The Censorship Industrial Complex Was Invented to Kill Peaceful Populism

By Adam Garrie, The Kennedy Beacon

Many people became aware of the “censorship industrial complex” during the COVID-19 crisis when both public figures and ordinary social media users found that even peaceful and truthful speech could be censored from platforms — including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit — when that speech questioned official pandemic narratives. 

The Censorship Pandemic of 2020

Shortly after Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October of 2022, Musk allowed independent journalists to review company documents that detailed both direct and indirect government instigation of the censorship of unambiguously legal social media content. The people censored included prestigious medical doctors and researchers such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, and many others. Journalists were also censored, including former New York Times writer Alex Berenson and independent journalist Kim Iversen. Among those censored under the direct request of the Biden administration was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a matter referenced in documents filed with the Supreme Court. 

mikemacmarketing, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

During the height of what Dr. Malone referred to on the Joe Rogan podcast as the “mass formation psychosis” of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy was a practicing attorney whose advocacy included public health matters, environmental issues, and cases of severe personal injury as the result of corporate malfeasance. 

In April of 2023, Kennedy made the decision to run for president. During the speech in which he declared his candidacy, Kennedy explained that one of the reasons he decided to run was that he was tired of being “shut up” by government-directed censorship and wanted to fight for the restoration of free speech to all Americans.

Kennedy was one of many erudite figures “shut up” due to state-directed censorship beginning in 2020. This notwithstanding, the reality of state-sponsored censorship that became omnipresent during COVID-19 was set in motion long before the pandemic. 

A new report by some of the most important authors of the Twitter Files has uncovered new information about vectors of the censorship industrial complex, that provides answers to previously open-ended questions relating to the pre-COVID-19 origins of mass censorship in the United States and beyond. 

A War against Populism 

Writing in Public, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi explore the question as to why none of the architecture of what would become the censorship industrial complex appeared to exist in 2019, yet somehow was effectively deployed in early 2020. 

The answer comes in the form of a previously little-known group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). According to a whistleblower whose documents form the basis of the Public report, “A leader of CTI League, a ‘former’ British intelligence analyst, was ‘in the room’ at the Obama White House in 2017 [prior to President Trump’s inauguration] when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016.’”

What this means is that the scope of the censorship industrial complex is far wider than the self-appointed “mandate” of fighting so-called “medical misinformation.” The founding goal of CTIL was to prevent populist and anti-establishment political and social movements from forming in the digital public square and influencing electoral outcomes. In this sense, the censorship industrial complex can be described as undemocratic, opposed to the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, and entirely lacking in transparency. 

Tellingly, none of the documents reviewed in the report from Public mention any concern among CTIL’s members about the public being in any danger from COVID-19. Their obsession centered on censorship and censorship alone. If CTIL’s members had any private thoughts of altruism, they kept such thoughts to themselves. 

A Military-Intelligence War on Free Speech

CTIL’s leadership was composed of figures with direct links to the military-intelligence sector of the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel. According to the report’s authors, CTIL’s leading figure during its inception in 2018 was Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, a former UK defense researcher. 

Although CTIL represented itself as a non-governmental body, it worked closely with multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, and had equally close and apparently cordial relations with executives at major social media companies. The whistleblower told the report’s authors that a number of CTIL’s members were FBI and CIA agents. 

In a familiar modus operandi to those who have read the Twitter files and the contents of Missouri v. Biden, a case whose discovery is a treasure trove of information relating to government encroachment on the First Amendment, CTIL directed social media companies to suppress content that was found to dissent from government-approved narratives. This included objectively harmless phrases used on social media at the beginning of COVID-19 shutdowns, including “all jobs are essential.” 

From Censorship to Struggle Sessions

CTIL not only suppressed online speech, it actively propagandized specific government narratives. It did this by manipulating trending topics on social media, as well as through the creation of so-called “sock puppet” social media accounts, which were centrally coordinated to promote pro-government COVID-19 narratives under the guise of “authentic social media users” who did not exist. 

According to the report’s authors, 

The documents also show that Terp and her colleagues, through a group called MisinfoSec Working Group, which included DiResta, created a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy called Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT).

The tactical aspects of AMITT were directly based on the methods intelligence agencies previously used to manipulate foreign populations and governments, including across the Middle East and North Africa. This time, the target was the American people. 

Becker1999 from Grove City, OH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons...

According to the whistleblower who spoke with the report’s authors, Terp “expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.” 

Perhaps even more frightening than the group’s aim of propagandizing government narratives under the guise of authentic discourse was its mission to discredit otherwise respectable public figures. The report explained how CTIL organized social media attacks on figures with opinions that dissented from the political establishment. Such attacks were the calculated preamble to repeated calls for the censorship of the individuals who had just been subjected to the deeply un-American phenomenon of public humiliation rituals. 

These methods recall those of Roland Freisler, the head of Germany’s People’s Court between 1942 and 1945. Freisler infamously made defendants appear before the court in tattered and ill-fitting clothes before screaming invectives at them as they hunched over in pain due to intentionally poor prison conditions. 

To Hell with the Constitution 

The report’s authors further reveal that in addition to working with members of the formal military-intelligence apparatus, putative civilian members of CTIL appeared to revel in their militaristic role as public censors. 

Private discussions exposed by the whistleblower documents reveal an incredible zeal for censorship in which some members of the group spoke of their censorious mission as though it were on par with a great scientific breakthrough or supremely altruistic activity. Members of the group likewise spoke of the First Amendment as though it were a nuisance and discussed the best methods they could use in order to evade legal scrutiny from free speech activists invoking constitutional protections. A reasonable reader of the report is likely to be taken aback by this zealous attitude that has more in common with the language of communist revolutionaries than with that of responsible American public servants who are legally bound to obey the Constitution and ethically bound to protect the rights of citizens, rather than to censor and insult them. Perhaps this is not surprising given the fact that while members of CTIL enforced government policy, their official status remained clouded in subterfuge, thus allowing the group to act like a secret police tasked with enforcing unwritten laws which clearly violated the written ones. 

Despite the group’s cavalier attitude toward the First Amendment, CTIL’s members went to great lengths to remain anonymous, according to the report’s authors. Nonetheless, the group’s activities, while hardly discussed, did not go fully unnoticed. The report’s authors talk of “press release”-like “reportage” about the group’s mission from 2020 articles in Wired, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post. The group’s direct links with the military-intelligence community were notably absent from these reports. 

What It Means to “We the People”

CTIL is yet another supposedly independent organization of “volunteers” which in reality was an entity that acted as the go-between and facilitated censorship of privately run social media platforms, through its direct links to the military, intelligence community, and powerful government agencies. 

At its most fundamental level, censorship is the elimination from public view of words and images. There has never been any scientific study that suggests reading certain words or seeing certain images can cause any harm to a person’s health. 

Why, then, was so much effort and money expended on censoring doctors, people afraid of losing their income, people attempting to educate their children, and peaceful activists like Kennedy? The only logical conclusion one can draw is that while the fear of words and images is a scientifically irrational concept, powerful people were afraid certain words and images would challenge their power.

This is why Kennedy compared his campaign to a peasant revolt in which patriots scale the castle walls sheltering elite rulers, so that ordinary people can share the wealth and freedom enjoyed by a select few, as reported in The Kennedy Beacon. 

Full Speech: Kennedy Declares Himself Independent Candidate for President

CTIL’s origins had nothing to do with any viral pandemic. The group was formed due to a desire of its founders to stop populist politics from becoming an electoral factor in the United States. It was, however, quickly mobilized against the very freedoms that populists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seek to protect, and in doing so it became virulently antagonistic to people like Kennedy and many others who exercise their First Amendment rights to hold government to account by speaking truth to power.

The report by Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Taibbi exposes yet another terrifying chapter in America’s undemocratic separation from the Constitution. As one of CTIL’s main figures privately admitted, the techniques employed by the censorship industrial complex are those honed in wars and espionage operations overseas. To say that the war against the First Amendment is hypothetical or exaggerated negates the importance that America’s founders placed on this lodestone of constitutional law.