This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
An organization founded by Mike Benz, a former State Department official who worked on U.S. foreign policy, has revealed its top 10 list of times "the censorship industry suppressed the truth."
And it includes instances of targeting "malinformation," Hunter Biden's laptop, multiple issues that developed during the COVID pandemic, and more.
Its report explains it was "media-driven panics" about "fake news" that drove the censorship agenda.
And the ultimate result was the censorship of true information, the report said.
The list includes the targeting of "malinformation," which was lumped with disinformation and misinformation.
"The DHS’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has been at the forefront of popularizing the MDM framework. … They define disinformation as speech that is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate. Misinformation is information that is factually incorrect, but not on purpose. The third level of bannable speech – 'malinformation' – is defined as factually accurate, true speech that is deemed to be taken out of or lacking context," the report said.
Second on the list was the "suppression" of the Hunter Biden laptop.
It was the New York Post that documented scandalous details about the Biden family's business dealings uncovered in the laptop.
"This would spark the most impactful coordinated act of censorship in the 2020 election, with Twitter and Facebook both suppressing the story, hampering its virality and preventing it from reaching millions of Americans," the report said.
Ultimately, Joe Biden won the election, but a polling after said that had details about the scandals contained in that laptop been reported routinely, Biden almost certainly would have lost.
Further, it was revealed that the censorship of that story came after the FBI interfered in the election, warning media companies to suppress the information.
Next on the list were discussions about the now-confirmed multiple and sometimes dangerous side effects of the COVID-19 shots.
"In an email exposed through the Twitter Files, members of the Virality Project can be seen recommending censorship of 'stories of true vaccine side effects' and 'true posts which could fuel hesitancy,'" the report said.
Also connected to the COVID pandemic were discussions about the effectiveness of the government-mandated masks, and they were censored.
"In 2021, YouTube removed a video from Senator Rand Paul because he called the efficacy of masks into question," the report said.
And then there were the stories, the narratives: "By targeting entire narratives rather than individual posts, the censorship industry can censor at scale, regardless of the intent or factual accuracy of individual posts. One example is the Pennsylvania Poll Watcher story, a narrative targeted by the Election Integrity Partnership in 2020 that resulted in over 600,000 tweets being flagged."
Benz, in a 2022 report on election censorship, explained, "As just one example of the myriad tricks EIP used to shoehorn in censorship of election discussions, in highlights above, you’ll see that EIP labeled the entire narrative surrounding a Pennsylvania poll worker’s denial of entry into a polling station as being 'misinformation.' Their reasoning does not even deny the basic facts of the denial of entry, but rather makes a subjective determination about the political motivations behind the narrative."
No. 6 on the list was censorship of "mistrust of the media," and No. 7 was the censorship of scientists who assembled the Great Barrington Declaration.
"While the censorship industry’s efforts to maintain control over COVID-19 narratives have often caught ordinary Americans in its crosshairs, medical professionals and experts were not immune. A group of epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in the fall of 2020, advocating against broad lockdown policies in favor of a targeted approach aimed at protecting those most vulnerable to the virus," the report said.
"Simply advancing a theory and an alternative policy prescription can’t be characterized as 'misinformation,' … the Barrington Declaration authors and their supporters were immediately targeted."
Also cited was "The Sunrise Movement," a series of Zoom calls in which "liberal activists" allegedly schemed to "ferment chaos in the wake of a potential Trump victory or a contested election."
Also cited was the censorship of anything described as a "delegitimization narrative," or anything that could cast doubt on the integrity of the election process, no matter the evidence.
Benz has reported that is "defined to mean any speech that 'casts doubt' on any kind of election process, outcome or integrity issues."
Last were comparisons of COVID to the flu. That opinion, now apparently adopted by even DHS, encouraged "family members to report each other for stating the mere opinion that 'COVID-19 is no worse than the flu.'"
