EXCLUSIVE: Obama-Linked Stanford Center Held Secret Meeting With Foreign Governments To Plot Global Internet Censorship

By Michael Shellenberger · Public ·Oct 28, 2025 · 1 min read

Deep Dives

Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:

Section 230 13 min read
Central to understanding US internet regulation debates - this law shields platforms from liability for user content and is the legal framework that censorship proposals like PATA aim to modify or circumvent
Stanford Internet Observatory 1 min read
Directly mentioned as pioneering the 'censorship-by-proxy' strategy discussed in the article - readers would benefit from understanding its founding, stated mission, and controversial role in content moderation debates
Five Eyes 13 min read
The article mentions coordination with foreign governments including Australia's censor - Five Eyes is the intelligence alliance through which US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand share information, providing context for international coordination on internet policy

In the spring of 2022, former President Barack Obama gave a major policy address at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, where he laid out a sweeping proposal for government censorship of social media platforms through the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act. Six days later, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced that it had created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to serve as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth with the clear goal of controlling the information Americans could access online.

At the heart of Obama’s vision for Internet censorship was legislation that would have authorized the US government’s National Science Foundation to authorize and fund supposedly independent NGOs to censor the Internet. The DHS and Stanford Internet Observatory, which was part of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, pioneered this censorship-by-proxy strategy as a way to get around the First Amendment in 2020 with posts raising concerns about the 2020 elections and in 2021 with “narratives” expressing concern about the Covid vaccine.

Australia’s top censor, Julie Inman-Grant (left); former President Barack Obama (center); Michael McFaul, former Russia ambassador under Obama, who oversees Stanford Cyber Policy Center (right)

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