US government officials have wanted to establish a Ministry of Truth, but the efforts of Elon Musk and X have prevented this for now.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Truth manipulates and controls the public through government propaganda, restricting speech and telling people what to believe. Washington bureaucrats wish they could do the same, but the First Amendment’s protection of free speech prevents them from doing so.
Instead, as the rapidly spreading news around Elon Musk’s war with online advertisers makes abundantly clear, the U.S. government is intent on being an indirect or covert arbiter of what counts as truth. Rather than overtly establishing a Ministry of Truth-like institution, the government funds progressive third-party NGOs and private companies to regulate speech through contracts and grants totaling billions of dollars. In return, these organizations identify certain ideas, and the media that platform those ideas, and devise ways to banish them as outside the bounds of orthodoxy, all in the name of fighting misinformation and disinformation.
Given the importance and complexity of this incident, and the interest of the government and its allies in ensuring that the truth of what happened is remembered, understanding this sequence of events is crucial.
Timeline
In 2019, the World Federation of Advertisers, a global association of the world’s largest advertisers, formed the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
partner It is working with the World Economic Forum to combat “hate speech” and “disinformation” and “make online environments safer.”
Shortly after GARM launched, and before the 2020 presidential election, conservative media was labeled “fake news” by media investment group GroupM, which is also a GARM member.
Leaked Data Gabe Kaminsky bought the company, which resulted in these conservative media outlets being blacklisted and missing out on millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Group M’s clients, which included Coca-Cola, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Ford and others.
And in 2020, NewsGuard, a pro-censorship company that created a browser extension that labels conservative media as fake news, received a $25,000 federal grant.
victory NewsGuard took part in a “Pentagon and State Department competition to detect COVID-19 disinformation and misinformation,” NewsGuard said in a press release, supporting the State Department and Department of Defense by “identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation and misinformation narratives, understanding the nature and possible motivations of those sources, and flagging hoaxes, narratives, and fake sources as they emerge.”
NewsGuard
Advisor These include former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Israel Mirsky, an elite who doesn’t have a Wikipedia page at the intersection of medicines, psychedelics, advertising, and technology.
Then, in February 2021, the United States Agency for International Development (now
Led Samantha Powers, former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations under President Obama, and Michelle Smilas, former program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, leaked internal documents.Introduction to disinformationThe initiative encourages partnerships with the private sector and encourages technology companies to “stand up to audio and visual misinformation and disinformation” and “build fact-checking and verification tools,” as well as media organizations to “partner with others,” “debate sources and content,” and “communicate the scale and threat of information chaos.”
As NewsGuard’s prize for winning a COVID-19 propaganda contest, the organization also received participation in a “Government Contracting 101 session.” The Department of Defense quickly began working with NewsGuard, reportedly granting the company $750,000 in “early stage company funding to develop products and technologies” in September 2021, according to a January 2022 report.
reportBut while Newsguard called it a subsidy in its January 2022 report, it later told reporters it was merely a license fee.
Either way, NewsGuard received about $750,000 from the federal government in 2021.
That same year, the Global Disinformation Index, a British pro-censorship nonprofit founded by Clare Melford and Daniel Rogers, also received a $100,000 grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
GDI is
Dynamic Exclusion ListGDI notifies companies of media that GDI classifies as misinformation or disinformation. Most of these media are conservative. list The top 10 riskiest online media outlets include Blaze News, as well as the Daily Wire, Newsmax and One America News Network.
Washington Examiner
report “Financial records show that between 2020 and 2021, approximately $545,000 flowed to GDI’s American nonprofits from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit funded almost entirely by congressional appropriations.”
And in October 2021, NewsGuard
Partnered Negotiated with the European Union, it revised its disinformation code of conduct, which was published the following June. A week later, GARM added “disinformation” to the list of online harms it deemed inappropriate for advertising support. As a result, NewsGuard announced that it would provide free compliance assessments to ensure that companies were compliant with their advertising. NewsGuard also created an option for advertisers to access exclusion lists (blacklists) to “prevent advertising from appearing on disinformation or untrustworthy news sources.” In simple terms, NewsGuard will encourage companies to stop advertising on conservative media.
A few months later, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Faced criticism Many Republicans have condemned the administration for restricting dissident free speech, establishing a Disinformation Control Board to act as an arbiter of truth, and choosing Nina Jankowitz to head the board, who spread disinformation by covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story. resemble The commission was transferred to the Ministry of Truth, a government propaganda arm tasked with telling people what to believe.
Finally, the Disinformation Control Committee
finished August 2022. With no government tools to directly censor speech, Jankowicz turned to government-backed NGOs to carry out the task. After her dismissal, Nina Jankowicz Hypatia Project To combat “gender-based abuse and disinformation.” Her project was carried out in collaboration with the Information Resilience Center, as well as other pro-censorship companies and NGOs. Funding It is supported in part by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
And in October 2022, Elon Musk officially acquired X (formerly Twitter) with the goal of building a free speech social media platform where people can freely share their opinions, including those outside the Overton Window. Soon after, GARM recommended that its clients boycott X, essentially blacklisting it, for violating GARM guidelines. Between November 2022 and December 2023, at least 18 GARM members and other major advertisers stopped advertising on X.
The GARM-backed blacklist has sparked outrage among conservatives and highlighted attempts by NGOs and private companies to censor speech. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against these organisations over the past two years.
Litigation Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist, the lawsuit was filed against the State Department, GDI, and NewsGuard for “funding censorship technology.”
In July 2024, the House Judiciary Committee
report The report was titled “The Pests of Gam: How the World’s Biggest Brands Try to Control Online Speech.”
Then in August 2024, X and Rumble filed an antitrust lawsuit.
Litigation GARM has created an illegal blacklist of X, which could cost X billions of dollars in advertising revenue. What’s most surprising is that some of the world’s largest advertising companies, who are members of GARM, U.S. Federal Government Contracts It amounts to billions of dollars.
Additionally, Publicis Groupe, one of the pro-censorship GARM advertising firms that has federal contracts, led NewsGuard’s seed investment round.
Today, August 8, 2024, the World Federation of Advertisers:
end Following Musk’s GARM project “war” A protest against the advertising mafia that supports censorship. In response to this big news, the House Judiciary Committee Posts X: “A big win for the First Amendment. A big win for surveillance.”
