There’s a group of people who control what you are allowed to see — the news you read, the videos you watch, the posts you engage with.

You haven’t heard of them. You don’t know their names, but they determine, through methods both direct and indirect, whether you are allowed to be exposed to particular messages. Their decisions can bankrupt companies, silence voices and fundamentally shift cultural norms. Who are these people and how do they do this?

Well, at the top level you have a network of global elites who have created a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce “approved” narratives and punish disapproved ones. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, except it isn’t a secret and we’re not guessing.

First, you have the World Economic Forum, the WEF, and their platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. Second, you have the World Federation of Advertisers, the WFA, who represent mega-corporations that control 90% of global advertising dollars. WFA members are a who’s who of global business and include some of our recent wokeified favorites like Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev, Hershey, Procter & Gamble, Lego and Disney.

There is barely a billionaire Fortune 500 CEO, heavyweight philanthropist, government or woke nonprofit that isn’t associated with the WEF or the WFA.

In 2019, the WFA established the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM. Within months, the WEF adopted GARM as part of its platform for shaping the future of media, entertainment and culture. GARM is a cross-industry alliance that brings these mega-corporations — the advertisers — together with Big Tech companies like Meta, who owns Facebook and Instagram; Google-owned YouTube; the CCP’s TikTok; and even Snapchat and Pinterest.

This unholy alliance created something they call the Brand Safety Floor & Suitability Framework. Think of Brand Safety as a dog whistle for censorship. They say it themselves: The Brand Safety Floor means, “Content not appropriate for any advertising support.” In other words, if you publish content that violates these guidelines, you will be blacklisted from 90% of the advertising revenue in the marketplace.

So, what have these global elites decided to put in their censorship framework? They started with things we can all universally agree on, like preventing the distribution of child pornography or the advocacy of graphic terrorist activity. But they don’t draw the line at what is objectively criminal, abusive or dangerous. They continue expanding the guidelines to include far more subjective parameters.

For example, the framework lists subjective terms like “hate speech” as a problem. It says that anything surrounding transgenderism that they decide is dehumanizing or discussing what they deem to be a debated social issue in an insensitive way is off limits.

The framework is deliberately vague, allowing those in control to pick and choose how they enforce it and against whom.

So, how exactly do the approved narratives set by these global entities get enforced all the way down to the daily content you consume?

Well, here’s how. We’ll start with NewsGuard. NewsGuard is an organization that formulates ratings for American media. They rank news sites on a 0-to-100 scale based on nine supposedly apolitical criteria. These criteria are anything but apolitical. They often align with left-wing positions.

During the height of COVID-19, NewsGuard falsely labeled and downgraded 21 news sites, only well after the fact admitting that they either “mischaracterized the site’s claims” about the lab leak theory — referring to the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory” — or “wrongly grouped together unproven claims” about the lab leak with the “separate, false claim” that the “COVID-19 virus was man-made” without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated and the other was false.

“NewsGuard apologizes for these errors,” they said. “We have made the appropriate correction on each of the 21 labels.”

And when you compare their ratings of Left-leaning news organizations to Right-leaning news organizations, you see the same bias appear.

The Media Research Center, a free-speech nonprofit, studied NewsGuards’ ratings. The study found glaring examples of bias by NewsGuard.

The Left’s BuzzFeed managed a 100 out of 100 perfect score, despite its reporting on the Steele dossier and alleging collusion between former President Donald Trump and Russia.

The study found that The Global Times, a Chinese propaganda government outlet, scored a 39.5 — that is 27 points higher than the U.S.-based conservative outlet The Federalist. Despite a scandal at USA Today revealing the publication of multiple fabricated sources in their stories and their own fact-checking operation misleading readers on the history of the Democratic Party and the KKK, USA Today maintained the 100 out of 100 rating by NewsGuard.

NewsGuard is also working with others to use AI technology to enforce Brand Safety standards at scale, by identifying scalable hoaxes and misinformation in order to streamline blanket removal. This means that the news that you read, news that is supposed to be fair and objective or at least diverse, must adhere to GARM, the WEF, the WFA and their subjective and biased standards in order to be deemed monetizable.

If you think this is only something big news corporations have to contend with, think again. Even the content you consume from independent content creators on social media platforms is subject to these globalist powers that be.

The WEF, GARM and the WFA are all actively working with social media companies to censor what they consider to be misinformation, which very often is just good information with which they disagree.

Finally, the WEF, WFA and GARM are all aggressively pouring billions of dollars a year into news and content that drives their preferred narrative — narratives that are often counterfactual at best and harmful at worst.

When you look at the news, you need to feel as though you’re getting all the information. And even if one source isn’t giving you all the information, you can find another source, and all the sources together will give you a broad view of the world. But the World Economic Forum, World Federation of Advertisers and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media don’t want you to have a full view of the news.

They want you to see what they want you to see. And they will work to prevent anyone from disseminating information they don’t pre-approve. They are determining what you see, what you hear, what you watch. And that’s dangerous.

        Ben Shapiro, 39, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.” To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Note (Ed Morrissey): This relates to what I wrote yesterday about attempts to suppress debate on key issues.