Government's Mass Censorship Campaign

Tucker [00:37:14] So in other words, complaining about election fraud is the same as taking down our power grid.

Mike Benz [00:37:21] Yes, you could literally be on your toilet seat at 9:30 on a Thursday night and tweet, "I think that Mail-In ballots are illegitimate." And you were essentially then caught up in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security, classifying you as conducting a cyber attack on U.S. critical infrastructure because you were doing misinformation online in the cyber realm and misinformation is a cyber attack on democracy when it undermines public faith and confidence in our democratic elections and our democratic institutions.

They would end up going far beyond that. They would actually define democratic institutions as being another thing that was a cyber security attack to, to undermine. And lo and behold, the mainstream media is considered a democratic institution. That would come later. What ended up happening was in advance of the 2020 election, starting in April of 2020 - although this goes back before.

You had this essentially Never-Trump neocon Republican DHS working with essentially NATO on the national security side and and essentially the DNC, if you will, to to use DHS as the launching point for a government coordinated mass censorship campaign spanning every single social media platform on Earth in order to pre censor the ability to dispute the legitimacy of mail in ballots.

And here's how they did this. They aggregated four different institutions: Stanford University, the University of Washington, a company called Graphika, and the Atlantic Council. Now all four of these institutions, the centers within them, were where we're essentially Pentagon cutouts...

Benz explains that in about 2016 the government could no longer count on its backdoor to the legacy media -- favor for favor and access -- to control communications across a broad spectrum, something that had served it well as a censorship tool for decades.

The internet had far wider reach and allowed independent voices to outcompete the legacy media, which had been the government’s reliable megaphones. The growth of huge social media platforms disrupted the government’s usual speech-control techniques and it scrambled to find new ways to control what we learned as legacy media was shrinking in reach and respect. Using the fraudulent Russiagate as a justification for their conduct, they were forced to seek new, less plausible justifications when the Mueller investigation established that pretext would be unavailing.

The extent of the government's meddling was revealed when Elon Musk took over and released internal files revealing much of the government censorship of what was then Twitter...

There are several cases now pending in the Supreme Court questioning whether the government can censor internet communications through proxies what it cannot do directly...

Benz has made a persuasive historically accurate case demonstrating how techniques developed by government agencies to meddle with elections abroad have now metastasized online to interfere with domestic elections and policies. He has also persuasively shown how these agencies fear popular control, justifying their actions by confusing the concept of "democracy" with the preservation of existing institutions like NATO and the IMF. And, of course, their own power to continue to control public perceptions of government policies and elections.

THREAD: @MikeBenzCyber speaks with @TuckerCarlson about the Department of Homeland Security-backed censorship consortium that censored millions of social media posts during the 2020 election and COVID-19.

The 2020 election and COVID-19 were the two most censored events in American history.

Mike Benz outlines how the government established a permanent domestic censorship office under the pretext of countering misinformation and disinformation.

Initially considered for the State Department, CIA, and FBI, the censorship office found its home in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), utilizing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

DHS classified elections as critical infrastructure and online misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation as cybersecurity attacks.

The original goal of countering Russian disinformation shifted to suppressing domestic dissent and the populist movement led by President Trump.

Examining the 2020 election's censorship strategy, Benz details CISA's collaboration with Stanford University, University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council through the Election Integrity Partnership.

The censorship consortium employed coercive tactics, leveraging its deputized status to pressure tech companies through government threats.

A critical element was the seven-month pre-censorship campaign before the 2020 election. The consortium compelled social media companies to introduce a new "delegitimization" violation, targeting content challenging faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes.

The overarching goal was narrative control, preventing doubts about a Biden victory and avoiding a crisis akin to the 2000 Bush-Gore election.

Anticipating Biden's victory hinging on mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot dropboxes, the consortium precensored any questioning of the election's legitimacy, particularly if Trump appeared to win on election night but later lost due to late-arriving mail-in ballots.

The so-called "Red Mirage-Blue Shift event."

... internet services, meaning the actual experience of using the internet for communication and commerce, are not the same in every nation...

When western government applied economic sanctions against Russia via financial restrictions writ large, the layer of internet commerce control merged with the information and national security control systems of the internet...

... I do not want people to get too disheartened in what is going to happen here in the United States...

... the Shadow banning of The United States internet is a big and complex story...

The origin of the public-private partnership goes all the way back to the origin of the tech system in relationship to the DARPA programs and government sponsored research labs. The outcome of the modern partnership is evident in the Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) collaboration with the various communication platforms or pipes of information...

... Artificial Intelligence (AI), or smart data systems, are launching into the United States internet control mechanisms almost daily...

Everything will change. Every route of online traffic including Internet Service Providers (ISP's) to filters and rerouting on Domain Name Systems (DNS), to the Internet Protocol (IP) itself will be subject to change in the form of background shadow banning. If the DHS partnership is successful, you will not initially notice - much like a shadow banned platform user doesn’t notice their new defined status. The shift will become more obvious over time...

"The Alpha/Google spiders are not crawling around with their enhanced AI looking for words, phrases or content issues. Enhanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) has given the spiders the ability to look for context...

The social media restrictions became more prevalent and noticeable in the past several years; now it is time for DHS to expand that process to the entire U.S. internet...

When I wrote about Jack's Magic Coffee shop... Eventually DHS control over Twitter was revealed in the Twitter files. The same background is true here...