Shellenberger: Why The Media Is Attacking Free Speech Authored by Michael Shellenberger via ‘Public’ substack, Governments around the world are cracking down on free speech. What they are demanding includes the ability to read private encrypted text messages and invade homes in search of wrongspeech. Their demands thus go far beyond what the Censorship Industrial Complex was able to get away with over the last six years. And things are getting worse. Last week, the European Union announced it would punish Twitter for withdrawing from its supposedly “voluntary” censorship laws. “Twitter leaves EU voluntary code of practice against disinformation,” said the EU’s top censor, Thierry Breton, “You can run, but you can’t hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be a legal obligation under [the Digital Services Act] DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement.” Politico begs to differ. The Censorship Industrial Complex, it wrote last week, is an “unproven conspiracy theory that a group of left-leaning academics, think tanks, tech workers and government employees coordinated to silence right-wing voters ahead of nationwide votes. To be clear (looking at you, Twitter Files), none of this has been proved, and there’s evidence that right-leaning voices have a larger, not smaller, presence online compared with those on the left.” But it’s not unproven. In fact, the existence, funding, and actions of the Censorship Industrial Complex are extremely well-documented at this point. Across thousands of pages of Attorneys’ General lawsuits, thousands of pages of Congressional reports and testimony, and hundreds of pages of Twitter and Facebook files themselves, it’s clear that here was a highly coordinated campaign by top White House officials, government agencies, and government-funded contractors to demand Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies censor, in their own words, “often-true” content, including about drug side effects, both to prevent the public from seeing it but also to spread misinformation on behalf of

Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing set Twitter on fire with a 16-part thread that accuses Elon Musk and Twitter of pulling out of a deal to premiere Matt Walsh’s documentary “What Is A Woman?” on the social media platform for free on Thursday evening. The sometimes humorous doc gained national attention as Walsh presented a “deeply disturbing” deep dive into “the logic behind a gender ideology movement that has taken aim at women and children.” (Video: YouTube) In celebration of the first anniversary of the film’s release, the Daily Wire planned “to give it away for free for 24 hours on Twitter.” But, at the last minute, things apparently took a dark turn. “Twitter canceled a deal with @realdailywire to premiere What is a Woman? for free on the platform because of two instances of ‘misgendering,’” Boreing tweeted. “I’m not kidding.” 2/16 One year ago today, we released What is a Woman?. To celebrate the occasion and expand the movie’s already enormous impact, we decided to give it away for free for 24 hours on Twitter. — Jeremy Boreing (@JeremyDBoreing) June 1, 2023 Initially, Boreing explained, Twitter seemed like the ideal place to show the film. “With Twitter’s recent commitments to free speech, we thought it would be the perfect place to distribute the film and drive the conversation forward on one of the most important topics of our day,” he wrote. And Twitter seemed to like the idea. “Twitter responded with enthusiasm and offered us the opportunity to buy a package to host the movie on a dedicated event page and to promote the event to every Twitter user over the first 10 hours,” Boreing recalled. “We accepted and signed an agreement.” It wasn’t until after Twitter actually watched the documentary that things began to fall apart. “After we

Combating The Censorship Industrial Complex Authored by Charlie Tidmarsh via RealClear Wire, It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files—the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship—was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.   For six months, not much of consequence has happened, either in Washington or the mainstream media, in response. Those who owe us mea culpas have not provided them, tending instead to attack the individual reporters or ignore their findings. Meanwhile, some concerning developments have emerged: Congress formed the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in order to conduct its own investigation, which would have been encouraging had it not culminated in representative Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands threatening Taibbi with imprisonment for his testimony; Mark Warner’s RESTRICT Act, which would yield the federal government an enormous media-censorship leeway, was introduced in the Senate in March; Montana banned TikTok statewide; special counsel John Durham’s report on Russian interference was released and received with a profound lack of interest in the FBI’s dubious and error-laden investigation; and the Global Disinformation Index, a British NGO that ranks news outlets on a scale of “risky” to “least risky” (this website is one of