10 Times The Censorship Industry Suppressed Factually True Information
1/3by FFO Staff March 20, 2024
The era of online censorship was fueled by media-driven panics about “fake news” and “disinformation.” The focus of fear switched many times, from the spy-thriller narrative of Russian agents spreading disinformation intended to undermine U.S. elections, to “conspiracy theorists” questioning the official response to COVID-19 and undermining “election integrity” by raising concerns about mail-in ballot fraud.
Eventually, these narratives led to the censorship of true information. The Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled some of the top examples:
1. Targeting of Domestic “Malinformation.”
There are three categories used by the censorship industry and its government partners to distinguish between speech violations on social media: dis- mis- and mal- information (MDM). The DHS’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has been at the forefront of popularizing the MDM framework. They maintain an entire website for MDM resources (as documented by FFO, it was later scrubbed to remove all mentions of targeting domestic speech).
They define disinformation as speech that is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate. Misinformation is information that is factually incorrect, but not on purpose. The third level of bannable speech – “malinformation” – is defined as factually accurate, true speech that is deemed to be taken out of or lacking context. In other words, malinformation is information that is completely true or accurate, but used in the wrong way.
2. Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story
Weeks before the 2020 election, the New York Post released their bombshell story revealing correspondence from Hunter Biden’s laptop that would reveal he arranged a meeting between his father and a Ukrainian business executive. This would spark the most impactful coordinated act of censorship in the 2020 election, with Twitter and Facebook both suppressing the story, hampering its virality and preventing it from reaching millions of Americans.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg would later say, on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, that his company’s decision to censor the story had in part been due to FBI warnings about “Russian propaganda.” Records obtained by House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan also revealed that the FBI, when asked by Facebook, initially refused to comment on whether the Hunter Biden story was real. One day later, FBI agent Elvis Chan advised Facebook that there was no evidence that any foreign government was connected to the leaks – but this information would not reach the public eye until Jordan obtained it.
In the meantime, fifty former intelligence officials including NewsGuard advisory board member Michael Hayden signed an open letter denouncing the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinfo,” while NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill would repeat a similar claim on CNBC.
3. Vaccine Side Effects
The Virality Project was composed of the same supposedly “nongovernmental” organizations who coordinated with the federal government to censor the 2020 elections under the name Election Integrity Partnership (EIP): The Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab. After the elections were over, the consortium rebranded as the Virality Project to censor domestic COVID-19 vaccine skepticism online rather than election-related narratives.
One of its top targets was information about COVID vaccine side-effects. In an email exposed through the Twitter Files, members of the Virality Project can be seen recommending censorship of “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”
4. Mask Efficacy
In 2021, YouTube removed a video from Senator Rand Paul because he called the efficacy of masks into question. He said that “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection” and “cloth masks don’t work.”
While YouTube and the censorship industry’s media allies labeled his claims as false, a study has since shown that masking makes little to no difference in preventing COVID. The CDC has since updated its guidance to say that cloth masks “provide the least protection” against COVID. In response to the study,
Anthony Fauci has backtracked on his previous mask mandates, saying “the data are less strong” on showing the efficacy of masking on mitigating the pandemic — the same opinion Fauci expressed at the beginning of the pandemic, before switching his position.
https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/10-times-the-censorship-industry-suppressed-the-truth/