Big Tech Anti-Free Speech censorship guru Kate Starbird on 60 Minutes
On Sunday night 60 Minutes, a “news magazine”, invited anti-free speech zealot Kate Starbird on to discuss the necessity to control thoughts and speech in America today.
Starbird went on ’60 Minutes’ to argue the need to control free speech in America today so that only one viewpoint is allowed to reach the masses.
Lesley Stahl: Kate Starbird said the social media platforms often ignore the researcher’s suggestions.
Kate Starbird: The statistics I’ve seen are just for the Twitter platform. But my understanding is that they responded to about 30% of the things that we sent them. And, I think on a majority of those they put labels.
Lesley Stahl: But just a third?
Kate Starbird: Just a third, yeah.
Comrade Kate Starbird played a massive role within the Censorship Industrial Complex in the Twitter Files. She continues to lobby hard for access to X to try & control what we can & cannot read or say without a hall monitor’s approval. pic.twitter.com/d5aZDanAYa
— TeasLindsay (@TexasLindsay_) March 25, 2024
So who died and made Kate Starbird director of truth in speech in America?
Kate Starbird is not new at this. She has been working with government agencies to stifle free speech in America for years now.
Kate Starbird was successful in her efforts to censor and blacklist The Gateway Pundit before the 2022 election. Now her goal is to control all speech on X.
Starbird is a key player in the government censorship complex.
We have reported on Kate’s work at The Gateway Pundit.
Stephen Miller and America First Legal is currently involved with litigants from the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, where Gateway Pundit Publisher Jim Hoft is a plaintiff. In the pivotal lawsuit the Attorney Generals of Louisiana and Missouri are suing Joe Biden and his administration to stop censoring conservatives and independent voices who do not echo and support current government policy.
Jim Hoft is also fighting back against the other parts of the Biden censorship regime.
Part of the vast array of industrial Censorship Complex set up by the unelected officials of the Deep State involves not just the official acts by the FBI as in the Missouri v. Biden case, but also the complex ecosystem of system censorship represented in this critical and pivotal case against the “Election Integrity Partnership” known as EIP.
The Gateway Pundit, via Jim Hoft, is currently in multiple lawsuits to protect the First Amendment for all Americans.
There is a vast array of government-sponsored censorship deployed against Americans that most are not aware exists. Federal authorities fund most of this through quasi-governmental entities, outfits, and non-governmental organizations. But they use this system to control what Americans think and as a form of social control, as a way of ensuring that certain narratives, stories, facts, and information is not challenged.
Much of this understanding started when James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, in January 2018, revealed the practice of ‘shadow banning’ content and individual user accounts. Amusingly in retrospect, the ‘fact check’ outlets at the time claimed this was false because Twitter lied to them and said they didn’t engage in shadow banning.
The not-so-secret goal of the pro-censorship apparatus is to create a Chinese-modeled social credit score for America, which will permanently censor speech and thought. These steps, this vast apparatus that ostensibly fights ‘disinformation’, are part of the baby steps necessary to build this system of social control and oppression.
Last year America First Legal announced they had added the Aspen Institute as a defendant to their current class-action lawsuit against “Election Integrity Partnership” & “Virality Project” for conspiring with the federal government to censor conservative political speech.
/1 LAWSUIT UPDATE
In May, we filed a class-action lawsuit against “Election Integrity Partnership” & “Virality Project” for conspiring with the federal government to censor conservative political speech.
We just added the Aspen Institute as a defendant. pic.twitter.com/P1qkPQpND3
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) October 24, 2023
America First Legal discovered that the Aspen Center was formulating plans to demote The Gateway Pundit before the 2022 election.
/5 In early August 2021, Starbird participated in a strategy session with the Aspen Institute on implementing Defendants’ key censorship priorities.
Starbird’s notes for this in-person meeting with the Aspen Institute include formulating plans to “demote sites like… pic.twitter.com/QOCghycAv7
— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) October 24, 2023
The government has allowed certain social media companies to grow and thrive as monopolies. They do this by subsidizing and giving certain companies official sanctions and carte blanche and penalizing and harassing others. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have contracts with the government for many millions of dollars. This has the effect of preventing any competition or challengers from emerging to these dominant players in the social media market.
From this state-enforced monopoly position, the government is emboldened to request and demand the censorship of speech that it disfavors.
From 2011 through the present, the Deep State realized that it had to develop informal systems to accomplish its purposes of digital social control. To do this most effectively, it had to use third parties. Third parties would ensure that all of the spending, documents, emails, and decisions could be private and not subject to any kind of document request. The funding could come from governments, but the actual operations would be private, at least on the surface.
During this time period, around 2017, almost all the major “fact check” organizations were created, including Politifact. These groups, part of the fact-check industrial complex, create a layer of insulation between the social media companies and the government. These fact-check organizations allow the deep state to police the news on the idea that they are fighting ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ – terms that they repeatedly fail to define to this day with any precision or meaning.
Effectively they can label all news they dislike as ‘fake’ or ‘lies’ and suppress that content. They alternatively suppress individual stories but also punish specific outlets that are not in favor.
But the goal is not merely to write an article about how ‘fake’ a conservative news story is; they want to specifically suppress it and remove it from social media altogether. At first, this starts as a ‘takedown notice’ from a government official, but the deep state again realizes that the paper trail that it left behind was problematic. So they set up the Election Integrity Partnership, known as “EIP,” to handle the takedown notices.
The EIP, in less than a few months of starting, is handling millions of takedown requests from mostly governmental agents and actors. While they claim to focus on health-related misinformation, and their power and presence became more pronounced during the COVID epidemic, their creation started several years prior.
The EIP’s “Top Target” was the Gateway Pundit.
The EIP was officially formed on July 26, 2020—100 days before the November election—as a coalition of research entities who would focus on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.
Four different entities helped create the EIP network. One of which is the “Stanford Internet Observatory” funded lavishly by the government and creates a great deal of frameworks to suppress and censor the news using coded terms and dog whistles. One of the major funders of this effort is billionaire Craig Newmark, the “Craig” of “Craigslist.” Craigslist was accused in 2018 of being one of the largest facilitators of human sex trafficking at the time.
Craig Newmark, billionaire, heavy donor to censorship causes
EIP is sophisticated and processes takedown requests through its “Rapid Response Team” with extraordinary resources, handling millions of requests. This is the wholesale version of official social media government censorship with a non-profit veneer to preclude any claim that the government was systemically violating the First Amendment. This effort is ongoing throughout the re-election campaign of the Trump administration, busily suppressing the speech and thoughts of primarily Trump supporters.
EIP later brags in its internal documents that over 98% of the tickets they produce result in the offending content being suppressed from social media. They censored millions of social media posts related to the election, ensuring that conservative and pro-Trump arguments and communication couldn’t reach the intended audiences. This effort was ultimately bankrolled by the government.
The workflow of the EIP:
A lawyer who has investigated the EIP told The Gateway Pundit that the scale of their operations and the complexity of the law and processes involved is, in one word, ‘breathtaking.’
Even though the mainstream media regularly engages in a series of disinformation and misinformation campaigns relating to a wide variety of race hoaxes, crime stories, and left-wing fantasies, those are never corrected or subject to takedowns or fact checks. Instead, only conservative thought is policed. The selective enforcement is complained about by conservatives, but even Republican lawmakers are loathe to say or do anything. The left, publicly and privately, rejoices that they are the censors and they are in control of the censorship regime.
The wide array of interests and entities involved are instrumental in ensuring that credible and documented instances of voter fraud in the 2020 election never reach the American people with the credibility necessary to reach beyond the pro-Trump circles. Normies remain ignorant because every social media company is purposefully keeping this kind of information from ever reaching them.
When, in January 2022, The Gateway Pundit Publisher Jim Hoft posted the video evidence of the 3:30 AM vans from Detroit delivering illegal ballots to the TCF Center, 7.5 hours after polls closed and 7 hours after City of Detroit whistleblower Jessy Jacob said all legitimate legal ballots were processed, Hoft was permanently banned from Twitter.
This is just one example of what EIP was busy doing: ensuring that the “wrong narratives” don’t spread and ensuring that the “wrong facts” don’t get seen by the public.
The small clique of left-wing civil libertarians had been long expunged from the polite left for various wrongthinks about a given topic or issue of the day.
This effort is well-funded by the government, much of it through the State Department. The creation of “Newsguard”, which is a vital cog in the machine of the fact check industrial complex, as it exists to weaponize left-wing fact checks into an ‘index’ of ‘reliability’ to assign specific scores to media outlets. These scores are then further used by left-wing non-profits to demonetize outlets with a low score.
These scores are a way to introduce Chinese-style social credit scores into the media ecosystem, where they can be relentlessly deployed against conservatives and alternative media outlets. This system, where fake fact checks lead to fake scores, which are then used to penalize and punish advertisers and companies who choose to advertise with these outlets, is not well documented or understood. However, the power of this system is well known among conservative media outlets since it is largely strangling their finances and ability to operate.
Outlets that were receiving 10x more traffic were suddenly receiving 10x less revenue at the same time. The power of this system to bankrupt successful conservative media outlets and further shape the public’s opinion by removing opposing viewpoints is an ongoing power struggle.
In addition to Newsguard, the State Department also helps fund the International Fact Check Network, a part of the Poynter Institute. The Poynter Institute is a left-wing good journalism outfit that publishes standards and best practices for newsrooms. But they are also a perfect fit for funding to help color revolutions globally through the utilization of new media and social media. In the short span of three years between 2018 and 2020, this obscure IFCN group, which operates as a small association for fact-check agencies, suddenly has dozens of members in foreign countries.
This is not organic, rather, this is the U.S. intelligence community posing as suitable journalism outfits to police the narratives and thoughts in other countries. This becomes an important tool of American diplomacy to help police thought globally.
Whistleblowers have previously told The Gateway Pundit that millions of dollars flowed through non-profits like Freedom House, The International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Initiative to fund these efforts. The money comes through the intelligence community’s ‘black budget’ but shows up in ‘outreach’ via these non-profits that help push revolution and political results for Washington.
This basic blueprint, and likely the money and technology involved, was simply turned around and deployed against America, Americans, and President Trump.
These mechanisms are functionally no different than those deployed in Communist China to police their citizens’ thoughts and ability to receive information.
Since this system is new and still developing, however, there is still a relatively small number of prominent individuals.
One prominent deep-state operative is Kate Starbird, a professor at the University of Washington.
Starbird is a key agent of the Disinformation Regime. She is a hard-left ideologue seeking to police speech online. Lavishly funded by left-wing billionaire Craig Newmark, she provides much of the thinking to build this censorship regime.
Starbird recently tried to gaslight critics by saying she really took the First Amendment seriously when she set up the censorship regime.
Kate Starbird, censor
Here’s Starbird’s nonsensical and moronic defense of her censorship regime:
“Recent revelations — which occurred after the MDM Subcommittee had completed its work — indicate that, between 2018 and 2020, some CISA employees sent messages to social media platforms alerting them to content containing false information about election processes and procedures. The Committee’s interim report attempts to frame this “switchboarding” activity as “censorship,” and while I do not agree with that framing, I do agree there should be further discussion and the establishment of guidelines for government employees around communicating with social media platforms going forward.
However, in pursuing political objectives, The Committee obscures key contextual details — e.g., that this activity was focused on preventing people from being disenfranchised by misleading information about when and where to vote, and not indicative of broad “censorship of conservative voices,” an accusation implied by the report. Additionally, by omitting clarifying information about the timing and opacity of these activities, The Committee creates a false impression — which then echoes throughout the report — that these “switchboarding” activities were related to the MDM Subcommittee’s work.”
Much of this censorship regime was created in order to shut down The Gateway Pundit. Academics like Starbird identified stories they particularly disliked and tracked where the original content originated from and measured its ‘virality’ meaning its ability to reach a wide segment of the population and inform a wide swath of the public.
This is how they chose which outlets to censor: which ones produced independent news that was read, believed, and acted upon by the most number of Americans.
These pro-censorship academics studied the internet ecosystem, and Harvard studies found that this publication significantly and substantially outperformed where it should be in their matrix. The Gateway Pundit beat their algorithms. The academic research showed that these key outlets were able to help set the news agenda on the right, so they decided they must be destroyed.
Part of this hard-left academic work involved bringing in lawfare specialists to help bankrupt these media outlets. Specific hedge funds were assigned specific outlets to target with non-stop harassment litigation with blank checks. Some of the lawsuits against outlets like Alex Jones and Infowars, One America News Network, Newsmax, and others had legions of attorneys working around the clock to punish these outlets with legal process. By picking judges and venues carefully, they ensured that the defendants had little chance for equal justice and the due process of law.
The pressure was on advertisers to stop advertising and social media companies to stop circulating their content. There was constant pressure to fight finances and reduce reach. Conservatives couldn’t be allowed to have opinions that could reach their neighbors because everything they believed was labeled ‘fake’ and ‘disinformation.’
After Trump won in November 2016, and it was clear that no amount of recount shenanigans would produce a Hillary victory, Zuckerberg was summoned to the last days of the Obama White House. And by the first quarter of 2017, Facebook announced its first major overhaul of its algorithm, delivering content and suggestions to its users. The change enormously disadvantaged conservative media, and conservative media giants suddenly saw their traffic numbers decrease by 90% or more. With one small change in the algorithm, many outlets went bankrupt almost immediately.
Hillary Clinton
Having killed a large number of these sites, the remnants were bought up by competitors at the time at a firesale price.
This massive conspiracy against the First Amendment, whose goal is to silence American speech and thought, is partially governmental and partially ‘private’ even though still largely funded by tax dollars.
The staffers for many of these censorship outfits are sourced from the intelligence community.
Part of the authority for this effort comes from the government classifying information as a national security asset, allowing and empowering federal authorities to then consider ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ as essentially akin to terrorism. Much of this effort came about through the radicalism of Barack Obama and his administration, where left-wing zealots were able to run wild throughout the government and intelligence communities.
However, an attorney involved in fighting these efforts relates that federal officials have always wanted to police American thought and politics. Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, they note, infiltrated and obsessed with both the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King. Hoover disrupted black militants and white militants. The FBI harassed anti-war protesters and pro-war protesters. The common denominator is not ideology but control and ensuring that new political leaders and sources of information don’t develop that aren’t under control.
The available academic literature doesn’t describe it thusly, but the attorney continued to say that the organic ‘virality’ of internet content peaked in 2011-2013 and has effectively been quashed. Instead of unexpected viral trends like Antoine Dodson’s “hide yo kids, hide yo wife” or inadvertent stars like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” – social media companies have figured out how to control ‘virality’ to both boost content they prefer, but also limit and suppress content they dislike.
Similarly, social media companies adjusted their algorithms around 2015 across Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and elsewhere to serve left-wing content instead of recommendations based on what the user wanted more of; instead of giving more of what was desired, the algorithms were adjusted to deliver what served a left-wing political and ideological purpose. All of these efforts are critical to controlling and containing ‘virality’ so that the public cannot naturally determine what it wants.
The era of Trump, starting in 2016, coincides with this unfortunate moment where the deep state figures out how to capture control over digital virality through the perversion of algorithms.
According to experts friendly to the political right who work in legislative affairs, what’s next is the gradual identification of one’s implicit social credit score to become a known public score. Right now, the government is keeping a social credit score on every American it’s just inaccessible to the public and to entities. Much in the same way that a financial credit score exists but is not usually known in real time, the social credit score will become more known by entities and the public.
When this score becomes critical to accessing services, receiving benefits, and being used in court proceedings, it will have a very powerful effect on people obeying the authorities.
The left will continue criminalizing speech based on its content, with laws against challenging elections and ‘intimidating’ favored left-wing groups. As well, the left will likely try to criminalize entire classes of people they dislike in one swoop. As they prosecuted attendees at the January 6th protest, they can similarly indict and prosecute people they label as ‘white nationalists’ or other pejoratives that they define. Already, left-wing prosecutors are indicting and prosecuting 2020 Trump electors in many swing states, indicting all of them at once for made-up crimes. Prosecutors could indict and prosecute ‘election denialism’ or call doubting and challenging elections a species of ‘fraud’.
The censorship regime is poised to take more power by deplatforming and punishing its opponents, and no politician on the right is even verbally challenging it, much less articulating potential solutions at the moment.
The post Kate Starbird Led the Censorship Efforts Against Gateway Pundit in 2022 – Now Her Goal Is to Control Your Speech on X appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
