‘An Alamo Moment for the First Amendment’: Congress Holds Hearing on Government Censorship

Censorship by the U.S. government dominated Wednesday’s U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing on the censorship-industrial complex.

by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.

Censorship by the U.S. government dominated Wednesday’s U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing on the censorship-industrial complex Wednesday.

The often-contentious hearing featured testimony by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, who released documents as part of the “Twitter Files” that revealed the government’s efforts to censor online speech, including narratives that contradicted official government policy on COVID-19.

Taibbi and Shellenberger’s testimony, and that of Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya of The Free Press, also focused on the global encroachment of the censorship-industrial complex and the Trump administration’s efforts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development or USAID, which is accused of funding censorship-related efforts globally.

“USAID is just a tiny piece of the censorship machine” which uses “think tanks, research, fact-checking, anti-disinformation, commercial media scoring and … straight up censorship” to “transform the free press into [a] consensus machine,” Taibbi said.

Shellenberger suggested the “censorship-industrial complex is on the defensive” today, but that “it’s also clear that many governing and media elites worldwide view expanding censorship of online platforms as a must have, not a nice to have feature of global governance.”

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) agreed. Referring to the return of public figures like President Donald Trump to social media after being de-platformed, and to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s acknowledgment that social media platforms censored speech, Jordan said, “What a difference a few years make.”

While the witnesses’ testimony and the statements of many of the Republican committee members focused on the censorship-industrial complex, Democrat members turned the discussion to Elon Musk, the Trump administration’s firing of federal employees, and inflation and rising egg prices.

“We face a profound First Amendment crisis in the actions taken by this administration,” said Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-N.Y.).

Investigative reporter Paul D. Thacker, a former U.S. Senate investigator who publishes The Disinformation Chronicle, said, “It’s pretty clear that Democrats remain mired in denial — denial that Biden censored, even though Mark Zuckerberg admitted they pressured Meta to censor, and denial that censorship is bad.”

Government censorship part of ‘a woke reign of terror’

In his opening statement, Taibbi referred to examples of the Biden administration and key officials who encouraged censorship and criticized the First Amendment.

“I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum,” Taibbi said, “speaking about disinformation.” “He said ‘our First Amendment stands as a major block’” to hammering disinformation out of existence and “complained that ‘it’s really hard to govern’ because ‘people self-select where they go for their news,’ which makes it ‘much harder to build consensus.’”

Taibbi added:

“‘Building consensus’ may be a politician’s job, but it’s not mine as a citizen or as a journalist … making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem.”

He called the present time “an Alamo moment for the First Amendment.”

Shellenberger said efforts to censor expanded beyond the Biden administration and U.S. government to include “Bill Gates, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, influential think tanks,” U.S. states, and agencies like NATO, the CIA, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“All called for government censorship of so-called ‘misinformation’ in recent years,” Shellenberger said. “Deep state agencies within the U.S. government have, for two decades, sought to gain control over the production of news and other information around the world as part of ongoing covert and overt influence operations.”

Shellenberger described this as “a woke reign of terror” spanning the last 12 years, “where people were scared to speak their mind in public [and] in private.”

The witnesses frequently cited USAID, the target of recent cuts by the Trump administration. Shellenberger said USAID helped develop censorship structures in countries like Brazil and implemented “a broader strategy for information control that included censorship but also … taking control of investigative journalism” worldwide.

“USAID has been in the process of taking over so-called ‘independent’ investigative journalism around the world,” Shellenberger said, and at the same time, training nongovernmental organizations “how to demand censorship.” He said USAID also promoted “digital IDs that tie people’s bank accounts to their social media profiles.”

Promotion of government vaccine narratives ‘propaganda, not journalism’

The hearing also included debate on COVID-19-era censorship, with Taibbi noting that USAID played a key role in perpetuating it. He said that USAID funded the Internews Network, whose head, Jeanne Bourgault, helped promote “vaccine enthusiasm” in India. Taibbi said:

“She gave a talk once about ‘building trust and combating misinformation’ in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of ‘a really beautiful unified Covid-19 message,’ vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when ‘mixed information on vaccine efficacy’ got out, hesitancy ensued.

“We’re paying this person to train journalists and she doesn’t know that the press does not exist to promote ‘unity’ or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.”

Jordan said the censorship-industrial complex targeted figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the newly confirmed secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and former chairman of Children’s Health Defense.

Jordan referred to a Kennedy tweet from 2021 suggesting that the death of baseball great Hank Aaron soon after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine was suspicious. “There is not one thing in that two-sentence tweet that’s not … absolutely true, but the Biden administration was pressuring to take it down,” Jordan said.

Shellenberger said the “Twitter Files” showed that “true stories of vaccine side effects” were targeted during the COVID-19 pandemic. “They were pre-choosing narratives and then looking for posts that fell into the bucket of things that might constitute ‘violation.’”

“That’s the most fundamental kind of conversation that we should be allowed to have between ordinary folks, and Facebook secretly censored it at the behest of the Biden administration,” Shellenberger said.

Taibbi referred to the example of former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson, who was “taken down” due to White House pressure, “for saying an absolutely true statement, which was that the vaccine does not prevent infection or transmission.”

Shellenberger referred to government agencies like the National Science Foundation, which offered fellowships “to create censorship tools” for social media platforms, and fact-checking firms such as NewsGuard — “tools that would allow centralized authorities to decide what the truth was and filter it for people.”

‘The whole mechanism has to go’

Taibbi said that after testifying before the House about the censorship-industrial complex in 2022, he was targeted by the IRS, which opened a case against him.

Shellenberger said Congress should “defund the censorship-industrial complex” and investigate its funding sources, including “pass-through organizations and shell organizations like the ones employed by USAID.”

A potential first step toward defunding this structure came shortly after the hearing. In a post on X, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) announced the introduction of H.R. 1233, a bill that would “eliminate taxpayer funding of online censorship.”

Shellenberger also called into question U.S. allies and NATO members who are “demanding censorship by American companies of our speech,” citing European Union efforts to target Elon Musk’s X for the spread of purported misinformation and hate speech.

“There is no way to remove this … surgically. The whole mechanism has to go,” Taibbi said.

“My view is that Democrats will look back at giving up the free speech issue to Republicans as just a catastrophic political failure,” Shellenberger said.

Watch the hearing here:

Related articles in The Defender

• USAID Bankrolled Secretive Nonprofit Global News Network With Alleged Ties to Censorship

• Zuckerberg: White House Would ‘Scream’ and ‘Curse’ at Facebook Staff to Remove COVID Content

• Group Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Sought to ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter,’ Launch ‘Black Ops’ Against RFK Jr.

• New Report: State Department Funded Fact-checkers to Censor ‘Lawful Speech’

• Zuckerberg Admits Biden Administration Pressured Facebook to Censor COVID-related Content