Jacob Siegel has written a massively researched, thoroughly reported, and well-thought-out essay on the rise of the Disinformation Industrial Complex. By this he means the industrial-scale censorship that is done by a matrix of intelligence agencies and Department of Defense programs, working with legacy media institutions, non-governmental organizations, and billionaire philanthropists. He views its establishment as a crime, and an effective repeal of the First Amendment:
The crime is the information war itself, which was launched under false pretenses and by its nature destroys the essential boundaries between the public and private and between the foreign and domestic, on which peace and democracy depend. By conflating the anti-establishment politics of domestic populists with acts of war by foreign enemies, it justified turning weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets for mass psychological operations. The crime is the routine violation of Americans’ rights by unelected officials who secretly control what individuals can think and say.
The astonishing and frightening conclusion is that so far this information warfare on the American public has been conducted by people — many of them bumblers (Nina Jankowicz) or zealots (John Brennan) — who could be easily identified, tracked, exposed, and criticized. But the task is now being increasingly offloaded to algorithms and artificial intelligence.
An early contender for essay of the year, in my humble opinion.