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How the Disinformation Industry Took Control of American Speech
By Mark Keenan
November 14, 2025
Censorship used to be loud. Books were banned. Newspapers left blank spaces where articles once appeared. Speeches were shut down with police and chains.
Today, censorship happens silently. No bonfires, no blacked-out paragraphs — just disappearing voices. A person is not arrested or silenced — they simply become invisible.
That is the strategy of modern censorship: it happens quietly, algorithmically, and under the banner of “protecting the public.” What began as a national-security effort has grown into a sprawling international disinformation industry — a network of government agencies, intelligence bodies, NGOs, universities, and tech corporations that now collaborate to decide what citizens are allowed to see and share.
And they do it without ever passing a law.
It began as a journey from censorship to “content moderation.”
The First Amendment forbids the government from restricting public speech. So rather than censor directly, governments increasingly outsource enforcement to private companies.
The method is simple:
Government agencies identify topics or viewpoints they want suppressed.
Think tanks and academic institutions produce reports claiming these viewpoints cause “harm.”
Tech platforms implement the blacklists, quietly burying disfavored voices.
No courtroom, no jury, no debate — just a silent partnership.
The “Twitter Files” made this system visible. Internal emails released in 2022 showed that the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and CDC regularly flagged posts to Twitter for removal or suppression. Many of these posts were not scams, threats, or foreign propaganda. They were the opinions of doctors, journalists, elected officials, and ordinary Americans whose views differed from government policy.
This pressure extends beyond social media, into professional institutions that punish dissenting experts.
Former German parliamentarian and physician Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, who once chaired the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, had his board membership at Transparency International Germany suspended in March 2020 after criticizing government pandemic policy.
He argued that COVID-19 case numbers were based on unreliable PCR testing, calling it a “PCR-test pandemic,” and claiming that reported infection figures created “panic rather than scientific clarity.”
Whether one agreed with him or not, he was a licensed medical doctor and elected official raising policy concerns — yet his professional standing was punished for dissent, not for public safety.
Furthermore, even referencing vaccine side effects could result in censorship. My own Twitter account was suspended after I posted publicly available government data on adverse reactions.
It's a matter of emerging new 'gatekeepers.'
The internet was once described as the greatest force for human freedom since the printing press. It gave every person a voice. It bypassed the corporate newsroom and the political press secretary. It allowed ideas to spread faster than governments could control them.
That era is ending.
Today, a handful of corporations control most public speech in the Western world — Google, Facebook, YouTube, and X. Their digital infrastructure has become a private public square. And in many cases, their policies are shaped not by transparency or democratic debate, but by pressure from intelligence agencies, global institutions, and politically aligned activist groups.
This is not speculation. It is documented.
The House Judiciary Committee’s 2023 report on government–tech censorship detailed hundreds of contacts between federal agencies and social media executives. The Election Integrity Partnership, funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security, pressured platforms to downrank or remove content, including posts by journalists and even satirical memes. Much of the material targeted for removal was later described by journalists and analysts as “true but inconvenient” — information that was not false, but challenged official narratives.
In its final report, the Election Integrity Partnership describes its role as part of a broader effort to “predict and pre-bunk false narratives, detect mis- and disinformation as it occurs, and counter it whenever appropriate.” That language makes clear their work is not neutral research — it is active intervention in online speech — a new form of censorship far more effective than the old-fashioned kind. People are not silenced; they are quietly erased.
We have reached a point where disagreement is treated as deviance.
When Australian scientist Dr. Peter Ridd questioned research claiming climate-driven destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, he was fired after 30 years at James Cook University.
In the United States, climatologist Judith Curry — formerly chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech — took early retirement in 2017, citing the “poisonous nature” and “craziness” of the political climate surrounding global-warming research. She has since written about the “hostile environment” in academia, describing the toxic rhetoric and intolerance toward dissenting scientists in posts such as “Admitting Mistakes in a ‘Hostile Environment’” (2018) and “The Toxic Rhetoric of Climate Change” (2019).
When meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson joined a climate-skeptic think tank, colleagues warned the association could end his career. These were not fringe voices. They were senior scientists punished for asking the wrong questions.
After that came the Censorship Industrial Complex.
This network has a structure. It has funding. It has a mission.
It has been called the “Censorship Industrial Complex” — a web of intelligence agencies, NGOs, data-analysis firms, and academic institutions that monitor online speech, build “risk scores” for users, and encourage platforms to remove or suppress content.
They insist this protects democracy. But censorship is the opposite of democracy. Democracy assumes that citizens are capable of hearing arguments and deciding for themselves. Censorship assumes the public must be protected from dangerous ideas, like children being protected from sharp objects.
A free society cannot survive on that assumption.
Then COVID changed the rules.
During the “pandemic,” censorship moved from occasional to systematic. Posts critical of lockdowns, school closures, or vaccine mandates were labeled “misinformation,” even when the authors were credentialed experts. In many cases, their statements later proved correct — but the debate had already been smothered.
The message was clear: there is only one science, and it is the science of the state.
After that, it went from health to climate to elections.
Once built, censorship systems do not dismantle themselves. They expand.
The same organizations that monitored pandemic speech have now turned to climate policy, elections, agriculture, and energy. International bodies and some governments have proposed tougher measures — including calls for criminal penalties — against climate-related ‘disinformation.’
Meanwhile, the EU is advancing broad misinformation regulations that could encompass climate speech. Under such frameworks, dissenting scientific views could be swept into “misinformation” categories, creating the possibility that legitimate debate is regulated or penalized rather than discussed.
Others, including the European Union, require social media companies to remove undefined “harmful content” — opening the door to ideological censorship erected through corporate policy rather than constitutional law.
This is the strategy of modern censorship: the government does not silence you. The company does. Legally, the government claims clean hands. Politically, dissent disappears.
Why does this matter?
Censorship is not about protecting the public from lies. It is about protecting institutions from accountability.
We now live under “science by decree,” where truth is not discovered, but announced—and questioning it can cost your career. Science without dissent is not science; it is dogma. Journalism without opposition is not journalism; it is public relations. A democracy that fears free speech is not a democracy at all.
A society where scientists must whisper and journalists self-censor is not a free society. It is an obedient one.
The danger is not simply that Americans are being told what to believe. The deeper danger is that Americans are being prevented from knowing what they are not allowed to hear.
And there is another cost — a spiritual one. Those who propagate falsehoods do not only mislead others; they ultimately deceive themselves. Conforming to lies may keep one comfortable for a time, but it leads a person away from truth, and away from integrity. To participate in a culture of deception is to cheat oneself as much as anyone else.
No one wants to reach old age full of regret — realizing they spent their life echoing what they did not believe, helping to mislead others, or remaining silent for the sake of acceptance. What would be the point of such a life?
It is better to stand for truth, even when it brings discomfort or opposition. In the end, each of us will have to answer to God — the absolute Truth.
So what's the road back?
The first step toward restoring free speech is honesty. A government that outsources censorship to private corporations is still engaged in censorship. If a policy cannot survive public debate, the policy is the problem — not the public.
Second, platforms should be required to disclose when content is suppressed, why, and at whose request.
Tech companies will argue they are private entities and can set their own rules. But when those rules are influenced — or quietly dictated — by government agencies, the line between public and private power dissolves.
Speech is not a privilege granted by governments or tech companies. It is a right — and the cornerstone of all others.
Every society that silences its reformers eventually silences its truth-tellers. And a society that silences its truth-tellers soon finds itself ruled by people who fear the truth most.
If we do not defend free expression now, we will discover the First Amendment exists only on paper — while the real power lies in the hands of those who control the algorithm.
Mark Keenan is a former scientist with the U.K. Department of Energy & Climate Change and a former technical expert with the United Nations Environment Programme. He writes on the intersection of science, finance, and public policy. His books include The Debt Machine, Climate CO₂ Hoax, No Worries No Virus, and Demonic Economics.
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Source: American Thinker
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