PART 1: Mike Benz: The West’s Burgeoning Censorship Industry & the Gov’t Funds Pouring In
February 2, 2023
“Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition.”
The Twitter Files were just the tip of the iceberg, says Mike 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 says.
“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, he 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 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.”
Benz is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department diplomat under the Trump administration.
“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.
PART 2: Mike Benz: How the ‘Department of Dirty Tricks’ Turned on Americans
February 4, 2023
Previously, in part one of my interview with Mike Benz, he explained the existence of a “whole-of-society” censorship industry in the West. Benz has been tracking the rise of censorship for years as executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online and a former State Department diplomat.
Now in part two, Benz explains how tools originally developed to promote regime change were deployed against Americans.
“What you are doing in a regime-change operation is you are operationalizing huge masses of an indigenous or domestic population in order to create a ground-up overthrow of a sitting government. And in order to do that, you need to control the media infrastructure, you need to control the narratives that people believe… What was new is that in 2016, this began coming home,” Benz says.
Changes in America also corresponded with changes in the broader Western world, Benz says. “There became a whole new military doctrine—it’s not a new concept, [but] I think it was given a new name—called hybrid warfare. NATO declared a new doctrine called ‘from tanks to tweets.’”
And a whole new lexicon emerged to describe the new censorship regime, Benz says, from “digital resilience” to “media literacy” to “moderation” and “intervention.”
“Whoever can control the Department of Dirty Tricks is able to use it to remove all opposition,” Benz says.
