The Censorship Industrial Complex

(Hardback)

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In late 2022, the Twitter Files began to reveal an extensive network involving government, NGOs, think tanks, academic departments, foundations, Big Tech, and more collaborating to suppress free speech on the internet. That network came to be known as the Censorship-Industrial Complex. From Covid-19 to Russia and the 2016 elections to the Hunter Biden laptop and beyond, the terms "misinformation," "disinformation," and "malinformation" have flooded the public sphere and been weaponized to justify speech controls and censorship.

Drawing on his experience mapping the Censorship-Industrial Complex for Matt Taibbi during the Twitter Files, Andrew Lowenthal lays bare this new system for managing public thought and action. He details how in the wake of the Brexit vote and 2016 Trump election the infrastructure built for counterterrorism was converted to countering violent extremism and then towards counter-populism, within which censorship played a central role.

He describes how liberals and progressives came to see free speech not as a path to liberation but a threat to be suppressed, and the Faustian bargain they made with government, the intelligence services, and Big Tech to suppress populist opposition on both the Left and the Right. It is the story of the Left's betrayal of one if its most core values and the radical political realignment this betrayal ushered in.

The free speech fight is far from over. Lowenthal warns of the emerging new threats and lays out what it will take to defend free speech in the coming decade.

Author Bio

Andrew Lowenthal spent twenty-five years on the progressive left advocating for free speech online, only to watch progressives abandon one of their most central values. Andrew worked with Matt Taibbi on the Twitter Files as a researcher and project manager. He released three Twitter Files himself on the censorship of RFK Jr, censorship of COVID-19 dissent in Australia, and collaboration by NGOs and academia with the intelligence community to promote censorship. With Taibbi, he led the mapping of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, revealing the vast network of institutions working to suppress speech online.

Born in Tasmania, Australia, Andrew is a former fellow of Harvard'sBerkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, the Harvard Film Studies Center, and the MIT Open Documentary Lab. He is the co-founder and former executive director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific digital rights and open technology nonprofit he led for almost eighteen years. He is the CEO of liber-net, a nonprofit digital civil liberties initiative. He writes on Substack at Network Affects.