>>12562
I don't think it matters, but our political vocabulary is much better at fighting formal state tyranny than decentralized networks controlling a handful of nominally private chokepoints, so it's worth pointing out 5eyes was probably involved.

Consider the Anglosphere Intelligence's role in the 2015-2023 closure of the Internet. Not a ton of evidence on the topic (obviously), so this part isn't super dense. There was a huge surge in tech hiring of ex-FBI employees in 2018.


It is not inherently suspicious that ex-spooks go to Silicon Valley companies; many have expertise in cybersecurity and related fields. What IS suspicious is that so many flock to the content control/moderation roles (Trust and Safety etc).


For example, you have Meta product policy managers for disinformation (ex-CIA) and senior managers of Trust & Safety at Google (also ex-CIA).


One Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for MENA was simultaneously a psyop specialist for the British army.


The Twitter Files revealed that both the CIA and FBI regularly met with Twitter, and there were so many ex-FBI agents at the firm that they had their own slack channel. FITF meetings, which were supposed to be about foreign influence, usually focused on "domestic intelligence."

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1/?

>>12590




Not too much to say. Certainly tech and intelligence are fairly closely bound and have been since before the closure of the Internet (NLT the late Obama era - note 2016 is cut off, chart should end in 2015 to compare full years to full years).



The question is not "to what extent is intelligence involved with tech" (the answer is obviously, "a lot"), but to what extent have they used this to influence domestic politics (the answer is "not zero," but hard to tell how much).

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Some sources/links:

https://techtransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-revolving-door-us
https://jacobin.com/2022/12/twitter-files-censorship-content-moderation-intelligence-agencies-surveillance
https://newsweek.com/twitter-executive-revealed-psyops-soldier-spreading-disinformation-across-social-media-1462406
https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/09/google-twitter-meta-tiktok-crawling-hundreds-former-feds/

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>>12562

On top of covert involvement, many Western governments participated directly and formally with wide-ranging moderation and censorship laws and "guidelines," especially Germany, Britain, the EU, and Australia.

Germany's 2017 NetzDG act, which forced large platforms to hire thousands of moderators or potentially face huge fines for hosting illegal content even outside of Germany, was the first major law.


This German law served as the template for similar laws in other authoritarian despotisms, such as Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and India.


The EU has also exercised informal pressure, imposing a "Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online" on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft in 2016.


This escalated in 2020 to law with the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposed fines of up to 6% of global revenue for illegal content and demanded certain EU-based orgs (mostly NGOs and official journalists) get "trusted flagger" status, meaning their reports are prioritized.

>>12592
1/?

(Adhering to the 2016 (later updated in 2018) Code of Conduct on Hate Speech is evidence of compliance with the DSA, which gives platforms a strong incentive to police speech on their own rather than wait to get flagged)


The UK was probably the most important Western government in the closure of the Internet. This began in 2017, when the UK govt pulled all YouTube ads as part of a press campaign against "hate speech" on the platform.


Post-Brexit, the UK govt spent years hounding several social media companies and summoning/humiliating executives, most notably Facebook, over Cambridge Analytica conspiracy theories, including personally threatening Zuckerberg.



This culminated in Britain's 2023 Online Safety Act. Australia has actually gone further than Britain; its version of the OSA (2021) gave its e-safety commissioner (position created in 2015) the ability to remove content at will.

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>>12593
2/?


Australia was also the first country to force companies to break encryption on request, in 2018.


In 2019, New Zealand announced a pledge to "counter online extremism," which most tech companies and Western governments immediately signed. The US did not (citing freedom of speech) until the Biden admin took office in 2021.


US government pressure was generally informal and behind the scenes. For example, in 2021 the White House Director of Digital Strategy requested Facebook censor "borderline content," and Facebook complied.

>>12594

3/?

Biden's Surgeon general similarly demanded social media companies redesign algorithms and impose clear consequences on violating accounts to reduce "misinformation."


FBI pressure helped lead Facebook to censor the (true) New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election.


CISA (a DHS sub-agency) explicitly talked about how to invest in third-party NGOs “clearing house for information to avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”


In 2020, one of the most important of these clearinghouses was Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was set up behind the scenes by the CISA.


The EIP was then expanded into the Virality Project during the lockdowns, which explicitly tried to censor true stories that could fuel vaccine hesitancy, like a Cleveland Institute article on natural immunity.


I've previously covered the Twitter Files, so I'll just reiterate: extensive FBI contacts including individual account deletion requests, multiple types of blacklist/algorithmic suppression.


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Some sources/links:

https://schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/australia-threatens-to-force-companies-to-break-encryption.html
https://esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation
https://tremau.com/resources/online-service-providers-should-prepare-for-tough-new-laws-in-australia/
https://committees.parliament.uk/work/6330/disinformation-and-fake-news/news/103661/government-response-to-committees-final-report-on-disinformation-published/
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/103614/committee-pushes-for-zuckerberg-appearance-after-facebook-ctos-unsatisfactory-evidence/
https://engadget.com/2017-03-17-uk-youtube-ads-hate-speech.html
https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/03/lawsuit-shows-governments-hands-all-over-the-election-integrity-partnerships-censorship-campaign/
https://justthenews.com/government/congress/just-news-reporting-flagged-federally-involved-election-misinformation-system
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
fortune.com/2024/08/27/mark-zuckerberg-meta-censorship-biden-administration-letter/
https://axios.com/2021/07/15/coronavirus-misinformation-surgeon-general-murthy
https://reclaimthenet.org/the-white-houses-social-media-censorship-demands
https://cfr.org/articles/year-review-content-moderation-social-media-platforms-2019
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-codes-conduct
https://coe.int/en/web/cyberviolence/-/european-commission-the-eu-code-of-conduct-on-countering-illegal-hate-speech-online
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/trusted-flaggers-under-dsa
https://justitia-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Analyse_Cross-fertilizing-Online-Censorship-The-Global-Impact-of-Germanys-Network-Enforcement-Act-Part-two_Final-1.pdf
https://itif.org/publications/2025/06/02/germany-content-moderation-regulation/

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>>12562
The EU, with its phenomenal market size and lack of meaningful internal opposition, was particularly important.
The role they played was very critical, where in 2016 they "introduced voluntary legislation that saw Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft commit to regulating hateful speech" in the 2016-2019 closure of the Internet.



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Whenever I complain about enormous Internet platforms engaging in giga-scale censorship and repression starting in 2016, I get a horde of morons telling me it's their First Amendment Right as private actors. These people are natural slaves; what matters is the censorship and not who does it. Open discourse and freedom of thought are intrinsically important, not because they're in the Constitution (roughly 3/4 of which is at best honored in the breach anyways). They're also wrong; governments have been involved in these censorship efforts from the beginning.

Source: https://hal.science/hal-03609930v1/file/Reddit_hatespeech.pdf

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I don't want to burn through another account, so I will continue to my next section.

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In order to do this moderation, tech companies needed "ground truth," which was outsourced to an ostensibly neutral (in reality very partisan) network of NGO fact-checkers.

To make fact-checking work during the closure of the Internet, social media platforms had to know the ground truth of claims. Since this is not precisely knowable, they outsourced determining the truth to a web of news organizations and NGOs.


Most official fact-checking organizations were certified by other the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) or the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), which created a chokepoint in the ecosystem.


The IFCN was founded by the Poynter Institute, a school of journalism, in 2015, after a $1M foundation grant. They hired an ex-SPLC employee to create a list of 515 orgs to be used in ad blacklists, including mainstream conservative ones like the Washington Examiner.



1/?

>>12597
Sometimes, claims are just wrong. But often, they are judged by fact-checkers as misleading for missing context (which may or may not be true - but what context is relevant is not prima facie obvious) or partly false based on nitpicking. Both types get suppressed.


Meta's initial source of ground truth was five US fact checkers, hired in 2016: PolitiFact, Factcheck[.]org, Snopes, ABC News, and the AP. All are correctly known to be strongly leftist and Democratic orgs, albeit with more neutrality than one like HuffPo.


Another IFCN-like "alliance of news media, social media, and technology corporations" to "combat disinformation" was the Trusted News Initiative, founded in 2019 and closely linked to the British government.


An example of one of the most academic orgs used by these various alliances was the SIO, the Stanford Internet Observatory, funded by the US government. This was eventually dismantled after House Republicans noticed it kept id'ing conservative arguments as disinformation.

>>12598
2/?

Another similar org is the Digital Forensic Research Lab (note the date: founded 2016).


Hamilton 68 was an extremely prominent "low-level" group which was used as a source by bigger fact-checkers (Snopes, Politifact). Their alpha was a list of Russian disinfo accounts... almost all of which turned out to be ordinary conservatives with no links to Russia.


(You can see how easily national security concerns were weaponized against domestic opponents.)


Another example of what these orgs looks like: Turnitin, which created a browser extensions for students that automatically flagged "misinformation."

>>12599
3/?

Many fact-checking orgs were funded by, who else, the EU. The other major sources of funding were the tech platforms using them as ground truth and the big US foundations (think Ford Foundation), which have been notoriously leftist since the 60s.


Another problem with these orgs: flagging obvious satire like the Babylon Bee. Why was this a problem? Because this automatically led to algorithmic suppression and potential demonetization on tech platforms.


The problems with fact-checking orgs can be summed as follows:
1) These were partisan, left-leaning, and Democratic orgs. Even strictly within the bounds of factuality, there is (what you check vs don't, what counts as misleading, etc) almost infinite grounds for bias...


(As an example: fact-checking claims that COVID wasn't very dangerous in 2020 by pointing out it was 10x as dangerous as the flu, and failing to do similar quantitative fact-checks for claims that huge numbers of unarmed blacks were slaughtered by police)

And these orgs did not stay strictly within the bounds of factuality; they were regularly wrong (eg COVID lab leak, actually almost everything related to COVID and the lockdowns, Hunter Biden laptop) and often waded into strictly political issues (mail-in ballots).

What you see with people who trust fact-checkers is that they are usually more than right on average (an extremely low bar) on most issues, but badly and systematically wrong (ironically, misinformed) on select issues of key national importance (eg COVID, police shootings).

>>12600

4/?

These orgs produced countless "media bias charts" which are taught in middle schools right now, and look like this. AP, to their credit, is often misleading but rarely lies, but NPR? HuffPost?:


Or this. (LOL at Socialist Alternative being on par with the New York Post, or AP and Reuters not being solidly 'skews left')


So you had "ground truth" deputized to a network of (Democratic, left-wing) partisans, whose personal views not only gained the sheen of neutral fact-checking, but had the power to systematically censor and suppress literally billions of social media posts.


These fact-check networks were often publicly funded, and ~always funded by tax-advantaged foundations. They should be seen as a decentralized version of China's censorship apparatus. But it's worse, because unlike China, official truth changes daily and is never explicit.

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Some sources/links:

ncll.org/news-alerts/snopes-fact-checks-christian-satire-site-babylon-bee
https://web.archive.org/web/20230804014434/https://www.allsides.com/blog/global-disinformation-risk-assessment-shows-media-bias-against-right
https://washingtonexaminer.com/news/2749593/disinformation-inc-meet-the-groups-hauling-in-cash-to-secretly-blacklist-conservative-news/
https://turnitin.com/press/turnitin-partners-with-newsguard
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/funding-news-media-sector
https://racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton?r=2xssg
https://atlanticcouncil.org/programs/digital-forensic-research-lab/
https://insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/research/2023/06/23/stanford-u-wash-faculty-fought-disinformation-got-sued?ref=platformer.news
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_News_Initiative
https://poynter.org/fact-checking/2019/in-the-past-year-facebook-has-quadrupled-its-fact-checking-partners/
https://transparency.meta.com/features/how-fact-checking-works
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynter_I

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>>12562
Funnily enough, just as tech was making their ostensible roles (uncovering and disseminating info) obsolete, journalists became deputized as truth oracles and gained official subsidies and privileges (like exemptions from German speech laws).
Canada provides several privileges for officially-recognized media organizations, such as tax refunds up to 35% of labor costs and huge transfers directly from platforms where their content is posted. Australia, UK, South Africa, Brazil, and NZ have similar programs.



France subsidizes officially-recognized journalists to the tune of a billion pounds a year. The Nordics have a similar program. France and Italy also provide recognized journalists with tax credits.

>>12602
1/?

Unsurprisingly (it is basically the UK with good weather and Silicon Valley), California is going down a similar route of state-subsidized media.


Stepping away from direct subsidies for a moment, courts and the administrative state in the US have effectively created "reporter's privilege" not to have to reveal sources to official reporters. Non-reporters do not get this.


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Some sources/links:

publicmediaalliance.org/do-bargaining-codes-have-a-future/
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/italy/corporate/tax-credits-and-incentives
https://toutsurmesfinances.com/impots/comment-declarer-ses-revenus-de-journaliste.html
https://french-property.com/news/french_life/newspapers_press_subsidies/
https://nordicom.gu.se/en/facts-analysis/nordic/factsheets/direct-media-subsidies-news-media-nordic-overview
https://journalism.berkeley.edu/15-million-to-journalism-fellowships/
https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/businesses/topics/corporations/business-tax-credits/canadian-journalism-labour-tax-credit.html

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>>12562

In all cases, there was a very clear progression: each platform started by going after Neo-Nazis and similarly unsympathetic groups and within a couple of years escalated to alt-center, mainstream conservatives and mild-mannered academic types (psychometrics).
I gave the timeline as 2015-2022, but it's never actually stopped, just somewhat receded thanks to Twitter's Musk era, the extreme excess during the lockdowns (eg shutting down lab leak discussion) provoking a backlash, and Republican officials wising up to what was going on.

As of now, there are two distinct phases:
1) 2015-2019, started by the migrant crisis, Brexit, and Trump I, which destroyed the Internet Right.
2) 2020-2022, related to the 2020 election and the lockdowns, which massively intensified everything and went after normies.

The effect of this on Internet discourse was to not only shift it extremely far to the left but to dumb it down. Like unpredictable environments leading to r-selection, ubiquitous censorship discouraged original research or high-effort books/essays/videos in favor of memes.


Seeing this happen in real time was immensely blackpilling and the fact that it isn't even widely-known and discussed that this happened (almost entirely in the last 11 years) is a travesty. "Closure of the Internet" is 1000 times worse than McCarthyism ever was.


I regret not being able to do this topic justice; it really needs a proper book/documentary/TV series, with interviews with key participants (eg Vijaya Gadde) and a look through archives of major institutions. Forum threads and essays are not enough.

Pinning this thread because I believe it to be fundamental/foundational information for any newcomers unaware of the current situation and even for those who know the current situation but don't quite understand how it got to this point and why.

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