The full-length film, titled The Censorship Files, will bring viewers inside the investigation and the related censorship case that will be heard by the Supreme Court next year. Last year, a team of journalists, including Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, were granted exclusive access to the internal systems of X, formerly Twitter, and were able to probe files to determine the extent to which government actors pressured Big Tech executives to take action against users and content the government disfavored. That effort was called the “Twitter Files,” which told a story of a large-scale effort by federal officials to impede the First Amendment rights of Americans. In promoting the film, Shellenberger said:Investigative reporter Michael Shellenberger has announced a new documentary based on his bombshell exposé showing how the U.S. government illegally pressured social media companies to censor Americans.
“The Censorship Files” will be a landmark film in educating younger Americans, who are more censorial than their elders, about America’s remarkable history of strong free speech protections. They will learn about the Civil Rights movement, the right of the New York Times to publish “the Pentagon Papers,” and the right even of pro-Nazi and pro-terrorism activists to march freely through America’s streets. “The Censorship Files” will reveal the origins and scope of the Censorship Industrial Complex, its leaders and architects, and its victims of censorship, from moms sharing stories about the Covid vaccine’s side effects on their children to two of the world’s foremost experts on the Covid response, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya. Finally, we will use “The Censorship Files” to build a new free speech movement in America, city by city, campus by campus, from the grassroots up. Because if we can’t persuade America’s youth to support free speech, then the First Amendment is just some words on a piece of paper. Shellenberger is asking for 30 percent of his free subscribers to his Substack account, where he regularly writes, to become paid subscribers at a cost of $9 per month to help fund the film.
