CV NEWS FEED // According to a new House report, multiple government agencies worked together to unfairly censor conservatives during the 2020 election cycle under the guise of fighting “disinformation.”
The over-100-page-long Interim Staff Report was compiled by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Both the committee and subcommittee are chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH.
The Monday report is titled “The Weaponization of Disinformation Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered With Universities to Censor Americans’ Political Speech.” It cited multiple emails, documents, and other forms of communications accessed by the committee and subcommittee.
“BOMBSHELL REPORT ON THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX,” Jordan wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) Monday evening:
HUNDREDS of secret reports show how [the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)], [the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)], [the Global Engagement Center (GEC)], [Stanford University], and others worked together to censor AMERICANS before the 2020 election.
According to Jordan, the censored material included “true information, jokes, and opinions.”
“The federal government, disinformation ‘experts’ at universities, Big Tech, and others worked together through the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor & censor Americans’ speech,” the House Judiciary chairman added.
CISA is an agency of DHS and GEC is part of the State Department.
“This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefitted one side of the political aisle,” the report stated:
True information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as “misinformation” while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors.
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.
As FOX News’ Kyle Morris outlined, the report went on to discuss how a group known as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) worked with CISA to “alert, suppress and remove certain online speech in coordination with big tech companies.”
According to its website, the EIP
was founded in 2020 as a non-partisan coalition to empower the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.
In an email sent just over two months before the 2020 election, the director of a digital research lab working closely with the EIP wrote: “I know the Council has a number of efforts on broad policy around the elections, but we just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo.”
Jordan explained how the allegedly coordinated effort worked.
“EIP ‘stakeholders’ (including the federal gov’t) would submit misinformation reports,” he wrote in his series of X posts. Then, the “EIP would ‘analyze’ the report and find similar content across platforms.” Finally, it would “submit the report to Big Tech, often with a recommendation on how to censor.”
Jordan stated that his committee and subcommittee were able to access this “nonpublic” information from Stanford “only after the threat of contempt.”
Jordan highlighted several of the social media posts that the EIP targeted.
All of the posts cited by Jordan were made by prominent Republicans, including then-sitting President Donald Trump.
One was a humorous post by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee less than two weeks before the election. In it, Huckabee joked that he voted using mail-in ballots marked with the names of deceased family members.
Another one of the censored posts simply consisted of Sen. Thom Tillis, R-NC, celebrating his 2020 re-election win and thanking voters for their support. The November 4 post was likely flagged by the EIP due to the fact that the senator’s Democratic opponent did not concede for nearly another week – despite the fact that Tillis was well ahead at the time and ended up winning the election by nearly 100,000 votes.
“The Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s investigation remains ongoing,” the report stated:
CISA still has not adequately complied with a subpoena for relevant documents, and more fact-finding is necessary. In order to better inform the Committee’s legislative efforts, the Committee and Select Subcommittee will continue to investigate how the Executive Branch worked with social media platforms and other intermediaries to censor disfavored viewpoints in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
