Former U.S. president and censorship proponent Barack Obama’s fingerprints are all over an emerging story that reveals that the left’s quest for global censorship has moved forward unabated by the election of Donald Trump in 2024.
According to investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, on Sept. 24, “hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia.”
So it all basically happens the way you imagine it does. People sitting around in comfortable private settings planning your world for you. Very cozy. Drinks included. https://t.co/9aa0L38xE6
— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) October 29, 2025
Shellenberger points to the continued pressure governments around the world are placing on the major tech platforms to conform to a “unified” set of censorship standards. While the altruistic argument for such a singular, global system for censorship is murky and characterized by nonspecific bureaucrat-speak, it’s obvious that all of it is a naked grab for power and dominance by the globalist elites.
One case that illustrates this sort of pressure centers on Brazil’s successful attempts to force Elon Musk and the X platform to censor the Brazilian populace, according to Shellenberger.
Brazil's Supreme Court only lifted its ban on X after the company paid sizable fines and made certain promises to the incumbent government. Some of those promises included blocking specific accounts that are “accused of spreading misinformation,” which actually means they were accounts likely telling the truth about the government in power.
The globalists would like to repeat this sort of thing worldwide and are working to make this happen.
Shellenberger’s compelling argument is that American tech giants will find it more cost-effective to expediently comply with a global standard for censorship rather than to spend the time, resources and legal energies to defend certain free speech rights in America, while clamping down in other countries – places like the UK, for instance, where bobbies will come knocking on your door if your latest Facebook post gets the wrong person’s knickers in a twist.
The lowest common denominator rules. In other words, the countries with the most aggressive and strict standards for censorship will set the global standard.
The Stanford Cyber Policy Center is run by Michael McFaul. He was U.S. Ambassador to Russia under — wait for it — President Obama.
Shellenberger reported that the dinner in September was part of a “new, secretive, and possibly illegal censorship initiative that appears even more ambitious than the one Obama proposed in 2022.”
That was when Obama delivered remarks to the Cyber Policy Center and detailed his own proposal for government censorship of big tech platforms. Shellenberger noted that only six days later, Obama’s flunky, President Joe Biden, through the Department of Homeland Security, announced it had created its “Disinformation Governance Board.”
Our own David Manney pointedly summed that all up in June of this year when focusing on how Brazil is the model for leftist censorship infrastructure:
The Biden administration tried its version of this just a few years ago with the short-lived Disinformation Governance Board. Led by a TikTok singer with a censorship fetish, it was the first official attempt at federal speech control since the McCarthy Era.
It folded only after public outrage, not on principle.
So, while that was a swing-and-a-miss for Biden, it wasn’t enough to deter the elites. With that in mind, it’s important to know a thing or two about the Cyber Policy Center’s McFaul. He’s described as an expert on “colour revolutions,” and this is important. He’s been a developer of strategies that employ censorship and misinformation to take down governmental regimes around the world. Check out what Mike Benz has to say about McFaul. Benz himself is a former State Department official and now the Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online.
Michael McFaul - The "scholar of the Colour Revolutions”
— Theosis (@Theosisss) November 10, 2024
(P.S. He is now working domestically to censor Americans) pic.twitter.com/Az4OZ9ivVD
In short, McFaul is not just an academic who deals with things in the abstract. He’s a leftist insider whose Cyber Policy Center, Shellenberger says, hosted that secret dinner: “The meeting was titled ‘Compliance and Enforcement in a Rapidly Evolving Landscape.’ Frank McCourt, the same person behind the Stanford Internet Observatory, financed the gathering through his ‘Project Liberty Institute,’ (PLI), toward which he gave $500 million to “strengthen democracy” and “foster responsible technology.”
Cutting to the chase, the PLI appears to frame the current model of loosely and inconsistently regulated Big Tech platforms around the world as the enemy of democracy. So after getting the people to hate Big Tech, it then positions a centralized global infrastructure for censorship and control as the white knight and the solution. You see, it’s in the interest of democracy and “public safety” for some globalist in a far-away cubicle to decide what’s good for you. He/she/they just wants to restrict information and opinions that might harm — who exactly?
Obama, McFaul, and company have been working to make free speech the enemy of democracy, when in fact, true democracy can’t exist without free and unfettered speech.
But if you think it can’t happen here, take note of this strategy put forth by Benz. He says that because the globalists in America see the First Amendment as the major obstacle to the creation of a system for centralized control of speech, it takes an export/import approach. More to the point, the elites use Europe as a “backdoor” to regulate and restrict speech in America.
🇺🇸 MIKE BENZ: THE EU IS THE BACKDOOR FOR U.S. CENSORSHIP OPERATIVES
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 14, 2025
Benz read a quote that pulled the curtain back on post-Twitter censorship.
In 2023, after Elon gutted the old “trust and safety” teams, a former Twitter executive admitted that “if it weren’t for Europe,”… https://t.co/PuygV1UZbY pic.twitter.com/dKHwz1zunu
What this all adds up to is that the left is committed to censorship for the long term and is looking past the current Trump term. It's got its sights set on ramping up a global censorship infrastructure that sees the current Trump years as a speed bump, not a barrier to its vision.
As Shellenberger acutely observes:
All of this is happening in a context of global censorship intensifying. The UK government arrests 30 people per day for "offensive" social media posts, is attempting to censor 4Chan, which has no servers in the UK, and will mandate digital IDs for employment, which may give unprecedented control to politicians and bureaucrats to censor. The Brazilian government has, for years been censoring journalists and policymakers, incarcerating people for legal social media content, and threatening prosecution of journalists, including this author. And several European nations are censoring and arresting their citizens, preventing opposition political candidates from running for office, and preparing to implement digital IDs.
Totally unrelated, but I wonder if that new library monstrosity in Chicago that Obama is building for himself will have some nice private meeting rooms.
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