On the release of Racket’s “Top 50” census of “anti-disinformation” organizations, why the general public will have to keep fighting to keep track of the exploding censorship bureaucracy

First of all, after months of work by a team of ten, Racket has released a huge taxonomic survey of the “Top 50 Organizations to Know in the Censorship-Industrial Complex.” This is the result of both traditional research and journalism, and a painstaking effort at following leads in the #TwitterFiles. If you’re interested in talking with me and with some of the list’s authors, Racket is hosting a Callin discussion today at 3:00 p.m. EST. To attend, you just have to download the app, and follow the link here.

About this project, a few additional notes:

A million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I briefly worked for First Look Media, I had a strange conversation with the firm’s owner, eBay founder and billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Pierre at the time — this was 2014 — was being hyped in progressive-leaning outlets like New York magazine as a progressive savior, the leader of an “insurgency,” presumably against a corrupt, militaristic political establishment. He’d pledged to spend a whopping $250 million on new press ventures and through such gifts would re-orient the information landscape, putting people like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in charge of a true alternative to outlets like CNN, FOX, and MSNBC, which were still choking on the WMD fiasco that sent America to war in error.

Omidyar’s Greenwald-Poitras project, which would be called The Intercept, was supposed to pound the powers that be with hardcore investigative reporting, using the leaked documents of Edward Snowden as leads. My sideshow contribution was to be more modest. I was hired to run a satire site, based on the old Spy magazine, whose ostensible purpose would be to train audiences to take a more sarcastic/skeptical view of media, making episodes like the WMD mess less likely.

Pierre and his eBay staffers periodically arrived at the Intercept’s editorial offices armed with bundles of Moneyball-type questions about the news business, which were received much as one might expect a baseball operations office to respond to new theories of lineup construction, sent in by the insurance or pharmaceutical company that just bought the Mets or Red Sox.

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