Elon Musk is right: End the online censorship racket

Few Americans have ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, let alone understand how it shapes what they read and hear in news and commentary. That may soon change.

An alarming new report of the House Judiciary Committee details this organization’s work to censor conservative and opposing viewpoints in the media by targeting figures such as Joe Rogan and entire social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter).

It is part of a massive censorship system that a federal court recently described as “Orwellian.” The sophistication of this system makes authoritarian regimes like China’s and Iran’s look like mere amateurs in censorship and blacklisting.

In my new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage,” I discuss our history of speech crackdowns and how this is arguably the most dangerous anti-free speech period that we have faced as a nation. The reason is an unprecedented alliance of government, corporate, academic and media institutions supporting censorship and the targeting of largely conservative viewpoints.

As discussed in the book, there is a crushing irony to the current anti-free speech movement. During the Red Scare and the McCarthy period, it was the left that was targeted with blacklisting, censorship and arrests. It is now the left that has constructed a global censorship system that exceeds anything that Joe McCarthy even dreamt of in the control of news and commentary.

Through the years, I have testified repeatedly in Congress on this system supported enthusiastically by President Biden and his administration. It has proven to be a frustrating game of whack-a-mole for civil libertarians. The Democrats in Congress have uniformly opposed any investigation or action on censorship while denying for years that there was a coordinated effort between government and corporations. When we were successful in uncovering components of this system, they were often quickly shut down as the work shifted to other components and assets.

One of the most insidious efforts has been to strangle the financial life out of conservative or libertarian sites by targeting their donors and advertisers.  This is where the left has excelled beyond anything that has come before in speech crackdowns.

Years ago, I wrote about the Biden administration supporting efforts like the Global Disinformation Index to discourage advertisers from supporting certain sites. All of the 10 riskiest sites targeted by the index were popular with conservatives, libertarians and independents. That included Reason.org and a group of libertarian and conservative law professors who simply write about cases and legal controversies. The Global Disinformation Index warned advertisers against “financially supporting disinformation online.” At the same time, HuffPost, a far-left media outlet, was included among the 10 sites at lowest risk of spreading disinformation.

Once that index’s work and bias was disclosed, government officials quickly disavowed the funding. It was a familiar pattern. Within a few years, we found that the work had been shifted instead to groups like the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which is the same thing on steroids. It is the creation of a powerful and largely unknown group called the World Federation of Advertisers, which has huge sway over the advertising industry and was quickly used by liberal activists to silence opposing views and sites by cutting off their revenue streams.

These censorship groups typically proclaim that they are merely trying to promote “brand safety” when they target for suppression the same sites that challenge the political and media establishment. The group states that it “unites marketers, media agencies, media platforms, industry associations, and advertising technology solutions providers to safeguard the potential of digital media by reducing the availability and monetization of harmful content online.”

That “harmful content” seems to be the very same sites long targeted by the Biden administration and its allies in business, the media and academia.

The internal communications of these censorship groups demonstrate their contributors’ underlying agenda. In one conversation between Global Alliance for Responsible Media co-founder Rob Rakowitz and individuals with an associated “GroupM,” two executives explained to Rakowitz how they identified sites that they did not like and simply monitored them until they could find something that crossed the line. An example is the Daily Wire, a site hated by liberals for its conservative viewpoints and critiques of mainstream media.

In describing how they work to bag such sites, John Montgomery, executive vice president of Global Brand Safety, explained: “There is an interesting parallel here with Breitbart. Before Breitbart crossed the line and started spouting blatant misinformation, we had long discussions about whether we should include them on our exclusion lists. As much as we hated their ideology and bulls–t, we couldn’t really justify blocking them for misguided opinion. We watched them very carefully and it didn’t take long for them to cross the line.”

In other words, they preselected the sites and then followed their every move like a patrol unit following a car to wait for them to go one mile per hour over the limit.

This is called “deplatforming,” a favorite term from higher education, whereby liberal groups organize to shout down and block speakers with opposing views. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media is too sophisticated to simply bullhorn groups into silence. Instead, it strangles them financially.

Those who do not yield, from Elon Musk’s X to mega-podcaster Joe Rogan, were quickly added to the list to be deplatformed. Musk is particularly dangerous because he was responsible for blowing the lid off the censorship system by releasing the “Twitter Files,” detailing coordination between government and social media companies to silence citizens and groups.

To this day, companies like Facebook continue to fight efforts to disclose their own censorship files.

Musk has threatened to sue in light of the report. “Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, X has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” he said.

A lawsuit would be difficult to maintain. These groups have a right to organize to silence opposing views just as book burners have a right to burn books. However, deplatforming, book burning and blacklisting have long been anathema to free speech values. They are efforts to prevent opposing views from being heard rather than to respond to such views on the merits.

And Musk is right in describing this as a “racket.” There is now a disinformation cottage industry where a wide array of academic and private groups are raking in a fortune targeting individuals and other groups for blacklisting, banning and censorship. 

There are other groups working in tandem in this effort. For example, Newsguard was created by to Chief Executive Officers Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz to monitor and effectively blacklist media that they deemed misinformative or false. The site uses mainstream journalists to rate news sites, even though many of these sites have challenged the bias of the mainstream media. 

Once again, the apparatus serves to shield that bias in targeting disfavored sites. The Biden administration has extended contracts with Newsguard to incorporate the system, and it is even being used in schools, despite complaints that it shows the very same pro-Democrat and left-wing bias.

There is a reason why projects such as the Global Disinformation Index have been largely concealed from public view. There is a reason Facebook and other companies have fought mightily to conceal their own censorship files. The anti-free speech movement is not a popular movement.

A majority of the public continues to oppose censorship. This is a movement that came from higher education and has been pushed by the political and media establishment, not the public.

That is why many of us in the free speech community are hoping that the 2024 election will become a referendum on censorship. Biden has given a full-throated endorsement of these efforts, even to the point of claiming that companies that do not censor American citizens are “killing people.” He presides over the most anti-free speech administration since John Adams.

So now, let him defend it with voters.

In 1800, that did not work out well for Adams, who was defeated by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had run on restoring freedom of speech. The public can now flip the script. It is time to defund and deplatform America’s censors.

Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the
George Washington University Law School.