Mike Benz

But the US State Department is actually putting pressure on foreign countries to enact their own censorship laws.

So I don't really see what's happening in the UK or Brazil as being distinct from the US.

But in terms of how much time we have left,

This is one of these spaces where there's a lot of two steps forward, one step back, three steps back, one step forward.

You can lose and lose badly even for a number of years and then begin to make inroads again.

For the first six years of me doing this, I've been involved in this space for eight years now, just dedicated my whole life to it.

And for the first six years, there was no traction at all.

It was one loss after another.

And that does make you feel hopeless, but you just keep putting one foot in front of the other until you start to get victories.

And then we've had a lot of victories on the free speech space in the past 18 months, and go through them if folks are interested.

Totally, totally.

So coming into the year 2022,

you had the censorship industry was completely invincible.

And what I mean by the censorship industry is this whole of society framework that our government uses for its counter misinformation work, which ties together four different stakeholder institutions, government agencies, private sector companies, civil society institutions like universities,

NGOs, researchers, and then media institutions.

And all four of them, government, private sector, civil society, and media, all work together to achieve a common censorship outcome.

So they can each pull their own levers in order to achieve the censorship of a narrative or of an account or kill someone's advertising revenue, whatever needs to be done in a particular case.

And from 2016, when this was all really getting established in the U.S., until 2022, there was never any piercing of any one of those four quadrants.

No government agencies were under scrutiny.

Most people didn't even know there was a government role.