Elon Musk is right: End the online censorship racket - Jonathan Turley

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The Hill

Few Americans have ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, let alone understand how it shapes what they read and hear in news and commentary. That may soon change.

An alarming new report of the House Judiciary Committee details this organization’s work to censor conservative and opposing viewpoints in the media by targeting figures such as Joe Rogan and entire social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter).

 

 

It is part of a massive censorship system that a federal court recently described as “Orwellian.” The sophistication of this system makes authoritarian regimes like China’s and Iran’s look like mere amateurs in censorship and blacklisting.

In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage,” I discuss our history of speech crackdowns and how this is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech period that we have faced as a nation. The reason is an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic and media institutions supporting censorship and the targeting of largely conservative viewpoints.

As discussed in the book, there is a crushing irony to the current anti-free speech movement. During the Red Scare and the McCarthy period, it was the left that was targeted with blacklisting, censorship and arrests. It is now the left that has constructed a global censorship system that exceeds anything that Joe McCarthy even dreamt of in the control of news and commentary.

Through the years, I have testified repeatedly in Congress on this system supported enthusiastically by President Biden and his administration. It has proven to be a frustrating game of whack-a-mole for civil libertarians. The Democrats in Congress have uniformly opposed any investigation or action on censorship while denying for years that there was a coordinated effort between government and corporations. When we were successful in uncovering components of this system, they were often quickly shut down as the work shifted to other components and assets.

One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers.  This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. The Global Disinformation Index warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

 

 

Once that index’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.

These censorship groups typically proclaim that they are merely trying to promote “brand safety” when they target for suppression the same sites that challenge the political and media establishment. The group states that it “unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations, and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”

That “harmful content” seems to be the very same sites long targeted by the Biden administration and its allies in business, the media and academia.