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Censorship Industrial Complex

UK Could Weaken Online Censorship Law To Avoid US Trade Battle

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London weighs free speech against trade as Washington pressures Labour to amend online censorship laws.

As European leaders scramble to shield their economies from impending US tariffs, the UK’s Labour government appears ready to make significant concessions. Facing the risk of economic fallout, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration has reportedly signaled to Washington that it is open to revising the controversial and dangerous Online Safety Act — legislation critics have described as an aggressive censorship regime.
The Act, which gives UK regulators the power to fine tech companies for failing to remove vaguely defined “harmful content,” has been a major point of contention between the two allies and has become a major threat to free speech online. The Trump administration has been especially vocal in its opposition, viewing the law as an affront to free speech and a potential financial burden on US tech giants.
According to The Telegraph:
“Downing Street is willing to renegotiate elements of the Act in order to strike a trade deal, should it be raised by the US, The Telegraph understands. The law has been heavily criticized by free speech advocates and economists, who argue its broad provisions to tackle harmful online content could lead to excessive censorship and deter investment from American tech giants.”
The Online Safety Act arms UK media regulator Ofcom with sweeping new authority over social media platforms, enabling the imposition of multimillion-pound fines for failing to police content according to government directives. While supporters claim the law is necessary to protect users, critics argue that its vague wording and punitive approach encourage preemptive censorship — where platforms remove lawful content simply to avoid regulatory punishment.
President Donald Trump’s return to the White House has intensified scrutiny of the law. The president, who has been highly critical of social media censorship, has surrounded himself with influential voices in the tech world, including Elon Musk, whose platform, X, is already preparing to challenge Ofcom’s authority.
“Another source close to the Trump’s (sic) administration suggested the act was viewed as ‘Orwellian’ in the US and could become a flashpoint in negotiations. ‘To many people that are currently in power, they feel the United Kingdom has become a dystopian, Orwellian place where people have to keep silent about things that aren’t fashionable,’ they said. ‘The administration hate it [Online Safety Act]. Congress has been saying that [it is a concern] ever since it was enacted. Those in the administration are saying the exact same thing.’”
Musk has publicly condemned the Act, and with Ofcom set to gain new enforcement powers in March, tensions between US tech firms and the UK government are likely to escalate. The entrepreneur recently welcomed Trump’s presidency as a potential counterweight to the UK’s regulatory crackdown.
Free speech advocates on both sides of the Atlantic have long warned that Britain’s approach to online regulation represents a stark departure from the First Amendment protections enjoyed in the US. The Free Speech Union and groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argue that the law’s restrictions on “harmful but legal” speech will lead to widespread content suppression, limiting open debate and investigative journalism.
Lord Young of Acton, the founder of the Free Speech Union, underscored the looming confrontation between UK regulators and US tech leaders:
“If that happens, Trump will side with his tech bros and tell Sir Keir that if he wants a trade deal, he’ll call off his dogs.”
Labour has previously doubled down on online regulation, with its election manifesto promising additional measures to “keep everyone safe online.” However, in the face of potential US trade repercussions, the government’s stance appears to be softening.
From Washington’s perspective, the Online Safety Act has become an obstacle to trade negotiations, raising concerns that UK regulatory overreach could deter American investment. Andrew Hale, a trade policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, confirmed that this issue has been a recurring theme in discussions with US officials.
“Every meeting I have to discuss trade policy with people either in the administration or Congress, they always raise that. They say, ‘This is a huge roadblock’.”
With Ofcom’s enforcement powers set to take effect soon, Britain faces a fundamental choice: cling to its stringent online censorship policies or prioritize economic cooperation with the US. The decision could shape the future of free speech in the UK for years to come.
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Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan Ramp Up Pressure On Google Parent Company To Deal With ‘Censorship’

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Andi Shae Napier

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan are turning their attention to Google over concerns that the tech giant is censoring users and infringing on Americans’ free speech rights.

Google’s parent company Alphabet, which also owns YouTube, appears to be the GOP’s next Big Tech target. Lawmakers seem to be turning their attention to Alphabet after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta ended its controversial fact-checking program in favor of a Community Notes system similar to the one used by Elon Musk’s X.

Cruz recently informed reporters of his and fellow senators’ plans to protect free speech. 

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“Stopping online censorship is a major priority for the Commerce Committee,” Cruz said, as reported by Politico. “And we are going to utilize every point of leverage we have to protect free speech online.”

Following his meeting with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai last month, Cruz told the outlet, “Big Tech censorship was the single most important topic.”

Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent subpoenas to Alphabet and other tech giants such as RumbleTikTok and Apple in February regarding “compliance with foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders, or other government-initiated efforts” with the intent to discover how foreign governments, or the Biden administration, have limited Americans’ access to free speech.

“Throughout the previous Congress, the Committee expressed concern over YouTube’s censorship of conservatives and political speech,” Jordan wrote in a letter to Pichai in March. “To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee must first understand how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

Jordan subpoenaed tech CEOs in 2023 as well, including Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple and Pichai, among others.

Despite the recent action against the tech giant, the battle stretches back to President Donald Trump’s first administration. Cruz began his investigation of Google in 2019 when he questioned Karan Bhatia, the company’s Vice President for Government Affairs & Public Policy at the time, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Cruz brought forth a presentation suggesting tech companies, including Google, were straying from free speech and leaning towards censorship.

Even during Congress’ recess, pressure on Google continues to mount as a federal court ruled Thursday that Google’s ad-tech unit violates U.S. antitrust laws and creates an illegal monopoly. This marks the second antitrust ruling against the tech giant as a different court ruled in 2024 that Google abused its dominance of the online search market.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

CIA mind control never ended – it evolved and went mainstream

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From LifeSiteNews

By James Corbett

From the CIA’s MKUltra to Britain’s COVID fear tactics, governments have spent decades perfecting psychological operations against their own people.

Surveying the battlefield

For thousands of years, military strategists have understood that an army’s success often depends not on its size or even on its armaments but on its knowledge of the opponent.

After all, as Sun Tzu observes:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

It follows, then, that the success of the globalists in their fifth-generation war on us all depends on their knowledge of humanity itself.

What makes people tick? What motivates and demotivates them? What stimuli do they respond to, and in what way do they respond?

From the viewpoint of those wishing to manipulate, control and subdue humanity, the knowledge of the human mind that can be gleaned from the answers to these questions is the most prized knowledge of all.

So, it shouldn’t be surprising to learn that not only scientific researchers but military planners and government officials have spent centuries trying to better understand humans and their behaviors – and, more importantly, how to mold, influence, shape, or outright control those behaviors.

Everyone knows about Ivan Pavlov’s experiments in conditioning. Any high schooler could tell you how Pavlov was able to condition dogs to salivate upon hearing the ringing of a dinner bell.

But how many know that Pavlov’s research didn’t end with his observation of canines? That he next began duplicating his experiments on human subjects? That those human experiments saw Pavlov and his protégé, Nikoli Krasnogorsky, scooping orphans off the streets, drugging them, surgically fitting them with salivation monitors and force-feeding them food so that these children, like Pavlov’s dogs, could be trained to salivate on command?

Source: “Ivan Pavlov Mechanics of the Brain 1926”

READ: Is the US Intelligence Community hiding secret weapons from the American public?

How many are familiar with the experimenters who followed in Pavlov’s footsteps? How many have seen the footage of John B. Watson’s “Little Albert” experiments, where the psychologist deliberately traumatized an 11-month-old baby in an attempt to refine the techniques of conditioning humans?

How many have read Watson himself bragging that “[a]fter conditioning, even the sight of the long whiskers of a Santa Claus mask sends the youngster scuttling away, crying and shaking his head from side to side”?

Source: Psychological care of infant and child by John B. Watson

How many have followed the thread from Pavlov and Watson and the “classical conditioning” researchers to the “radical behaviorists” like B. F. Skinner and his work in perfecting operant conditioning?

How many have read Skinner’s Walden Two, in which he proposes a scheme for creating a utopian society by conditioning children from birth to assume specific roles in society?

By this point, it’s fairly common knowledge that the CIA conducted mind control experiments like Project MKUltra, using operatives like Sidney Gottlieb and Dr. Ewan Cameron to administer LSD to unwitting subjects and conduct other ghoulish experiments in mental manipulation. But how many have heard of MKSearch or MKChickwit or MKOften or any of the other spin-offs of this nightmarish research?

How many know these experiments “were designed to destabilize human personality by creating behavior disturbances, altered sex patterns, aberrant behavior using sensory deprivation and various powerful stress-producing chemicals, and mind-altering substances” and were carried out on so-called “expendables” – i.e., “people whose death or disappearance would arouse no suspicion”?

How many have heard of George Brock Chisholm, who served as the first Director-General of the World Health Organization and helped spearhead the World Federation for Mental Health? How many have read the transcript of his 1945 lecture, “The Reestablishment of Peacetime Psychiatry,” in which he declared, “If the race is to be freed from its crippling burden of good and evil it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility”?

And how many are aware that Chisholm’s call to action was heeded by men like British military psychiatrist Colonel John Rawlings Rees, the first president of Chisholm’s World Federation of Mental Health and chair of the infamous Tavistock Institute from 1933 to 1947?

How many know the story of how Dr. Jim Mitchell – a military retiree and psychologist who had contracted to provide training services to the CIA – took the findings of Dr. Martin Seligman on the psychological phenomenon of “learned helplessness” and weaponized them for the CIA in the service of the agency’s post-9/11 illegal torture program?

Whether the general public is aware of this documented history or not, the record shows that the last 125 years of research into the human psyche has been conducted – or at least weaponized – by Machiavellian manipulators and secret schemers whose intent is to socially engineer the masses.

And, as the science of the mind progresses in the 21st century, these social engineering schemes are only getting more effective.

The information war

The alternative media has certainly had cause to note that we here in the 21st century are the (largely unwitting) targets of a large-scale information war. This war is being waged upon us largely (though not exclusively) by our own governments.

Occasionally, stories of some of the campaigns in this war break through the information blockade, and the public catches a glimpse of the battle that is being waged against them on all fronts.

Bemused Canadians, for example, were able to read about the Canadian military’s bizarre “wolf letter” psyop in the pages of The Ottawa Citizen back in 2021. But any concerns that might have been raised by this psyop and its wild story of forged government letters and recorded wolf noises were soon quelled by the usual establishment lapdog journalists.

The whole thing, we were told, was caused by “a handful of military reservists testing psychological tactics at a weekend exercise” and “new control measures are now in place to ensure psychological operation exercises and influence activities do not reach unintended audiences” – so, obviously there’s nothing more to worry about!

Residents of the U.K., meanwhile, got their own glimpse of the infowar in 2021 when members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) – a group providing “independent, expert, social and behavioural science advice” to the U.K. government – admitted they were guilty of “using fear as a means of control.”

Tasked with providing insight on how to make Britons compliant with their government’s lockdown, social distancing, masking, and other restrictions at the beginning of the scamdemic, the SPI-B experts urged the government to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from COVID-19. Multiple members of the SPI-B team later expressed regret about the scheme, calling it “totalitarian” and unethical.

One SPI-B member confessed: “You could call psychology ‘mind control.’ That’s what we do.”

Another put it even more bluntly: “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon … Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”

But to the extent that these operations ever come to public light, it is almost always in disconnected and decontextualized stories like these. Those Canadians who learned about the “wolf letter” psyop, for example, likely never read about the SPI-B scamdemic psyop, let alone connected the events together as evidence of the all-out infowar.

In recent years, however, the existence of the infowar has not only become undeniable. It is undenied.

The cognitive domain of the information battlespace

In 2022, the Associated Press published “‘Pre-bunking’ shows promise in fight against misinformation,” an article touting new research that claims to show progress in the creation of new weapons in the information war.

After detailing the usual examples of the scourge of “misinformation” – i.e., observations that erode public faith in “democratic institutions, journalism and science” – the article then reports uncritically on new techniques that are being developed to trick the public into once again trusting these demonstrably untrustworthy institutions:

New findings from university researchers and Google, however, reveal that one of the most promising responses to misinformation may also be one of the simplest.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, the researchers detail how short online videos that teach basic critical thinking skills can make people better able to resist misinformation.

The researchers created a series of videos similar to a public service announcement that focused on specific misinformation techniques – characteristics seen in many common false claims that include emotionally charged language, personal attacks or false comparisons between two unrelated items.

Researchers then gave people a series of claims and found that those who watched the videos were significantly better at distinguishing false information from accurate information.

Although research like that touted by the AP is ostensibly civilian in nature, the fact that this information campaign is part of a literal military battle that is being waged against us is now starting to be admitted, as well.

In 2023, for example, the Japanese military officially added the “cognitive domain” as the latest new battle domain added to Japan’s National Defense Program Guideline. In addition to the traditional domains of territorial land, water, and airspace, and to newly added domains like space, cyberspace, and the electrogmagnetic domain, Japan’s defense authorities now claim the cognitive space as part of their remit.

According to The Global Times:

The building of such cognitive capability would also be written into the National Security Strategy, one of the three major diplomatic and security documents to be amended before the end of 2022, VOA Chinese reported, citing the theory that the Japanese defense authorities and the Self-Defense Force attach great importance to the “misinformation” released by Russia and China, consider that information spread in the Chinese language is a global trend and that cognitive warfare by the island of Taiwan against the Chinese mainland provides valuable experience for research and study.

[…]

Analysts said that cognitive warfare is a combination of digital information, media and spy technology that leads public opinion to extremes in order to affect the basis of diplomacy between countries and to realize the goals of political manipulation, citing the U.S.’ infamous “peaceful transfer of power” strategy in other countries as an example.

The recognition of the “cognitive domain” as a literal battlefield is not limited to the Japanese defense forces, however.

In 2019, the Chinese State Council Information Office released a white paper on “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” arguing that “[w]ar is evolving in form towards informationized [sic] warfare, and intelligent warfare is on the horizon.”

In 2022, Motohiro Tsuchiya, a professor at Keio University, wrote an article on “Governing Cognitive Warfare” for Governing the Global Commons: Challenges and Opportunities for US-Japan Cooperation (a publication of the German Marshall Fund of the United States!) in which he warned that the threat of “intelligentized warfare” by China and other U.S. State Department bogeymen necessitated U.S. cooperation to “create and promote rules and norms that can effectively govern cyberwarfare.”

And, perhaps inevitably, it wasn’t long before it was discovered that the real threat in this new “cognitive domain” isn’t the ChiComs or the CRINKs or any other outside force, but… *drumroll, please*… online conspiracy theorists!

That’s right, in 2023, Tomoko Nagasako, a research fellow at The Sasakawa Peace Foundation, penned “The Threat of Conspiracy Theories in the Battle for the Cognitive Domain – A Consideration of the Status of Conspiracy Theories in Japan Based on Attempts at Regime Destruction Overseas.” As you might guess from that title, the article provides “an overview of the state of conspiracy theories overseas and in Japan,” details how these dastardly conspiracy theorists present a threat to national security “[f]rom the perspective of cognitive warfare,” and proposes countermeasures to address these grave dangers to the nation.

And what “conspiracy theories” does Nagasako cite in her piece? That there exists a “deep state” over and above the surface-level government, that the COVID vaccines were harmful, that the U.S. has conducted biological weapons research in Ukraine in recent years… you know, the usual harebrained ideas that only kooky conspiracy realists would even entertain.

Yes, for those who haven’t received the memo yet: there most certainly is a war for your mind. It certainly is taking place right now. It is being waged by militaries around the world. The target of these wars is, more often than not, these very militaries’ fellow countrymen.

To those who are just waking up to this war, you have my deepest sympathy. Realizing that you are a target in a battle you didn’t even know you were fighting in a “cognitive domain” you never even knew existed must be wildly disorienting, to say the least.

But here’s the bad news: new technologies are being developed that will make all of this history – from Pavlov to Skinner to Mitchell to SPI-B – and all of these secret operations – from MKUltra to MKChickwit – and all of these military campaigns – from Chisholm and Rees and the machinations of the Tavistock minions to the ChiComs and the Japanese and the development of cognitive warfare – seem like small potatoes.

As we shall see in a follow-up article, the technology to rewire the brain – quite literally – is already being tested and deployed. And, once these technologies are ready to be unleashed on the public, they may bring the age-old dream of the dictators for total domination of the human population to reality.

Reprinted with permission from the Corbett Report.

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