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Feb. 21, 2024 - Epoch Times
46:24
[FREE EPISODE] PART 1: Mike Benz: Inside the West’s Censorship Industry—And the Funding Behind It
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22 million tweets were categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or throttling through EIP, the Election Integrity Partnership.
Mike Benz has been tracking the rise of the West's censorship industry for years as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department official.
The Twitter files were just the tip of the iceberg, he says.
To monitor social media discourse about COVID, Grafica was immediately working with NATO's essentially psychological warfare branch in January 2020.
In this comprehensive two-part interview, he breaks down the major players in today's censorship regime and how tactics once used abroad were deployed to target Americans.
It is a career path.
It is a path to power.
People who are in government roles in misinformation, disinformation at DHS will get their next jobs at the German Marshall Fund or at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Mike Benz, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thanks for having me.
Mike, in our conversations, you told me that you have a mission of fostering a free and open internet.
Where are we at now?
Because you're basically saying that this is not the case here.
Well, we're very far removed from the days of what I consider to be the golden age of the internet.
Between 2006 and 2016, when you had this combination of a mature social media ecosystem where people could share information, basically a pure information meritocracy, if you will, Until after the political turbulence of the events of 2016,
which instituted a sort of revenge of the gatekeepers, if you will, a sort of increasingly, incrementally more regimented system of censorship that we are now in the process of negotiating opposition to, if you will.
You're saying that something profound happened in 2016 that changed the ecosystem dramatically.
So, obviously, you said it was the political turbulence, but what actually happened?
How did the system change?
Well, there were two enormous and unexpected political events that year.
In June 2016, you had Brexit.
Brexit at the time It was not just a sort of small, isolated, domestic issue within the United Kingdom.
It was viewed as an existential threat to the integrity of the European Union, because at the time there was a fear that France would then go through Frexit with Marine Le Pen's movement, Italy would go through Idlexit with Matteo Salvini's movement, You would have Grexit in Greece,
Spexit in Spain, the EU would come undone, NATO would fall apart, the entire rules-based international order would collapse if something urgent wasn't done about it, and then in quick succession you had Who at the time was an almost 20 to 1 underdog.
The New York Times, the morning of the 2016 election, had Trump at about 5%, and Hillary Clinton at 90x, and a little bit for the stragglers.
But basically, it was this idea that this couldn't happen, and yet it did.
And it seemed like everything was going to fall apart, so to speak, with the rules-based international order, unless The information ecosystem was radically and permanently altered because both of these events were viewed as being internet elections, if you will.
Social media was the reason that Nigel Farage developed the popularity of the Brexit movement.
It was through his viral YouTube speeches to the European Parliament.
And it was the domination of Twitter hashtags and Facebook groups that were responsible for Donald Trump's popularity at the base level.
So you had an organized effort to contain populism by containing the means through which populists could distribute their messaging and mobilize politically.
Populist seems like a catch-all term, right?
Is it actually populist that we're talking about?
That's their terminology, and I think that's fair to use because it captures both the idea that Base-level opposition to elite institutions can come from both the right and the left.
It's not necessarily a right-wing or a left-wing thing.
Left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders in the U.S. or Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. were targeted with equal...
It's just that they didn't come as close to power as Trump and the Brexit movement did.
Why don't we just sketch out where we are today?
You describe it as a whole-of-society effort, which just sounds massive and unbelievable, frankly.
You're saying that a lot of people are beginning to understand what this is.
They might know that, oh, the Twitter files have exposed a lot of censorship.
They might have themselves experienced something, but they can't necessarily, they don't see the whole picture.
A whole of society?
What does that mean?
Right.
So that's actually the terminology of basically every mainstream censorship industry professional.
Addressing disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach.
Disinformation is not going to be fixed by governments acting alone.
I think we've seen that a whole-of-society effort is really key to the solution.
This is a whole-of-society challenge.
A whole-of-society approach.
This is a whole-of-society problem.
This is something that is now such a well-worn phrase within the censorship industry that they often apologize at conferences for using the term because it's so It's so well-worn at this point.
So what that means is four categories of institutions in society all working together towards the common goal of censorship.
So you've got government, the private sector, civil society, and then news media and fact-checking.
So just to break down those four elements, you've got DHS, FBI, DOD, State Department, the National Science Foundation, The CIA and National Endowment for Democracy on issue-specific issues like COVID censorship.
You've got HHS, NIH, CDC, NIAID, all of those playing various roles at the government level.
Then you've got the private sector.
You've got the tech platforms where the censorship actually occurs.
That is, you know, where the button gets pressed, so to speak, or where the algorithms play out.
But then you've also got private sector censorship technology development.
That is, private companies whose job is to create machine learning, artificial intelligence, to incorporate the training data, to actually create the tools that are used for the act of censorship.
And then you've got the corporate social responsibility, the CSR money that pours into it from the private sector.
In fact, there's a whole new impact investing angle.
VCs investing in censorship companies because there's such a gold rush into the field.
And then on the civil society side, you've got universities, NGOs, activists, and non-profits and foundations.
And then finally, at the news, media, and fact-checking level, you've got political like-minded within the media who are propped up by the government, by the private sector, by the civil society, So that they can manage public narratives about various issues and can amplify pressure for censorship by creating negative press on the tech companies, for example.
And then you've got the fact-checking conglomerates within that who flag the individual posts for the tech companies to manage.
So all four of those in concert have all been fused into basically the nucleus of a single atom.
I mean, it's hard to conceive how this works, right?
When they have disinformation conferences, there will be representatives from all four institutions there.
They will negotiate what their own preferences and needs are.
They will talk with each other about doing favors for favors.
They will work out common terminologies, common problems that they're having.
They will have a revolving door at the professional level.
People who are in government roles, for example, in misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation at DHS will get their next jobs at the German Marshall Fund, or at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Stanford University has a fellowship there.
It is a career path.
It is a path to power.
We're now going on, essentially, year five or six of this industry being created, so it's reaching a stage of maturity.
As it would a technology space or an energy space.
It's becoming much more seamless as these roles become more interchangeable.
What is it that unites these people?
Is it ideology?
I think different people are in it for different reasons.
What I find most fascinating is the young people, actually.
Because it's my contention that censorship, if you will, is the fastest growing major on college campuses.
For ambitious young people who want jobs in Washington D.C. or in Silicon Valley, Often, a top career path was you'd go to Georgetown, you'd major in international relations, and you'd aspire to get a job on the Hill and then work your way up, or maybe you'd start in finance and then transition over.
What's happened with the rise of the censorship industry, and basically, you don't get your degree in censorship.
You'll get it in something like computational data science, or advanced linguistics, or the internet research lab, There are so many different ways to launder the concept,
but essentially what they're doing day to day in these majors and in these PhDs is they are fusing the social sciences with the computer sciences to help both Silicon Valley and big government Control public discourse.
Control the political momentum of various ideas.
And this puts young people right at the nexus of Google and Facebook and Washington DC and Congress.
So you can shortcut, you know, making a tiny salary at the Hill out of Georgetown and then taking that pedigree into a long term by going directly over to Google's content moderation team or public policy team and working directly with Congress there or working directly with essentially congressional cutouts It is a path to power that is stunning in both the salaries these folks make and in how glitzy it is.
I mean, you really do get the cocktail party invitations.
You really do get access to a beautiful life.
And you get impact.
You're not a sort of desk jockey, if you will, who's Correcting typos for the first five years of your career.
You're in the action.
So I think it's very exciting for people, and I think they become very intoxicated with the power, the godlike power, if you will, that total censorship capacity gives you.
As I'm listening to you speak, I'm still having trouble imagining how, in 2016, suddenly this whole industry just kind of launches or is created, basically.
You're saying it's not out of nothing, right?
And now you're saying it's maturing at this time, and it happened without, frankly, most people being entirely aware, even though they were aware that there is some more censorship, that there is, you know, if you were targeted, of course, right?
If you're, over the last few years, but you never imagined it would be something so grand as you're portraying here.
These things were not on the front page of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
They were in sort of You'd pick it up in strange vibrations, and for me, I came to it through the artificial intelligence sort of space.
I was an avid chess player as a kid, and I lived through that period when computers overtook humans in the capacity to play chess well.
And I remember all the naysayers saying that chess computers would never be able to beat Garry Kasparov or there will always be this ability to have the purity of the human spirit pierce through the dead soul of a chess computer.
And then I remember the existential dread that befell the chess community when Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue and it was like humans would never be able to compete against computers again and it was this This negotiation existentially with what we do in a world where you've got no hope.
And I remember when I first, in late 2016, came across literature around the deployment of artificial intelligence for purposes of content moderation.
And it gripped me.
I became fixated at the cognitive level On the existential threat that this posed, and every time I would try to have conversations with folks about it, both socially, politically, familiarly, nobody took the concern seriously.
And laughed it off in a very similar way that people did in 1998, 1999, before the Garry Kasparov match.
And so for me, none of what's happened has been a surprise to me.
I only wish that folks had...
Had taken the issue much more seriously before the infrastructure became consolidated.
Because now it's like trying to stop a cancer once it's already metastasized into the brain and the lungs.
It's much harder to do now.
It's still essential and that's what I consider to be my purpose.
What is it that you saw exactly?
What did you realize that no one else realized?
The power of control over words was very similar to the power of control over chess pieces, if you will.
The way chess computers work for algorithms is they condense everything into a number system so that you can grade every aspect of a chess position on a number scale to spit out a clean number that tells you who's winning and by how much.
For example, if the computer says the position is negative 0.5, it means that the computer assesses the person who's playing the black pieces to be up by approximately half of a pawn.
When I started looking into what was being done with artificial intelligence and natural language processing and machine learning training models that were being developed, they were using a very similar system in order to map linguistically what was happening in the human language on social media.
If someone was talking about, say, A Trump policy.
You could map the linguistic topography of that narrative and you could grade all of the different words and slogans and memes and concepts into essentially what looked like a chess computer readout for whether you want to play knight to F3 or bishop to C5. The power this gives you to be able to automatically trip varying levels of interventions, is what they call it, you know, censorship things.
If the threshold goes above 1.5, this thing just gets banned.
If it's between 1 and 1.5, we're going to shadow ban it.
If it's between 0.5 and 1, we're going to just affix a fact-checking thing to it.
It gives you perfect control over the ability to determine The popularity of a narrative.
Let me talk about the Twitter files.
We've known about censorship for a while.
At the Epoch Times, we've experienced hit pieces and deplatforming or demonetization associated with such hit pieces.
Some of what we've been talking about here, we're kind of aware of.
What the Twitter files revealed to me Was that while on one side there's censorship happening, the thing that really hit me at one point as we were looking at these dumps is that there's this essentially ability that comes out of this to shape the perception of a whole significant portion of society by just excluding discourse.
This is what you're making me think of right now as you describe this in chess.
But you say that the Twitter files are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, right?
A very tiny tip of it.
The fact is, my foundation, Foundation for Freedom Online, had already covered a lot of the things that ended up coming out in the Twitter files.
A lot of this was available Frankly, just by listening to the folks involved own public meetings.
A lot of these things were done on YouTube or were added as Facebook videos or were on their own websites.
What the Twitter files revealed was basically the presence of censorship operatives at virtually every national security-related institution in the U.S. government, as well as in the intelligence and in the public health spheres.
So there were Twitter files for the FBI, for the DHS, for the DOD, for the State Department.
I saw that at the State Department myself.
Everything from funding censorship-themed video games to promoting censorship of populist groups around the world, often with a conscious view of it having a boomerang effect on limiting the popularity of populist groups in the U.S., What the Twitter files tended to focus on, even in their most explosive cases, were one-off requests for censorship takedowns.
For example, the FBI would send a message to the Twitter trust and safety team to say, here's a batch of six or seven tweets that we don't like and we want you to take.
They violate your terms of service, so you may want to take them down sort of thing.
That Only captures the tiniest fraction of censorship that was actually done in each of the major geopolitical events that we've experienced in the past few years.
So take six or seven takedowns in the context of, say, something like the Election Integrity Partnership, which had a formal partnership with the Department of Homeland Security to operate as their formally designated disinformation flagger.
22 million tweets were categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or throttling through EIP. Compare that to, you know, six or seven highlighted in a Twitter files dump.
These are six or seven orders of magnitude.
It's not even the same ballpark.
And this is because it wasn't just government individual takedown requests.
It was government pressure and coordination with the changing of the policies and the private sector themselves.
To actually coerce the tech companies to create whole new categories of things to censor, and then arming them with the artificial intelligence to then automatically scan and ban the new thought violations that they themselves had helped install.
So they did a one-two punch behind the scenes that the Twitter files still have not even come close to touching.
How are you cataloging all this?
Where are you discovering all this, the evidence of this happening?
Sure.
So what we just covered was stated very frankly and directly by an individual named Alex Stamos, who was the head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was sort of the anchor entity of the Election Integrity Partnership.
My suggestion is if people want to get the platforms to do stuff, is first you've got to push for written policies that are specific and that give you predictability, right?
And so this is something we started in the summer in August is, as Kate talked about, Carly Miller led a team from all four institutions to look at the detailed policies of the big platforms and to measure them against situations that we expected to happen.
Now, we're not going to take credit for all the changes they made, but we had to update this thing like eight or nine times, right?
And so putting these people in a grid to say, you're not handling this, you're not handling this, not handling this, creates a lot of pressure inside of the companies and forces them to kind of grapple with these issues because you want specific policies that you can hold them accountable for.
The second is when you report stuff to them, report how it's violating those written policies, right?
So there's two steps here.
Get good policies, and then say, this is how it's violating it.
We will have our statistics, right?
But I think we were pretty effective in getting them to act on things that they hadn't acted on before.
November 9th, 2022 report has about 20 to 25 embedded videos of censorship professionals confessing what they did and what I just cited here of how EIP Using DHS's clout and pressure on the back end,
coerced the tech companies to create a new category of censorship called delegitimization, which was anything in the 2020 election that delegitimized public faith or confidence in mail-in ballots, early voting drop boxes, or ballot tabulation issues on election day.
100% of their targets, 100% were Trump voters, right-wing populist groups, and the tech companies didn't want to do these policies initially, but they were coerced through pressure from EIP and EIP's friends in the legislature.
Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Mark Warner, Adam Schiff, this whole intelligence committee, foreign affairs committee faction, as well as through others in the DNC to put pressure on the tech companies to create the censorship category.
And then he laid out in that video the two-step process, which is one, you get them to change the policies by putting them in a grid and threatening this and then creating negative news media that, and then two, you engage in this mass documentation and assist you engage in this mass documentation and assist with the actual development of the capturing of all the violations of the new policies you just put them, got them put in.
Now, The reason they do all these confessions on video is because you have to understand Censorship is not just an industry, it is a mercenary business.
Everyone in the censorship industry is competing for the same pool of government grant funds and donor dollars.
And it is a competitive industry at this point.
We're not in 2018-2019 anymore.
It is a mature industry with many players in it.
You need to stand out.
You need to prove what a good mercenary you are, what a good censor you are, how effective you are at silencing the opposition of the donors and the grant organizations.
So you need to brag about it on video so that you are more qualified than your competitors in getting more government grants.
And in fact, right after Alex Damos made this confession, not just on video, but in a 292-page public report, he and the lad that he partnered with got a $3 million government grant from the Biden administration.
They became government funded for the first time ever, right after he made that confession.
Confession.
So many things coming out of what you just said.
But the first one is, so this is actually like a market for censorship now.
Competitive market for censorship.
Yes.
That you're talking about.
It is an industry.
And it is a subsidized business by the federal government and by large entrenched commercial and political interests who all have varying investments in neutralizing opposition to their concerns, which can be done through censorship because social media is the great equalizer when it comes to creating social and political momentum.
So what's really interesting is what you're describing, you know, you're talking about it in the context of election integrity.
We use that term.
It also applies directly when it comes to, you know, COVID misinformation.
It's the exact same tools that are being used essentially in the same way.
It's funny you say that, actually, because we just covered the Election Integrity Partnership, EIP. It's the entity that That DHS formerly partnered with as their disinformation flagger.
When the 2020 election ended, and they had censored their 22 million tweets and had 120 staffers censoring for DHS, Trump supporters for the 2020 election, there was no more election cycle until 2022.
They came back and partnered with DHS again for the midterms.
But in between then, they...
They briefly folded up and then rebranded and renamed themselves as a new entity consisting of the same censorship entities.
But instead of calling themselves EIP, they called themselves VP, the Virality Project, where they did the exact same system of coordinating the government, the civil society, the private sector and the news media and fact checking organizations.
Instead of doing election censorship, they did COVID censorship.
But they did the exact same ticketing system.
They had the exact same relationships with Facebook, with Google, with YouTube, with Twitter, with TikTok, with Reddit, with the 15 different platforms they monitored.
And they had the same system of chopping conceptual opposition to In the election context, it was mail-in ballots and drop boxes and ballot tabulation to COVID origins, to vaccine efficacy, to mask mandates, or to narratives about Bill Gates or Anthony Fauci.
In fact, in their own after-action report, they detailed how they micro-targeted 66 distinct narratives about COVID, chopped all of them up into all the different component claims, and then helped basically advise on the artificial intelligence censorship,
helped the reporting and flagging, and coordinated the censorship army that was trained on censoring COVID. So it was a seamless transition from election censorship to COVID censorship.
So basically all you need to do to do this is to know what the correct view is.
Is this what you're telling me?
And then you can just basically engage, system engage, and you're good to go.
It's an evolutionary process as well.
So one of the things that was onboarded several years ago into the censorship industry was this concept of subject matter experts on a narrative-by-narrative basis who can help do the linguistic mapping and monitoring the rise of new memes, of new ways of talking about an issue, and then continually folding that into the censorship paradigm that you've established.
I do want to quickly say, though, that I highlighted EIP turning into VP for COVID censorship after the 2020 election.
But COVID started at the end of 2019, and actually, the COVID censorship consortium I mean, really immediately.
For example, Grafica is one of the four component entities of the EIP censorship consortium that DHS partnered with.
Grafica is a U.S. Department of Defense funded censorship consortium, essentially.
They were initially funded to help do We're good to go.
Social media discourse about COVID and COVID origins or COVID conspiracies or COVID, you know, sort of issues that were...
In January 2020, they began their first formal...
This is one...
COVID-19 didn't even have the name COVID-19 in January 2020.
It was still called coronavirus at the time.
And yet Grafica was immediately working with NATO's...
Essentially, psychological warfare branch, the hybrid COE, hybrid center of excellence, in January 2020.
And immediately, they were doing social media network graphs of what right-wing social media, and they did this along political lines.
They had this sophisticated topography of what right-wing media was saying, what left-wing media was saying.
What was being shared, the nodes and links between nodes of all the different narrative discourses on social media for the purpose of then handing that to the government to say, here's what people are saying, what should we do to stop it?
So the censorship set in right away.
You know, you're reminding me of something I read that I wanted to get you to comment on, which is the foreign to domestic disinformation switcheroo.
It sounds like you're touching on something about this.
So what is that?
I think it's very important to this whole picture.
This is so important for understanding the history and chronology of how we got here.
And it's something that many commentators to the Twitter files are sort of discovering for the first time.
Now, Matt Taibbi has spilled a lot of ink in the past several weeks talking about how shocking it is, the Russian disinformation predicate, how central that was in retrospect, as he's been writing, to the normalization of domestic censorship.
This is something I've been screaming about for five years now.
What happened was, before 2016, the idea of domestic censorship in the U.S. was not just rare, isolated, and frowned upon.
It was a sacred existential attack on everything American.
Censorship was the one thing that really distinguished at the governmental and at the social contract level that distinguished the United States of America from every other country on the face of the planet.
Other Western democracies, No other Western democracies have a First Amendment.
We look at sort of liberal democracies like Canada or the United Kingdom as being, you know, kind of just like America in being, you know, Western tradition, you know, governmental democracies.
But what makes America distinct is that we have total free speech in this country.
At least that's what it was billed as.
And the idea of going directly from that into this system of mass domestic censorship where if you challenge mail-in ballots in a Twitter post while you're sitting on the toilet on a Thursday night, that the Department of Homeland Security has an entire division who is sitting there Who, when they see your tweet, will categorize you as conducting a cyber attack on US critical infrastructure because you've undermined public faith in the elections.
This is something that needed an intermediary step.
And that intermediary step was the foreign predicate.
Now, this is something that the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been doing, I want to say since time immemorial, but essentially since the 1940s, if you will.
When the national security state was established, Really consolidated with the 1947 National Security Act and the American foreign policy establishment basically came to a consensus opinion that if we want the 20th century to be the American century, we're going to need a department of dirty tricks.
We're going to need to play rougher on the world stage than we've been used to.
We will still have constitutional protections for Americans.
We'll still have free speech in America.
We'll still have due process in America.
But we're going to empower our foreign intelligence and our foreign influence capacities with much more ruthless and dirty capacities than we have to play at home because it's a tough world out there.
The Bolsheviks are going to do it if we don't do it.
There's this whole new order coming out of World War II that is going to need Some tough love to, you know, to consolidate.
Even in the 1960s, at the time in the 1960s when there were opposition movements to the bipartisan consensus on several things, including on war and foreign policy, the counterintelligence division at the FBI often deployed this Department of Dirty Tricks to neutralize anti-war protesters or some of the more stringent elements of the civil rights protests.
Martin Luther King, for example, was targeted by the FBI, formerly on the grounds that-- of his connections to Stanley Levison, who was a-- you know, had these affiliations with communism.
And so you could wiretap Martin Luther King's phone.
You could have COINTELPRO, you know, write nasty grams, suicide, you know, death threat letters.
Because it was a-- there was a foreign predicate So if you simply conflated the domestic with the foreign, then it wasn't really the classical type of deprivation of due process.
This is just being really aggressive about countering Russian influence.
So, it's a way of laundering, of bringing the Department of Dirty Tricks that's supposed to stay overseas, of bringing it home to do, if you think of it as a thumbie war between two sort of political factions, it's sort of a sneak attack by bringing in powers that aren't supposed to be there for this game.
They did that in the censorship industry through the use of the creation of a Russian boogeyman that was said to have hacked the 2016 election, that was said to have interfered on U.S. social media, on US social media that was said to have created these sophisticated bot farms and troll farms and Facebook pages and this enormous network tapestry that magically disappeared right before the 2020 election.
But somehow in 2016, it was said to be this enormous, Of course, all of the digital forensics were a total hoax on it.
They were done by the same disinformation experts like Grafica and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab that ended up becoming massively discredited in subsequent years when they completely made up results.
They called real people Russian bots, and those people went on TV and read their name, rank, and serial number.
So it was a hoax from the start, but it was a useful one because it allowed the handoff by the creation of censorship infrastructure on the foreign side that could then be grafted onto the domestic side.
We've talked about the Department of Homeland Security and how it became this hub within the U.S. federal government for coordinating whole society censorship.
At the time, before the Biden administration, for the 2020 election, the only thing that existed at the time to partner with EIP, to outsource all the censorship, to coordinate The domestic censorship of the U.S. election in 2020 was done technically out of a group within DHS called the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.
Countering Foreign Influence Task Force was technically the coordinating wing for censorship of...
You, of people in Ohio, talking about how it was a little weird that early voting drop boxes were open for six weeks before an election.
You can imagine what, you know, what might go wrong with it.
In the very first week Biden took office, this is in January 2021, before the calendar even hit the word February.
One of the first courses of action that Biden's DHS did is they renamed the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force to just the same personnel, the same staffers, but simply went from Countering Foreign Influence to MDM, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, as a general catch-all with no distinction between foreign and domestic.
That way it could paper over the fact that they weren't supposed to be operating on domestic soil.
As you're describing all this to readers of the Epoch Times and viewers of this program, you just keep thinking Russiagate, Russiagate, Russiagate.
Underpinning Russiagate was this idea that Russians had hacked the election.
In fact, there's still Americans that believe that Russians hacked the 2016 election.
And then there was the whole weaponization of the FISC, of the FISA warrants and so forth, which is again something you're alluding to in what you're speaking about.
I don't think anyone imagined, and this is perhaps Matt Taibbi's realizations in the last few weeks, no one imagined that the whole system could be somehow Engaged in all of this at the same time.
Does this make sense?
It still strains credulity that everyone, all these different institutions are working in lockstep.
Unfortunately, real people with real names at real meetings were very cognizant of this.
And in fact, it's my belief, based on compelling evidence that I think I've assembled, That this is actually very conscious from the very start.
Take, for example, in early 2017, when you had the foreign policy establishment trying to reconcile with the fact that an essentially uniparty apparatus that existed from Truman until Trump on foreign policy, this sort of shared left-hand, right-hand understanding that That there would not be any sort of partisan disagreement on foreign policy grounds.
We may disagree on whether it should be high taxes or low taxes.
We may disagree on something like pro-life or pro-choice or civil rights versus various...
But when it comes to what are we going to do about Venezuela?
What are we going to do about...
You know, Southeast Asia.
There's not going to be at least any sort of intense existential right-left sort of distinction, because that's what keeps Washington unified, and part of that is the commercial interest around that.
But when populism emerged and became powered by social media, it threatened The very bedrock of those institutions because now domestic manufacturing concerns may actually impede political will for multilateral institutions that form the basis of the consensus architecture.
What happened was, when they were negotiating the response to the threat of social media, in the very, very, very beginning, They were talking, and when I say they, I'll give an example.
Ambassador Daniel Freed is one example of this.
Now, I don't know Ambassador Freed.
I assume he's a very nice person in his personal life.
He has a certain grace with which he conducts diplomacy, but he was part of an architecture of The censorship industry's development on this Russiagate issue in a way that I find to be profoundly disturbing.
Ambassador Fried was a 40-year diplomat at the US State Department.
He's on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.
And in February 2017, he left the State Department in order to take his talents for coordinating government responses to sanctions.
He was the sanctions coordinator for the Obama administration after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 after the Crimea referendum.
He did the road show in Europe to get all the different NATO countries to pass what were for themselves painful sanctions on Russia, over the Crimea annexation.
A lot of European countries didn't want to do these sanctions because of the economic impact it would have on their own populations.
But Ambassador Fried took his State Department and network clout to put pressure on Europe to do sanctions on Russia for purposes of this Crimea response.
He then turned around after the 2016 election and took those same connections, those same power networks, and organized all these disinformation conferences, these whole-of-society meetings and mobilizations, and did The same thing that he did on sanctions coordination, he did on censorship coordination.
And he was a part of this network that helped pressure and contort the European regulatory climate to passing new censorship laws.
Like for example, Germany's NetzDG in August 2017 was this comprehensive, you know, Germany is the industrial powerhouse of Europe.
And when they passed NetsDG, it compelled Facebook and YouTube to adopt artificial intelligence censorship techniques in order to comply with $54 million fines for leaving various kinds of content on their platforms that violated this new German law.
And so once Facebook and YouTube had to adopt all this new AI, That had an immediate impact on that AI being redirected inward in the US context and in the UK context to counteract Brexit support.
Now, Ambassador Fried was talking openly about this at his own disinformation conferences with European regulators, with national security officials, with extremely important and influential people who at the time were saying, Ambassador Fried, you know, that sounds like a great idea, but it's just not enough.
You know, the Russians are only one component of this.
These populists, they've taken on a life of their own.
They seem to have their own independent interests.
And Ambassador Freed is in the room telling them, listen, I understand, I understand, but in America, we can't just go from zero to one.
We have to boil the frog.
I mean, as an old diplomat, the thing to do is to set up an informal mechanism, maybe formal, but start informal between the US, the EU, key shareholders, and bringing in the civil society, and then use that to have a conversation with the social media companies.
Like, we've got a lot of leverage.
We can use it.
And they will adjust.
Their culture is malleable.
They will respond to the incentive structure that we set up if we do our job.
If you do your thing in Europe, it will help the transatlantic alliance merge towards a common set of norms and values with respect to social media speech.
The creation of this counterintelligence infrastructure will naturally gravitate, you know, as the Mueller investigation is ongoing, as pro-Trump groups are seen more and more as an arm of Russians themselves, there will be an easier time simply consolidating those two concepts into one.
If you simply create a censorship infrastructure for Russia, as Trump gets merged into Trump-Russia, the two become one and the same.
And then suddenly no one's crying tears if a suspected Russian propagandist who happens to be some 17-year-old high school kid in Wisconsin who has a I mean, this is February 2017.
This is right at the outset.
So we should be far past the point and sputter stage at this point.
Coming up next on American Thought Leaders.
What you are doing in a regime change operation is you are operationalizing huge masses, domestic population, and in order to do that you need to control the media infrastructure.
You need to control the narratives that people believe.
What was new is that in 2016 this began coming home.
In part two of my interview with Mike Benz, we discuss how tools originally developed to promote regime change were deployed against Americans.
NATO declared a new doctrine called From Tanks to Tweets.
And there became a whole new military doctrine called Hybrid Warfare.
From, quote, To media literacy, to moderation and intervention, a whole new lexicon emerged to describe the new censorship regime.
Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition.
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