United States federal government agencies co-ordinated with so-called “disinformation” experts at Stanford University to actively monitor and censor the speech of conservative writers and commentators in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, according to an interim staff report from the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, published on Monday evening.
The report reveals the federal government “effectively outsourced” mass online censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), led by academics at the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which pressured social media companies into labeling truthful information, political opinions, and even jokes as “misinformation.”
The EIP, established in the summer of 2020 at the request of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), operated in tandem with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity within the State Department, to allow the federal government to censor information while bypassing public scrutiny and the First Amendment.
Federal agencies and organizations funded by the U.S. government submitted “misinformation reports” directly to the EIP, who would then contact major social media platforms, such as Twitter (now known as ‘X’), YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook, with recommendations as to how posts should be dealt with. This included reducing the information’s “discoverability,” temporarily suspending accounts, monitoring particular accounts, as well as removing posts.
The taxpayer-funded federal agencies were quick to justify their actions, arguing they have a responsibility to combat potential interference in American elections by hostile foreign actors.
However, the EIP disproportionately targeted conservatives. Vast quantities of truthful information posted by those on the right was marked as disinformation while “false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.” Those actively censored included Jack Posobiec, Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and even former President Donald Trump, among a large number of others.
“The pseudoscience of disinformation is now — and has always been — nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives,” the report argues. Yet, the unjust surveillance of conservatives by the federal government or agencies thereof is not merely limited to 2020 as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has begun weaponizing its resources to target supporters of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the run-up to November 2024.
