Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression

This book was made possible by the support of a number of individuals, institutions and organizations. While we cannot acknowledge everyone who helped us to assemble and polish this collection, a few are deserving of special recognition. First, much admiration is owed to series editor Anthony J. Nocella II for believing in and supporting our vision.

We want to thank our families for their continued insight, advice, and support. Taking on and following a project like this to completion it is felt by the entire family. We could not have done it without them.

We would also like to thank Fordham University, North Central College, and University of California, Santa Cruz for valuing free speech and fostering spaces where we can conduct this type of research.

We are privileged to be part of the numerous transformative organizations that have not only collaborated with us but inspired us as well. Such organizations include the American Association of University Professors, the Assange Defense Committee, the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Critical Media Project, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the National Coalition Against Censorship, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Index on Censorship, Improve the News, Media Freedom Foundation and Project Censored, the Mount Diablo Peace and Justice Center, Pacifica Radio, PropWatch, the Real News Network, and the Union for Democratic Communications.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the allies and colleagues who make our work possible: Elizabeth Abrams, Mnar Muhawesh Adley, Maximillian Alvarez, Adam Armstrong, Sharyl Attkisson, Margli Auclair, Phil Auclair, Jorge Ayala, Nicholas Baham III, Matt Bailey, Manfred Becker, Kate Bell, Mara Berkland, Adam Bessie, Ben Boyington, Lonny Avi Brooks, George Bunch, Amy Buxbaum, John Corbally, Ian Davis, Roberto de Roock, Brian Dolber, Janice Domingo, Davide Dormino, Jessie Dubreuil, Andrea Gambino, Henry Giroux, Noah Golden, Eleanor Goldfield, Doug Hecker, Aaron Heresco, Michael Hoechsmann, Supna Jain, Josef Kay, Dorothy Kidd, Grant Kien, Amanda Lashaw, Dylan Lazaga, Jackie Leder, Cynthia Lewis, Jen Lyons, Kalemba Kizito, Emil Marmol, Abby Martin, Aims McGuinness, Sangha Niyogi, Christopher Oscar, Chase Palmieri, Peter Phillips, Albert Ponce, Kayla Rivara, Reina Robinson, T. M. Scruggs, Jeff Share, Lauren Shields, John Shipton, John Stanley, Max Tegmark, Alison Trope, Obed Vasquez, Rob Williams, and Amber Yang. Special thanks are due to Shealeigh Voitl for her careful copyediting. Thank you all for your wisdom, humor, scholarship, and most of all, thank you for your friendship and ongoing support.

And we thank all of our students, past and present, for their insights, energy, and determination to make our world a better and freer place.

Trumpist Politics at the State Level

Trump’s governing style has been replicated by state lawmakers. Recently, Republican-led states have passed laws that ban books, silence the teaching of critical race theory, and criminalize transgender people. For example, in January 2023, with bill SB278, West Virginia doubled down on its transgender bans, proposing to fine trans people $1,000 and add up to six months in jail for just going out in public.²⁰ By mid-January, with 158 bills introduced, more anti-trans laws had been proposed than in all of 2022.²¹ The American Library Association reported that the wave of attempted book-banning intensified across the country.²² For example, in North Dakota, with HB 1205, Republicans are racing to ban more books, particularly any with “sexually explicit” content that includes depictions of gender identity and sexual orientation. The measure proposes up to thirty days imprisonment and a $1,500 fine for librarians who don’t remove such books from libraries.²³ In 2022, Pen America was alarmed by the number of books being banned in schools, saying such bans “threaten free expression and students’ first amendment rights.” They went on to note the “intense focus on books that relate to communities of color and LGBTQ+ subjects.”²⁴

States legislatures are also preventing public school teachers from covering topics about racism and economic inequality. At least thirteen states now have policies telling teachers how race can’t be taught in schools. As a result of a vaguely worded New Hampshire law, one instructor is “no longer teaching her students about how Jim Crow laws and redlining built the racial wealth gap that still persists.”²⁵ Since January 2021, thirty-five states have introduced 137 bills limiting what schools can teach with regard to race, American history, politics, sexual orientation, and gender identity.²⁶

As the Brennan Center for Justice has documented, in recent years an increasing number of US states have passed voting restriction laws. Since the beginning of 2021, lawmakers have passed at least forty-two restrictive voting laws in twenty-one states. Among those laws, thirty-three contain at least one restrictive provision that was in effect for the 2022 midterms in twenty states. Restrictive state laws enacted in 2022 amount to the second-highest number of such laws enacted in any single year in the last decade behind 2021.²⁷

The War on Whistleblowers and Human Rights Activists

Whistleblowers are individuals operating inside private, public, or government organizations, who disclose corruption, crimes, and abuses inside that organization. When whistleblower Edward Snowden, a government-contracted employee, exposed US intelligence agencies’ surveillance partnership with Big Tech, he was charged with espionage. The documentary film Citizenfour (2014) follows Snowden’s actions in real time and gives voice to his dedication to freedom of expression over the internet. The film also contains a damning critique of the Espionage Act, a law that bypasses all aspects of American jurisprudence based in due process. Lawyers cannot argue the public’s right to know or the illegality of government secrecy and hiding of information in a democratic society. This anti-democratic law was adopted during World War One and was used to jail socialist leader Eugene Debs and hundreds of members of the International Workers of the World (IWW) for their antiwar activism.²⁸

US government attacks on whistleblowers began in earnest with Julian Assange, a journalist who initially published WikiLeaks, including the shocking video of US war crimes depicting US pilots killing civilians and journalists in Baghdad titled “Collateral Murder.”²⁹ In fact, the US government’s harassment and prosecution of whistleblowers has been a defining feature of every presidency during the so-called War on Terror.³⁰ Chelsea Manning, who leaked over 600,000 documents about the war on terror to WikiLeaks was also charged with espionage. NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou were also charged under the Espionage Act. Kiriakou identified CIA operatives who used waterboarding to torture detainees. The Espionage Act was also used to prosecute Jeffrey Sterling for releasing information about US efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. The latest security analyst to be charged with espionage is Daniel Hale who leaked information revealing the actual numbers of civilians killed by US drone warfare. Hale’s revelations came in response to the deliberate withholding of the brutalities of the war on terror and the numerous intelligence reports admitting that the war in Afghanistan was un-winnable.

Recognizing that fear of retaliation such as job loss or imprisonment may dissuade whistleblowers from coming forward, some governments and companies offer legal protections to whistleblowers who expose illegalities. Despite such protections, whistleblowers remain under attack in the US and around the globe. In the Maldives, Gasim Abdul Kareem was arrested in 2016 after leaking information about a government banking scheme that led to the removal of authoritarian president, Abdulla Yameen.³¹ The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the global war on whistleblowers.³² In 2020, forty-five whistleblower groups came together to warn that whistleblowers had been intimidated, attacked, harassed, and punished for exposing “inadequate health system capacity and delivery, public procurement problems, violations of health and safety and labor law, inequitable and ill-prepared global supply chains, unfair competition practices and market abuses, and large-scale violations of personal privacy rights” during the pandemic.³³

Like whistleblowers, human rights activists campaigning to win justice for the victims of corporate malfeasance have faced increased harassment, retaliation, and intimidation. Perhaps the most notable recent example is the case of the environmental and human rights lawyer, Steven Donzinger. In 2013, Donzinger won a historic $9.5 billion lawsuit in Ecuador against oil company Chevron on behalf of indigenous people there. After that, he faced a Chevron-promoted campaign of retaliation in US federal court that resulted in his disbarment, two years of house arrest, and a conviction for “criminal contempt” that carried with it a six-month prison sentence. On October 1, 2021, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights ruled Donzinger’s confinement illegal under international law and declared that Donzinger had failed to receive a fair trial.³⁴

Without journalists, public interest lawyers, and whistleblowers to expose corruption and human rights abuses, and bear witness to protesters under attack, government and security forces will not be held responsible, either domestically or on the international stage. As the world becomes more interdependent, sound information about politics, finance and global markets, the environment, and international treaties that impact human well-being becomes a prerequisite for our collective survival. But as the Foreign Policy Centre detailed, more than half of the investigative reporters around the world who cover financial crimes—like the multinational team of journalists that covered the Panama Papers disclosures about global money laundering—say they have been subjected to defamation lawsuits, “cease and desist” letters, trolling, coordinated online smear campaigns, threats, and physical violence.³⁵

The Digital Crackdown: Internet, Monetization, and Freedom of Expression

Once celebrated as champions of free speech, social media platforms and Big Tech companies now execute attacks on journalists and abet legal prosecutions of whistleblowers. A ProPublica exposé revealed Big Tech’s failure to protect the privacy of its digital users on What’s App, an encrypted platform. Meta, formerly Facebook, has an extensive monitoring operation and regularly shares personal information with prosecutors.³⁶ In a disturbing development that followed the US Supreme Court’s anti-abortion ruling, local police departments in certain states have gained greater authority to invade people’s private data to hunt down and prosecute abortion seekers.³⁷ When governments institute systematic surveillance that traces the actions and activities, writings, books, and beliefs of their citizens, individuals live in fear of expressing critical thought. A social order based in fear stagnates in a type of conformity ironically depicted in the novel and movie, 1984.

Driving the global trajectory toward a 1984-like dystopia are powerful hacking tools such as Pegasus. developed by the Israeli cyber company NSO Group, Pegasus was sold to repressive governments around the world, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, Rwanda, Hungary, India, Mexico, and Azerbaijan.³⁸ It was used to target activists, journalists, and politicians in a massive surveillance campaign that hacked into citizens’ cell phones and was directly connected to the killing of at least one journalist in Mexico.³⁹ A team of international reporters investigated the spyware after Amnesty International gained access to a leak of more than 50,000 records of phone numbers hacked in countries known to be NSO clients. PBS Frontline quoted one reporter observing that “governments manage to retain their power by staving off threats from people who are campaigning for democracy, or holding them to account, or telling the truth. And here is a company that gave them a tool to do that.” Reporters Without Boarder (RSF), with others, filed a complaint to the UN in Paris in July 2021, citing the fears that journalists “were spied on by their governments as a result of having carried out independent journalistic reporting in the public interest.”⁴⁰ Another journalist added, the cyber surveillance tool is “a military weapon used against civilians.”⁴¹

Censorship by Proxy

Big Tech serves as a proxy for governments around the globe censoring political speech and robust public debate. This censorship by proxy escalated in the United States after the post-2016 moral panic over false information online, and the (now thoroughly debunked) charge of Russian influence in US elections. Big Tech companies colluded with the government to limit user access to select information and have been directed to remove and “correct” information deemed to be false or misleading. Such online censorship is often highly selective and politically motivated. For example, in December 2022, Elon Musk released thousands of internal Twitter documents. Soon afterward, journalist Matt Taibbi reported that Twitter’s staff regularly fielded phone calls from powerful people in government and acted upon their requests to moderate content. And it wasn’t just Twitter. In an interview with Joe Rogan, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted that his company’s decision to moderate content—including the 2020 Hunter Biden story—is sometimes based on recommendations from the intelligence community.⁴² Similarly, the Intercept reported in 2022, that Big Pharma, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security, and officials from both major parties regularly influence Big Tech’s content moderation practices.⁴³ Indeed, international partnerships between governments and private industry have strengthened the global crackdown on democracy. Governments around the world have enacted cyberlaws to prevent critical voices with claims of “fake” news, “terrorism,” and “national security” threats.⁴⁴

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not neutral platforms. The flood of conspiracy theories and fake news saturating the internet is a direct consequence of the monetized technologies that drive profits for the powerful tech industry. These technologies are deliberately designed to actively harvest human attention and sell it to advertisers, which is immensely profitable. For example, the global market for Digital Advertising and Marketing was estimated to be $476.9 billion in 2022, and is projected to reach $786.2 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 13.9 percent over the analysis period.⁴⁵

Compounding this influence is the way digital technology blurs the lines between paid ads, boosted posts, and organic content on platforms such as Facebook, where ads and newsfeeds alike go viral. This design choice came about because in-feed placement increased engagement with advertisements, and thus revenue for Facebook. Writing in Politico, Diresta and Harris note, “The self-serve ease and affordability of Facebook’s ads tool, and the fact that the platform can turn content viral quickly, is why advertisers and manipulators alike love it.”⁴⁶

Algorithmic Power

The inconsistencies in Big Tech’s content moderation reveal a commitment to political and market power rather than truth, accuracy, and democracy. As the fake news panic reverberated across social media platforms, Zoom censored events that featured speakers critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestine at San Francisco State University; Instagram prevented Raina Khalek from posting her interview about the conditions in Bolivia; and YouTube removed video content from the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas.⁴⁷ It is not clear what false information was being circulated in any of these cases. Meanwhile, many platforms removed discussions about QAnon but falsehoods about Russiagate were not removed from any platform.⁴⁸ These inconsistencies reflect Big Tech’s haphazard content moderation and arbitrary decisions they later re-think, such as Twitter’s removal of the October 2020 New York Post story about Biden’s son, a move CEO Jack Dorsey later apologized for,⁴⁹ or Facebook’s decision to end the company’s blockade of content about the possibility that the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab in China, a charge better addressed through research and investigation than censorship.⁵⁰

A glimpse into how this happened came from a study by Oxford University’s Internet Institute that found only 20 percent of sampled tweets contained links to “professional” news, which became identified as the problem. Google downgraded searches for websites and organizations not considered “professional,” and many alternative news websites were targeted for exclusion. Search engines like Google rendered a vast range of progressive and alternative views invisible to their users, effectively narrowing the range of acceptable public debate.⁵¹ Journalist Robert Parry argued that Google algorithms made it harder to find “some of the highest-quality alternative news sites on the Internet.” ⁵² Alternative news sites reported dramatic drops in readership as Google’s new search protocols began restricting access to leading independent, left-wing, progressive, anti-war, and socialist websites.⁵³ The number of readers visiting the progressive news and commentary website Common Dreams via Google search “dropped like a stone.”⁵⁴

As we enter a brave new world where artificial intelligence is deployed in web filters and algorithms purportedly targeting fake news, the winners are invariably mainstream commercial media. This may account for why so little discussion about the dangers of algorithmic censorship appears in corporate news, while positive reports that praise new technology do. The New York Times lauded “researchers harnessing digital technology to fact checking programs in a hunt for fake news. It’s a positive way of moving artificial intelligence forward while improving the political debate.”⁵⁵ Readers were told that tech giants were partnering with computer scientists and start-ups to develop sophisticated programs that analyze “reams of online data to quickly—and automatically—spot fake news faster than traditional fact-checking groups can.”⁵⁶

Big Tech’s moderation policies seem to be driven by their loyalty to ruling elites rather than to accuracy or truth. This is abundantly clear when it comes to online discourses about war. Just as it has been for decades, war continues to drive censorship in the twenty-first century. When nations go to war, most citizens must be persuaded to support state violence over alternatives—loud drums of war calling for belligerencies serve to incapacitate basic humanity and the desire for peace and well-being. Governments and the military hit civilian “soft targets” with aggressive, vengeful sentiments to justify mass killing by the state. Censorship is the necessary compliment to war propaganda and disinformation, an essential component to manufacturing public opinion so that lies flourish and debate is shut down. Fake news and censorship begins during times of war but lingers on during peacetime. This process has been evident and well-documented since the World War I.⁵⁷ The lies told in the rush to war metastasize, and the practices of concealing the truth, distracting audiences, covering up inconvenient facts, and censoring opposing voices become common political strategies that prevent the public from understanding the world. The disinformation of war is one of the precursors to today’s fake news, which has begun to imperil the possibility of an American democracy based on an informed citizenry.⁵⁸ As war is now fought using internet technologies and digital imaging for everything from drone warfare to spreading propaganda, social media platforms such as Twitter are harnessed into the war effort, compromising their ability to serve as sources of information around the globe.

The Global Crackdown

The impulse to censor print and online media is taking hold in a myriad number of ways around the globe. New cyberlaws with vaguely worded restrictions and far-reaching consequences for freedom of speech have been imposed in China, the Middle East, and many other regions and countries. In October 2021, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom issued a Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) that urged the Greek government to withdraw proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, which would introduce fines and jail sentences for journalists found guilty of publishing “false news.” Though it is important to recognize the serious threat false news poses to states around the world, “the passing of heavy-handed legislation” would do more harm than good. Subjective interpretation of such vaguely worded laws can open the door to censorship of legitimate reporting.⁵⁹

Attacks on Scholars, Poets, Artists and Citizen Activists

The rollback of democracy extends from journalism and human rights activists into other realms of expression. From the suppression of educational materials to the prosecution of individuals for scholarly or artistic expression, public discourse has become far more dangerous in many places around the world. For example, countries throughout Eastern Europe have banned Gender Studies programs and, in Russia, women face prison for disseminating images of body positivity that include drawings of vaginas.⁶⁰ India, Egypt and Turkey are notable for their attacks on universities, the internet, the news media, social media, and civil liberties.