America First Legal (AFL), a public interest law firm, has obtained documents through a lawsuit which reveal a government agency’s recommendations for censorship.
The documents, created by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), encourage national governments and private entities to combat disinformation. Its recommendations are vaguely expressed — “regulate ad networks”, for example — but the report spells out various censorship methods in positive terms without explicitly endorsing them. These include disrupting the finances of disfavoured information sources by getting advertisers to pull funding, and shaping the way the public interprets the news through “media literacy” programmes in schools.
