A former deep-state insider lays out how the government controls the flow of information




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America used to be the powerhouse of the world, exporting not only the best manufactured goods but also the best ideas the world has seen. But now, areas that were once rich in economic activity have turned into ghost towns as the State Department exports some of the worst ideas the world has seen.

On "Zero Hour," Mike Benz, a former State Department official in the Trump administration and the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, sat down with James Poulos to discuss the state of the U.S. State Department and its dystopian control of information.

Even though many of America’s manufacturing hubs have their best days behind them, America can still be proud to be the world's beacon of liberty — until now.

“The thing that we had to hold our hat onto is … the distinct values that we have in the U.S. We have free speech, [and] we have a rule of law which will protect you in court to always be able to defend your rights,” Benz told Poulos.

“What we've seen instead,” Benz added, “is this wanton abuse of the sanctions system so that anybody who does business in a way that upsets our State Department or Defense Department or Intelligence Community gets sanctioned.”

Benz attributes the rise of these ill-advised sanctions and censorship tools to America’s declining influence in the world today.

"We don't abide by this free-trade concept any more because any trade between two other countries that bothers us, we sanction. And we do the same thing if anyone invests here. You've got to be a little bit crazy, frankly, to put your money here under this current administration," he said.

What’s more, these sanctions have contributed to China’s growing might. Benz argues that Hungary, along with other countries, is strengthening its ties with China due to the West’s antagonism toward military restraint and traditional values.

“The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee [came] out and [said] that Hungary should be sanctioned because they're not co-signing war on Russia or military support for Ukraine or the LGBT agenda pushed by the State Department,” Benz noted.

To hear more of what Mike Benz had to say about censorship, free speech, China, semiconductors, and more, watch the full episode of "Zero Hour with James Poulos."

America was convinced tech would complete our mastery of the world. Instead, we got catastrophe — constant crises from politics and the economy down to the spiritual fiber of our being. Time’s up for the era we grew up in. How do we pick ourselves up and begin again? To find out, visionary author and media theorist James Poulos cracks open the minds — and hearts — of today’s top figures in politics, tech, ideas, and culture on "Zero Hour" on BlazeTV.

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Taxpayer-funded researchers are perfecting schemes to stealthily regulate speech and control sensitive narratives online: Report



Under the Biden administration, federally funded researchers are using millions of social media posts they claimed amounted to "misinformation" during the 2020 election in order to develop better ways of regulating speech, according to a digital free-speech watchdog.

Just the News reported that work by a research group at the University of Washington in Seattle, executed in part with taxpayer grants and previewed in an article last year in Nature Human Behavior, points to how various existing censorship strategies could be combined to create an invisible administrative hand with which to better throttle ideas in the cradle and crush undesirable content without leaving easy-to-see fingerprints.

In June 2023, the research group comprising members of the university's Center for an Informed Public detailed possible "solutions" to the purported threats that so-called "misinformation" poses — to democratic processes and public health measures in particular.

The researchers derived a "generative model of viral misinformation spread, inspired by research on infectious disease," then applied that model to 10.5 million tweets "of misinformation events that occurred during the 2020 US election."

They subsequently determined that "commonly proposed interventions are unlikely to be effective in isolation."

To achieve a "substantial reduction in the prevalence of misinformation" — which at one time or another has been a label assigned by big tech and big government to legitimate claims about the Hunter Biden laptop, COVID-19 vaccine side effects, and the Wuhan lab-leak theory — the researchers recommended that censorship and narrative controls be used in combination.

Some of the tactics they noted could be used effectively in combination include:

  • the removal or obfuscation of "all content matching search terms related to an emerging misinformation incident";
  • labeling content as "misinformation";
  • account banning and a strict adherence to a "three-strikes" rule;
  • hard-to-detect "'virality circuit breakers', which seek to reduce the spread of a trending misinformation topic without explicitly removing content," in part by suspending algorithmic amplification; and
  • "nudge-based approaches," whereby users are prompted to doubt a post's accuracy even if it has not been proven to be false or misleading.

The researchers claimed that "we urgently need a path forward that goes beyond trial and error or inaction," recognizing their proposals might serve as practical short-term alternatives to "large-scale censorship or major advances in cognitive psychology and machine learning."

Two of the researchers on the projected penned a piece in Nature Medicine last month calling for the use of "every point of leverage available" to combat "misinformation and disinformation."

Mike Benz, executive director at censorship watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online, told the "Just the News, No Noise" show Monday that the researchers' 2022 study is a road map on "how to censor people using secret methods so that they wouldn't know they're being censored, so that it wouldn't generate an outrage cycle, and so that it'd be more palatable for the tech platforms who wouldn't get blowback because people wouldn't know they're being censored."

Jevin West, a researcher on the project, contends that concerns like Benz's are much ado about nothing, telling Just the News that the fears about his research possibly impacting free speech relied upon a "fundamental misunderstanding of the paper that appears to be based on non-factual distortion and falsehoods."

Just the News took this to mean that "he considered criticism of the work to be disinformation."

"The paper made no policy or tactical recommendation to social media platforms or the federal government," added West. "There was no follow-up from them and we have no idea what, if anything, any of those entities did with the learnings from our paper."

Although West's suggested that this work is theoretical and apolitical, the censorship researchers nevertheless appear eager to see their work put into practice, having noted in their 2022 paper, "Our results highlight a practical path forward as misinformation online continues to threaten vaccination efforts, equity and democratic processes around the globe."

The FFO previously indicated that this censorship study is just the tip of the iceberg.

TheBlaze previously detailed the FFO's findings that in the first two years of the Biden administration, the National Science Foundation had spent nearly $40 million on government grants and contracts primarily through its Convergence Accelerator to combat "misinformation."

Over 64 censorship grants made their way to 42 colleges and universities, with some grants "explicitly target[ting] 'populist politicians' and 'populist communications' to scientifically determine 'how best to counter populist narratives,'" according to the FFO.

West's center at the University of Washington was among the recipients, nabbing a five-year, $2.25 million grant from the NSF for "Rapid-Response Frameworks for Mitigating Online Disinformation."

Benz insists that the purpose of these efforts to disguise censorship amid congressional probes and court challenges is to produce an "information purgatory to place largely conservative, populist or heterodox opinions and to stop them from going viral."

Responding to the researchers' stated ambitions, the FFO director said, "So they want to be able to control and prevent all opposition to election procedures that they want in place, to vaccination campaigns and to what appears to be racial and climate equity initiatives."

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