somehow, skate by. This raises questions about how these ostensibly neutral organizations are choosing their targets and how much influence the government-backed GEC has on these classifications.

An Ethical Tug-of-War: Security, Truth, or Free Speech?

As the debate heats up over the GEC’s impending renewal, we’re not just talking about a procedural rubber stamp. The reauthorization of the GEC is emerging as a proxy battle over far deeper questions: What role should the government play in policing information? And where is the line between safeguarding the public and controlling it?

On one hand, there’s the argument that a body like the GEC is essential for a world where foreign states meddle with domestic politics through armies of bots and fake accounts. Without it, we’re told, Americans would be defenseless against the unrelenting tidal wave of foreign-sponsored fake news designed to sow chaos and division. Yet, that same narrative has an underbelly—a creeping encroachment on civil liberties, a kind of censorship wearing the costume of patriotism, where political biases steer the GEC’s focus.

Congress at a Crossroads: To Renew, Reform, or Repeal?

Congress now faces a critical decision: Do they rubber-stamp the GEC for another seven years and trust that reforms and restrictions can keep it in check? Or is it time to dismantle a mechanism that critics argue is increasingly indistinguishable from the very disinformation campaigns it claims to fight? Senators are debating an array of reforms, from tighter financial oversight to strict prohibitions on domestic content moderation. But skeptics aren’t convinced that a few added layers of oversight will suffice; the GEC’s history suggests that mission creep may be inevitable, and with it, the erosion of free expression.

If the GEC’s renewal goes through with little structural change, the implications will reverberate far beyond Washington. It could set a precedent where government-sanctioned “disinformation” monitoring becomes normalized as part of the American media landscape, allowing those in power to define and punish “disinformation” with little accountability. The potential for abuse here is staggering.

Setting Precedents for a Digital Battlefield

The GEC saga is a window into the heart of a much larger debate over information warfare and the role of government in a digital age. If the GEC continues to exercise its authority as both referee and player in the information space, it could pave the way for similar agencies to wield censorship as an arm of policy. We might soon find ourselves living in a digital landscape where what’s considered “misinformation” conveniently aligns with what’s politically inconvenient for those in power.

Ultimately, the GEC’s future will set the tone for how the US balances national security with its commitment to free speech. As the Senate weighs its options, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This decision will define the boundaries of governmental influence over the public’s access to information, shaping the next chapter of American engagement in the digital world. The choice to renew, reform, or repeal the GEC is no small moment—it’s a defining one, with repercussions for every American’s right to think, speak, and decide for themselves what is truth and what is manipulation.

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Business

TikTok Battles Canada’s Crackdown, Pitching Itself as a “Misinformation” Censorship Ally

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TikTok challenges Canada’s decision to shut down its operations, citing its role in combating “misinformation” as a reason the government should let it stay in the country.

In Canada, TikTok is attempting to get the authorities to reverse the decision to shut down its business operations by going to court – but also by recommending itself as a proven and reliable ally in combating “harmful content” and “misinformation.”

Canada last month moved to shut down TikTok’s operations, without banning the app itself. All this is happening ahead of federal elections amid the government’s efforts to control social media narratives, always citing fears of “misinformation” and “foreign interference” as the reasons.

TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, was accused of – via its parent company – representing “specific national security risks” when the decision regarding its corporate presence was made in November; no details have been made public regarding those alleged risks, however.

Now the TikTok Canada director of public policy and government affairs, Steve de Eyre, is telling the local press that the newly created circumstances are making it difficult for the company to work with election regulators and “civil society” to ensure election integrity – something Eyre said was previously successfully done.

In 2021, he noted, TikTok initiated collaboration with Elections Canada (the agency that organizes elections and has the power to flag social media content) which included TikTok adding links to all election-related videos that directed users toward “verified information.”

And the following year, TikTok was invested in monitoring its platform for “potentially violent” content, during the Freedom Convoy protests against Covid mandates.

More recently, TikTok was also on its toes for “foreign interference and hateful content” related to Brampton clashes between Sikhs and Hindus.

This approach, Eyre argues, is now jeopardized because TikTok employees are not present in Canada, who would be able to inform the platform’s decisions in terms of the political and cultural “context” in Canada.

And the political context is that of the Trudeau government playing the election misinformation card indirectly and directly, to put pressure on social sites.

Even though the decision regarding the company’s business operations has been described by Foreign Minister Melanie Joly as “a message to China” – it’s really a message to TikTok, since the app remains available, but has been “put on notice.”

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Despite our wide readership, less than 0.2% of our readers contribute financially. With your support, we can do more than just continue; we can amplify voices that are often suppressed and spread the word about the urgent issues of censorship and surveillance.

Consider making a modest donation — just $5, or whatever amount you can afford. Your contribution will empower us to reach more people, educate them about these pressing issues, and engage them in our collective cause.

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Brownstone Institute

Freedumb, You Say?

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From the Brownstone Institute

By Gabrielle Bauer 

“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”

Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.

Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”

From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.

It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.

One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.

Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.

Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”

This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)

One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.

“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”

But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.

Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.

The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.

Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.

While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.

We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.

Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.

My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.

Republished from Perspective Media

Author

Gabrielle Bauer is a Toronto health and medical writer who has won six national awards for her magazine journalism. She has written three books: Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award, and most recently, the pandemic book BLINDSIGHT IS 2020, published by the Brownstone Institute in 2023

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