Tag: Foundation for Freedom Online

Mike Benz Details How Donald Trump Could Dismantle the Global Censorship Machine in ‘Five Minutes’ If Elected

Kaitlin Housler
Mike Benz

Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s censorship complex aimed at censoring Americans and people across the globe would be able to be dismantled in a manner of “five minutes” if former President Donald Trump was elected in the November 5 general election.

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Democrats Push Overseas Voting, but Republicans Sound the Alarm over Fraud Concerns

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Counting ballots

As Democrats are pushing overseas voting in the November election, Republicans and election integrity advocates are sounding the alarm over possible fraud that could occur with absentee ballots sent from other countries.

With the Democratic Party pushing for more overseas absentee ballots in a close presidential race, Republicans and proponents of election integrity are concerned about the verification of overseas voters and their ballots.

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Disinformation Police Officer NewsGuard Goes After Free-Speech Lawyer, Olympics Narratives as Peers Fall to Scrutiny

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Two months after the for-profit business NewsGuard came under congressional investigation for whether its business relationships with domestic and foreign governments are tantamount to state-sponsored censorship, the self-described “only apolitical service rating news sources” is taking on new targets like the Olympics and a high-profile free-speech lawyer.

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Mike Benz Exposes Cynical Censorship Practices at the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

Kaitlin Housler
Mike Benz

Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is actively censoring conservative Americans under the guise of carrying out unaudited “cybersecurity operations.”

Benz said the practice began in 2018 when CISA was created under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018. It was in full swing during the 2020 election under the guise of being a “cyber security and infrastructure security agency,” which, Benz said, is why the program was funded under former President Donald Trump’s watch.

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Tennessee Star Publisher First Amendment Rights at Risk over Mass Shooter’s Writings, But Establishment Media, Press Advocates Eschew Story

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Michael Patrick Leahy

Tennessee Star editor-in-chief Michael Patrick Leahy unveiled the Nashville Covenant School mass shooter’s personal writings earlier this month, but no mainstream news outlets appear to have reported about the revelations, and only one has reported on the subsequent legal battle that Leahy faces for uncovering the documents.

Additionally, while journalists’ rights organizations traditionally would have provided counsel to a reporter like Leahy in court, few are willing to comment on the case, and Leahy is being represented by America First Legal and Daniel Horwitz, a Nashville-based attorney who focuses on the First Amendment.

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Mike Benz Warns: The Supreme Court Needs to Exercise ‘Bravery’ in Murthy v. Missouri Case to ‘Dismantle the Government Censorship Complex’

Kaitlin Housler

Mike Benz, former Trump State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the Supreme Court is going to have to exercise “bravery” as opposed to “wisdom” in its ruling of Murthy v. Missouri for the government censorship complex to be dismantled.

Murthy v. Missouri seeks to determine whether the government’s “challenged conduct transformed private social media companies’ content-moderation decisions into state action and violated respondents’ First Amendment rights” related to COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

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Free Speech Expert: 2020 Election and COVID-19 Pandemic Most Censored Events in Human History

Peter D'Abrosca
Mike Benz Tucker Carlson

An expert in online free speech told Tucker Carlson in a wide-ranging interview that he believes the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election were the two most censored events in human history.

“The two most censored events in human history, I would argue to date, are the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ll explained how I arrived there,” Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) told Carlson.

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Security State Sees Internet Free Speech as ‘Massive Crisis’

Peter D'Abrosca

An internet free speech expert said in a recent interview that freedom of speech online combined with massive audiences for independent journalists and news sources created a “massive crisis” for America’s security state. 

“So initially, even these dissident voices within the U.S., even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers,” Founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview. “They never reached the one billion impressions per year type thing. As an uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media, this induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our State Department and intelligence services.” 

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RussiaGate Hoax Paved Way for Security State’s Domestic Censorship During 2020 Election, Internet Free Speech Expert Says

Peter D'Abrosca
Mike Benz

According to an expert in internet free speech, the RussiaGate hoax perpetrated against former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the beginning of the security state’s inward focus on domestic censorship online.

Mike Benz, the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week that since the mid-20th century, there was an unwritten rule that security state apparatuses like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not to be used domestically against the American people, but that the security state knew how powerful its apparatus could be if turned inward.

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Revealed: U.S. Military Working to Censor ‘Right-Wing Populist Groups’

Peter D'Abrosca
Military Cyber Warfare

According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.

“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”

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Federal Censorship Machine Started Years Before COVID, Involved Military Contractors: Whistleblower

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Military Person on Computer

The public-private efforts to restrict and suppress purported “mis-, dis- and malinformation” across tech platforms started almost immediately after the surprise election of Donald Trump in 2016, ramped up a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, and included U.S. and U.K. military contractors and plans to cut off financial services to dissenters and sue them.

That’s according to a “highly credible whistleblower” who says they were recruited to participate in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) “through monthly cybersecurity meetings hosted by” the Department of Homeland Security, independent journalists who reviewed the Twitter Files at new owner Elon Musk’s invitation said Tuesday.

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Director of Internet Free Speech Nonprofit Sounds Alarm on ‘Middleware’ Censorship by NewsGuard

Peter D'Abrosca

The founder of a nonprofit that advocates for freedom of speech on the internet is sounding the alarm on government weaponization of “middleware” companies, which he said are essentially shell organizations for government censorship.

“The reason that they call it competitive middleware is because they’re trying to create a competitive industry around middleware compliance to avoid any antitrust situations that could arise,” Mike Benz, the executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told The Tennessee Star Tuesday.

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Study Finding Facebook Does Not Censor Conservatives Is ‘Deeply Flawed,’ ‘Laughable,’ Experts Say

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Media Matters for America published a study recently concluding that Facebook does not censor conservatives, but experts told the DCNF the study is not credible because it did not properly measure the suppression of right-leaning pages.

Right-leaning Facebook pages typically got more total interactions than politically nonaligned and left-leaning pages on Facebook, according to the study. However, experts say this does not mean that there was no censorship of right-leaning Facebook pages, as the only example of suppression the Media Matters study cites is Donald Trump’s Facebook ban.

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DHS ‘Bystander’ Training Singles out Pro-Lifers, Government Critics as ‘Radicalization’ Suspects

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Nine days after President Biden’s inauguration, a Department of Homeland Security office proposed creating several “Choose Your Own Adventure” videos to show Americans how to identify and mitigate “radicalization and potential violence.”

Among the Americans that worry the sprawling bureaucracy created in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: middle-aged pro-life women, white men who question the government, and divorced mothers who suspect “government connections to child abuse and trafficking.”

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