Friends —
It was an honor and privilege to once again offer my testimony yesterday to the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives about the existence and threat of the Censorship Industrial Complex two years after I first identified and labeled the danger. I am happy to share it with you below, as well as video selections from the hearing, above.
Michael
The Censorship Industrial Complex, Part Three
The Foreign Threat
Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Raskin, and members of the Committee: thank you for inviting my testimony.
Nearly two years ago, I testified and provided evidence to a Subcommittee of this Committee about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, including Stanford Internet Observatory, and Big Tech social media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.
Today, the Censorship Industrial Complex is on the defensive. On January 20, 2025, just hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order on ”Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” which said the following: “Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve.”[i]
One week earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced, “ We're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platform.” Zuckerberg’s announcement came after he sent an open letter to you, Mr. Chairman, last August, in which he confirmed that “senior members from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor” Covid content. In the same letter, he acknowledged that the FBI programmed Facebook executives to censor a New York Post article about Hunter Biden laptops for being supposed Russian disinformation even though the FBI knew it was authentic.[ii]
Zuckerberg announced that he at Meta would follow the lead of Elon Musk at X and create crowd-sourced fact-checking, known as Community Notes, to replace much of the fact-checking the company had outsourced to others. In his video, Zuckerberg openly discussed the problem of “censorship,” using that word, or the word “censor,” nine times. “ We’re going to get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” he said.
And, thanks in large measure to the work of this Commitee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government last year, as well as to the investigative reporting by those of us here today, we were able to shine sunlight on some of the worst actors in the Censorship Industrial Complex, such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, which I singled out in my testimony two years ago. In June of last year, the Observatory shut down in response to our collective exposés.[iii]
Unfortunately, the Censorship Industrial Complex remains almost entirely intact, and Europe, Australia, Britain, Brazil, and other nations in the West continue to seek new forms of censorship and information control, including digital identification tied to social media. My colleagues and I are over two years into our research characterizing the Censorship Industrial Complex and we continue to discover whole new institutions involved in censorship.
