Mike Benz, former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said all of the “major censorship industry heavyweights” are currently carrying out “very nasty tricks” to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
“The main two tools that they’re using for 2024 censorship are the states because the federal censorship mechanism has been weakened after the Missouri v. Biden trial court ruling, which is now before oral arguments in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is likely to deal them a very heavy blow. So they’re moving into the states to help coordinate that rather than the federal government,” Benz explained on Tuesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
“They’re also planning to use this new NATO censorship law as a transatlantic flank attack, forcing U.S. platforms to censor distant election disinformation,” Benz added. “None of these platforms are going to want to lose their European market, so they will censor, in the U. S., what is required to be censored under the European descent disinfo laws, which is a very nasty trick.”
Benz (pictured above)gave an example of such tactics, explaining how the Pennsylvania Governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, established the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force under the secretary of state’s office, which administers the state’s elections, to work together with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to “mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation, and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information.”
“Pennsylvania, one of the biggest swing states in the entire country, has announced a federal censorship partnership with the federal government, which is likely going to involve high ranking officials at the state level, working in partnership with the censorship mercenary firms in the private sector and at the NGO level to make use of a domestic disinformation switchboard in order to kill any emerging narratives that are pro-Trump in the state of Pennsylvania. This was just announced less than a week ago – I predicted this weeks before – and they’re going to do this on a state by state basis,” Benz said.
“They’re going to do this in Michigan – California has already put out these new transparency laws that are being challenged. ‘Transparency’ and ‘accountability’ are their two big watchwords for how to cripple the social media companies,” Benz added.
In regards to his work at the Foundation for Freedom Online, Benz said his team is “targeting the government censorship angle from a dozen different directions.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Photo “Mike Benz” by Mike Benz.
