Half a century ago, Peter Jensen launched Project Censored, in part as a response to how the Watergate break-in was covered. Richard Nixon didn’t censor the initial reporting, but he didn’t have to. The press simply didn’t cover it with any serious scrutiny until well after Nixon was elected. The story didn’t reach the American people when it mattered most, before they went to the polls in November 1972.
Reflecting this, Jensen saw censorship as working differently in a democracy than in a dictatorship. He defined it as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method – including bias, omission, under-reporting, or self-censorship – that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.”
That happened with Watergate, though the truth belatedly came out. And an echo of the same sort of thing happened just as I was writing this half a century later. Six members of Congress who had served in the military or the CIA released a video accurately informing those serving, as they had, that they have the right – and in some cases the duty – to refuse unlawful or unconstitutional orders. President Donald Trump responded on social media by falsely claiming their video message was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” but the New York Times relegated the story to page 16, with a headline that didn’t mention Trump’s call for their execution.
This was only a faint echo of what happened with Watergate, especially given the Times’ diminished gate-keeping role. But those echoes are everywhere around us, every day. That same dynamic of suppression of information by under-reporting and self-censorship is constantly at play, with the same consequence of preventing the public from fully knowing what’s happening in society – particularly in time to do something about it.
Project Censored has been bringing these omissions to light, and while each story highlights a particular omission, they are often complex and interrelated to each other. There’s a perfect example in this year’s top censored story: “ICE solicits social media surveillance contracts.” Government spying on, suppressing and even criminalizing its critics goes back at least to World War I as a systematic endeavor, but new elements have intertwined with it over time.
It’s also an example of systemic abusive policing, which shows up again in stories seven and eight, targeting the homeless for private profit in the first story, and killing four people a day in the second one, mostly in response to 911 calls, the majority of which involved a non-violent offense, or no offense at all. Racial targeting is also involved in this story (with Black people and Native Americans far more likely to be killed), as well as in stories number three and four, regarding systemic exploitation of Native Americans and targeting of pro-Palestinian activists, respectively.
Stories four through six involve tech surveillance in different ways, not just targeting activists but also systematically blocking data privacy protections for everyone, and using surveillance technology to harm workers and disrupt unionization at Amazon and Walmart, the largest private employers in America.
In turn, the class exploitation and oppression involved in this last example appears in two others as well, No. seven, about private companies reaping over $100 million to sweep homeless camps in California (doing nothing to solve the problem), and No. 10 about the extreme under-representation of working-class Americans in state legislatures – a censored story about censored voices that fittingly rounds out the list.
This is the deeper point of Project Censored’s list: That it’s not just about this or that suppressed and under-reported story, it’s about a whole different way of seeing the world if that systemic censoring were stripped away.
1. ICE solicits social media surveillance contracts
In February 2025, Techdirt’s Tim Cushing reported on Sam Biddle’s Intercept investigation into a new ICE bid solicitation seeking private contractors to “monitor and locate ‘negative’ social media discussion” about the agency. The request, also covered by the Independent, appeared as the agency prepared for a more aggressive role under the returning Trump administration. ICE’s plan, Biddle wrote, could pull “people who simply criticize ICE online” into its surveillance dragnet.
Biddle noted the solicitation was “nearly identical” to a 2020 request that resulted in a $5.5 million contract with Barbaricum, a Washington-based defense and intelligence firm. But the new version, arriving amid ramped-up enforcement rhetoric, signaled a broader threat. Cushing observed that ICE justified the program by citing increased risks, yet provided no evidence.
The scope of potential targets is massive. Social media criticisms of ICE number in the millions, but contractors would be required to assess users’ “proclivity for violence” using “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles.” After scraping personal details – Social Security numbers, addresses, affiliations – contractors would deliver ICE dossiers containing photos, partial legal names, birth dates, education or work ties and identified family members. The request also sought facial recognition tools capable of scanning the internet for additional information tied to a subject.
Although framed as a safety measure for ICE employees, Cushing wrote that the document “makes it clear ICE is looking for tech that allows it to monitor people simply because they don’t like ICE.” The First Amendment implications, he added, are unmistakable: the government should not monitor social media users to quantify criticism, especially when it conflates negativity with threats.
While Forbes and the New York Times have addressed ICE’s tech investments targeting immigrants, no corporate outlet has covered this planned monitoring of ICE critics.
2. Water scarcity threatens 27 million U.S. residents
Nearly 30 million people in the U.S. live in areas with limited water supplies, Carey Gillam reported for The New Lede in January 2025. The finding comes from a first-of-its-kind U.S. Geological Survey study assessing national water availability from 2010 to 2020, including quality concerns. With climate change worsening droughts, floods and contamination, the crisis is expected to deepen. Project Censored also highlighted two ongoing threats: saltwater intrusion and PFAS “forever chemicals,” linked to cancers, liver disease and birth defects.
USGS Director David Applegate warned of “increasing challenges to this vital resource,” noting that socially vulnerable communities face the greatest risks. Gillam reported widespread pollution in waterways across the Midwest and High Plains tied largely to industrial agriculture runoff. USGS found “substantial areas” of major aquifers – supplying one-third of public drinking water – contaminated with arsenic, radionuclides, manganese and nitrates. Low-income, minority and rural, well-dependent communities face disproportionate exposure.
Globally, the situation mirrors U.S. trends. A joint U.S./UN assessment, Drought Hotspots Around the World 2023–2025, described current conditions as “a slow-moving global catastrophe,” with 48 U.S. states experiencing drought in 2024 – the highest number on record. Meanwhile, The Guardian reported that the Trump administration ordered the closure of 25 federal water-monitoring centers, undermining the nation’s ability to track shortages.
Although major outlets like the New York Times and The Washington Post cover droughts, Project Censored noted they typically frame the issue as an economic threat to agriculture, not a direct danger to human life. As of July 2025, Newsweek was the only U.S. corporate outlet to report on the USGS water-availability study.
3. Indigenous communities underfunded and exploited
A series of 2024–25 investigations by ProPublica, High Country News and Grist revealed how federal and state governments continue to underfund and exploit Indigenous communities. Matt Krupnick (ProPublica) documented the chronic underfunding of tribal colleges, institutions created in the 1970s to serve Native students harmed by generations of violence, dispossession and cultural erasure. Although Congress set funding at $8,000 per tribal student in 1978, adjusted annually for inflation, the government has never met its obligation. Since 2010, per-student funding ranged from $5,235 to just under $8,700 – far below the roughly $40,000 it would be if federal commitments had been honored – totaling a $250 million shortfall. Under the Trump administration, conditions worsened as at least $7 million in USDA grants for tribal colleges were suspended.
Meanwhile, a joint High Country News/Grist investigation showed how states profit from “trust lands” located inside reservations. These lands, often seized during the 1887 Dawes Act Allotment Era, generate millions through grazing, logging, mining, and oil and gas production – funding state universities, prisons, hospitals and schools. Earlier reporting traced this system to the 1862 Morrill Act, which granted nearly 11 million acres taken from nearly 250 tribes to states to build land-grant universities.
The new investigation mapped 1.6 million acres of state-managed trust lands within 83 reservations across 10 states, revealing how state control undermines tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction. In some cases, tribes must lease back what was once their own land, paying the state for agricultural or grazing use. One notable exception is the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana, who secured the return of nearly 30,000 acres through a 2020 water-rights settlement.
Corporate media coverage of these injustices remained minimal, limited mostly to stories about Trump-era layoffs that failed to address the deeper, long-term history of governmental neglect.
4. Meta undertakes “sweeping crackdown” of posts at Israel’s request
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Meta has executed a massive censorship campaign on Facebook and Instagram, removing or suppressing posts critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinians, Drop Site News reported in April 2025. The report called it “the largest mass censorship operation in modern history,” based on internal Meta data provided by whistleblowers and confirmed by multiple sources inside the company.
Meta reportedly complied with 94% of takedown requests from Israel – the single largest originator of content removals worldwide – affecting an estimated 38.8 million posts. While most requests were classified under “terrorism” or “violence and incitement,” the complaints all used identical language regardless of the content, linking to an average of 15 posts each without describing the posts themselves.
The campaign disproportionately targets users from Arab and Muslim-majority nations but has a global reach, affecting posts in over 60 countries. Drop Site News warned that Meta’s AI moderation tools are being trained on these takedowns, potentially embedding this censorship into future automated content decisions.
Project Censored noted that the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned Meta’s actions, stating, “Meta must stop censoring criticism of the Israeli government under the guise of combating antisemitism, and Meta must stop training artificial intelligence tools to do so.” The report also cited the Committee to Protect Journalists’ findings that Israel controls coverage of its military operations.
Although independent outlets such as ZNetwork and Jewish Voice for Labour republished the Drop Site News report, no major U.S. newspapers or broadcast outlets had covered the story as of July 2025.
5. Big Tech undermines data privacy protections
Big Tech companies are actively attempting to undermine consumer data privacy laws, using tactics reminiscent of Big Tobacco in the 1990s, Project Censored reports. Jake Snow documented this in Tech Policy Press and the ACLU of Northern California in October 2024.
Snow outlined a three-step strategy. Step one: “Respond to a PR crisis with a flood of deceptive bills.” Just as tobacco promoted “smoking sections” to weaken bans, Big Tech floods Congress with industry-backed laws that replace meaningful privacy protections with weak alternatives. Snow cites a 2021 Virginia law drafted by an Amazon lobbyist as “just what Big Tech wants.”
Step two: Complain about the “patchwork” of state laws, portraying diverse regulations as chaotic or unworkable. Tobacco did this in the 1990s; today, tech lobbyists repeat it, even creating websites like United for Privacy: Ending the Privacy Patchwork.
Step three: Use federal preemption to erase state laws and block stronger local legislation. While federal law could set a floor – like the federal minimum wage – Big Tech pushes it as a ceiling, limiting grassroots influence. Snow notes that states and cities historically drive real change. Once state legislatures are sealed off, communities with limited access to Congress lose power.
These tactics are not hypothetical. The House version of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” included a provision shielding tech companies from state lawsuits for a decade over negligence, privacy violations or AI misuse. Though removed by the Senate, similar efforts are expected.
Project Censored noted that while outlets like the New York Times and Time have reported aspects of Big Tech lobbying, no corporate coverage has fully captured the scale, coordination or historical parallels Snow identified – leaving much of the strategy’s impact unexamined.
6. Using surveillance technology against employees
Walmart and Amazon are the two largest retailers in America, with a combined workforce of over 2.7 million workers (not counting Amazon drivers). Their lives have been made more miserable by the use of surveillance technology, as documented in an April 2024 report from Oxfam America, At Work and Under Watch. The report finds that “regimes of measurement, surveillance, discipline and data collection deployed by both companies unduly punish workers, stifle worker voice and have negative impacts on worker health, safety and well-being,” as Alex Press reported for Jacobin.
“In 2018, Walmart patented surveillance technology designed for management to eavesdrop on workers, track customer interactions and oversee all employee movements,” Project Censored noted. “Amazon uses similar tracking methods, including a rating system that scores worker productivity, providing real-time feedback on individual workers’ speed and efficiency.”
Oxfam’s report drew on quantitative data from worker surveys at both companies, as well as qualitative research interviews.
“One might argue that unionizing could help workers resist surveillance,” Project Censored noted, but Amazon defeated a unionization effort in North Carolina in February 2025. However, “union organizers believe the vote was the result of Amazon’s nonstop intimidation of its employees,” and an academic study of an earlier organizing effort in Bessemer, Alabama, backs them up, as reported by The American Prospect in March 2025.
“The company manipulated workplace devices to send workers anti-union messages and to ask questions that employees say were intended to assess their support for the union,” Project Censored summarized. “Amazon also monitored the social media activity of its employees – including Facebook groups, many of which were private, and subreddits – to investigate posts that contained complaints from warehouse workers or plans for strikes and protests.”
“Amazon is not just tweaking pre-existing AI systems to make unionization harder to achieve for workers, but actually converting and weaponizing sprawling systems into new tools for quashing dissent,” the Prospect concluded.
Aside from some coverage of these issues by independent and specialist news outlets, Project Censored noted, “there has been zero corporate media coverage of Amazon and Walmart’s surveillance and mistreatment of warehouse employees or of Oxfam’s report.”
7. Private companies paid $100 million to sweep homeless camps
Criminalizing homelessness doesn’t solve the problem, but it does make some folks a lot of money.
“In total, private firms have been paid at least $100 million to clear homeless camps (in California), an investigation by the Guardian and Type Investigations has found,” Brian Barth wrote for the Guardian on April 16, 2024. But that was a serious undercount, he hastened to add. “The 14 municipalities and public agencies from which spending details could be obtained represent a small slice of such spending in the state.”
Still, the wastefulness was still obvious. “It can cost millions to clear a single camp. Marinship, a Bay Area construction company, received $3.4 million to dismantle an unhoused community with about 200 residents,” Barth wrote. In Silicon Valley, Santa Clara signed a three-and-a-half-year, $1 million contract “despite having documented only 264 unsheltered residents at the time.”
And it costs cities even more. “The police presence at one sweep in Los Angeles cost an estimated $2 million,” he noted.
As for what good it does, the answer is it doesn’t reduce homelessness, but it does cause serious harm. “A 2024 RAND study found that policy change – such as encampment sweeps and camping bans – in three Los Angeles neighborhoods temporarily reduced visible homelessness, but within months the unsheltered populations rose slightly in two of the communities and doubled in the third,” Robbie Sequeira reported for Stateline in January 2025.
In 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that punishing homeless people for sleeping outside doesn’t count as cruel or unusual punishment, which allowed police sweeps to confiscate any property belonging to people sleeping on the streets. Since then, “roughly 150 cities in 32 states have passed or strengthened such ordinances,” Sequeira reported, with another 40 in the works at the time.
Homelessness is a worsening problem in Europe as well, the Guardian reported in September 2024, but Denmark and Finland are reducing it with a housing first policy, which shifts focus away from managing homelessness in the shelter system to solving it by providing housing. Finland started first, and has only a quarter of the number of homeless families it had in the early 2000s, and less than half the number of homeless individuals, with only a small fraction of those “unsheltered,” or sleeping on the streets. So there are policies that work – they’re just not considered or reported on here. Instead, we have a massive new punitive industry dedicated to destroying lives already in peril.
“While the national corporate media have not shied away from covering the nationwide displacement of homeless people, there has been virtually no coverage of companies profiteering from the homeless crisis in California or other states since Brian Barth’s investigation,” Project Censored noted.
8. Often deadly abuses of police authority
U.S. police killed an average of nearly four people each day in 2024, disproportionately Black and Indigenous. Police killed more people in 2024 than in any year since 2013, when data collection began, and nearly two thirds were in response to 911 calls, the majority of which involved a non-violent offense, or no offense at all. These were some of the topline results of analysis by Mapping Police Violence reported by Sharon Zhang in a February 2025 Truthout article.
“Police killed at least 1,365 people in 2024,” and “Black people in the U.S. were 2.9 times more likely than white people to be killed by police,” Zhang wrote. They “were more likely than white people to be killed when unarmed or not posing a threat. The disproportion was even greater for American Indians and Alaska Natives (3.1 times) and for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (7.6 times) compared to white people.” An earlier report covering 1,260 instances found that officers were only charged with crimes in nine cases.
Zhang noted that these figures line up with reporting from the Washington Post that 2024 was the deadliest year on record for police violence, with 10,429 people killed by police in the last decade. However, the Post was discontinuing its tracking. “The change comes as the publication’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, has exerted an increasingly right-wing influence on the paper,” Zhang observed. This came at the same time that Trump shut down a federal database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement officers, which had only been in existence since December 2023.
“Mapping Police Violence was created by Samuel Sinyangwe, who is also the founder of Campaign Zero, an organization that advocates for a society not reliant on policing,” Project Censored noted. Its findings have been neglected by the establishment press, with two exceptions: one USA Today story in February 2025, using its data “for a report on demographic and geographic patterns in police killings in the United States,” and a May 2025 New York Times story reporting that “police killings keep rising, not falling,” since the murder of George Floyd in 2020, touching off the Black Lives Matter protests, the largest civil rights protests in US history.
9. Antarctic ice sheets approaching tipping point
Rising ocean temperature could lead to a tipping point in the melting of Antarctic ice sheets, potentially triggering “runaway melting,” according to a June 2024 article published in the journal Nature Geoscience, and supported by two other recent studies.
Robert Hunzikera in CounterPunch and Matthew Rozsa in Salon each reported on this research. “Scientists have debated whether a ‘tipping point’ exists for this ice sheet, or a moment when the effects of this melting would be suddenly both irreversible and catastrophic,” according to Rozsa. “A new study raises the bet on sea level rise, maybe by a lot,” Hunzikera summed up.
As Rozsa explained in Salon, “When warm water moves under a grounding line, the ice melts at an accelerated pace and could pass a threshold where the body’s ultimate collapse is inevitable. While this process occurs, sea levels will rise at a much faster rate than currently predicted, resulting in millions of people from coastal communities being displaced over the upcoming decades and centuries.”
Rozsa also cited a May 2024 study in the journal PNAS, which predicted that “Antarctica’s so-called ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is nearing collapse, as revealed by high-resolution satellite radar data that shows Thwaites [Glacier] is being flooded with warm sea water,” he explained. It’s “known as the ‘Doomsday Glacier’ because it could greatly contribute to sea level rise if it collapses,” he wrote in an earlier story. “And new evidence suggests that’s exactly what’s happening.”
“To date, U.S. corporate media have not covered these recent findings, especially Bradley and Hewitt’s model of grounding-zone melting of ice sheets,” Project Censored reported. “Independent outlets, including Salon and CounterPunch, have provided more substantial coverage of this study. Jessica Corbett of Common Dreams reported in February 2024 on the study that found evidence of rapid ice loss in the past, which CNN, the science news magazine Eos, and the environmental news site Earth.com also covered.”
10. Working class severely underrepresented in state legislatures
People considered “working class” make up half the country’s labor force, but only 1.6% of state lawmakers, according to the 2024 results of a biennial study. That’s 116 of the nearly 7,400 state legislators, down from 1.8% in 2022. This seriously distorts the legislative process, both in terms of issues considered and solutions proposed, as noted in a March 15, 2024, Stateline article by Robbie Sequeira. “The only person that’s going to advocate for working-class people is a working-class person,” said freshman Idaho state Rep. Nate Roberts, a lifelong electrician.
“Government works best when all types of personal experience are at the legislative table,” said Minnesota state Rep. Kaela Berg, a flight attendant who ran for office while living in a friend’s basement. “I knew that I was uniquely able to speak on issues that my other colleagues never experienced.”
The study by political scientists Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen defined “working class” as “those who have currently or last worked in manual labor, the service industry, clerical or labor union jobs,” representing 2% of Democrats and 1% of Republicans. Ten states have “no working-class state lawmakers.”
“Low salaries for working-class jobs are one reason why members of the working class rarely run for office,” Project Censored noted. Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits candidates for down-ballot races, also cited a lack of access to money from family or partners, as well as gatekeepers who typically recruit candidates based on their independent money-raising ability.
Making things worse, only five states allow public financing options for state legislative candidates.
In contrast, Project Censored notes the over-representation of wealth in our politics: the majority of the members of the 116th Congress were millionaires, with the 10 richest having estimated fortunes in excess of $30 million.
There’s a new move to change things, Project Censored noted: the formation of a political action committee called the Working Class Heroes Fund, aimed at organizing working-class voters and funding working-class candidates “across party lines to give the working class a seat at the table.” It was started by Dan Osborn, a pipe-fitter and union leader, who ran a surprisingly strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska as an independent in 2024.
While there’s been no national corporate news coverage of the study on the class background of state legislators, there has been occasional mention in opinion pieces in both the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Paul Rosenberg is the senior editor for Random Length News, a California-based independent newspaper. It was founded in 1979, just four years after Illinois Times got its start, and both publications are longstanding members of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. This article is copyrighted by Random Lengths News, a division of Beacon Light Press, 2025. The book is available at projectcensored.com.
This article appears in January 15-21, 2026.
