Censorship Industrial Complex
Here’s How The Trump Admin Could Help Crush The Censorship Industry

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Katelynn Richardson
The Trump administration has a major opportunity to deal a blow to the sprawling censorship industry, both inside the government and in the private sector.
Trump promised in a campaign video from Dec. 2022 to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” by, among other proposals, signing an executive order banning agencies from collaborating with private platforms to suppress speech and ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate parties involved in censorship.
“If Trump takes the steps that he has indicated he will, one focus of anti-censorship efforts I anticipate is nonprofits like the Atlantic Council and Stanford Internet Observatory [SIO] that operate as middlemen between the government and the tech companies,” New Civil Liberties Alliance attorney Jenin Younes told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “As President, Trump should ensure that the White House and his executive agencies do not work with these groups to censor ‘mis’ or ‘disinformation.’ In fact, all government efforts in the MDM [misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation] sphere should end, since this clearly results in suppressing First Amendment protected speech.”
Under the Biden administration, White House staff made explicit requests for platforms to restrict COVID-19 related speech. Other agencies participated in speech suppression, with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) flagging posts for removal and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) forwarding misinformation reports from local election officials to platforms, a practice they called “switchboarding.”
CISA likewise helped create of the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020, which the SIO played a key role in running, to monitor “misinformation” and report it to platforms during the 2020 election. A federal judge declined last week to dismiss a lawsuit against the SIO, along with several other groups, over their alleged targeting of conservative speech.
“Private entities cannot be permitted to partner with the government to censor Americans’ speech,” Nicholas R. Barry, America First Legal Senior Counsel, said in a statement.
Younes told the DCNF she would like to see “punishment for government actors who have violated Americans’ First Amendment rights.”
“At this time, such individuals manage to escape accountability for their actions because of doctrines like qualified immunity,” she said. “However, there can be exceptions to qualified immunity when government officials knowingly flout people’s civil rights, and those exceptions should be applied in the First Amendment context.”
Trump’s other suggestions included firing bureaucrats who have engaged in censorship, ensuring federal dollars do not go towards nonprofits and universities labeling domestic speech as misinformation and asking Congress to revise Section 230 to “get big online platforms out of censorship.”
The Biden administration has issued $267 million in grant funding for projects including the term “misinformation,” including $127 million specifically relating to COVID-19, according to a November Open The Books report. The DCNF reported in 2023 on several projects funded by the NSF to develop censorship tools, including a dashboard to forecast misinformation “trends” and another studying how misinformation influences online networks.
Great Discussion Between @AFergusonFTC And @nataliegwinters On The Censorship Regime And How The Trump Administration Can Combat It
Two Key Parts Of The Censorship Problem:
-Private companies colluding to censor speech they don't like. Advertiser Cartels being one of their… pic.twitter.com/i89sWWF9nQ
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) November 30, 2024
‘Smash This Censorship Cartel’
Many Trump nominees have been vocal about their commitment to promoting free speech.
Andrew Ferguson, who Trump selected as the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair, said on War Room in late November that Trump can cut off some censorship outright, ordering officials to stop communicating with platforms and ending government funding for entities participating in speech suppression. But private censorship would likely move to “new fronts,” he noted, making it important for the FTC to take “investigative steps.”
Ferguson said “advertiser cartels” could violate antitrust laws by agreeing to boycott certain shows, podcasts and platforms.
“If the government is going to get out of the business here in the states of cooperating and colluding with the platforms to suppress the speech that they don’t like, then it’s up to the FTC to make sure that that sort of cooperation and collusion doesn’t move into the private sector,” Ferguson said.
Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brennan Carr likewise said in a NewsNation interview that one of his top priorities would be to “smash this censorship cartel.”
Other appointees took strong stances on censorship. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s choice for National Institute for Health (NIH) head, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration pushing back on COVID-19 lockdowns and responses. United States Department of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought his own lawsuit against the Biden administration for alleged First Amendment violations.
Harmeet Dhillon, who is set to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, worked with her firm on a case challenging the California Secretary of State’s Office coordination with Twitter to suppress speech.
Continued Litigation
While the Supreme Court found in June that plaintiffs who challenged the Biden administration’s censorship efforts failed to link their accounts’ restrictions to the government’s communications with platforms, the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit is ongoing. In November, the district court allowed the plaintiffs to pursue more discovery to establish the government’s involvement.
“Depending on the approach the Administration takes, it is conceivable that cases like ours could resolve in a consent decree, in which the government acknowledges its wrongdoing and takes various specific steps to safeguard against future violations of Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights,” Younes told the DCNF regarding the case.
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) recently launched a new Center for Free Speech aimed at targeting censorship entities, pointing to the “new opportunity” free speech defenders will have as Trump takes office.
ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler told the DCNF the center is intended to create “substantial pushback on global censorship,” which he said has increased over the past decade by both private and government actors.
Potential targets include state level election laws, like the California laws targeting political satire that ADF already filed a lawsuit against on behalf of the Babylon Bee, along with debanking practices and other censorship by private actors.
“There is a lot of work to be done to dismantle this censorship industrial complex that’s been built up over many years,” Sechler told the DCNF.
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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