CTIL Files Reveal Much More Than Censorship

Offensive Intel Operations on the American Public

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testify in Congress in March 2023 (C-SPAN)

After the Twitter Files, and the Facebook Files, new bombshell censorship revelations have arrived called the CTIL files. The most shocking info just revealed in these documents proves that US-based “anti-disinformation” operations went on the offense using sock puppet accounts, fake personas and spy tactics. Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) operations used the same tactics as the “bad guys” but allegedly for “good reasons.” They also brag about doing some “really interesting false flag operations,” including blaming ISIS bombings on the Kurds in Turkey. 

These files explain the ways that the US and UK governments came up with comprehensive strategies to control online speech, including circumventing First Amendment protections of free speech in the United States. They also describe “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,” which is a concept known as shadow banning or even total bans of social media accounts or censorship of specific points of view.

Yet this operation isn’t just censorship or preventing speech, but something far worse. It is deliberate offensive operations using deep deception to distort reality and achieve desired goals where the ends justify the means, all while evading First Amendment protections. The journalists who broke this story, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag, and Matt Taibbi, say that these revelations could help explain the birth of the entire “anti-disinformation” sector.

Shellenberger and Taibbi testified before Congress last week giving in-depth testimony on what they uncovered in a trove of documents provided by an as-of-yet unidentified whistleblower. No one has disputed the validity of these claims or the documents.

The CTIL Files reveal how a former British intelligence analyst named Sara-Jayne Terp helped lead this mission, after having been in the Obama White House in 2017 where she “received instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a ‘repeat of 2016,’” as reported by Shellenberger and Gutentag. Terp then met a former US Navy Commander named Pablo Breuer who determined that “misinformation” could apparently be treated as a cybersecurity problem, thus avoiding the First Amendment.

Terp therefore proposed creating “Misinfosec communities” that collaborated with governments to create censorship, influence, and anti-disinformation strategies. As Shellenberger and Gutentag describe, “The Misinfosec report focused on information that “changes beliefs” through “narratives,” and recommended a way to counter misinformation by attacking specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinfo “incident” before it becomes a full-blown narrative.”

These techniques were adopted by the United States and the European Union just in time to be weaponized during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were used to help push public sentiment towards supporting draconian lockdowns and then vaccine mandates, while targeting and silencing so-called anti-vaxxers, which really meant anyone asking reasonable questions about the rushed COVID jabs.

These strategies are no longer new information since 2020, but were when they were proposed, and included targeting, black listing, censoring, and discrediting individuals and online accounts who questioned government pandemic narratives. Yet their recommendations even went as far as encouraging banks to cut off financial services to individuals who organize undesirable rallies or events, as seen in Canada after Trucker Protests in 2022.

Needless to say, most of this “misinformation” was actually truth that the governments did not want to acknowledge. Terp herself said in a 2019 podcast that “most information is actually true … but set in the wrong context.” The CTIL Files leave no doubt that the government managed to collaborate with Big Tech companies to control the COVID narrative and silence truth tellers.

Such censorship is now crucial to Missouri v Biden et al, which includes Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and numerous other epidemiologists and voices who were targeted and often “canceled” thanks to this censorship. While the mainstream media is largely ignoring this story and other similar ones, the public should be aware of the lengths government officials have gone to suppress free speech and true information from reaching the American public.