Some of the most pervasive and Orwellian left-wing censorship organizations are embedding themselves in public schools and deciding what sources and viewpoints students are permitted to be exposed to, according to a recent report from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO). Under the guise of promoting “digital citizenship” or “media literacy,” brazenly partisan organizations, such as NewsGuard, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, are implementing school curricula in over a dozen states.
Media literacy is described by Media Literacy Now, a grassroots organization lobbying state legislatures to mandate media literacy education in schools, as “know[ing] how to consume and evaluate information, ask critical questions, avoid manipulation, and engage in digital spaces safely.” However, according to the FFO, these “media literacy” programs appear to “instruct students to distrust any source or narrative that isn’t establishment-approved.”
“One media literacy curriculum promoted by the California Department of Education advises students to rely on ‘fact checkers’ with a history of partisan bias in one lesson,” reports the FFO, “and in another nudges students to discount critiques of progressive arguments on climate change by questioning the argument’s source. One teacher in Rhode Island voiced concerns that a DHS-funded ‘media literacy’ training program for K-12 teachers was ‘hyper focused’ on Donald Trump.”
Here’s a summary from the FFO of three of the supposedly “nonpartisan” organizations imposing “media literacy” programs on America’s youths:
- The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a highly controversial, partisan organization with a long history of political scandals, false accusations, and demands for social media platforms to censor political speech, has a “digital literacy” curriculum for K12 schools that is recommended as a media literacy resource for use in schools by California’s Department of Education.
- NewsGuard, a private company which sells blacklists of disfavored news websites to the advertising industry in order to financially throttle them, also advertises its blacklists as a media literacy resource for use in schools, universities, and public libraries. NewsGuard claims its blacklists are in use in 800 public libraries in the U.S. and Europe. It has a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which promised to roll out NewsGuard’s media literacy tools to “tens of millions of students.”
- The Institute for Strategic Dialogue: a global nonprofit at the forefront of efforts to censor “hate” and “disinformation,” ISD conflates populism – a political movement whose leading figures include Donald Trump – with extremism. ISD has described skepticism of climate change and COVID policies as “misinformation” that ought to be censored. In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, independent journalist and bestselling author Michael Shellenberger claims the organization directly targeted him for censorship. The nonprofit now wants to teach media literacy to schoolchildren through its Be Internet Citizens Initiative, which is – like the SPLC’s curriculum – recommended as a media literacy teaching resource by California’s department of education.
The authoritarian left wants to control the minds of all Americans but especially impressionable children. By conditioning children to only trust left-wing sources and narratives, Democrats will ensure their political power while simultaneously destroying free thinking and intellectual diversity in the United States for decades to come.
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