Mike Benz

And it grew to be this very all-powerful tool until, you know, as I mentioned, two years ago, the tide started to turn, both within the U.S.

government through Congress and the U.S.

private sector through

new freedoms on Twitter and YouTube and the rise of, I'm sorry, on Twitter and Facebook and even the rise of a somewhat robust YouTube alternative ecosystem like Rumble.

So now they've escalated that and they're putting pressure on countries like Brazil and regions like the EU.

And all over 140 countries now, we have these counter disinformation programs, which are purely designed to stop the rise of domestic populists who might challenge the foreign policy establishment.

I mean, it's hard to give a rough estimate.

Certainly, all of the countries in the EU

probably about half the countries in Latin and South America.

I don't have full vision into much of Africa.

I know that the disinformation programs are there and robust, and they're crying for more funding.

But I would say at least one to two dozen have fallen under this.

Another one or two dozen they're frustrated by.

I'll give you an example.

So thanks to U.S.

government funding, many of these spun out, cut out civil society institutions who receive funding from the Pentagon or the National Science Foundation, the sort of DARPA civilian arm, or through the State Department or USAID, do these stakeholder conferences where they will bring together their assets in the censorship industry in all the different countries.

And a few months ago, they did a public Zoom call that I happened to capture, where they talked about how they brought together their Brazil ecosystem and their Philippines ecosystem.

And they were frustrated that the folks in the Philippines were not willing to go as far as the folks in Brazil in terms of the counter disinformation laws that they were lobbying for, the different techniques that they were willing to apply.

But they brought together these multi-stakeholder groups

players from a dozen different countries' censorship ecosystems, all back-channeled essentially through USAID funding or through a sort of university front, where they will literally get everyone on the same page like a magnet so that they apply these censorship best practices to stop the rise of populist political candidates in their region.