Speaking before the House on Thursday about his work on the Twitter Files, journalist Michael Shellenberger expressed concern about a worrying trend toward a “censorship-industrial complex” being adopted by the government.
Shellenberger said it was a disturbing experience testifying about the weaponization of the federal government because of the Democrats’ efforts to persuade him to expose his journalistic sources.
The journalist said what has become clear is that we have now identified a censorship-industrial complex that includes government-funded firms that are performing state-sponsored censorship.
He detailed how we’ve seen Facebook and Twitter caught blocking truthful information because it may lead to outcomes of which they disapprove.
Shellenberger said that the United States government was using tax dollars to finance a censorship sector suppressing news about real-world events. This is a direct result of the Biden FTC coming after journalists and Elon Musk for disclosing the deep state’s censorship efforts.
This is why there is now a Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Once Elon Musk bought Twitter, the government had a weapon in the form of a consent order that Twitter had agreed to in 2010 in response to a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission over protecting users’ personal information.
Musk called Twitter a “crime scene.” Once he acquired the firm in late October 2022, he had the freedom to fire staff, institute new procedures, and invite reporters to cover it. Now, due to everything that’s happened, there’s a report from the House JudiciaryCommittee’s Subcommittee that claims the FTC misused its consent order to badger Elon Musk and Twitter.
The FTC’s requests for information were considerably beyond the parameters of the consent agreement. In an outrageous move, the agency also demanded to know the names of all the reporters who had been given access to the Twitter Files.
The testimony of Michael Shellenberger can be summed up quickly as follows: the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies met regularly with Twitter and other tech platforms to impose varying degrees of control over the content and the accounts allowed on social media.
The “censorship-industrial complex” couldn’t be more aptly descriptive.
