Mike Benz, Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, is a former State Department diplomat who specialized in international communications and information technology matters.

Federal Newswire:

What is the Foundation for Freedom Online?

Mike Benz:

Our mission is to restore the golden age of the internet. The free and open internet that existed from the time it was privatized in 1991, up until the geopolitical earthquakes of 2016.

There was a sort of whole-society effort to implement domestic censorship. What my foundation does is attempt to educate policymakers and members of the public about how the censorship industry dynamics work, and what sorts of things can be done in the interest of freedom.

Federal Newswire:

In terms of that golden age, are you referring to when online debates were left unmoderated and uncensored?

Mike Benz:

That's exactly right. We're living in the revenge of the gatekeepers. There was discourse without bumper cars that existed on the internet pre-social media at the time of blogs and forums. [We were] able to talk to each other because [we] all shared the same platforms.

You had this growing maturity of an independent media news and influencer ecosystem that came, by 2016, to be able to approximate the reach of the New York Times or CNN. What you saw was pushback to try to stop independent media or independent voices from being able to impact our political and social ecosystems.

Federal Newswire:

How should we view the fall of traditional newspapers and the rise of independent journalism?

Mike Benz:

What you had after the events of Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 is a dual threat that traditional legacy news media faced. On the one hand, they were losing impact and the ability to be agenda setters at the political level. But then they were also losing on the revenue side because of free content, and the proliferation of alternative sources of news that didn't require you to [pay].

Often the New York Times and CNN were not the first broadcasters of news. Citizen journalists were there at the scene or had some insider scoop.

[There were] a number of changes to turn the knobs of volume down on news media competition, and to force a captured market to redirect eyeballs back to traditional media. So there were actually partnerships that were set up in early 2017.

One of them was called the Trust Project. Another was Google's OWL project for so-called authoritative news. It would escalate up the search recommendation algorithms.

So if you look, for example, at YouTube from pre-2017, you're going to see search recommendations that have a wide range of sourcing for them.

Starting in late 2017, almost all search results were going to have pinned to the top of it a source from CNN or MSNBC or the Washington Post… a so-called authoritative source. It's basically the news cartel that existed during the gatekeeper era getting favors from the big tech companies to outperform artificially alternative sources of news.

Federal Newswire:

If the consumer doesn't know that their news is being curated how can they really know that there's competition?

Mike Benz:

Not only are you right, but there are levels of scandal to this that I find to be fairly shocking, and that need a higher level of publicity.

For example, Andy O'Connell was a former senior executive at Facebook who rotated in after the 2016 election as a former Obama State Department and White House guy. He was part of a panel discussion at Stanford in 2019. It was a multi-stakeholder panel about what to do about content moderation.

There was this sort of heavy-handed early censorship work from 2017 to 2019, but a lot of it was getting pushback. They were concerned about something they called the martyr effect, which is what happens when you censor or you curate somebody out of existence, essentially out of search.

Federal Newswire:

You mean de-platforming?

Mike Benz:

Right. There was a time where there was a wide range of political viewpoints represented by the top 10 search results on Google,YouTube, or Facebook feeds. They were concerned about the martyr effect, which is when someone perceives they're being censored and then develop a greater affinity. The censorship sort of backfires.

What Andy O'Connell's said in that Stanford meeting was they needed to pursue more "nuanced and covert methods" for being able to do content moderation to avoid the martyr effect. You also started to see DARPA grant money flowing to this exact avenue.

In fact, there's an academic, I believe he's at George Washington University, Neil Johnson, who's published a number of DARPA funded studies on different kinds of censorship techniques to avoid the martyr effect.

For example, the traditional type of censorship in the early iteration in 2017 was sort of top down. If there's an influencer or news institution who you want to ban from Facebook or to get de-platformed from ads via NewsGuard or another entity, they would… just nuke that account, and they found there's a tremendous amount of blowback.

So they proposed bottom-up methods where rather than burying the individual, you bury a proportion of their followers or their top amplifiers.

They also had a technique called random partial, where it would be random.

You'd basically draw a topographical map of an online narrative or of an influencer's reach. Rather than capping the accounts of the three or four top lieutenants or of the bottom class, you would have a random partial 35% from a smattering of this and that in order to prevent the perception and the knowledge by the actual users of the platforms that this was being done.

So there's a science of censorship behind this, which really started out of work that was done by the foreign policy establishment for counterinsurgency purposes abroad.

Federal Newswire:

Are you saying we are applying a tool that we use to hunt and stop terrorists?

Mike Benz:

That's exactly right. What you see is almost a one to one transfer from foreign policy establishment domains who were the originators of the technology for foreign policy purposes, then transferring it to the civilian or the domestic facing arms.

In this case, you had these DARPA grants back in 2014-2015 to map the language of ISIS. What kind of things were they saying to recruit people on Facebook and Twitter?

They used an AI technique called natural language processing, which just looks at the language that people use; prefixes, suffixes, hashtags, and image databases. Then you’re basically able to affix a score to any social media post. This is 85% likely to be a pro-ISIS recruiting statement. This is 25%. You can fine-tune those algorithms over time.

You can really fine-tune these things to be weapons grade. What DARPA was doing for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in 2014-2015 is what the National Science Foundation is doing for conservative sentiment or COVID skepticism now.

There was a department of dirty tricks, and it was never supposed to come home. That social contract is now broken in the current age of mass censorship and there needs to be strong protections.

Federal Newswire:

Should there be a duty on the part of these platforms to tell their users they promote some content while moderating others?

Mike Benz:

Well, it's a fascinating question because there's sort of the normative answer and the legal answer. The two watch-words from 2017 to 2020 were transparency and accountability.

This is the idea that we need platform transparency about how populist political messaging is spreading on the platform, then we need accountability to punish them for allowing it. [Think of] pro-Trump and even some left-wing populist political issues. Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in his earlier iterations were also targets of some of this.

So transparency is… purely a consumer protection issue. We live in an era where you can't have a career in sales and marketing unless you have a Facebook, Google account, or YouTube account.

You are cut out of the information age and kicked back to the industrial age if you do not have access to these platforms. This is not really something you can opt in and opt out of if you want to be a part of the modern era.

Right now there are thorny issues around hate speech, but it's way past that. Now they're down to simple mis-, dis-, and mal-information. Malinformation, by definition of the Department of Homeland Security, is true information that if taken on the whole, could mislead people.

Federal Newswire:

Did you see Congressman Massie point out Arizona Senator Mark Kelly’s comments about the Silicon Valley Bank collapse where he said something to the effect of, "how do we censor correct information about the financial services industry to prevent a panic?" Is this malinformation?

Mike Benz:

I actually replied to Thomas Massie's post with citations to CISA. CISA is the cybersecurity subagency within the Department of Homeland Security that transitioned to cyber censorship by declaring misinformation to be a cyber attack on democratic institutions.

So that's how they gained long-arm jurisdiction over election discourse, COVID discourse, and immigration.

Even according to their own June 2022 mis- and disinformation subcommittee minutes, they proposed adding a new category for financial misinformation. What Thomas Massie was referring to from that Mark Kelly comment is actually an initiative already underway at the Department of Homeland Security, simply by declaring the financial sector critical infrastructure.

Misinformation about critical infrastructure is now a cyber attack on the critical infrastructure. The cybersecurity agency can work with its deputized disinformation flaggers to get your opinion taken off the internet.

Federal Newswire:

Is this to stop us from pulling our money out of the market?

Mike Benz:

Right. Well, they talk about this in the national security context. They say it's pro-democracy but… they're defending their own policy and pecuniary interests from democracy.

But you see for example this in the COVID origins debate. The plain factor of the matter is you had a huge amount of government funded censorship of online discourse about COVID origins.

You had Graphica, Pentagon funded, State Department funded, NSF funded. There were tens of millions of dollars poured into stopping the viral spread of your opinions about COVID on a lab leak theory.

Two weeks ago, Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, suggested that's the dominant theory endorsed by the FBI. So this is essentially the protection of noble lies.

Maybe you're right about something causing a bank run, but [this leads to] if you believe something, you need to wait until the government authorizes you to believe that.

Federal Newswire:

If they're trying to silence debate is that anti-science?

Mike Benz:

In fact, the only way to actually trust the science is that the process has been respected. This is one of the points that I keep hammering home about what's going on right now with government funding for the purpose of preserving trust and government.

I'll give you a great example. The National Science Foundation took this program from the Trump era called the Convergence Accelerator Program.

Trump in February 2019 set up this program to solve quantum technology. These are grand science home run challenges that require multi-disciplines; the chemists have to talk to the physicists, who have to talk to the rocket engineers. So it’s funding this convergence of scientists from different domains to accelerate one particular field of science.

So Track A was quantum technology. The Biden administration gets into office, they inherit this giant science accelerator program, and they create a new track called Track F. It's called trust and authenticity. But the entire thing is for science censorship.

Now they declare in the founding program documents that the purpose of this is that mis- and disinformation on the internet is causing a crisis in democracy. It's undermining trust in government and trust in democratic institutions such as mainstream media.

To restore that trust, they're developing AI censorship techniques to tune down people who sow distrust or cast doubt on scientific consensus. Now, you've got a situation where they're essentially saying, "If trust cannot be earned, it must be installed."

Federal Newswire:

Have you heard of any people who have paid Facebook for promotion services and received no change in their outreach or sales?

Mike Benz:

One of the fascinating contributions of the Twitter files has been hard, unimpeachable evidence and screenshots of the Twitter accounts of high-profile accounts with various classifier labels given to them in the backend. They showed accounts like James O'Keefe and Charlie Kirk, and the screenshots from the Twitter file show they do not amplify.

Basically, all sorts of what they call friction. Every social media company uses this sort of tripartite tier system for how to censor the information. They call it remove, reduce, inform. Remove is a ban. Inform is a fact-check label. Reduce is where a lot of the magic is.

Friction is a word for slowing down the virality. That's everything from search bans, recommendation bans, shadow bans, interstitials, click-throughs, and sort of viral circuit breakers.

Federal Newswire:

Is the intent to slow the gain of followers?

Mike Benz:

Right. What we do know is that there has been a hugely robust ecosystem of political narratives that are tagged on the basis of this.

One of the things that my foundation has covered is [how this was applied] both on COVID and on election discourse for the 2020 election and 2022 midterms. Hashtags, branding terms, specific events at both at the state level and the national level were programmed into the AI to be able to detect the associated keywords and then automatically tune down the pro side of that equation; to turn down the knobs so that they couldn't make political impact.

Federal Newswire:

So when I would tag something like that I'm doing my tweets a disservice?

Mike Benz:

You are. Yes. You're making it easy for that to be detected.

Federal Newswire:

Can competition solve these problems?

Mike Benz:

Sure. [But consider] the famous example of Parler. After the 2020 election you had an alternative social media platform that was banned from competition because of gatekeepers up the stack.

You had their payment processors cut off, you had Amazon Web Services cut off their ability to use the cloud. But there's another aspect of this.

Every single one of the major tech platforms that exist today are government contractors. They are all subs. Google's got CIA contracts, DOD contracts. You've got this huge interrelationship with Facebook and the U.S. State Department for our foreign policy operations abroad. You had the same thing with Twitter all the way back 2007 to 2009.

They were part of the Office of Policy Coordinations operations in dozens of countries. Same thing with YouTube. Then even at the infrastructure level, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. Amazon has a $10 billion cloud contract with the CIA.

There is a leg up that the entrenched big tech companies have that you cannot compete with in a fair market, free market way because these are federal government-subsidized big businesses.

Federal Newswire:

What did you do for the State Department?

Mike Benz:

I was the deputy assistant secretary for International Communications and Information Technology, which is a long way of saying I ran the big tech portfolio for the State Department in the Economic Bureau.

I had three divisions under me. One was on security defending IT as it relates to low earth satellites and SpaceX and subsea cables and fiber optics. Another was our U.S. tech policy vis-a-vis countries on a one-off basis. The third division was multilateral affairs, which is basically the private sector.

This is where I ran into the Google lobbyists and the Facebook and the big tech consortium, and the nexus between big government and big tech.

I was there basically towards the end of 2020, principally where it was this period of intense consolidation between big government and big tech and a moment when big tech had basically severed the final vestiges of the social contract that had existed since the early '90s.

Federal Newswire:

Is that the danger?

Mike Benz:

Right. I'm a foreign policy realist on these things. It's a big bad world out there. I don't weigh into the substantive foreign policy thing on the grounds of saying we shouldn't have a full-throated, aggressive Maximalist foreign policy on these things.

But when big-government did favors for big-oil, when we treat ExxonMobil and Chevron as U.S. national champions in the oil space, at least in that case, you don't get cut off at the pump.

Federal Newswire:

Are we moving towards the beginning of a Chinese-style social crediting system?

Mike Benz:

We're no longer even in the infancy stages of that. We are in the adolescent stages. In fact, much of it is government funded. One classic example right off the bat that's been in the news a lot lately is a company called NewsGuard.

It was basically created in November, 2017 as an attempt to try to bankrupt the industry of so-called fake news. You had the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, MSNBC, BBC, Reuters, AP–sort of a news phalanx–that came up with a plan in tandem with allies in the national security state.

On their board, by the way, is Rick Stengel, who ran the global engagement side of the State Department, General Michael D. Hayden, former CIA, NSA head and four-star General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former head of NATO, Tom Ridge, the former head of DHS. It's a who's who of media institutions and top brass of national security.

What they created and what they've successfully implemented is a news ranking system for news credibility that they run through advertiser networks. [They] get the social media companies to de-platform news institutions so that there's no click-through traffic to their sites and then to get them banned from Google Ads and all of the major ad distribution platforms.

This is how they contained the independent news revolution that was budding up until 2017. NewsGuard, the Trust Project, there's a dozen of these companies. By the way, three quarters of them have government funding.

Federal Newswire:

Has there been a concerted effort on the part of the journalism field to move away from objective journalism to advocacy journalism?

Mike Benz:

Exactly. It's both-side-ism is what they call it. They need to abandon the objectivity principle because both sides lead to demagogues being able to come up.

But at the end of the day, it's the creation of a protected news cartel; because just like in the example of a big tech company, it's not like you can just create a lemonade stand and out-compete on the basis of better lemonade.

They're getting their sales not from the people on your street corner. They're getting their sales from the Department of Defense, Department of State, the USA.

You have a similar thing now happening in the news industry where if you want to create a competing news institution to CNN, well, guess what? CNN's got NewsGuard on their back. They're going to have you de-banked, de-platformed.

You're not going to be able to have a YouTube account, a Facebook account. Now you can finally potentially have a Twitter account but you're not going to be able to monetize through ads on your site. You're entering the coliseum of the free market with one hand tied behind your back and both of your legs cut off.

Federal Newswire:

Can you explain how you found out about early AI uses for the internet?

Mike Benz:

When I was practicing law and observing events in 2016, I came across research and news documents around the use of AI for content moderation on the internet. I saw the parallels between that and what I felt like I'd lived through as a kid in chess.

I tried to tell everybody I could, freedom on the internet has this existential threat to it right now because they're going to do for chess analysis what Deep Blue and Fritz and Hydra did to completely change the game of chess–they're going to do that but with the stakes of Western civilization.

They're going to be able to look at any political narrative, any social belief. They're going to be able to draw a topographical map of it. They're going to be able to say what your score is for any particular social media post. They're going to be able to transcribe your voice with speech to text.

The whole thing is going to be almost like a nuclear weapon. You don't need a standing army of a hundred thousand censors. You can have one disinfo-lab in Stanford that is going to be able to provide input to computer scientists.

So lo and behold, that's exactly what happened after the 2016 election.

You had institutions like Google Jigsaw who took this DARPA-funded AI. They started applying it domestically.

Federal Newswire:

What’s your take on AI?

Mike Benz:

In the chess world you had these AI chess engines that changed how people interacted with the game. In fact, there came to be this phenomenon called chess DJ'ing which is where a human would basically DJ four or five different chess engines in the process of creating a new chess line.

We're actually seeing that right now with ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Bard and all these different generative AI things.

I didn't see what happened in the chess world as being an attack on humans. It was opening up new lines of possibility and beauty that the human eye couldn't see until it could DJ different engines to see it.

We're now at the early stage of that revolution happening in the online content generation space. What ChatGPT-4 just opened up two days ago is the ability to draw something on a napkin and it auto generates a website, a music video, all this stuff.

It's incredible. All of it is now coming to the fingertips of 300 million Americans the moment they get versed in it. This is going to open up new lines of beauty. It's going to change news because it's going to change multimedia.

Federal Newswire:

How do folks find out more about the work that you do at the foundation for Freedom Online?

Mike Benz:

We're at foundationforfreedomonline.com. You can follow my updates online on Twitter at @Mikebenzcyber.