“CTIL Files”: Independent journalists reveal how U.S. and U.K. military contractors created massive censorship scheme in 2018

“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,” is how independent journalist Michael Shellenberger presented his latest investigation: the CTIL files, written together with two colleagues.

According to extensive reporting, even as many media outlets and journalists strive to debunk reports that Western governments are not part of the so-called “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a whistleblower showed a series of documents demonstrating the existence of an “anti-disinformation” group called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL).

According to Public and Rackets, two substacks that have published important stories about Big Tech censorship against conservative media and commentators, various agencies of the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom created a complex, massive censorship plan in 2018 to discredit opinion narratives that veered from official discourse, and thus avoid iconic political movements such as Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 or the approval of Brexit.

Matt Taibbi, freelance journalist and author of Twitter Files; Michael Shellenberger, freelance journalist, author and Twitter Files environmentalist; and the journalist Alex Gutentag, are the authors of the extensive research work.

Shellenberger and Taibbi will participate this Thursday in an explosive hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Instrumentalization of the Federal Government as a political weapon. According to Shellenberger, the whistleblower described the activities of the CTIL that began, in the first instance, as a volunteer project of data scientists and defense and intelligence veterans but was later absorbed by official projects of various federal government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

What do the revelations show?

“The CTI League documents offer the missing link answers to key questions not addressed in the Twitter Files and Facebook Files. Combined, they offer a comprehensive picture of the birth of the ‘anti-disinformation’ sector, or what we have called the Censorship Industrial Complex,” Shellenberger explained on the social network X (Twitter).

The documents revealed by the whistleblower, whose validity was verified by journalists through an exhaustive process of exchange of information, shed light on a hitherto unreported matter: How the existence of the Censorship Industrial Complex was conceived, which ultimately involved a large number of non-governmental organizations, media and government agencies that participated in a massive censorship process against conservative commentators on social networks such as Twitter (now X) and Facebook.

The report states that, in 2019, US and UK military and intelligence contractors led by a former British defense researcher, Sara-Jayne “SJ” Terp, developed the CTIL censorship framework. According to the research, these contractors co-led CTIL, which partnered with the DHS Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) in 2020, one of the agencies that most promoted social media censorship against conservative commentators.

The documents shown by the complainant describe, among other situations, how the digital censorship programs were developed and outline the involvement of the military and intelligence sectors of the United States and the United Kingdom.

They also explain that this type of censorship activities abroad are typically carried out by the CIA, the Department of Defense and the NSA; however, in the United States, against Americans, they must be carried out through private partners because the government itself does not have the legal authority to complete these efforts on its own.

“The CTIL framework and the public-private model are the seeds of what both the US and UK would put into place in 2020 and 2021, including masking censorship within cybersecurity institutions and counter-disinformation 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,” the journalists’ report reads.

What narratives was CTIL pursuing?

The work explains that, for example, in 2020, the CTIL began to attack narratives against COVID-19 confinements. Narratives such as “all jobs are essential” or “open America now” were pursued by this “anti-disinformation” group through a content-reporting channel.

Likewise, this same group investigated individual users who posted hashtags such as #FreeCA and created documents that included details such as biographies on the social network X (formerly Twitter).

“CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote “counter-messaging,” co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups,” explain the investigators, who announced that, in the coming days, they were going to expose the documents provided by the whistleblower while protecting their identity and also that of employees who are not high-profile.

The independent journalists also promised to turn over the documents to congressional investigators.