Foundation for Freedom Online Executive Director Mike Benz breaks down exactly how Big Tech, Big Government, and the Deep State are working together to impose speech restrictions on the people of the United States and across the globe.
The "Middleware" Plan To Restructure The Censorship Industry
1. Middleware = 'censorship as a service' orgs
2. Morphing from top-down to middle-out
3. Regs + middleware = disinfo compliance market pic.twitter.com/lDPqH72HrD
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 1, 2023
TRANSCRIPT
Good morning. I am here in sunny, beautiful San Diego in the famous Balboa Park, and I want to talk today about something called competitive middleware. Now, competitive middleware is a very Orwellian phrase. It doesn’t mean whatever you think right now middleware means.
You probably think it’s like some sort of computer software, sort of like anti spyware or like McAfee Antivirus or something.
Middleware actually refers to the middle-of-the-road censorship liaisons that are growing right now in size and strength and that are going to be the future of the censorship industry. So let me break down what I mean and just lay out a few things that we’re going to cover here in this little walk and talk.
So we’re going to cover the whole of society and how it’s structured, the whole-of-society censorship industry. We’re going to cover Newsguard. We’re going to cover the Missouri V Biden ruling and its implications. And we’re going to cover the plan for how they are going to restructure the censorship industry away from a top-down, government driven model and into a so-called competitive middleware model. And I’ll get through all that. So let’s start with the whole of society.
So as folks who have been following me for a long time know, whole-of-society means four categories of institutions, us all working together as a seamless web. Government institutions, private sector institutions, civil society institutions and news media and fact checking institutions. We’ll break down all those really quickly. Government institutions. There are five categories of government censorship activities within those government agencies.
There’s government funding, government pressure, government coordination, government outsourcing and government laundering, censorship, censorship of all that. So censorship, funding, censorship, pressure, censorship, coordination, censorship, outsourcing and censorship laundering. Every federal agency does a slightly different combination of all these things. For example, the National Science Foundation does censorship funding, but it doesn’t do censorship pressure. That is, you’re never going to find a Twitter Files from somebody at the National Science Foundation telling Twitter to take down a post.
But you will find the National Science Foundation funding the groups that do that. The FBI, you will see them doing censorship pressure, but you’re not going to see them doing censorship funding. They don’t know. There’s a little bit of compensation that they gave to tech companies for complying with the request, but that’s not really funding in a classical government sense.
So there are a whole coterie of federal departments that are involved in the censorship industry representing the government side. So the there’s DHS, which does government coordination and government outsourcing. There’s DOD, which does funding and laundering. There’s State, which also does funding and laundering. There’s FBI, which does pressure. And there’s HHS and IHH and NIAID, which do COVID related both funding and pressure.
And at this point, basically, every government agency that has a role will also have a sort of misinformation unit or a democracy unit that is deployed to help censor opposition to that government agency’s policies. So a great example of this is what’s happening with the FDA. Even the FDA now has a counter misinformation unit that does this. Around 2019, they implemented this whole society model and that’s why every government agencies is in on the business.
So that’s the government side. The private sector side is comprised of two parts. It’s the tech platforms themselves where the censorship happens, but it’s also the CSR wings of the private sector companies. That is corporate social responsibility. So when they say hold society, private sector, they mean Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Twitch.
But they also mean the corporate social responsibility arms, the funding arms of Microsoft and Apple and Facebooks endowment. So that’s the private sector, you know, so against where the censorship happens, but it’s also where funding comes from. Civil society is comprised of the universities, the NGOs, the non-profits, the foundations, and then activists, activist researchers there. So they talk about a spectrum between activism and research, but where they say is basically the same thing.
But you can be more of a shill or you can be more of a straight researcher. But of course, in this case, all of the research is basically weapons research for weapons grade censorship. And then there’s the news media and fact checking arms, which are the press class media institutions that are hand-picked in order to create a pressure valve, to pressure the private sector to censor what the government wants.
This has been the model from 2018, essentially up until late 2022, when a series of changes forced a anticipated restructuring of the censorship industry. Those changes were the House turned over from Democrat to Republican, and the House controls the purse spring and has investigations Power, which has created a lot of pressure from eight different congressional committees, all invested in this Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which broke the silicon Curtain, which had descended over all the terms of service policies, of all the social media companies, and then also a bunch of of legal victories and awareness campaigns around the disinformation governance boards toppling and the Missouri Biden case, among others.
So where are we now? The Missouri v Biden case has this very powerful injunction, which is currently on stay until oral arguments are heard. But it it threatens to ban all government coordination of domestic censorship with with with a few exceptions that that that are probably not going to be tried at first because there’s criminal contempt penalties for not going for for for violating it and they the Stanford Cyber working group anticipated a loss in the Missouri V Biden case and propped up a new plan called competitive middleware.
That competitive middleware is the idea that if you balloon up the civil society bridge between the government and the private sector, if you balloon up the civil society, then you can actually approximate a sort of top down government type quarterback role by parking it outside of government. And middleware means these sort of inner mediating censorship mercenary firms like Newsguard.
So Newsguard is said to be a middleware solution to countering misinformation. It’s a censorship tool, because what it does is it fixes these news ratings that allow the basically mass banning and throttling and de-platforming and democratizing of all alternative news that the government doesn’t want. So they staff up these middleware institutions with a kind of shadow government force and they give it government grade funding.
Then it can effectively circumvent the First Amendment prohibitions on running a comparable thing at DHS. And Newsguard is a great example of this because on their board of advisors they have a four star, a former four star general, head of the CIA, head of the NSA, head of the Global Engagement Center from the State Department, head of DHS and head of Naito.
So it is an all star apex predator cast of the national security state, all on the board of a middleware, not technically government. It is the greats of government boot heel and the national security state, but it’s all parked outside of government. Their plan right now is to build up middleware and they have a technique for doing this they call capacity building, which means pumping it up full of money, pumping it up personnel with personnel.
And one thing to really be out in the lookout for here is something around disinformation, compliance. Now, this is going to be big because on August 25th, just weeks away, the EU is going to kick into motion these new rules requiring compliance with EU disinformation rules for Twitter to continue to do business in the EU market.
Newsguard is already billing itself as a disinformation compliance service to comply with these new EU disinformation laws. So you have this situation right now where what they’re trying to do is rather than have DHS force Twitter through coercive pressure and twisting their arm, they’re going to have entities like Newsguard step in and in order to comply with the EU disinformation regulations, you’re going to need to buy news guards disinformation compliance services, very similar to how this whole comply with DIY industry popped up when when you needed DTI programs for your ESG scores or to qualify for government contracts.
It’s very nasty stuff and it’s coming soon.
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Read more about Mike Benz and the Foundation for Freedom Online at foundationforfreedomonline.com.
