Opinion
The independent journalists who combed through the Twitter Files and Facebook Files – which shined a bright light on the federal government’s infiltration of the social media giants to stifle free speech – are at it again. This time, the revelations published by Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi attempt to fill in critical blanks in their previous shocking discoveries.
Those blind spots were the concrete connections between the federal government and a concerted effort to shut down free speech through censorship strategies built off of existing defense frameworks created for the military. These frameworks initially sold as a tool to go after “bad actors,” such as your garden variety terrorists, allegedly were used to go after a new kind of “bad actor” – regular garden variety citizens.
The information provided by an unnamed whistleblower is alarming. It shows just how entitled the left-wing zealots who have taken over the United States government have come to be, and how much they believe in their own greatness and superiority.
As usual, this jaw-dropping story didn’t get the mainstream media coverage it deserved, so without further ado, let’s dive into what the three journalists found and what it means for democracy.
System designed for corruption
In what they dubbed the CTIL Files #1, Shellenberger, Gutentag, and Taibbi laid out information they received from a whistleblower that shows the beginning foundation of a federal government effort to formalize censorship activities. CTIL stands for the “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League.
CTIL, which mainstream media outlets have tried to sell as merely a group of volunteer “do-gooders” working in their private unofficial capacities to try to better the information landscape, was predominantly created by US and UK military and intelligence contractors as far back as 2018. One of the various activities employed by the CTIL included tracking and reporting “disfavored content” on social media.
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This disfavored content included anti-lockdown sentiments during the COVID pandemic, including references to “all jobs are essential,” “we won’t stay home,” and “open America now.” On its own, tracking and reporting data may not seem all that nefarious, but when taken into account that this tracking and reporting was done by military and intelligence contractors, whether on their own time or not – things get scary.
Additionally, when considering the intended goal of CTIL, it’s clear that just as the three intrepid journalists diligently investigating this phenomenon have indicated, a “Censorship Industrial Complex” was in the works, if not fully operational today.
Whistling Dixie?
The unnamed whistleblower who provided the treasure trove of information claims to have been recruited to CTIL through monthly cyber-security meetings held at the Department of Homeland Security.
The goal of CTIL, according to the whistleblower, was to:
“…become part of the federal government. In our weekly meetings, they made clear that they were building these organizations within the federal government, and if you built the first iteration, we could secure a job for you.”
This accusation goes firmly against the narrative that this group was merely a collection of private citizens volunteering time to passively track “misinformation” and report their findings in an unofficial capacity. Digging deeper into the documents and information obtained by the whistleblower, the construction of the tools used by CTIL shows how connected the federal government was to this group.
CTIL created what they described as a censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategy titled Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT). The creation of AMITT was made possible by adapting a cybersecurity framework developed by a significant defense and intelligence contractor called MITRE.
MITRE, per their website, was established to:
“advance national security in new ways and serve the public interest as an independent adviser.”
This “independent adviser” has a federally funded annual budget of between $1 and $2 billion.
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They wrote what?
It’s damning enough to discover how closely connected defense and intelligence officials and offices were ingrained with this “league.” Still, it’s only made worse when one dives into a report they wrote.
In the “Misinfosec” report, they wrote on the results of Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump:
“A study of the antecedents to these events lead us to the realization that there’s something off kilter with our information landscape.”
The report goes on to state:
“The usual useful idiots…are busily engineering public opinion, stoking up outrage, sowing doubt and chipping away at trust in our institutions.”
They punctuate their concern with the following:
“…now it’s our brains that are being hacked.”
It’s essential to focus on these individuals’ wording in this report. This group of individuals honestly don’t believe what they were doing and, more than likely, are still currently doing, is wrong.
They believe that the US and UK citizens didn’t (can’t) make decisions of their own but were duped into voting for Donald Trump and Brexit, that they don’t know better and need mechanisms like CTIL to make the right decisions.
In the same report, they wrote:
“For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state. Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means.”
To break that down into simpler terms, this report’s writers lament that companies like Twitter now X dared to allow everyday citizens access to a platform where they could freely exchange information, ideas, and thoughts not approved by the government. This brings us to the reason the government and left-wing elites hate Elon Musk.
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We need a hero
When the Twitter Files first dropped after Elon Musk freed the blue bird, the billionaire told Tucker Carlson:
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind.”
For a time, it blew the public’s mind as well. However, the mainstream media and the political elites that control their puppet strings banked on the public’s collective ability to lose interest in things they believe don’t affect them.
However, what happens on Twitter and now subsequently X drives mainstream media’s discourse. Simply put, it is the most powerful social media platform. When Twitter was under the watchful and influential thumb of federal and intelligence community entities, the platform was used to stifle conservative voices and drive left-wing narratives.
Now that X no longer has this leash, it is an open forum letting loose divergent viewpoints and elevating the citizenry through independent journalism.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote this week that:
“X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people. We’re a platform that allows people to make their own decisions.”
Make no mistake: the Censorship Industrial Complex does not want you to make your own decisions, because they believe you are incapable of making the right decisions. They don’t want information independence because they believe information independence is dangerous and that they are the only ones who can safely construct and distribute the right information.
It’s time to pay attention to the details because the devil resides in the obscurity of minutiae, hoping we don’t see him until it is too late.
Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
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