The release of internal Twitter documents detailing the company’s recent collaboration with federal agencies to shut down dissident voices sheds new light on the nature of government-sponsored censorship. But the Twitter Files barely scratch the surface, according to former State Department official Mike Benz.
Benz said the government has implemented “a whole-of-society” approach to silence dissent under the guise of fighting “disinformation.” In reality, “it’s a censorship industry.” Its purpose is to protect the privileges of U.S. political and corporate elites and turn the power of the federal government against Americans, strip them of their First Amendment rights, and subjugate them like an occupied nation.
The machinery that drives the censorship industry has its roots in the Cold War struggle against communism. But now, he said, the ruling establishment is using those instruments of political warfare internally against those it dismissively calls “populists.” In reality, they’re targeting traditionally conservative Americans, at least half the country, who are increasingly angry to see their constitutional rights trampled and their country degraded by a deracinated elite.
Whole of society refers to four different categories of institutions within society, according to Benz: “The government, private sector, civil society, and news media.”
Concerning the government, he said, “We’re talking about the national security state agencies. So that is everything from the Pentagon to the State Department and CIA to the FBI and DHS [Department of Homeland Security]. And then on issue-specific censorship issues, you also have the onboarding of other federal agencies, such as HHS [Health and Human Services], CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], NIH [National Institutes of Health], for censorship of things like COVID.”
The private sector makes up the tech platforms themselves, “as well as private-sector partners who play an assisting role [by] financing censorship activities,” according to Benz.
The civil-society component, often federally funded, is made up of “U.S. colleges and universities,” he said, “and other NGO, nongovernmental groups, which are often tightly linked with government.”
Among their contributions to the censorship industry, academia and NGOs create artificial intelligence software used by social media platforms to identify targets for censorship.
Media is the fourth category. They “go out and detect misinformation,” Benz said. There are also the “fact-checking organizations who go out and flag” what the social media platforms should censor.
In other words, the NSF is using taxpayer dollars to boost Democrats by censoring the opposition. To put that in context, Benz said, “Sam Bankman-Fried made $40 million of contributions to the Democrats in the last election cycle.” This made the disgraced crypto-currency guru the party’s second-largest individual donor. The NSF’s grants, he said, are like a “matching contribution just from a single government division.”
The NSF has long been a vital “instrument of federal government research to the private sector,” according to Benz.
“Most people associate the National Science Foundation with federal funding for engineering or aeronautics, or computer science,” he said.
And decades ago, that research contributed to America’s almost half-century-long conflict with the Soviet Union. But there was another dimension to that struggle, one much less discussed—political warfare. In the late 1940s, Benz said, U.S. leadership resolved to do things such as “control the information space, social opinions, the political leadership of basically every country on Earth that matters to us. Or else the Bolsheviks will.”
The United States clearly held the upper hand in the information space, largely because it had long dominated media, radio, the print press, and, perhaps most crucially, the motion picture industry. In the Cold War context, the purpose of promoting free speech and democratic ideals abroad was to destabilize totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union. According to Benz, that equation still holds true today—free speech destabilizes target regimes.
And this is why the U.S. national security apparatus embraced the 21st-century revolution in information technology.
“For the purposes of insurgency,” he said, U.S. officials saw social media “as a regime change tool.” To mobilize an insurgency, “you could simply create a hashtag, you could simply pay YouTube influencers, you could simply create Facebook groups.”
The Obama administration deployed precisely those instruments to shape the 2011 upheavals across the Middle East, also known as the Arab Spring. Together with NGOs and the media, U.S. and foreign, the White House toppled former U.S. allies it had in its crosshairs, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
And then the national security establishment turned its attention to the domestic arena. The way to understand the “whole-of-society” censorship consortium, according to Benz, is that the U.S. officials who once fought for information space abroad have trained their sights on the Biden administration’s opponents.
“Whereas free speech on the internet is useful for regime change,” he said, “internet censorship is useful for regime stabilization.”
For the establishment, 2016 was a wake-up call. It perceived the Brexit vote and then the election of Donald Trump as existential threats.
“National security insiders as well as political operatives,” Benz said, feared they “were losing control.”
In response, they “launched this whole-of-society push to counter ... ‘disinformation’ or to counter populism as a threat to democracy. They said, ... ‘How can we pour tens of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, into this, in order to create this massive whole-of-society, well-funded, well-oiled machine to censor our opposition online.’” The result is the whole-of-society censorship consortium.
What Benz calls “total information dominance ... is how you create a one-party state, when you have the instrumentalities of the federal government being used by the incumbents ... to stop any sort of change to the government from the voter side.”
The moment Americans are living through now, he said, is what many other countries around the world experienced in the 20th century.
“The United States [is] controlling your information ecosystems, controlling your political leadership, controlling your ability to transact in commerce in your region,“ he said. ”People in Boston are now experiencing what people in Baghdad did. This is what it feels like when the U.S. government deploys its military, its intelligence, and its civil society cutouts in order to do a whole-of-society political control operation on your region.”
