It’s official: Social media is state media. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on November 30, investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger revealed that the government is working with Big Tech to censor what you watch and read.

Of course, this revelation is not news to those who read the Twitter Files or listened to Taibbi’s and Shellenberger’s testimony before Congress earlier this year. What is new is the sheer scope, power and lawlessness of the censorship industrial complex exposed in the recent congressional hearing.

Before testifying in a congressional hearing titled “Weaponization of the Federal Government,” Taibbi and Shellenberger coauthored a substack exposé on how the federal censorship machine started years before the covid-19 pandemic. Until recently, hearings about the weaponization of the federal government focused on events that occurred during Donald Trump’s presidency. These hearings have deliberately avoided delving into Barack Obama’s role in setting up the censorship industrial complex. This might be about to change.

“A whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance,” wrote Taibbi, Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag.

They describe the activities of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or ctil, that officially began as the volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but whose tactics over time appear to have been absorbed into multiple official projects, including those of the Department of Homeland Security.

The ctil seems to be the missing link exposing where and when the federal censorship machine started. The whistleblower alleged that a leader of the ctil was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received special instructions to create a counterdisinformation project to stop a “repeat of 2016.”

This is a shocking revelation. Yet it is very believable. Twitter began in 2006, became popular in 2007, and was already an enormously powerful censorship tool by 2017 (when Trump was inaugurated president). Simple deduction tells you that if the government started giving Twitter marching orders, it must have begun during the presidency of Barack Obama. This whistleblower’s testimony explains Obama’s motive for controlling social media and Internet news.

A MisinfoSec Working Group published a report in 2019 advocating for sweeping government censorship and countermisinformation to prevent a repeat of the twin political earthquakes of 2016: Brexit and Donald Trump. It makes sense that these earthquakes inspired the Obama White House to order a counterdisinformation project.

The whistleblower did not mention the name of the ctil leader at the Obama White House but mentioned she was a female British intelligence agent. We do know the names of the two military contractors who took the lead in developing Obama’s counterdisinformation project. United Kingdom defense researcher Sara-Jayne Terp and U.S. military contractor Pablo Beuer started a consultancy called threet and took the lead in developing the artificial intelligence algorithms necessary to establish a censorship industrial complex.

Taibbi, Shellenberger and Gutentag wrote:

Now, a large trove of new documents, including strategy documents, training videos, presentations, and internal messages, reveal that, in 2019, U.S. and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former UK defense researcher, Sara-Jayne ‘SJ’ Terp, developed the sweeping censorship framework.

The ctil framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the U.S. and the UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counterdisinformation agendas; a heavy focus on stopping disfavored narratives, not just wrong facts; and pressuring social media platforms to take down information or take other actions to prevent content from going viral.

This military-grade technology was used to censor information about the true origins of covid-19, the adverse effects of mrna vaccines, the criminal activities of the Biden family, evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and numerous other viewpoints. Yet it likely would not have existed if the Obama White House had not ordered a ctil leader to find a way to stop things like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump from ever happening again.

In his article “How the fbi Hacked Twitter,” investigative journalist Lee Smith concluded that the federal government’s takeover of Twitter “was never simply a weapon to harm Donald Trump. It was designed to replace the republic.”

This is exactly right. You don’t have to like Trump’s policies to realize it: America is no longer a constitutional republic if a sitting president can order defense researchers to design algorithms that ensure their opponent never gets reelected.

There is a reason America’s Founding Fathers put freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If government agents can censor positive news stories about politicians they don’t like and negative news stories about politicians they do like, then America no longer has free and fair elections. Rather, its leaders are being preselected by the people controlling the flow of information.

Many Americans are still under the illusion that they live in a democratic republic, but that republic has been replaced by an authoritarian technocracy run by bureaucrats, military leaders, intelligence agents, media moguls, tech entrepreneurs and Wall Street financiers. It will take a miracle to restore free and fair elections to this nation, yet the Bible indicates that God will perform such a miracle so people have one last chance to repent (Amos 7:8).

Pay attention to the corruption being exposed in the censorship industrial complex. Our articles “Dark Truths Exposed” and “Barack Obama and the Twitter Files” will catch you up to speed so you can make sense of what people like Taibbi, Shellenberger and Smith are saying about the end of the republic.

The values that helped make America great are being cast to the ground, but Obama and his supporters are only able to do this because of America’s lawlessness and lack of faith. God will allow this until people see the need for repentance.