Mike Benz (Part 1): The West’s Burgeoning Censorship Industry and the Government Funds Pouring In–From DHS to DARPA to National Science Foundation
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2023
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition,” says Mike Benz.
He is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department diplomat under the Trump administration.
The Twitter Files were just the tip of the iceberg, says Benz, who has been tracking the rise of the West’s censorship industry for years.
“22 million tweets were categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or throttling through [the Election Integrity Partnership],” Benz said.
“It wasn’t just government individual takedown requests. It was government pressure … to create whole new categories of things to censor and then arming them with the artificial intelligence to then automatically scan and ban the new thought violations.”
In this comprehensive two-part interview, Benz breaks down the major players in today’s censorship regime and how tactics once used abroad were deployed to target Americans and so-called election “delegitimization” or COVID “misinformation” online.
“Graphika was immediately working with NATO’s essentially psychological warfare branch—the Hybrid Center of Excellence—in January 2020 … They had this sophisticated typography of what right-wing media was saying, what left-wing media was saying, what was being shared, the nodes and links between nodes of all the different narrative discourses on social media.”
“They will have a revolving door at the professional level. That is, people who are in government roles, for example, in Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation at DHS, will get their next jobs at the German Marshall Fund or the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab … It is a career path. It is a path to power,” Benz says.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 22 million tweets were categorized as misinformation for purposes of takedowns or throttling through EIP |
| 0:07.6 | at the Election Integrity Partnership. Mike Benz has been tracking the rise of the West's |
| 0:12.2 | censorship industry for years as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online |
| 0:17.2 | and a former State Department official. The Twitter files were just the tip of the iceberg, |
| 0:21.1 | he says. To monitor social media discourse about COVID, |
| 0:25.6 | Graphica was immediately working with NATO's essentially psychological warfare branch in January 2020. |
| 0:32.3 | In this comprehensive two-part interview, he breaks down the major players in today's censorship |
| 0:37.3 | regime and how tactics once used abroad were deployed to target Americans. It is a career path, |
| 0:43.1 | it is a path to power, people who are in government roles in misinformation, disinformation at DHS. |
| 0:48.8 | We'll get their next jobs at the German Marshall Fund where the Atlanta Council's Digital |
| 0:52.8 | Forensics Research Lab. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Janja Kellek. |
| 0:59.0 | Mike Benz is such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. |
| 1:02.8 | Thanks for having me. Mike, in our conversations you told me that you have a mission of fostering |
| 1:11.1 | a free and open internet. Where are we at now? Because you're basically saying that this is not the |
| 1:17.9 | case here. Well, we're very far removed from the days of what I can certainly be the golden |
| 1:25.7 | age of the internet between 2006 and 2016 when you had this combination of a mature social media |
| 1:35.0 | ecosystem where people could share information, basically a pure information meritocracy, if you will, |
| 1:42.3 | until after the political turbulence of the events of 2016, which instituted a revenge of |
| 1:49.0 | the gatekeepers, if you will, a increasingly, incrementally more regimented system of |
| 1:56.8 | censorship that we are now in the process of negotiating opposition to. If you will. |
| 2:04.1 | You're saying that something profound happened in 2016 that changed the ecosystem dramatically. |
| 2:10.0 | So obviously you said it was the political turbulence, but what actually happened? How did the |
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