Protect FREE Speech, The Censorship Must Be DISMANTLED

… by abolishing forever the body formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC)

… GEC is dead. It will not return

… bodies like GEC nearly destroyed America’s long free speech history

… had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse

… “disinformation,”

… was the No. 1 threat to “our democracy.”

… this “disinformation” had to be identified and stamped out

… a means of entrenching its own power and rolling back the freedom

… Obama’s man in charge at GEC, Rick Stengel

… redefining it so that “democracy” came to mean silencing the part of the electorate he doesn’t like

… GEC tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users

… lists of thousands of accounts

… accused of being foreign propaganda vectors

… for sharing articles or even following certain accounts

… to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech

… the GEC paid private actors to do it for them

… a British entity called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI)

… produced a list of the top 10 “riskiest online news outlets”

… a direct bid to drive off their ad revenue and put them out of business

… Every one of those 10 sites was on the political right

… Another entity receiving State Department dollars was NewsGuard

… a company that rates the reliability of various websites

… for the purposes of driving traffic and ad revenue away from those rated poorly

… its board of advisers has included one Rick Stengel

… The entire “disinformation” industry, from its very beginnings, has existed to protect the American establishment

… This travesty has gone on long enough

… If citizens need the government to step in and tell them what is disinformation

… then power doesn’t rest with the people at all

… it rests instead with the people who write the propaganda telling the public what to believe

… an obscure agency to “protect” them from lies by pressuring X to ban users

… This administration will fight false narratives with true narratives

… not with heavy-handed threats decreeing that only one “truth” be visible online