The "Middleware" Plan To Restructure The Censorship Industry
1. Middleware = 'censorship as a service' orgs
2. Morphing from top-down to middle-out
3. Regs + middleware = disinfo compliance market
Video Transcript AI Summary
In this video, the speaker discusses competitive middleware, which refers to the growing censorship industry. They explain that the censorship industry is structured through government institutions, private sector companies, civil society organizations, and news media and fact-checking institutions. The speaker breaks down the different categories of government censorship activities, such as funding, pressure, coordination, outsourcing, and laundering. They also mention the role of tech platforms and corporate social responsibility arms in the private sector. Additionally, they discuss the involvement of universities, NGOs, non-profits, foundations, and activist researchers in civil society. The speaker highlights the role of news media and fact-checking institutions in pressuring the private sector to censor certain content. They mention recent changes, including legal victories and the Missouri v Biden case, which has led to the proposed restructuring of the censorship industry through competitive middleware. The speaker explains that competitive middleware involves intermediating censorship through firms like NewsGuard, which fix news ratings to ban alternative news. They mention the plan to build up middleware institutions and the concept of capacity building. The speaker also discusses the upcoming EU disinformation regulations and how entities like NewsGuard are positioning themselves as disinformation compliance services to comply with these regulations. They compare this to the compliance industry for diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Speaker 0: Good morning. I am here in sunny, beautiful San Diego in the famous Balboa Park. And I wanted to talk today about something called competitive middleware. Now competitive middleware is a very Orwellian phrase. It doesn't mean what you whatever you think right now, middleware means.
You probably think it's like some sort of, You know, computer software sort of like anti spyware or like McAfee antivirus or something. Middleware refers to the middle of the road censorship liaisons that are growing right now in size and strength and that are going to be the future of the censorship industry. So let me break down what I mean and, and just lay out a few things that we're going to cover here in this Walk and Talk. So we're gonna cover the whole of society and how it's structured, the whole of society censorship industry. We're gonna cover NewsGuard.
We're gonna cover the Missouri v Biden ruling and its implications. And we're gonna cover the plan for how they are going to restructure the censorship industry away from a top down government driven model and into a so called competitive middleware model. And I'll get through all that. So let's start with the whole society. So as folks who have been following me for a long time know, whole society means 4 categories of institutions, all working together as a seamless web.
Government institutions, private sector institutions, civil society institutions, and news media and fact checking institutions. We'll break down all those really quickly. Government institutions. There are 5 categories of government censorship activities within These within those, government agencies. There's government funding, government pressure, government coordination, government outsourcing, and government laundering.
Censorship censorship of all that. So censorship funding, censorship pressure, censorship coordination, censorship outsourcing, and censorship laundering. Every federal agency does a slightly different combination of all these things. For example, the National Science Foundation does censorship funding, but it doesn't do censorship pressure. That is, you're never gonna find a Twitter files from somebody at the National Science Foundation telling Twitter to take down a post.
But, you will find the National Science Foundation funding the groups that do that. The FBI, you will see them doing censorship pressure, but you're not going to see them doing censorship funding. They don't know, there's a little bit of compensation that they gave to tech companies for complying with The request but that's not really funding in a classical government sense. So, there are a whole coterie of Federal departments that are involved in the censorship industry representing the government side. So there's the there's DHS, which does government coordination and government outsourcing.
There's DOD which does funding and laundering. There's state, which also does funding and laundering. There's FBI, which does pressure. There's there's HHS, NIH, and NIAID, which do COVID relating, but COVID related both funding and pressure. And At this point, basically every government agency that has a role will also have a sort of misinformation unit or a democracy unit that is deployed to help censor opposition to that government agencies policies.
So, a great example of this is what's happening with the FDA. Even the FDA now has a counter misinformation unit that does Around 2019, they implemented this whole society model, and that's why every government agency is is in on the business. So I'm gonna walk their music down here. So that's the government side. The private sector side can is comprised of 2 parts.
It's the tech platforms themselves where the censorship happens, but it's also the CSR wings of the private sector companies That is corporate social responsibility. So when they say whole society private sector, they mean Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Twitch. But they also mean the corporate social responsibility arms, the funding arms of Microsoft and Apple and and Facebook's endowment. So that's the private sector, you know. So again, it's where the censorship happens, but it's also where funding comes from.
Stival Society is comprised of the universities, the NGOs, the non profits, the foundations, And then, activists. Activist researchers. There's, they talk about a spectrum between activism and research, but where they say it's basically the same thing, but you can be more of a shill Or you can be more of a straight researcher, but of course, in that in this case, all the research is basically weapons research for weapons grade censorship. And then there's the news media and fact checking arms, which are the priest class media institutions that are handpicked in order to creates a pressure valve to pressure the private sector to censor what the government wants. This has been the model from 2018, essentially, up until late 2022 when a series of changes forced a anticipated restructuring of the censorship industry.
Those changes were the House turned over from Democrat to Republican and the House controls the purse spring and has investigations power, which has created a lot of pressure from 8 different congressional committees all invested in this. Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, which broke the Silicon Curtain, which had descended over all the the terms of service policies of all the social media companies. And then also a bunch of of legal victories and, awareness campaigns around the disinformation governance boards toppling, and the Missouri Biden case among others. So where are we now is the Missouri v Biden case has this very powerful injunction, which is currently on stay until all arguments are heard. But it it threatens to ban all government coordination of domestic censorship With with a with a few exceptions that are that that are probably not going to be tried at first, because There's criminal contempt penalties for not going for for for violating it.
And They the the Stanford Cyber Working Group anticipated a loss in the Missouri v Biden case and propped up a new plan called competitive middleware. Now competitive middleware is the idea that if you balloon up the civil society bridge Between the government and the private sector, if you balloon up the civil society, then you can actually approximate A sort of top down government type quarterback role by parking it outside of government. And middleware means the sort of intermediating censorship, mercenary firms like NewsGuard. So NewsGuard is said to be a middleware solution to countering misinformation. It's a it's a censorship tool.
Because what it does is it fixes these news ratings that allow the, Basically, mass banning and throttling and deplatforming and demonetizing of all alternative news that the government doesn't want. So if they staff up these middleware institutions with a kind of shadow government force, and they give it government grade funding, then they can effectively circumvent the first amendment prohibitions on running a comparable thing out of DHS. And NewsGuard is a great example of this because on their board of advisors, they have a former 4 star general, head of the CIA, head of the NSA, head of the Global Engagement Center from the State Department, head of DHS, and head of NATO. So it is an all star Apex predator cast of the National Security State all on the board of a middleware, not technically government. It is the grace of government boot heel in the national security state, but it's all parked outside of government.
Their plan right now is to build up middleware. And they have a technique for doing this they call capacity building, which means pumping it up full of money, pumping it up personnel with Park personnel. And one thing to really be out on the lookout for here is something around disinformation compliance. Now, this is gonna be big. Because on August 25th, Sorry, it's a little hot out here.
On August 25th, just weeks away, the EU is going to kick into motion these These new rules requiring compliance with EU disinformation rules for Twitter to continue to do business in the EU market. NewsGuard is already billing itself as a disinformation compliance service to comply with these new EU disinformation laws. So you have the situation right now where what they're trying to do is rather than have DHS force Twitter through coercive pressure and twisting their arm, they're going to have entities like NewsGuard step in. And in order to comply with the EU disinformation regulations, You're going to need to buy NewsGuard's disinformation compliance services. Very similar to how this whole compliance with DEI industry popped up When when you needed, DEI programs for your ESG scores or to qualify for government contracts.
It's very nasty stuff and it's coming soon.
