BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' exposes how the censorship industrial complex silenced Americans during COVID

The censorship industrial complex went to great lengths to stop Americans from questioning the lockdown measures in reaction to COVID-19 as well as the origins of the virus.

On Episode 5 of BlazeTV's "The Coverup," host Matt Kibbe and investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reveal how the federal government, technology platforms, and nongovernmental organizations worked together to censor dissent.

'This is why I was in a panic in 2024, as a global review system didn’t seem far off.'

Taibbi, who reported on the infamous Twitter Files, mentioned how Europe implemented the Digital Services Act, which "essentially forces private companies to engage in censorship." While he called it "encouraging" that the United States remains the one holdout supporting free speech, he noted that it "will take a prolonged, sustained effort to prevent it from being implemented here."

He explained that the federal government used "a number of Orwellian mechanisms" to communicate with social media platforms, such as Twitter, regarding content.

Kibbe stated that the revelation that the FBI and other government agencies pressure social media platforms to censor their users' speech showed that it "wasn't just cowardly CEOs acting on their own."

"This was the government clamping down to enforce a narrative in flagrant violation of the First Amendment," Kibbe remarked.

The federal government placed gag orders on the social media companies so they could not tell their customers, Taibbi added.

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Matt Taibbi. Image Source: BlazeTV

Kibbe and Taibbi discussed how the Twitter Files revealed that the company had been shadow-banning users, including Jay Bhattacharya, who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration.

The Twitter Files also revealed that social media companies were pushed to censor not just alleged false information, but also "mal-information, "or information that is "true, but true in a way that doesn't point in the direction the administration wants you to look," Kibbe stated.

Taibbi explained that even NGOs had requested Facebook suppress posts that suggested the COVID-19 virus leaked from the Wuhan, China, lab or discourse that detracts from the authority of health leaders at the time, such as Anthony Fauci.

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Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

As far as the government's end goal for the overreach, Taibbi believes the censorship campaign during the COVID era was an attempt to rewire Americans to be more compliant.

"When we looked at these censorship programs, we tried to figure out, what are they doing here? They're not going to just continually censor things over and over again. That's so exhaustive. That's going to take so much energy," he told Kibbe. "Gradually, we realized ... they were trying to re-engineer how people thought generally. They wanted to create a more timorous, obedient kind of person who would just forget to ask questions, who would stop wondering 'why.' And so they're trying to get us to forget we ever had anything to say."

When asked what role independent media could play in countering attempts to implement censorship controls like Europe’s DSA in the U.S., Taibbi told Blaze News that “even high-tech efforts to counter such aggressive platform censorship will hit lots of obstacles.”

“This is why I was in a panic in 2024, as a global review system didn’t seem far off. Independent media is great, but it has limited impact if it’s severely deamplified, which is what already happens in Europe and will happen elsewhere,” he continued.

“Very worried.”

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