I went on The Hill’s “Rising” YouTube TV show yesterday (above) to describe former President Barack Obama’s role in advocating for government censorship, why I believe it is important for creators including us at Public to publish on multiple social media platforms, and why we must push for other nations to protect free speech at the same high levels as we do in the U.S.
But the big news yesterday was that journalist Matt Taibbi and eight of his colleagues have created a 70-plus page barn-burner “Report on the Censorship Industrial Complex,” which covers over 50 government, Big Tech, and NGOs that are actively seeking to impose their secret, undemocratic, and totalitarian mode of social control over the entire population of the world.
The report won’t be enough to destroy the Censorship Industrial Complex. We must continue to shine a disinfecting light on the government-funded censorship organizations around the world, and build a global movement of citizens, journalists, and attorneys who are willing to step up to demand governments defund them.
But Taibbi et al.’s report is a powerful foundation for doing precisely that, and we at Public feel grateful to him and his team for their remarkable investigative and intellectual contribution, which was several months in the making. The Report on the Censorship Industrial Complex is not the beginning end of the worldwide effort to dismantle it, but it marks the end of the beginning.
Here are three key points made by Taibbi and his colleagues:
