June 2, 2025 - Epoch Times
04:51
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| They moved quickly to end the Global Engagement Center, which was part of the State Department, which had funded an organization that had targeted media, the Global Disinformation Index, a little outfit out of Britain that was just smearing media and trying to basically run advertiser boycotts, trying to get advertisers to boycott perfectly legitimate, mostly right-of-center media outlets. | |
| National Science Foundation, TRAC-F, funding for censorship activities, misdescribed, of course, as fighting misinformation, but this is a very scary effort to basically pour millions of dollars into universities to develop censorship tools for social media companies. | |
| It's actually a continuation of tools that were developed by DARPA, our great defense department R&D laboratory. | |
| They have shut down, I think, the beating heart of the censorship industrial complex, which were these four organizations that were all, or I think most all of them, if not all of them, were receiving or going to receive National Science Foundation money. | |
| And some of that was already happening. | |
| I mean, the Stanford Internet Observatory, due to pressure that we and others put on them, that shut down last year before Trump was elected. | |
| And he's also come out, been critical of the head of the DHS agency that oversaw the censorship, which is called the Cybersecurity Information Security Agency, Chris Krebs, somebody who was involved in that censorship activity. | |
| You mentioned GARM. | |
| Also, the advertiser censorship effort has disbanded, though we're concerned it's restarting up again. | |
| Just huge success. | |
| There's strong rumors that we will see actions to sanction the Brazilian Supreme Court judge who is behind the censorship in Brazil. | |
| And I am myself under criminal investigation under Brazil for the Twitter files Brazil. | |
| So I'm very happy to see that. | |
| We saw concerns expressed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the persecution. | |
| And the censorship of British citizens, some of whom said some ugly things online that are reprehensible, but nonetheless should not result in two and a half years in jail, which is the situation of a 42-year-old mother in Britain right now. | |
| So I'm thrilled. | |
| Now, is it game over? | |
| Not quite. | |
| I wish it were. | |
| the censorship industrial complex has always been very strong in Britain and in Brussels as part of the European Union. | |
| The European Union has a free speech content, that they would declare misinformation or hate speech, and with the punishment of 6% of global revenues. | |
| Of social media platforms, which could bankrupt them because the profit margins of social media companies are so thin. | |
| So they've decamped to Britain and Europe. | |
| The censorship industrial complex really mirrors the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement where the Five Eyes, English-speaking nations, United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand. | |
| Have all collaborated on intelligence. | |
| They also collaborated on censorship and on really, I would call them defamation and disinformation and demonization campaigns against people, including myself, by some of those organizations who are funded by the censorship industrial complex, such as Institute for Strategic Dialogue, one of the worst actors in that space, demanding censorship by social media platforms of completely legitimate and accurate information. | |
| So we should be very concerned and Worried about what's happening in Britain and also what's happening in Brussels. | |
| But I do think the wind is to our backs, and that's not a reason to stop fighting. | |
| That's a reason to really continue to build those alliances. | |
| So we do a meeting every year in London in Westminster, the Westminster Free Speech Forum. | |
| In 2023, we did a Westminster Declaration for Free Speech. | |
| Which many public intellectuals, maybe yourself and other journalists, have signed, which opposes censorship of legal speech by social media platforms and any government pressure to do that. | |
| So Australia killed legislation that would have done censorship last year. | |
| Ireland pulled legislation that would have caused censorship. | |
| Two steps forward, one step back in a lot of these places, there are still things that they're trying to move forward. | |
| They're often using protecting children. |
Export Selection