The following article is a supplement to the MRC Report: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives.
If Linda McMahon is confirmed today as President Donald Trump’s secretary of education, it is imperative that the scourge of media literacy be excised from American schools.
The Biden administration labored to build more public, international support for censorship by producing elaborate propaganda pieces rebranding the silencing of others as “media literacy” and “resilient media.” This work necessitated frequent and covert partnerships with media literacy outfits, which used increasingly elaborate messaging strategies to push their anti-American agenda.
- Harmony Square and Cat Park
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the United Kingdom government and a Dutch media collective collaborated to produce and then disseminate the video game Harmony Square.
As the Harvard Kennedy School reported, CISA instructed the game’s developers to “strengthen the national immune system for disinformation.” At CISA’s direction, Harmony Square embodied the principles of infodemic theory, which posits that an “overabundance of information” is a disease that must be “inoculated” against. The program was pushed into schools across the globe, from the United States to Ukraine.
After successfully rolling out Harmony Square (a process begun by unelected bureaucrats prior to Biden even taking office), GEC partnered with Tilt, a Dutch media studio, and Harmony Square’s developers to develop a game Cat Park in 2022. Using the United States Embassy in the Hague, the GEC funneled $275,000 to create the video game to counter so-called disinformation, according to RealClearPolicy.
After Cat Park was developed, the GEC worked extensively to promote its use by schoolchildren across the world. The GEC was assisted in this effort by both the U.S. embassies to Ethiopia and Uganda. The game’s developers even provided teachers instructions on how to hide that Cat Park’s inclusion in classroom curriculum was part of a “media literacy” program, saying this deception could be “politically sensitive.”
- Building Resilient Media
The National Science Foundation (NSF) paid George Washington University $199,516 to create the propaganda initiative “Pandemic Communication in Time of Populism: Building Resilient Media and Ensuring Effective Pandemic Communication in Divided Societies,” as reported by Open the Books. The work was part of the Pancopop Project, a partnership between American, Brazilian, U.K. and Polish state actors (as seen in the “Pandemic Communication in Times of Populism” video), which was also funded by the censorship-obsessed European Union government.
Pancopop’s taxpayer-funded video claimed that “[t]he presence of populist leaders obstructs the capacity of media organisations [sic] to engage in effective health crisis communication” because they encourage “distrust” of the government “among citizens, making them more vulnerable to misinformation.”
The “Building Resilient Media” work specifically attacked former and future President Donald Trump for perpetuating alleged science denial. It attacked his and other “populist” administrations for having “no systematic policies” to block “misinformation,” while praising “digital platforms” for filling the gap. “Building Resilient Media” concluded that “it’s obvious that governments should allow the experts to have the main say in how society should respond to public health crises.”
- The Digital Sorcerer
The GEC and the U.S. Embassy to Ivory Coast worked in tandem to push for a long-term censorship plan in Ivory Coast. As reported by Africa Newsroom and Tech Africa News, this included the initiative “Stop the Digital Sorcerer,” where the U.S. government launched a joint collaboration with the Ivorian Ministry of Communications to encourage the use of censorship sites, collude with international organizations to label so-called “disinformation,” teach more “media literacy” (a euphemism for censorship) in schools and even threaten people with criminal sanctions for their speech. 
- The Escape Rooms
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) paid the University of Washington to create virtual “escape rooms” to push censorship. In its grant proposal, the university asked for and received $249,691 to challenge the notion “that good information seeking practices can mitigate the effects of misinformation,” and instead push the idea that there is a health condition known as an “information disorder,” which must be treated by “deferring to authoritative sources.”
IMLS chose to award the grant even though the university boasted it would keep its work secret and limit its accessibility “to protect the integrity of the project and not allow these resources to fall into the hands of individuals and groups that may want to use them to advance harmful misinformation agendas.” Also, the university stated it would “target” its reeducation campaign towards the “Black-identified” and that the designer team would be racially segregated.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that they investigate censorship under the guise of “media literacy.” If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
