The feds tried to create an American Ministry of Truth. Elon Musk had other plans.

U.S. government bureaucrats wanted to create a Ministry of Truth, but Elon Musk and X's efforts thwarted them for the moment.

In George Orwell’s "1984," the Ministry of Truth manipulates and controls the public via government propaganda, which restricts speech and tells the public what to believe. Bureaucrats in Washington wish they could do the same. But due to the First Amendment’s free speech protections, they can’t.

Instead, as the fast-developing news story around Elon Musk’s war with online advertisers makes abundantly clear, the U.S. government has devoted itself to becoming the indirect or secret arbiter of what counts as truth. Rather than nakedly forming an agency akin to the Ministry of Truth, the government helps fund progressive third-party NGOs and private firms to regulate speech through contracts and grants worth billions of dollars altogether. In return, these organizations create methods to identify certain ideas and media outlets that platform these ideas and excommunicate them for being outside the bounds of orthodoxy in the name of fighting mis- or disinformation.

Given the importance and complexity of this story and the government and its allies' interest in memory-holing what’s happening, understanding the sequence of events is crucial.

A timeline

In 2019, the World Federation of Advertisers, a global association of the world’s biggest advertisers, formed the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which also partners with the World Economic Forum to “improve the safety of online environments” by combating “hate speech” and “disinformation.”

Shortly after GARM’s launch and prior to the 2020 presidential election, conservative media outlets were labeled “disinformation” by the media investment group GroupM, which also happen to be a GARM member, according to leaked data acquired by Gabe Kaminsky. As a result, these conservative outlets were blacklisted and missed out on millions in ad revenues from GroupM clients, which include Coke, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Ford, and more.

And in 2020, NewsGuard, a pro-censorship company that created a browser extension that labels conservative outlets fake news, received a $25,000 grant from the federal government after winning the “Pentagon-State Department contest for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.” In its press release, NewsGuard said it helped the State Department and the Department of Defense by “identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation or misinformation narratives, understanding the nature and possible motives of those sources, and flagging hoaxes, narratives, and sources of disinformation as they emerge.”

NewsGuard’s advisers include Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary; Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs; Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA; Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former secretary general of NATO; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; and Israel Mirsky, an elite figure with no Wikipedia page at the intersection of pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, advertising, and technology.

Then, in February 2021, the U.S. Agency for International Development — currently led by Samantha Powers, former U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations under President Obama, and Michele Sumilas, former program officer for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — sent out a leaked internal “Disinformation Primer” that pushes for partnerships with the private sector. It also encourages tech companies to “pay attention to audio/visual forms of mis- and dis-information” and “build fact-checking and verification tools” and media organizations to “collaborate,” “debunk sources as well as content,” and “tell stories about the scale and threat posed by information disorder.”

As part of NewsGuard’s prize for winning the COVID-19 propaganda contest, the organization also gained access to a “Government Contracting 101 session.” Soon enough, the DOD collaborated with NewsGuard by reportedly granting it $750,000 in September 2021 to “fund early-stage companies to develop products and technologies,” according to a January 2022 report. However, NewsGuard later told reporters that it was only a licensing fee even though it had previously called it a grant in its January 2022 report.

Regardless, NewsGuard received around $750,000 from the federal government in 2021.

In the same year, the Global Disinformation Index, a British pro-censorship nonprofit founded by Clare Melford and Daniel Rogers, also received a $100,000 grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

GDI censors free speech through its Dynamic Exclusion List, which informs companies of the media outlets GDI labels misinformation or disinformation. Most of these outlets are conservative-leaning. GDI’s list of the 10 riskiest online media outlets includes Blaze News, alongside the Daily Wire, Newsmax, One America News Network, and more.

The Washington Examiner reported that “roughly $545,000 flowed from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit group funded almost entirely through congressional appropriations, to GDI’s American nonprofit groups between 2020 and 2021, according to financial records.”

Then in October 2021, NewsGuard partnered with the European Union to revise its Code of Practice and Disinformation, which was published the following June. A week later, GARM added “misinformation” to the list of online harms it deemed inappropriate for advertising support. As a result, NewsGuard announced that it would offer a free compliance assessment for companies to make sure their ads comply. NewsGuard also created an option for advertisers to access an exclusion list — a blacklist — to “avoid placing ads on misinformation and unreliable news sources.” Simply put, NewsGuard will encourage companies to stop advertising on conservative media outlets.

A couple of months later, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security faced criticism for creating the Disinformation Governance Board to restrict the freedom of speech for political dissidents and act as an arbiter of truth and for selecting Nina Jankowicz, who herself spread disinformation by covering up the Hunter Biden laptop story, as the board’s head. Many Republicans likened the board to the Ministry of Truth, a government propaganda arm to tell citizens what to believe.

Ultimately, the Disinformation Governance Board was terminated in August 2022. Unable to censor speech directly through government means, Jankowicz turned to a government-backed NGO to accomplish her mission. After the termination, Nina Jankowicz announced the Hypatia Project to combat “gendered abuse and disinformation.” Like other pro-censorship firms and NGOs, her project was conducted with the Centre for Information Resilience, a group funded in part by USAID, the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Then in October 2022, Elon Musk officially bought X (formerly Twitter) in the hopes of forming a free speech social media platform where people would be free to share their opinions — even those outside the Overton window. Soon, GARM recommended that its clients boycott X, essentially blacklisting X, for supposedly violating GARM's guidelines. Between November 2022 and December 2023, at least 18 GARM members, in addition to other major advertisers, stopped advertising on X.

This GARM-backed blacklist sparked large outrage among conservatives, which brought attention to NGOs and private firms’ attempts to censor speech. In the past two years, a number of lawsuits were filed against these organizations, inducing a lawsuit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Daily Wire, and the Federalist against the U.S. State Department, GDI, and NewsGuard for “funding censorship technology.”

In July 2024, the House Judiciary Committee released a report titled, “GARM’S HARM: HOW THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BRANDS SEEK TO CONTROL ONLINE SPEECH.”

And in August 2024, X and Rumble filed an antitrust lawsuit against GARM for its illegal blacklist of X, causing X to potentially lose out on billions in ad revenues. What’s most startling is that some of the largest advertising firms in the world, all of which are GARM members, receive U.S. federal contracts to the tune of billions of dollars.

Furthermore, Publicis Groupe, one of the pro-censorship GARM advertising firms with federal contracts, led the seed investment round for NewsGuard.

Today, August 8, 2024, the World Federation of Advertisers announced the termination of its GARM project following Musk’s “war” against the pro-censorship advertisement mafia. In response to this big news, the House Judiciary Committee posted on X, “Big win for the First Amendment. Big win for oversight.”

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