After speaking at the National Press Club, I will be testifying today before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on free speech and censorship. My testimony is below.
The hearing, titled “The Censorship Industrial Complex” will be held in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building at 2 p.m.
We now know a great deal about the censorship system developed under the Biden Administration in coordination with academic and corporate units. Indeed, the release of new information since January has proven a windfall for those of us who have been seeking greater transparency for years. There is still much to be done. It is essential for Congress to complete this work and allow for total transparency on the past funding and coordination by the government.
The past efforts to block investigations and withhold information on the censorship system have failed. However, the motivation is telling. While publicly declaring the need to combat misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, the Biden Administration and its allies in the censorship system struggled to withhold information on their actual targets or actions. The reason again is obvious. The public understands the threat to free speech and strongly supports an investigation into the FBI’s role in censoring social media.
Almost 250 years ago, Tom Paine famously wrote that “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” That was the first line of a work published by Thomas Paine in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19, 1776, a work which would become known as “The American Crisis.”
We are living through a new crisis in the fight for free speech. The anti-free speech movement that has swept over Europe has now reached our shores. The United States remains a final line of defense for free speech, a nation founded on free speech as our indispensable right as a free people. This is a crisis of faith as the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” finds every excuse for remaining silent as others are censored or canceled for their views. Congress must step forward to demand both greater transparency and protection for free speech. This new “American crisis” can be our greatest American moment in speaking in one voice – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – in support of the right that defines us as a people.
In the previous installments of this investigation into how the Harris-Walz presidential campaign is dishonestly manipulating online platforms, I noted the existence of a Discord server where campaign employees coordinate with a volunteer army to flood social media sites with campaign propaganda. The volunteers also vote en masse on social media to artificially boost Harris-Walz content or downvote content that is harmful to their campaign. Not only is this deceptive and misleading to voters, it’s a clear violation of these websites’ Terms of Service.
In part one and part two of the investigation, I noted this strategy had been successful at manipulating both Reddit and X. Over the past month, one out of every eight of the top stories in the eight-million-member Politics subreddit was planted by the campaign. On X, the campaign appears to have successfully voted down Community Notes accurately calling out the Harris campaign for tweeting out brazen lies.
But one activity I found on the Discord server was particularly concerning. After years of Democrats erroneously insisting that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election and otherwise warning of foreign election manipulation, the Harris-Walz campaign is actively recruiting foreigners to work on the campaign and is even encouraging them to donate to American political causes.
There appears to be no vetting and given that the Harris-Walz campaign’s Discord community overtly engaged in disinformation campaigns, it was ripe for infiltration and abuse by foreign intelligence and other bad actors attempting to influence the election — although I saw no concrete proof of that.
However, my research found multiple foreign nationals actively volunteering for the Harris-Walz campaign. This activity, while permitted by the FEC, raises questions about whether foreigners should be allowed to volunteer for official U.S. political campaigns. Their comments ranged from showing excitement at how they could volunteer to “save democracy” …
… to Canadians sharing their plans to make road trips to Michigan, where they aim to go door-to-door canvassing …
…and asking how they, as foreigners, could donate money to “help fund the Harris-Walz campaign” using a legal donation loophole …
… which was praised by the server’s moderators, who went on to distribute the link to other channels (chats) in the Discord server.
The server’s moderators embraced the foreigners with open arms. Moderators are powerful users in Discord communities — they have the power to delete messages, ban users, and make announcements that reach the entire server’s user base (35,000 individual people at the time of writing). They were overjoyed to see non-American support, and eager to help foreigners learn how they could make a meaningful impact in the upcoming presidential election.
On Oct. 20, 2024, the campaign pinged the abroad group, desperately urging foreigners to spam call Wisconsin voters. Their goal was to reach 5 million telemarketing calls on Kamala’s birthday.
When one foreign user expressed concern about “meddling in US elections,” a moderator quickly assured him this was perfectly legal, and urged him to phone bank for Kamala.
While the Federal Election Commission does prohibit foreign nationals from making monetary donations and contributions to U.S. campaigns directly, it does explicitly allow foreign nationals to volunteer for campaigns as long as they are uncompensated. Unfortunately, the FEC does not account for donation loopholes, which are currently being propagated throughout the Harris-Walz Discord server.
The Harris-Walz staff are clearly teaching foreigners how to skirt FEC regulations. This may not be illegal, but it is enticing foreign nationals to influence American elections — something that Democrats have spent years warning is a serious threat to democracy.
Whether this directly violates election laws is also beside the point for many Americans, who believe foreign nationals should not be allowed to volunteer for U.S. presidential campaigns. American elections should be for Americans, and the Harris-Walz campaign is actively inviting foreign influences into their campaign.
The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.
Below is my column in the New York Post on the recent interview of Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz defending his record on free speech. The interview with Fox host Shannon Bream only magnified concerns over what I previously described as the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries.
Here is the column:
Roughly five centuries ago, a new dance first reported in Augsburg, Germany was promptly dubbed the “waltz” after the German term for “to roll or revolve.” Today, there is no nimbler performer of that dizzying dance than Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Indeed, “Walzing” has become the Minnesota governor’s signature political two-step after his controversial statements on his allegedly socialist views, eliminating the electoral college and other topics. On Sunday, Walz’s dance partner was Fox News host Shannon Bream, who seemed to be fighting vertigo as the candidate tried to deflect his shocking prior statements on free speech.
Bream asked Walz about his prior declaration that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech”— a statement that runs counter to decades of Supreme Court decisions. Walz notably did not deny or retract his statement. Instead, his interview ironically became itself a flagrant example of misinformation.
First of all, misinformation and hate speech are not exceptions to the First Amendment: Whether it is the cross burnings of infamous figures like KKK leader Clarence Brandenburg or the Nazis who marched in Skokie, Ill., hate speech is protected. Yet both Harris and Walz are true believers in the righteousness of censorship for disinformation, misinformation and malinformation.
The Biden administration defines misinformation as “false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm” — meaning it would subject you to censorship even if you are not intending harm. It defines malinformation as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” So, you can post “true facts,” but would still be subject to censorship if you are viewed as misleading others with your pesky truth-telling.
Furthermore, “book bans” are not equivalent to the Harris-Walz censorship policies. After years of supporting censorship and blacklisting, Democrats are attempting to deflect questions by claiming that the GOP is the greater threat.
“We’re seeing censorship coming in the form of book banning’s in different places,” Walz told Bream. “We’re seeing attempts in schools.”
First, a reality check: The Biden-Harris administration has helped fund and actively support the largest censorship system in our history, a system described by one federal court as “Orwellian.” These are actual and unrelenting efforts to target individuals and groups for opposing views on subjects ranging from gender identity to climate change to COVID to election fraud. While Walz and others rarely specifically reference the book bans in question, Florida is one state whose laws concern age limits on access to graphic or sexual material in schools.
School districts have always been given wide latitude in making such decisions on curriculum or library policies. Indeed, while rarely mentioned by the media, the left has demanded the banning or alteration of a number of classic books, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men,” under diversity or equity rationales.
I have long opposed actual book bans perpetrated by both the left and the right. However, school districts have always made such access and curriculum decisions.
Finally, Walz and others often sell censorship by citing the dangers of child pornography or of threats made against individuals. Walz on Sunday followed Hillary Clinton’s recent pro-censorship campaign as he employed such misdirection.
“The issue on this was the hate speech and the protected hate speech — speech that’s aimed at creating violence, speech that’s aimed at threats to individuals,” he claimed. “That’s what we’re talking about in this.”
First, he’d said there is no protected hate speech. Second, the law already provides ample protections against threats toward individuals. What’s most striking is that, after years of unapologetically embracing censorship (often under the Orwellian term “content moderation”), the left does not seem to want to discuss it in this election.
Democrats in Congress opposed every major effort to investigate the role of the Biden administration in the social-media censorship system it constructed. Many denied any such connection. Elon Musk ended much of that debate with the release of the Twitter Files showing thousands of emails from the administration targeting individuals and groups with opposing views.
Now the public is being asked to vote for the most anti-free speech ticket in centuries — but neither Harris nor Walz want to talk about it in any detail. The result may be the largest bait-and-switch in history. Walz, Clinton and others also falsely claim they are simply trying to stop things like child pornography — which is already covered by existing criminal laws.
But what many on the left want is to regain what Clinton called their loss of “control” over what we are allowed to say or hear on social media.
Make no mistake about it: The “Walzing” of free speech is one dance you would be wise to decline. Otherwise, do not be surprised if, when the music stops, you find yourself without both your partner and your free speech.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Wednesday to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) — which has been called the “nerve center” of government censorship — notifying the agency that documents related to CISA’s partnership with Pennsylvania to target so-called “misinformation” are included in the Judiciary Committee’s ongoing subpoena, according to a copy of the letter obtained exclusively by The Federalist.
Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro recently announced the state’s Election Task Force would partner with CISA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to “mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation, and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information.”
The Pennsylvania State Department revealed to The Federalist that the state would also be partnering with CISA to “open lines of communication and share intelligence among the included government agencies.” The State Department did not clarify what “intelligence” refers to or what will be done with said information.
Jordan demanded the DHS provide more detailed information on the partnership by April 3.
“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced or colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech,” the letter reads. “In light of recent public reporting that the [CISA] has partnered with at least one state government in a way that may target Americans’ speech online in the lead-up to the upcoming 2024 election, we write to notify you that documents about such partnerships are responsive to the Committee’s April 28, 2023 subpoena.”
“The reporting about a partnership between CISA and the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force reinforces concerns that CISA is again partnering with third parties in a way that will censor or chill Americans’ speech,” Jordan wrote.
“The government’s involvement in this type of speech is particularly alarming because, as the Supreme Court has recognized, ‘the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith’ for ‘core political speech,’” the letter continued.
Shapiro said the task force would “combat misinformation” but CISA, the DHS subagency which congressional Republicans have called the “nerve center” of federal censorship, has a history of targeting Americans and their free speech by smearing it as “misinformation” or “malformation.” CISA defines“malinformation” as anything “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
In other words, CISA has censored Americans for stating true information. For example, America First Legal obtained documents showing CISA created a six-point list in October 2020 warning of the risks of unsupervised mail-in voting. Publicly, however, the weaponized agency flagged social media posts highlighting those concerns as “disinformation” for Big Tech companies to censor.
CISA partnered with consulting firm Deloitte and asked for notifications of social media trends about “narratives relating to ‘Vote-By-Mail’ — and to flag specific social media posts for CISA’s awareness and attention.”
One of the posts Deloitte flagged was an October 2020 tweet from then-President Donald Trump in which he claimed there were “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested in oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis. Pictured: Jackson arrives for President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address at the Capitol on March 7. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government strong-armed Big Tech companies into censoring as “disinformation” Americans’ true experiences while effectively mandating government propaganda, which itself turned out to be misinformation. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether that strategy violated the First Amendment.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested during oral arguments Monday that the First Amendment should not be allowed to “hamstring” the government amid a crisis.
Jackson asked J. Benjamin Aguiñaga, the solicitor general of Louisiana, a rather revealing question about the issue.
“So, my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods,” Jackson said.
The Supreme Court justice presented an extremely unlikely hypothetical that most American young people would find very insulting. She presented a scenario in which young people took cellphone video of their peers jumping out of windows, and that trend went viral on social media (preposterous), Big Tech companies failed to take action on their own (very unlikely), and the government wanted to stop it.
She asked Aguiñaga, “What would you have the government do? I’ve heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, ‘Kids, this is not safe, don’t do it,’ is not going to get it done.”
“So, I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information,” Jackson said. “I’m really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government’s perspective, and you’re saying that the government can’t interact with the source of those problems.”
“I understand that instinct,” Aguiñaga replied. “Our position is not that the government can’t interact with the platforms there … but the way they do that has to be in compliance with the First Amendment.”
🚨REVEALING: Justice Jackson says "your view has the First Amendment📄 hamstringing the federal government in significant ways."😲 Some of us might think THAT'S THE ENTIRE POINT. https://t.co/kFD1yerSwxpic.twitter.com/exa2Wxezha
Jackson suggested it would be unjust for the First Amendment to limit the government’s actions in addressing a hypothetical crisis, but the First Amendment expressly exists in order to hamstring the federal government.
As Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said in response to Jackson’s concern about the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government, “that’s what it’s supposed to do, for goodness’ sake.”
The amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The amendment does not include a “crisis-exemption clause” allowing the government to trample on free speech if the president declares a national emergency. If it did, President Joe Biden might declare a national emergency on climate and strong-arm Big Tech into censoring opposition to the climate alarmist narrative. He might declare a national emergency on the nonexistent “epidemic” of violence against transgender people, and pressure social media to ban any disagreement with gender ideology.
Big Tech platforms already censor conservative speech on those issues, but it could become far worse.
Missouri v. Murthy presents an excellent illustration.
The plaintiffs in the case—Missouri and Louisiana, represented by state Attorneys General Andrew Bailey and Liz Murrill, respectively; doctors who spoke out against the COVID-19 mandates, such as Martin Kulldorff, Jayanta Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty; Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft; and anti-lockdown advocate and Health Freedom Louisiana Co-Director Jill Hines—allege that the Biden administration “suppressed conservative-leaning free speech” on the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election; on COVID-19 issues, including its origin, masks, lockdowns, and vaccines; on election integrity in the 2020 presidential election; on the security of voting by mail; on the economy; and on Joe Biden himself.
On July 4, federal Judge Terry Doughty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued an injunction barring the Biden administration from pressuring Big Tech to censor Americans. Doughty’s injunction named various federal agencies—including the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci formerly directed), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the State Department—and officials, including HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit narrowed the extent of Doughty’s injunction, and the Supreme Court stayed the 5th Circuit’s order before taking up the case.
“The Twitter Files” revealed how the process worked: Federal agencies would have frequent meetings with Big Tech companies, warning about “misinformation” and repeatedly pressuring them to remove or suppress content. Federal agents and politicians occasionally threatened that if the companies did not act, the government would reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, removing legal protections the companies enjoyed.
As Justice Samuel Alito noted, federal officials treated Facebook, Twitter (now X),and other social media companies “like their subordinates.”
🚨Justice Alito: "I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media. … The only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket." They're "treating Facebook… like their subordinates."😲 pic.twitter.com/QKRchwXlJF
As part of this lawsuit, Bailey unearthed documents in which Facebook told the White House that it suppressed “often-true content” that might discourage Americans from taking COVID-19 vaccines. In that context, Jackson’s question about the First Amendment “hamstringing the government” seems particularly alarming. The federal government did not act to suppress speech amid an existential crisis like a world war or a civil war. It acted after good data became available showing that COVID-19 poses a deadly threat to the elderly and those with co-morbidities, and while the government was advocating vaccines for all populations, not just the most vulnerable.
Jackson’s question suggests that she wants the government to have more control over speech on social media, even after the abuses this case uncovered. If the First Amendment is good for anything, it should “hamstring” the government from silencing Americans in order to push its own propaganda. Jackson, as a sitting Supreme Court justice, should know that.
Then again, if she can’t define the word “woman,” perhaps Americans shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t grasp the fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.
West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.
The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”
“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states.
The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’
Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime.
CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient.
A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.
Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”
But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.” CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit.
“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,” The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May.
‘Only a Matter of Time’
Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role.
As the congressional report notes:
CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States.
CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”
‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’
Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.
But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.”
But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats.
CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.”
Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong.
A Warning
It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign.
“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”
Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.
“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote.
“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added.
They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.”
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.
Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
A left-wing dark money group masquerading as a Midwestern newspaper selectively clipped the announcement speech for a Wisconsin Senate candidate to frame the businessman as a heartless, clueless elite.
Eric Hovde launched his campaign to unseat Democrat incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin Tuesday. Heartland Signal, a political newspaper based in Chicago, published a 44-second segment from Hovde’s speech when he addressed the crisis on the U.S. southern border.
“It’s not just a humanitarian crisis for our country,” Hovde said. “But do you know how many lives are lost on that journey to get here? How many people’s life savings have been wiped out by the human trafficking cartels? And they’ve lost 100,000 children that they can’t account for.”
“Let me assure you,” Hovde added, “more than a few of them have ended up being sexually trafficked. I know this all too well. My brother and I have homes all over the world, and we have three in Central America that deal with issues like this.”
Heartland Signal, a leftist digital website backed by Democrat donors, posted the clip on X with the caption, “Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there.”
Announcing his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Wisconsin, Republican Eric Hovde says he understands the tragedy of children being trafficked through Central America because he owns three homes there. pic.twitter.com/LsQhPWvpAc
The post received more than 383,000 views before a community note was attached to offer accurate context.
“‘Hovde Homes’ are shelters the Hovde Foundation has built around the world to support children – including those who have been trafficked,” the note reads. “They are not residential homes as this post suggests.”
The Midwestern news group published a follow-up post offering the right context. That post, however, received a fraction of the views of its misleading post.
Misleading tweet: 383,000 views Devastating correction: 4,800 views They do it on purpose. pic.twitter.com/1noKDDLksr
Heartland Signal was recently purchased by Future Now Action, a left-wing activist group. Hovde faces four GOP opponents in the Wisconsin Republican Senate primary that concludes Aug. 13 to challenge the two-term Democrat incumbent elected in 2012. Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, the state’s other U.S. senator, narrowly captured a third term two years ago by roughly 27,000 votes in the hotly contested swing state that dramatically expanded mail-in voting in 2020.
Immigration is a top issue going into the 2024 election, with Democrats on defense after spending four years turning control of the U.S. border over to international criminal cartels. Last week, House Republicans formally impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for dereliction of his constitutional duties.
On Tuesday, more than a dozen conservatives in the upper chamber penned a letter to demand that GOP Senate chief Mitch McConnell prepare for the Mayorkas impeachment trial.
“It is imperative that the Senate Republican conference prepare to fully engage our Constitutional duty and hold a trial,” they wrote.
The Republican Senate leader faced humiliation this month following the defeat of a border amnesty and mass migration bill.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”
In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”
The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”
Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.
More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.
Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.
The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.
In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.
Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.
The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.
Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.
The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.
Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.
In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”
Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”
Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.
The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.
Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.
But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.
Pandemic Policing
In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”
The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.
That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.
Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.
The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.
Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.
Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.
Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.
Questionable Fact-Checking
In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.
The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vicesimilarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.
Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.
Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”
But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”
Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.
“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”
Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”
In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.
Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.
But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.
“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”
Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”
Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”
The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.
Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.
Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.
“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.
“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”
The U.S. Department of State reportedly hired German censors to train American teachers on how to facilitate so-called anti-disinformation efforts in the classroom.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Media Research Center (MRC) and shared exclusively with The Daily Wire reveal that the State Department paid for trainings for hundreds of teachers “created mostly by German ‘disinformation’ activists.” The “Medialogues on Propaganda,” which featured 11 online training meetings between June 2021 and April 2022 and was attended by some 700 teachers, was funded by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
“The intent was to train teachers to ‘inoculate’ students against disinformation that train them in ‘media literacy,’” The Daily Wire reported. “The State Department sessions were used by its activist organizers to promote products from their for-profit ‘partner,’ Ad Fontes, as well as NewsGuard.”
Ad Fontes is a for-profit firm founded in 2018 that advises advertisers, online platforms, and educators about which websites to either boycott or censor. While the company claims to be impartial, its recommendations show otherwiseby disproportionately targeting conservative media as outlets for clients to avoid.
NewsGuard is a similar “disinformation” group backed by federal grant money. It operates as a browser extension that rates the credibility of news organizations and has been deployed in classrooms. A study published last month by the Media Research Center shows NewsGuard’s credibility ratings “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” Prominent examples of NewsGuard’s biased ratings include perfect grades for legacy outlets that botched the Hunter Biden laptop story while giving failing grades to conservative websites that got it right.
The federal government’s use of taxpayer funds to back NewsGuard is the subject of a lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, which are collectively suing the State Department to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.” The case exposes federal censorship efforts beyond the dramatic discoveries in the pending Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
The State Department did not respond to The Federalist’s repeated inquiries about why the agency did not shut down the propagandist trainings by German censors.
The government trainings were reportedly run by Germany’s University of Würzburg’s Media Education & Educational Technology Lab and the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab with Media Literacy Now (MLN), a non-profit group.
“MLN lobbies for mandatory training in schools to fight ‘misinformation’ and ‘online radicalization,’ boasting that it has helped convince 18 states to make laws on media literacy training,” the Daily Wire reported. “And while the Rhode Island Lab wrote an entire report on the importance of ‘media literacy’ without ever defining it, MLN had spoken more clearly, calling it a ‘tool to create the society we all deserve: one that nurtures racial equity, social justice, and true democracy. Media literacy equals cultural change.’”
University of Rhode Island Communications Professor Renee Hobbs is an MLN advisory board member and the founder of the Rhode Island Lab. According to the Daily Wire, Hobbs previously pressed for $60 million in subsidies for “anti-disinformation work like hers — legislation whose momentum rested on the idea that Russians caused Trump to win in 2016, itself a conspiracy.”
Hobbs played host to the state-sponsored “disinformation” seminars while also serving as chair of a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) group encouraging teachers to shift their focus to “consumerism and economic injustice.” Hobbs’ Rhode Island Lab also once used a fake, satirical Lego set to encourage teachers to hold student discussions about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“When asked why the State Department would fund a propaganda seminar aimed at Americans,” the Wire reported, “the State Department told The Daily Wire that with its $30,000 grant to Media Literacy Now, ‘the U.S. Embassy in Germany supported the participation of German participants in the media literacy program you are inquiring about.’”
The current U.S. ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann, was sworn in back in April 2022, just as the State Department trainings were purportedly ending. Before becoming Biden’s ambassador in Berlin, however, Gutmann was president of the University of Pennsylvania since 2004. The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was established under Gutmann’s tenure, where about ten classified documents were discovered from Biden’s time as vice president that included “top-secret material.” Biden was paid a nearly seven-figure salary from the Ivy League university despite rare school appearances.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis were among several prominent conservatives targeted by a federal censorship operation carried out during the 2020 election, according to a new bombshell congressional report.
Released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Monday, the interim report documents how the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Global Engagement Center (GEC), which fall within the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, respectively, colluded with Stanford University to pressure Big Tech companies into censoring what they claimed to be “disinformation” during the 2020 election.
According to the analysis, this operation aimed to censor “true information, jokes and satire, and political opinions,” with prominent conservatives such as Hemingway and Davis being among the prime targets. Other notable targets include the social media accounts of former President Donald Trump, Newsmax, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Harmeet Dhillon, and Charlie Kirk, to name a few.
As The Federalist previously reported, CISA, which is often called the “nerve center” of the federal government’s censorship operation, “facilitated meetings between Big Tech companies, and national security and law enforcement agencies to address ‘mis-, dis-, and mal-information’ on social media platforms.” Ahead of the 2020 contest, the agency ramped up its censorship efforts by flagging posts for Big Tech companies it claimed were worthy of being censored, some of which called into question the security of voting practices such as mass, unsupervised mail-in voting.
Meanwhile, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland reported, GEC “funded the development of censorship tools and used ‘government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.’” One of these GEC-funded nongovernmental entities is the Global Disinformation Index, a so-called “disinformation” tracking organization “working to blacklist and defund conservative news sites,” including The Federalist.
At the heart of the federal government’s censorship apparatus, however, was the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), “a consortium of ‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory” that coordinated with DHS and GEC “to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.” According to House Republicans’ Monday report, the initiative was developed “at the request” of CISA during the summer of 2020 and effectively allowed federal officials to “launder [their] censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”
During the 2020 election, federal agencies and government-funded entities submitted so-called “misinformation reports” to EIP. Once acquired, EIP misinformation “analysts” would take posts flagged by the aforementioned entities, find similar examples on other Big Tech platforms, compile them into reports, and forward them to these same platforms “with specific recommendations on how [they] should censor the posts.” These EIP reports, which were known as “Jira tickets,” were hidden from the public and “accessible only to select parties, including federal agencies, universities, and Big Tech,” according to the report.
Among the posts flagged by EIP is a Nov. 4, 2020, tweet from Hemingway, in which The Federalist editor-in-chief reported claims from Georgia insiders who said it was “ridiculous [the] media are refusing to admit Trump has won the state.” The tweet also included a link to an Insider Advantage article calling Georgia for Trump. Another Hemingway post classified as “misinformation” by EIP is a Nov. 8, 2020, tweet linking to a Federalist article titled, “America Won’t Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated.”
Meanwhile, EIP flagged a Nov. 4, 2020, tweet thread by Davis reporting how Pennsylvania’s Democrat-controlled Supreme Court “gave Pennsylvania Democrats a license to print post-election ballots, fill them out for Biden over the next three days, and record them without a postmark.” The censors also flagged another Nov. 4, 2020, tweet, in which Davis claimed “The absolute best evidence right now that Democrats, media, and Big Tech are conspiring to steal the election is Big Tech censoring anyone and everyone who observes that Big Tech is using corrupt censorship to steal the election for Democrats.”
But it’s not just reporting and claims about the 2020 election that EIP censors were flagging as so-called “misinformation.” Several examples highlighted in House Republicans’ report demonstrate the willingness of federal officials to censor users posting other truthful or satirical information.
In one instance, EIP analysts requested that Twitter, which has since been rebranded as X, censor a Nov. 4, 2020, tweet from Tillis thanking his supporters for propelling him to victory because EIP “deemed his declaration of victory to be premature” despite Tillis winning reelection. In another case, EIP censors flagged an Oct. 24, 2020, tweet from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who jokingly claimed he filled out and submitted mail-in ballots on behalf of his deceased relatives.
“The suppression of conservative politicians and media resulting from this censorship operation deprived countless American voters from exposure to a range of perspectives on the most important political issues in the days and weeks surrounding a general election,” the report reads. “Critically, the EIP conducted its censorship operation at the direction of, in collaboration with CISA, a federal government agency actively seeking to undermine free expression and the sitting President. The significance of these facts cannot be overstated.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A “disinformation” group is out with new reports flagging online information as “misinformation” for corporate tech giants known for censoring such info — even if the content is true.
VineSight, a Tel Aviv-based tech company with offices in New York, relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to scan the internet for “toxic narratives” and “misinformation.” A thorough examination of the company’s recent reports, however, reveals so-called “toxic narratives” and “misinformation” are synonymous with conservative arguments and inconvenient truths.
The company’s report on clean energy, for example, highlights a post from a “bot-like” account as misinformation that reads, “China emits the most CO2.” The statement, however, is verifiably true. China is by far the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions on the planet and has been for almost two decades.
VineSight’s clean energy report also highlights statements from human accounts as misinformation including, “Climate advocates are hypocrites,” and “[electric vehicles] repeatedly catch on fire.” Climate advocates, however, are often hypocrites when they endlessly lecture about fossil fuels while flying to glitzy conferences courtesy of private air travel. And electric vehicles, including bikes and scooters, are seeing a rise in spontaneous combustion triggered by the malfunction of lithium-ion batteries.
On Facebook, allegedly misleading viral topics include a claim from conservative radio host Glenn Beck saying an “EV battery factory needs fossil fuels to run” and another from Breitbart that “Biden’s green policies benefit China.” But studies have shown that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than their gas-powered counterparts — in part because of the pollution-inducing production of lithium-ion batteries, a market China dominates. In other words, the more President Joe Biden subsidizes rich Americans buying electric vehicles, the more Beijing stands to profit.
Almost every energy-related statement VineSight flagged in its “misinformation” report is backed by either an outright truth or, at minimum, evidence to support the claim. For example, VineSight identified as misinformation a statement attributed to former President Donald Trump that went viral on TikTok: “The Green New Deal is the Destruction of Our Country.” The Green New Deal is a far-left proposal to radically reengineer the nation’s economy and power grid to prioritize climate change above all else. Residents in California are already suffering the effects of state officials implementing aspects of the Green New Deal on a local level; frequent blackouts and strict rules on water use are the new norm.
VineSight’s reports on climate change and voter fraud are not much different. Its climate change report this month flagged topics such as “climate change is a hoax” and “there is no climate crisis” as top examples of viral misinformation. Yet earlier this year, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist became the second Nobel laureate to sign a declaration with more than 1,600 other scientists that emphatically says, “There is no climate emergency.”
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” reads the declaration, organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
Another climate “topic” written off as disinformation by the misinformation group is, “China opens a new coal transportation network.” Yet here’s a headline from National Public Radio (NPR) in March: “China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds.”
A VineSight press release in May celebrated the firm’s updated disinformation technology to “not only identify and alert organizations to disinformation attacks faster but also help mitigate, counter-message, takedown or label content before it damages a company’s reputation and business.”
“Today VineSight’s premier solution is used by major Fortune 500 brands including financial, manufacturing and pharmaceutical institutions, political campaigns, and other causes across the globe,” the company wrote.
The same press release highlights how “VineSight works with the terms of service of each social platform and where possible, get [sic] messages labeled or removed, to counteract any attacks or minimize virality.” In other words, by VineSight’s own admission, it shares its reports with major tech platforms to flag posts for censorship.
The company also admits its concerns about “disinformation” are related to election outcomes. “Disinformation is disrupting the legitimacy of the election process, threatening democracy, and allowing extremist views to become prevalent,” VineSight said in its May press release.
VineSight’s “tracking report” on voter fraud identified conservative themes on election integrity as “viral misinformation and toxic narratives.”
Here are a few The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway highlighted on X:
The topics also included “allowing illegal immigrants to vote is an insult to Americans,” and “MAGA movement was able to make election fraud a top voters issue.” The group also flagged the topic: “the 2020 election was stolen and now Democrats are trying to interfere with 2024.”
Democrats did of course rig the 2020 election — a conspiracy they’ve admitted to — by way of exploiting Covid-19 to transform “Election Day” into election season with the radical expansion of mail-in voting, the least secure format to conduct elections. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also dumped some $350 million into the leftist nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, which funded and staffed local government election offices. These dollars flowed overwhelmingly to the blue areas of swing states, effectively making the operation a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
Then there was the collusion of Big Tech and the media, which openly suppressed blockbuster stories surrounding the corruption of the Democratic nominee and his involvement in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business ventures. Hemingway wrote an entire 448-page book documenting the myriad ways Democrats rigged the 2020 contest.
As for the upcoming election, Trump, now the Republican front-runner in his third run for the White House, is faced with 91 felony indictments just over a year ahead of the next election. On Monday, the leading candidate for the GOP nomination was slapped with a gag order from an activist judge who effectively barred the former president from even campaigning against his top political opponent: the federal government. It bars Trump from publicly defending himself against attacks from potential witnesses, court personnel, or his federal prosecutors, including Special Counsel Jack Smith. According to VineSight, none of that constitutes election interference. Saying as much is amplifying “misinformation.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Elvis Chan, the lead FBI agent involved in mass social media censorship, to appear for a September 21, 2023 deposition. Last week’s subpoena followed Chan’s failure to appear for a scheduled voluntary interview to face questioning about the federal government’s role in burying the Hunter Biden laptop story in the month before the 2020 election.
While that scandal is much bigger than Chan, he is first in line to untangling the truth about how the government interfered in the 2020 election by running an info op to convince voters the Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Given Chan’s testimony in the civil lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana and several individual plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, as well as since-uncovered documents from Facebook, the importance of questioning Chan cannot be overstated.
What Chan Said
In Missouri v. Biden, the plaintiffs sued the Biden administration and numerous agencies and government officials, including the FBI and Chan. They alleged the federal defendants violated the First Amendment by, among other things, coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech].” After filing suit, the plaintiffs filed a motion for a preliminary injunction and then obtained an order allowing for expedited discovery.
Since then, the district court has entered a preliminary injunction barring several federal agencies from coercing tech giants into censoring speech. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the injunction but upheld many of the lower court’s legal conclusions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the Biden administration’s motion for a stay of the injunction.
What matters to the House’s subpoena of Chan is what the expedited discovery in Missouri v. Biden uncovered. It included the plaintiffs’ deposition of Chan. In his deposition, Chan testified he was one of the “primary” FBI agents who communicated with social media companies about so-called “disinformation.”
Specifically, “During the 2020 election cycle, Chan coordinated meetings between the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and at least seven of the major tech giants, including Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Google/YouTube, Yahoo!/Verizon Media, and Microsoft/LinkedIn,” with meetings occurring weekly as the election neared.
In questioning Chan, the plaintiffs’ attorneys pushed him on several points related to the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, forcing Chan to acknowledge the FBI regularly raised the possibility of “hack and dump” operations with senior officials at the various tech companies. Those discussions included the FBI warning of a potential hack-and-leak occurring in advance of the 2020 election, much like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack and WikiLeaks release of internal emails.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs also quizzed Chan on the identity of the government officials who discussed “hack-and-dump Russian operations” with the tech giants. Chan identified Section Chief Laura Dehmlow, along with four FBI officials who attended Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) meetings. Chan named Brady Olson, William Cone, Judy Chock, and Luke Giannini as some of the individuals who had discussed the supposedly impending hack-and-leak operation. Chan claimed not to recall, though, whether anyone within the FBI suggested he raise the possibility of Russian hack-and-dump operations with the tech giants.
That Chan and others warned big tech of the potential for a pre-election hack-and-dump operation is huge. As Chan also testified, the government had no specific intelligence suggesting there were plans for such an operation. Nonetheless, the warnings prompted Twitter and Facebook to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story following The New York Post’s story breaking.
FBI Played Social Media Companies
While the government had no reason to believe a hack-and-leak operation was in the works, several of the FBI agents involved in warning the social media companies knew Hunter Biden had abandoned his laptop at a computer repair store and that the material on the laptop was genuine. That includes Chan, Demhlow, and at least three other individuals connected to the FBI’s FITF.
Chan did not reveal these details in his Missouri v. Biden deposition. Instead, Dehmlow informed the House of these facts during her deposition. Among other things, Dehmlow testified that soon after The New York Post broke the Biden laptop story, somebody from Twitter asked the FBI whether the laptop was real. An analyst in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division confirmed, “Yes, it was.’” An FBI lawyer on the call then immediately interjected, “No further comment.”
Dehmlow further testified that several individuals on the FBI’s FITF knew the laptop was real, including then-FITF Section Chief Brad Benavides and the unit chief. Dehmlow then confirmed that after the call with Twitter, the FBI had internal deliberations about the laptop and that later when Facebook asked about the authenticity of the laptop, Dehmlow responded, “No comment.”
During his deposition in the Missouri v. Biden case, Chan confirmed Dehmlow’s representation that in response to the Facebook inquiry, she had replied, “No comment.” Chan, however, then claimed he was not aware of any other inquiries from social media companies concerning the Hunter Biden laptop.
Was Chan Telling the Truth?
Last month, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan revealed his committee had obtained internal documents from Facebook that call into question Chan’s testimony. “I spoke with SSA Elvis Chan (FBI San Francisco) on 15 October 2020, as a follow up to the call with the Foreign Influence Task Force on 14 October,” one Facebook document read, contradicting Chan’s claim that he knew of no other inquiries from social media companies.
“I asked SSA Chan whether there was any update or change. . . as to whether the FBI saw any evidence suggesting foreign sponsorship or direction of the leak of information related to Hunter Biden as published in the New York Post story,” Facebook’s memorandum continued. According to Facebook’s internal document, Chan stated “that he was up to speed on the current state of the matter within the FBI and that there was no current evidence to suggest any foreign connection or direction of the leak.” Chan further assured Facebook “that the FBI would be in contact if any additional information on this was developed through further investigation.”
Chan’s claim to Facebook that he was “up to speed on the current state of the matter” also seemingly conflicted with Chan’s testimony in the Missouri v. Biden case that he had “no internal knowledge of that investigation,” and “that it was brought up after the news story had broke.” It is also difficult to reconcile Chan’s claim — that the laptop was only brought up after the Post ran the story — with Dehmlow’s testimony that several individuals on the FITF knew the laptop was real, including an FBI analyst.
What the House Should Ask Chan
The House should explore these inconsistencies with Chan and further quiz him on both Dehmlow’s testimony and the Facebook documents. Chan should also be quizzed on with whom else he discussed the potential for a hack-and-leak operation.
We know from Chan’s Missouri v. Biden deposition that he had served as the supervisor for the Russia-adept cyber squad that investigated the DNC server hack before the San Francisco office handed it to FBI headquarters. Chan testified in that deposition that he would have discussed national security cyber-investigations involving Russian matters with Sean Newell, a deputy chief at the DOJ National Security Division who had also worked on the DNC hack. Chan should be pushed further on whether Newell or anyone else who worked on the DNC hack had raised the issue of a 2020 hack-and-release repeat.
If so, the question then becomes whether they knew of the existence and authenticity of the Biden laptop. That question proves significant because it appears the hack-and-leak narrative was peddled to the social media companies to prime them to censor the laptop story. So, knowing who knew the laptop story was accurate but still fed the hack-and-leak hysteria will point to the players responsible for interfering in the 2020 election by silencing the truthful reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Chan may refuse to testify, however, even pursuant to a subpoena, or the Department of Justice may direct Chan not to submit to congressional questioning, forcing Republicans to enforce the subpoena in court. We’ll know tomorrow if either scenario plays out or if Chan comes clean with what he knows.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
On Thursday afternoon, three Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard Biden administration arguments to let government keep pressuring social media monopolies to ban ideas they don’t like from the internet. On July 4, a lower court had ordered the Biden administration to cease what it called “arguably … the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The Fifth Circuit paused that injunction on July 14 and heard oral arguments against it on Aug. 10 in Missouri v. Biden.
In this major case likely to hit the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration is fighting to stop American citizens from sharing messages government officials don’t like. This case uncovered reams of White House and other high-level officials threatening internet monopolies with the end of their entire business model if they didn’t ban speech by Democrats’ political opponents.
“It’s far beyond the scope of what people realize,” says a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Zhonette Brown, of the public interest firm New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA).
Internal documents Twitter divulged under new owner Elon Musk provided more proof that social media monopolies are silencing Americans from Tucker Carlson and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to millions of non-famous citizens at the behest of government pressure. Here are some key takeaways from Thursday’s oral arguments and earlier revelations from this massive First Amendment case.
1. By the Government’s Own Definition, It’s Censoring
Key to Thursday’s arguments was the question of coercion: Did government demands of internet monopolies equal coercion, or were those merely officials advocating for their views?
“If the government was doing something like that in a coercive manner, then that could be the subject of a proper injunction,” Department of Justice lawyer Daniel Bentele Hahs Tenny told the court in his opening remarks. “The problem is that what you would have to do is say, ‘Here is what the government is doing that’s coercive, and I’m enjoining that.’”
Judge Don Willett responded: “How do you define coercive?”
Tenny: “I don’t think there’s too much disagreement on this point. Coercive is where a reasonable person would construe it to be backed by a threat of government action against a party if it didn’t comply.”
That’s exactly what the government did, the voluminous documents already discovered in this case show. In just one of the examples, Meta executive Nick Clegg, a former high-ranking U.K. official, told his bosses Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more COVID-19 vaccine discouraging content” (emphasis original).
Clegg also characterized to colleagues an interaction with Andy Slavitt, a White House Covid adviser, this way: “[H]e was outraged – not too strong a word to describe his reaction – that we did not remove this post” of a meme about trial lawyers getting 10 years of vaccine-injured clients from government mandates.
2. Government Officials Treated Internet Monopolies Like Their Subordinates
The Fifth Circuit panel demonstrated familiarity with the numerous examples of this kind of government behavior, such as this email exchange between White House digital director Rob Flaherty and Facebook, in which Flaherty swears at Facebook engineers, “Are you guys f-cking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”
“What appears to be in the record are these irate messages from time to time from high-ranking government officials that say, “You didn’t do this yet,’” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod told Tenny. “And that’s my toning down the language. … So it’s like, ‘Jump!’ and, ‘How high?’”
The judges also noted the White House publicly threatened the business model of all online communications monopolies through potentially revoking Section 230 and launching antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuit documentation shows leading Democrats making the same public threats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and multiple U.S. senators.
Joe Biden even threatenedto hold Zuckerberg criminally liable for not running Facebook the way Biden wanted. In office, Biden also famously accused Facebook of “killing people” by not doing enough to spread the administration’s message and suppress opposing messages. FBI agent Elvis Chan‘s deposition in this case noted federal officials showed adverse legislation to social media monopolies’ leaders as examples of what the government would do to them if they didn’t ban Americans’ speech.
“It’s not like, ‘We think this would be a good public policy and we want to explain to you why that would be a good policy,” Elrod said. “There seems to be some very close relationship that they’re having these — ‘This isn’t being done fast enough’ you know, like it’s a supervisor complaining about a worker.”
3. Judges Likened Government Behavior to Mobsters
Tenny claimed there was no “or else” explaining what the government “would do” if the internet monopolies didn’t obey, so there was no government coercion present.
“This is an analogy, probably an inapt analogy, so if you’ll excuse me — like if somebody is in these movies we see with the mob or something. They don’t spell out things but they have these ongoing relationships and they never actually say, ‘Go do this or else you’re going to have this consequence,’ but everybody just knows,” Elrod replied. “And I’m certainly not equating the federal government with anybody in illegal organized crime, but there are certain relationships that people know things without always saying the ‘Or else.’”
Willett followed that up by commenting the case documentation makes it look like the government is “relying on a fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming and veiled or not so veiled threats. ‘That’s a really nice social media platform you got there, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’”
4. Censorship Is Election Interference
The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, John Sauer, initiated this case as Louisiana’s solicitor general. In representing state government interests to the judges, he noted that elected officials have to pay attention to what their constituents are saying online, or they won’t have a good read on what voters what them to do in office.
“We’ve gotta be able to craft messages and know what policies we’re adopting to be responsive to our citizens,” he summarized from statements submitted to the court from multiple state officials. “…Going back to 1863, as everyone knows, going back to the Federalist number 56 where [Bill of Rights author James] Madison said it, everyone knows state legislators have a sovereign interest in knowing what their constituents think and feel, and that’s directly impacted.”
When the federal government silences some Americans’ views online, Sauer said, it makes it harder for elected representatives to actually represent them. Two of the state injuries the plaintiffs assert against the federal government’s censorship are “Interference with our ability to hear our constituents’ voices on social media” and “interference with our ability to have a fair and unbiased process for our people to organize and petition the government for grievances.”
Court documents also revealed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a federal agency, set up a private entity to ban and throttle election-related online speech Democrats dislike. Much of the information choked by this algorithmic censorship operation is true, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, investigations and members of Congress have noted.
“They invented a whole new word, ‘mal-information,’ to justify going after the censorship of true speech and ideas,” Sauer said last month in a public discussion of the case that YouTube banned.
5. Democrats Want Free Speech for Themselves While Banning It for Their Enemies
The oral arguments also got into the FBI’s 2020 election interference in telling online monopolies that The New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop was foreign disinformation. Tenny claimed the FBI refused to comment on the laptop because it was a pending investigation.
Yet the FBI and other federal intelligence agencies actually did comment on the laptop by calling it “foreign disinformation,” both privately to the internet monopolies and publicly. This was false, and the FBI knew it. The lower court ruled this deception constituted coercion because it caused people to act on false information.
As Ben Weingarten notes, these lies and FBI-demanded online content bans to protect them benefitted Joe Biden in the 2020 election:
According to Elvis Chan (pdf), an FBI official leading engagement with the social media platforms, while the bureau didn’t explicitly ask the companies to change their hacked material policies, it did frequently follow up to ask whether they had changed said policies, as the FBI wanted to know how they would treat such materials.
The judges almost broached an important question: If the First Amendment protects the FBI’s lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation, for which not one federal employee has been disciplined, how can it allow for criminalizing the same behavior by average Americans by labeling their views “disinformation” and “mal-information”?
6. Today’s Internet Is Still Massively Rigged
Taibbi also noted that court documents show the Biden administration got mad enough to fire the F-bomb at social media companies when the algorithmic censorship they demand affected Biden’s Instagram account. Instagram instantly fixed the issue for the White House, but not for non-powerful Americans.
It’s clear from the case documents and other disclosures such as the “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” that the algorithms controlling what Americans see online are now deeply, massively rigged. That rigging is multilayered. It includes all this government coercion of entities including Apple, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter going back to at least 2017, as well as pressure operations from corporate media and internal employee groups.
Beyond algorithm changes, social media monopolies have also changed their terms of service in response to government demands, the NCLA attorneys noted last month. So government control of public discourse will continue even if the Fifth Circuit reinstates the injunction.
Tenny told the Fifth Circuit the Covid-era censorship that ignited this case is over because the government currently deems Covid not an emergency. In court, Sauer cited YouTube banning two weeks ago a video of attorneys discussing this case as more proof this massive censorship persists. He also cited court documents showing Americans still can’t post social media messages about censored topics.
“Attorneys present gave estimates ranging from a few weeks to two months for the panel to rule” on whether to reinstate an injunction against more of this government behavior, reported Taibbi, who attended the oral arguments in New Orleans, Louisiana. The previous injunction includes exceptions for crimes such as sex trafficking.
“The government wants to be doing something that it shouldn’t be doing, and they really, really want to be doing it,” said NCLA attorney John Vecchione in the discussion YouTube banned.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her latest ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her several books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The FBI colluded with a Russian-infiltrated intelligence agency in Ukraine to censor American speech, according to a new document out Monday. In an interim report published by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, House investigators exposed the FBI’s cooperation with foreign agents to orchestrate online censorship.
“The Committee’s analysis of these ‘disinformation’ registries revealed that the FBI, at the request of the [Security Service of Ukraine (SBU)], flagged for social media companies the authentic accounts of Americans, including a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists,” the report reads. “At times, the FBI would even follow up with the relevant platform to ensure that ‘these accounts were taken down.’”
The SBU was notoriously infiltrated by the Kremlin’s Federal Security Service (FSB), whose agents were instrumental in President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In March last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired the head of the SBU’s Crimean branch, who is accused of being a double agent. Ivan Bakanov, who ran the entire SBU, was let go in July last year over the service’s status as a compromised agency.
The FBI, lawmakers added, “had no legal justification for facilitating the censorship of Americans’ protected speech on social media.”
House investigators compiled the report based on subpoenas to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, which oversees Google and YouTube.
“The inclusion of American accounts on the SBU’s lists indicates that the FBI either did not properly vet the SBU’s requests or was aware of their domestic nature, and nonetheless carried them out,” lawmakers concluded.
At the heart of the operation was FBI Agent Elvis Chan in the San Francisco field office, who served as the “primary liaison” between the FBI and Silicon Valley. Chan also coordinated meetings between the FBI and social media companies during both the 2020 and 2022 elections. House investigators reported the SBU wasn’t purged of Russian agents until months after the Ukrainian security service began colluding with the FBI to censor U.S. citizens.
The FBI and SBU reportedly sent “massive spreadsheets” that contained “thousands of accounts” for censorship to Meta. The FBI also “facilitated” the SBU’s requests for censorship on Alphabet platforms. Posts flagged for removal were often supportive of Ukraine and critical of Putin.
One episode of censorship on Instagram included the suspension of a verified account run by the State Department with the username “@usaporusski.”
“Neither the FBI nor the SBU provides an explanation as to how the U.S. State Department account was ‘involved in disinformation,’” lawmakers noted.
One censorship request also included an American journalist whose name has been redacted.
The government coordination with Silicon Valley ran so deep that Meta even proposed a “24/7 channel” with foreign agents to facilitate censorship. The operation continued at least into May, even after Twitter’s Yoel Roth warned U.S. officials about the SBU’s targeting of American accounts.
“The full extent of the FBI’s collaboration with the SBU to censor American speech is unknown,” investigators wrote, but added, “To be clear, the FBI’s participation in the SBU’s censorship enterprise was a willing and intentional choice by the FBI, involving no fewer than seven agents across the Bureau.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, have fired off a letter to CIA Director Bill Burns renewing their requests for documents and phone records concerning the public statement on the Hunter Biden emails letter that was signed by 51 former intelligence community officials.
The House committees last week issued a report that revealed the October 2020 letter was perceived as being so partisan that many intelligence officers refused to sign it.
“On March 21, 2023, we wrote to you requesting documents in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) custody relating to this statement about Hunter Biden,” the lawmakers wrote in their letter. “This statement, signed by former intelligence community officials using their official titles and emphasizing their national security credentials, suggested that public reporting about Hunter Biden’s business dealings and Biden family influence-peddling ‘ha[d] all the hallmarks of a Russian information operation.’
“We have since learned that the statement was drafted and disseminated following communications between former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell and Biden campaign adviser—now Secretary of State—Antony Blinken.”
Jordan and Turner wrote, after making a minimal production of documents May 9, “the CIA admitted that it did not perform a full and complete search of all agency records prior to that production.”
A May 12 phone conversation with House staff ended with the CIA committing to cooperate in full with the committees’ oversight.
Jordan and Turner wrote the CIA committed to:
Conducting an agency-wide search for documents and communications with each of the names of the 51 signatories to the public statement for the period Oct. 1-31, 2020.
Conducting a search for all documents and communications related to the approval of [former CIA employee] David Cariens’ memoir “Escaping Madness,” including but not limited to Cariens’ email(s) to the PCRB [Prepublication Classification Review Board] seeking approval of his work, any internal communications about the work, and any outgoing email responses from the PCRB to Cariens.
Conducting a search of all CIA phone records for the period Oct. 1-31, 2020, for any phone communications between CIA employees and any of the 51 signatories to the public statement, including but not limited to Cariens.
The lawmakers ended their May 16 letter by saying they expect all documents by May 30.
“If the CIA does not produce all responsive documents, the committees may resort to compulsory process,” Jordan and Turner wrote.
Antony Blinken represents neither the beginning nor the end of the info ops run to convince voters the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Revisiting the contemporaneous coverage of the laptop story in light of last week’s revelations about Blinken reveals the scandal extends far beyond the Biden campaign and involves government agents.
Last week, news broke that a former top CIA official, Michael Morell, testified as part of a House Judiciary Committee investigation that Blinken, now-secretary of state and then-Biden campaign senior adviser, had contacted Morell to discuss the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Blinken and Morell reportedly “discussed possible Russian involvement in the spreading of information related to Hunter Biden.” According to Morell, Blinken’s outreach “set in motion” what led to the public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed the laptop as Russian disinformation.
This revelation is huge — but it’s only a start to understanding the scope of the plot to interfere in the 2020 election by framing the laptop exposing Biden family corruption as foreign disinformation.
The First Clue
The first hint that Blinken’s outreach to Morell was a single spoke in the wheel of the Biden campaign’s deception came from a follow-up email Blinken sent Morell on Oct. 17, 2020. In it, Blinken shared a USA Today article that reported “the FBI was examining whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a ‘disinformation campaign.’” The very bottom of Blinken’s email contained the signature block of Andrew Bates, then a Biden campaign spokesman and the director of his “rapid response” team, suggesting Bates had sent the article to Blinken for him to forward to Morell.
Blinken forwarding an article claiming the FBI was investigating the laptop as a potential “disinformation campaign” is hugely significant because we know the FBI was doing no such thing. The FBI knew both that the laptop was authentic and that John Paul Mac Isaac had possession of the hard drive, just as the New York Post had reported, albeit without identifying the computer-store owner by name.
The USA Today article nonetheless furthered the narrative that Morell and the other former intelligence officials would soon parrot in their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” — that the emails have “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
For those who lived through the Russia-collusion hoax, it was the USA Today article and the presidential campaign’s use of Russia to deflect attention from the Biden scandal that bore the “classic earmarks” of an information operation — one that mimicked Hillary Clinton’s ploy four years prior. Given the similarities between the two Russia hoaxes, it seemed likely the Biden campaign worked with the press to push the Russian-disinformation narrative.
USA Today Didn’t Start the Falsehood
Sure enough, the legacy press began pushing the narrative days before Blinken emailed Morell the article on Oct. 17.
On Oct. 14, 2020, the same day the New York Post broke the first laptop story, Politico ran an article, co-authored by Russia-hoaxer extraordinaire “Fusion Natasha” Bertrand, raising questions about the authenticity of said laptop. “This is a Russian disinformation operation. I’m very comfortable saying that,” Bertrand quoted former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Biden adviser Michael Carpenter.
At the time, Carpenter also ran the Penn Biden Center — the same place a cache of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president and senator were discovered in a closet.
Politico also quoted Bates, whose signature block would later appear on Blinken’s email to Morell. Bates spun the scandal as one about Rudy Giuliani, who had provided a copy of the hard drive to the Post, and Giuliani’s supposed connection “to Russian intelligence.”
Intel Community Helped Peddle Russia Hoax 2.0
As was the case with the Russia-collusion hoax, the Biden campaign received an assist from the intelligence community. On Oct. 14, 2020, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence analysts “had picked up Russian chatter that stolen Burisma emails” would be released as an “October surprise.”
Burisma, of course, was the Ukrainian energy company that paid Hunter Biden nearly $1 million to sit on its board during his father’s final year as vice president.
The chief concern of the intelligence analysts, the Times reported, “was that the Burisma material would be leaked alongside forged materials in an attempt to hurt Mr. Biden’s candidacy.”
Lying Leakers Advance the Narrative
The next day, another foundational Russia-collusion hoaxer, Ken Dilanian, published an “exclusive” at NBC. Citing “two people familiar with the matter,” Dilanian claimed that “federal investigators are examining whether emails allegedly describing activities by Joe Biden and his son Hunter and found on a laptop at a Delaware repair shop are linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” Dilanian also quoted Bates, who again focused on Giuliani and his alleged connection to Russia.
The Washington Post also embraced the narrative on Oct. 15, reporting, “U.S. intelligence agencies warned the White House last year that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.” Based on “four former officials,” The Washington Post reported that Giuliani had interacted with people tied to Russian intel.
More Lies Leaked to USA Today
This brings us to USA Today’s Oct. 16, 2020, article, “FBI Probing Whether Emails in New York Post Story About Hunter Biden Are Tied to Russian Disinformation.”
“Federal authorities are investigating whether a Russian influence operation was behind the disclosure of emails purporting to document the Ukrainian and Chinese business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden,” USA Today opened its article, citing “a person briefed on the matter” and immediately bringing up Giuliani.
According to USA Today, that person “confirmed the FBI’s involvement but did not elaborate on the scope of the bureau’s review.”
The next day, Oct. 17, USA Today followed up with the article, “A Tabloid Got a Trove of Data on Hunter Biden from Rudy Giuliani. Now, the FBI is Probing a Possible Disinformation Campaign.”
It began by saying the New York Post portrayed the laptop contents as a “smoking gun.” “Enter the FBI,” USA Today interjected, reporting that “federal authorities” are investigating whether the laptop is “disinformation pushed by Russia” and claiming there are many questions about the laptop data’s authenticity.
“Experts say the story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign,” it continued, using language strikingly similar to what the former intel officials would use days later.
Blinken Uses Reporting to Prod Morell
It is unclear which of the two USA Today pieces Blinken forwarded to Morell because both articles included the FBI investigation claims. It seems likely, however, that Blinken sent Morrel the second article because USA Today’s Oct. 17 coverage included a quote from supposed “experts” who said the New York Post “story has many hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.”
That language tracked near-perfectly the wording used by the 51 former intelligence officials in their infamous Oct. 19 statement, which claimed the laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
That’s Not All
Morell’s contact with Blinken reportedly went beyond the phone call and email. According to CNN, following his conversation with Blinken, “Morell had conversations with other former intelligence community officials, which is what led to the letter,” and then Morell “circled back to the Biden campaign to let them know that the letter efforts were underway.”
In testimony to House oversight investigators, Morell told how Biden’s campaign helped strategize releasing the statement, according to a letter Reps. Jim Jordan and Michael Turner sent to Blinken last week. Specifically, “Morell testified that he sent an email telling Nick Shapiro, former Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to the Director of the CIA John Brennan, that the Biden campaign wanted the statement to go to a particular reporter at the Washington Post first and that he should send the statement to the campaign when he sent the letter to the reporter.” Shapiro was another signatory of the statement.
Politico, however, eventually first broke the story and published the statement, under the headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intel Officials Say.”
Mission Accomplished
In his testimony to House investigators, Morell “explained that one of his two goals in releasing the statement was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate and to assist him in winning the election,” Jordan and Turner wrote. In fact, according to attorney Mark Zaid, who represents several of the signatories, “when the draft [statement] was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign.”
Both parts of the ploy worked. When the final presidential debate arrived on Oct. 22, 2020, and then-President Trump confronted Biden with the details revealed in Hunter’s “laptop from hell,” Biden responded by telling the American public:
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the … five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend, Rudy Giuliani.
Biden Campaign Thanks Morell for the Assist
Morell testified that after the debate he received a call from Jeremy Bash, who was one of the 51 signatories of the statement. Bash asked Morell if he had a minute to talk to Steve Ricchetti, head of the Biden campaign. Bash testified that he said “yes,” Bash got Ricchetti on the line, and the Biden campaign representative thanked Morell “for putting the statement out.”
More Than Dirty Politics
Morell’s testimony revealed Blinken and the Biden campaign’s role in prompting the bunk statement from the former intel officials. But the contemporaneous media reporting exposes a larger scandal: Representatives of our government helped promote that narrative by falsely telling media outlets the FBI was investigating whether the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian-disinformation campaign.
The FBI’s role in assisting the Biden campaign’s plot transforms this case from one about dirty politics to a scandal involving government interference in the 2020 election. Accordingly, the House oversight committees need to determine which members of the FBI or intelligence agencies were responsible for the false media leak and whether anyone working on behalf of the Biden campaign collaborated with those government actors.
The committees thus need to gather evidence and question not merely Blinken, but every signatory of the statement, especially Bash; members of the Biden campaign, such as Bates and Ricchetti; and Biden advisers, including Carpenter.
While Blinken provides an entry point to unraveling the Russian-disinformation hoax, there is much more to learn.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The federal government peddled technology to Big Tech companies to assist them in censoring Americans’ speech on social media in the run-up to the 2020 election, according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. Specifically, the State Department marketed this censorship technology through its Global Engagement Center. In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the regime’s narrative. They also paid for government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.
I’ve been “tasked with building relationships with technology companies,” Samaruddin Stewart, then a senior adviser for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or “GEC,” wrote in an early-February 2020 introductory email to LinkedIn, allegedly requesting a meeting. According to the lawsuit, his email also suggested he would be reaching out to other social media companies interested in “countering disinformation.”
On March 9, 2020, Stewart again contacted LinkedIn, referencing an earlier verbal discussion and writing:
I’ll send information [to LinkedIn representatives] about gaining access to Disinfo Cloud — which is a GEC funded platform that offers stakeholders an opportunity to discover companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.
These two emails are explosive. Yet because they were revealed in two passing paragraphs of the 164-page complaint filed by Missouri, Louisiana, and a handful of other plaintiffs against the Biden administration, they — and their enormous significance — have been overlooked.
‘Cold-Calling’ Big Tech
The Stewart emails establish that in 2020, federal government actors contacted social media giants to promote GEC’s Disinfo Cloud. GEC represented that this government platform provided “companies, technology, and tools” to “assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.” Then it gave private tech companies access to Disinfo Cloud.
Almost identical to how GEC described Disinfo Cloud in congressional testimony, the State Department’s webpage marketed it as a “one-stop shop” to “identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation.” “Fact checking” and “media authentication” are just a couple of the types of technologies available through the dashboard.
GEC didn’t just promote Disinfo Cloud or give Big Tech access to what GEC called“the U.S. government’s online repository.” Government employees at GEC also offered to help private companies identify tools to suit their specific needs. Just “write” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division about “what your office needs to counter propaganda and disinformation,” the State Department instructed on its webpage, and the government will “assist” in finding “a technological solution.”
‘Testbed’
Access to Disinfo Cloud, according to the State Department’s webpage, also provides “a gateway” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division’s “Testbed,” allowing users to review and test the technology against their unique needs.
While Stewart’s emails don’t expressly mention the “Testbed” feature, the State Department boasts that the “private sector” uses both Disinfo Cloud and Testbed. The GEC’s webpage also invites Disinfo Cloud users to ask “for assistance in identifying a technological solution or draft a test proposal for a tool.” If Disinfo Cloud users can’t find a tool that works for them, the GEC Technology Engagement team stresses it “is open to insights and is here to help implement ideas to move the counter propaganda and disinformation mission forward.”
Infomercials
Deposition testimony by FBI Agent Elvis Chan suggests GEC’s marketing of the censorship tools went beyond making cold calls (or emails) to LinkedIn and other Big Tech companies. It also seemingly went further than providing product advice and samples on Disinfo Cloud: The GEC’s Technology Engagement Division apparently hosted infomercials to help the private vendors market their censorship software.
Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco field office, was “one of the primary people” communicating with social media companies about supposed “disinformation,” and thus is one of the named defendants in Missouri v. Biden. As part of that litigation, the plaintiffs deposed Chan. During questioning, Chan testified that ahead of the 2020 election, he periodically spoke with Stewart, who would meet with the social media companies separately from Chan.
According to Chan, Stewart met with policy individuals with the various social media companies about “different initiatives.” Those initiatives included various kinds of vendor-made software “that they would pilot to see if they could detect malign foreign influence on social media platforms.”
Chan further testified that Stewart and GEC “would provide webinars” from these vendors. As Chan explained, “[T]he State Department was just providing a venue where different vendors could show off their products.” The presentations were open to the general public, said Chan, but the GEC “would invite all sorts of audiences, to include researchers, employees from State Department counterparts, so typically Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The intended audience, according to Chan, was “State Department-equivalent personnel, social media companies, and researchers.”
Chan said he attended only a couple of the webinars because the companies took only a “surface-level” look at the content, and thus he didn’t consider the technology useful to the FBI. But apparently, it was fine for the State Department to market the same tools to social media companies.
From Chan’s deposition testimony, it appears Stewart, the GEC’s then-senior adviser, made the equivalent of sales calls and hosted infomercials, all for the purpose of pushing various censorship services to social media companies.
It is unclear whether these webinars were in addition to the GEC’s “Tech Demo Series” — at which private vendors showcased their knack for fighting so-called disinformation for “U.S. government counterparts and foreign partners” — or whether, after the GEC sent a full-time representative to Silicon Valley in December of 2019 (presumably Stewart), the Tech Demo Series was opened to the public. However, given that the official Disinfo Cloud Twitter account promoted the Tech Demo Series, it seems likely that GEC expanded its target audience for the series to include the private sector and other Disinfo Cloud users.
Either way, Chan’s deposition testimony reveals our government marketed censorship technology to social media companies through “webinars.” And while Chan claimed he didn’t think GEC endorsed the products, the government expressly represented the Disinfo Cloud technology as tools to “assist” with attacking so-called disinformation.
The Tools
So what exactly were those tools?
From open-source material, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify the entire dataset of tech companies featured on Disinfo Cloud or participating in the Tech Demo Series. That’s because Disinfo Cloud has “been retired as [a] GEC-sponsored effort,” according to the State Department. The DisinfoCloud.com webpage has also been shuttered.
But because GEC ran various “tech challenges,” giving winners State Department “sponsorship” on the government’s Disinfo Cloud Testbed — advertised as worth $25,000 — among other things, several censorship companies involved can be identified, including NewsGuard, PeakMetrics, and Omelas.
NewsGuard’s censorship technology includes “its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes,” as I detailed in March. NewsGuard’s winning tech-challenge entry built upon those databases and used“AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax,” and to find instances of the hoax being “repeated or amplified” online.
The second winner, PeakMetrics, offered a dashboard for tracking mentions of a topic across multiple media channels with social listening technology. The third winner, Omelas, developed tools to visually map online information.
The government gave these winners the ability to pilot their technology on Disinfo Cloud’s Testbed. Then it promoted Disinfo Cloud to social media giants as offering “access to companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.”
So were NewsGuard, PeakMetrics, and Omelas among the companies GEC marketed to Big Tech? Did they participate in the government-run Tech Demos and present infomercials to the private sector? Did GEC help these vendors test their products for private companies on the Testbed?
In Practice
Consider the implications, using NewsGuard to illustrate.
NewsGuard rates various media outlets on a 100-point scale and provides a red “unreliable” rating if its “experts” score the news source below 60. The company rates The Federalist “red” and claims it is one of the top-10 “most influential misinformers.” Conversely, some of the outlets that botched the biggest political stories of the century maintain a 100 percent reliability score.
The government awarded NewsGuard a $25,000 prize to develop new technology on Disinfo Cloud, using, in part, that ratings system as a backbone. NewsGuard would later receive an additional $750,000 from the government to advance the development of its censorship technology. PeakMetrics and Omelas also both scored additional government funding of $1.5 and $1 million respectively.
But think about the government’s other behind-the-scenes censorship entanglements. The government, via your tax dollars, funded both Disinfo Cloud, which provided the technology necessary to pilot the program, and the outside contractor, Park Advisors, that managed it.
The State Department’s GEC promoted the companies and technology featured on Disinfo Cloud, and a government liaison working for GEC personally contacted social media companies to encourage them to use the platform. The government also hosted Tech Demo Series for the vendors to market their products to the private sector.
Disinfo Cloud regularly promoted private censorship technology on its official Twitter account and retweeted NewsGuard’s announcement of its partnership with Mediabrands to “bring NewsGaurd’s rating work to TV news programming.
Then beyond promoting the censorship tools, government employees working with GEC helped social media and private-sector businesses identify, test, and tweak the most “appropriate” technology for their “needs.”
And what are those “needs?” Censoring the speech of you and your fellow Americans.
A Scandal Like No Other
This scandal far surpasses the one that formerly ensnared GEC, when it was revealed the State Department awarded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) — another “ratings” company that blacklists conservative outlets — $100,000 as part of the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. GDI also reportedly received money from other government-funded organizations. Those taxpayer funds helped finance GDI’s blacklist of conservative media outlets, which advertisers relied upon to defund dissenters.
But what Stewart’s emails now reveal is that the government is not merely funding censorship research. It is acting as a sales rep to market censorship technology to private companies.
The State Department isn’t skirting the First Amendment. It is driving a stake through its heart.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
“Why, you little… I’ll teach you to laugh at something that’s funny!” -Homer Simpson
As a society, we understand very well the term, “free speech isn’t free.” This double-entendre statement has arguably been more applicable in the past several years than in any other time in history. That all freedoms come at a cost, most understand, but the freedom to say what you believe or think, is literally under siege these days.
In such cases, due to terms like, ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ it need not even be a lie; an imagined slight is all it takes. This quote from “The Simpson’s movie” back in 2007 references an ideology that at the time, seemed far-fetched. However, as life imitates art in 2023, simply laughing at something funny or speaking unpopular truths can end a career.
During the last weekend of February 2023, the popular comic strip “Dilbert” was dropped by nearly 80 newspaper outlets across the country after what many considered a ‘racist rant’ by its creator, Scott Adams.
According to News One, “It followed an incident in which Adams, on his program “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” reacted to a recent survey by Rasmussen Reports that concluded only 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” If only about half thought it was OK to be white, Adams remarked, this qualified Black Americans as a “hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f— away because there is no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.”
Adams later doubled down on his statements, writing on Twitter that “Dilbert has been canceled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.”
According to Forbes, this was the timeline of events:
February 22: Adams spends several profanity-laden minutes telling white people to “get away” from Black people after reading a Rasmussen poll that found that only 53% of Black respondents agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”
February 24: Some newspapers and publishing groups, including the USA TODAY Network and Advance Local Group, decide to stop publishing Dilbert, removing the cartoon from over 200 papers across the country.
February 25: The Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Antonio Express-News, among others, drop Dilbert.
February 25: Adams expands on his remarks in an almost two-hour interview with online personality Hotep Jesus.
February 26: Adams links to Saturday’s interview and tweets he’s only accepting criticism from people who know the full context, claiming that much of the coverage against him is “fake news.”
February 26: Elon Musk tweets support of Adams, claiming: “For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians.
February 26: The National Cartoonists Society disavows “all forms of racism and discrimination” (Dilbert won the Society’s highest honor, the Reuben Award, in 1998).
February 27: Adams is dropped by publishing company Andrews McMeel Universal, whose chairman and CEO tweeted that the company supports free speech but not “commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.”
February 28: Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House, cancels the September release of Adams’ Reframe Your Brain, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Cancel Culture Gone Crazy
Though Adams has been derided for his outspokenness before, this was something new. In a matter of only four days, an iconic comic strip with millions of devoted readers is erased from newspapers all over America. Amazing how damaging thinking aloud can be.
Whether audiences of media, social and otherwise realize it, we are at an inflection point. While it may appear hyperbolic, unless you’ve been sleeping- we should all be concerned. One of the best things that Americans and those seeking to be citizens of this country once appreciated was our Constitution.
Within that document sits a list of Amendments, and these contained rights that bestowed freedoms on every American. Among those are rights against illegal search and seizure, the right to bear arms, and of course- the freedom of speech.
No doubt most of us have watched over time as those rights (mentioned and not mentioned) have not just eroded, but rather, simply been taken away. If the adage, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” tells us anything, our Constitution, as is, may have a shelf life, with a looming expiration date.
Weighing In
While this writer does not agree entirely with Scott Adams’ feelings or assessment, he has every right to say it, much like a Klansman in full-hooded garb, can, and has the right to walk into an all-black-neighborhood and yell, “I HATE NIGGERS!” from the top of his lungs- at his own peril. And while “The Simpsons” is not anyone’s paragon of virtue, hope or even familial example, Homer’s words still ring no less true.
As we watch black-and-white films of civil rights attacks from the 60’s, and cringe at the Holocaust atrocities of the 40’s, we dare not be so naïve to miss the fact that history is repeating herself. However, don’t be fooled. It isn’t through angry words and rhetoric that this is occurring, and not even because of those colleges and venues that boycott and allow the shouting down of speakers.
It won’t be due to judges being mocked and bullied from outside their own homes, or pro-lifers being accosted because of praying in front of abortion clinics. No, it will be because of those that knew it happened, those that heard it happened, those that saw it happen, and those sat by as it happened-and did nothing.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time this has happened; stay tuned.
“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.
Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.
But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.
In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.
“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”
Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”
An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”
Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”
Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.
So who is this overlord of information, the Virality Project?
The Stanford Internet Observatory reports that it launched the Virality Project in response to the coronavirus, to conduct “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” Stanford expanded the project in January 2020, “with colleagues at New York University, the University of Washington, the National Council on Citizenship, and Graphika.”
Beyond collaboration with state-funded universities, the Virality Project, in its own words, “built strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC, to facilitate bidirectional situational awareness around emerging narratives.” According to the Virality Project’s 2022 report, “Memes, Magnets, and Microchips Narrative Dynamics Around COVID-19 Vaccines,” “the CDC’s biweekly ‘COVID-19 State of Vaccine Confidence Insights’ reports provided visibility into widespread anti-vaccine and vaccine hesitancy narratives observed by other research efforts.”
The Virality Project’s report also championed its success in engaging six Big Tech platforms — Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter, Google (including YouTube), TikTok, Medium, and Pinterest — using a “ticket” system. The social media platforms would “review and act on” reports from the Virality Project, “in accordance with their policies.”
With the Virality Project working closely with the surgeon general and the CDC, which provided “vaccine hesitancy narratives” to the Stanford team, and the Stanford team then providing censorship requests to the tech giants, the government censorship loop was closed.
Censorship requests were not limited to Covid-19, however, with the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Election Integrity Partnership playing a similar role in providing Twitter — and presumably other Big Tech companies — requests to remove supposed election disinformation.
Earlier “Twitter Files” established that the Election Integrity Partnership was a conduit for censorship requests to Twitter for other government-funded entities, such as the Center for Internet Security. And in addition to receiving millions in government grants, during the 2020 election, the Center for Internet Security partnered with the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security — again completing the circle of government censorship we saw at play during the 2020 election cycle.
The groups involved in both the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project are also connected by government funding. The Election Integrity Partnership boasted that it “brought together misinformation researchers” from across four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. Both Graphika and the University of Washington also partnered with Stanford for the Virality Project, along with individuals from New York University and the National Council on Citizenship.
Beyond the taxpayer-funded state universities involved in the projects, Graphika received numerous Department of Defense contracts and a $3 million grant from the DOD for a 2021-2022 research project related to “Research on Cross-Platform Detection to Counter Malign Influence.” Graphika also received a nearly $2 million grant from the DOD for “research on Co-Citation Network Mapping and had previously researched “network mapping,” or the tracking of how Covid “disinformation” spreads through social media.
The Atlantic Council likewise receives federal funding, including a grant from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center awarded to its Digital Forensics Research Lab. And Stanford rakes in millions in federal grants as well.
The government funding of these censorship conduits is not the only scandal exposed by the “Twitter Files.” Rather, the internal communications of the social media giant also revealed that several censorship requests rested on bogus research.
But really, that is nothing compared to what Thursday’s “Twitter Files” revealed: a request for the censorship of truthful information, including news that certain Covid shots had been banned in some countries. And that censorship request came from a group of so-called disinformation experts closely coordinating with the government and with several partners funded with government grants — just as was the case during the 2020 election.
This all goes to show that sometimes there is a vast conspiracy at play and that the problem is not that someone is donning a tinfoil hat, but that he’s buried his head in the sand.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
The media fell head over heels for a shoddy propaganda operation spearheaded by an ex-FBI agent. Twitter, internally, understood the operation to be partisan hackery but never spoke out. Organizations full of influential ex-government officials promoted the operation. And it’s only thanks to Matt Taibbi’s most recent contribution to “The Twitter Files” that we know the full extent of institutional corruption in the mind-boggling case of Hamilton 68.
American intelligence operatives have a history of using credulous reporters to spread disinformation for political purposes. (Remember when President Nixon’s team forged cables about John F. Kennedy and tried to get them in Life? Or the fate of Jean Seberg and her baby, thanks in part to COINTELPRO and the Los Angeles Times?) We’ve learned more and more about this in the years after the Cold War, yet elite media outlets eagerly swallow tactical disinformation when it confirms their priors.
The consequence? Self-appointed disinformation police in government and media shape American politics with actual disinformation, crafted specifically to quiet dissent.
New Information
Given access to Twitter’s internal records by new CEO Elon Musk, Taibbi pulled the company’s communications surrounding Hamilton 68 and reported his findings last Friday. The project styled itself as a “dashboard” that tracked Russian disinformation on Twitter.
As Taibbi wrote, “The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked ‘to Russian influence activities online.’ It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first ‘reverse-engineered’ Hamilton’s list in late 2017.”
The files unearthed by Taibbi show Twitter’s internal audit of the Hamilton 68 list found it to be, in the words of former executive Yoel Roth, “bullish-t.”
“These accounts are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” another employee said. What Hamilton 68 was passing off as foreign disinformation was largely legitimate speech from anti-establishment American tweeters. Here’s Roth again: “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard] will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
The “dashboard” confirmed elites’ bizarre anti-Trump Russia-collusion narrative by secretly classifying as Russian activity political speech from Americans with whom they disagreed.
Who ran Hamilton 68? Created by former FBI Special Agent Clint Watts, the project was supported by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the German Marshall Fund. That means a host of powerful former government officials with long histories in and around intelligence agencies promoted the shoddy research for years or, at the very least, were complicit in Hamilton 68’s work by lending their support. Watts himself is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor. (Bill Kristol is a member of the Alliance’s advisory board.)
Institutional Corruption
It gets so much worse on three fronts: academia, Big Tech, and media.
First, Taibbi notes the suspicious research was promoted uncritically by elite American universities, including Harvard and Princeton. Second, the files show Twitter declined to call out Hamilton 68 publicly, opting to “play a longer game here,” in the words of one employee who now advises Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation.
Third, and most importantly, Twitter’s efforts to privately nudge reporters away from the story failed miserably. Taibbi found, “[Emily] Horne wrote several times that she had no luck in steering journalists away from these hack headlines. ‘Reporters are chafing,’ she wrote, adding, ‘it’s like shouting into a void.’” Horne works for the Biden administration as well.
This is a damning illustration of the institutional corruption rotting American politics and culture. You may wonder how ex-spooks could create a secret list, hide their results, pass off the research as legitimate, convince just about every major media outlet to run with the findings, convince elite universities to run with them, and keep Twitter quiet in the process. The answer is that some institutional powerbrokers are corrupt, some are inexcusably incompetent, and others are a combination.
Media Enable It All
If the media, however, had a semblance of the competence and virtue journalists claim to have, there would be much more incentive for powerful people in other institutions to stop behaving badly.
Watts and Co. did not make an honest mistake. When leftists at Twitter saw the same information, they immediately and literally called BS — privately, at least. Even their warnings could not dissuade dozens of journalists and politicians from blasting Hamilton 68’s findings to millions of Americans for years. This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.
“This was an attempt to create junk science, hide the results with a laughable excuse, and use it to bolster a false narrative that discredited a political opponent.“
Journalists did their part and took the bait. Bear in mind that NBC News and MSNBC have used Watts himself as a national security contributor for years, ignoring plenty of evidence that he was a dishonest propagandist using their airwaves to advance the interests of intelligence agencies. They actually used their own “disinformation” reporters to spread more disinformation.
My colleague Mollie Hemingway called this out all the way back in 2018, when the likes of Adam Schiff, Dianne Feinstein, and an astounding array of media outlets were promoting Hamilton 68.
“Hamilton 68 won’t let anyone review their dashboard to determine in any way if they’re tracking actual Russian propaganda bots, or just conservative Americans who, for instance, care about FISA abuse,” Hemingway wrote. “Yet Hamilton 68’s claims are repeated uncritically by a media that asks no questions about the methodology.” (Twitter seemed to be misrepresenting its internal knowledge at the time, as well.)
Five years ago, making that point was met with attacks from anti-Trump activists who engaged in amateur intellectual gymnastics to classify every argument they disliked as Russian propaganda. The effect was to turn down the volume on people who were undercutting the campaign against Trump, empowering their own false narrative. Taibbi’s reporting vindicates the people who pushed back.
Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist and host of Federalist Radio Hour. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center, co-host of the weekly news show “Counter Points: Friday” and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.
In preparation for the close of the year’s second economic quarter, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has already started the spin: We’re not in a recession if we just redefine what a recession is.
“While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” the supposedly nonpartisan group said in a blog post on Thursday.
It’s doubtful the verbal smoke and mirrors will persuade the average Americans whose grocery bills keep growing as fast as their gas tanks empty. A recession is a sustained downturn in economic activity, and many Americans can feel it without knowing what the Q2 numbers are. But it’s far from the first concept the left has simply redefined to deflect the consequences of their failed policies and ideas.
One of their favorite words to redefine, apparently as “full and unchallenged political control,” is democracy. When actual democratic processes are at work — such as when an elected majority votes not to pass a pet piece of legislation, or when issues such as abortion law are left to elected representatives of the people at the state level — leftists scream their favorite catchphrase and call it a “threat to democracy.” They’ve levied that smear at everything from our bicameral legislature to the Supreme Court to the other party in our two-party system. It’s obvious they’re not really talking about democracy in any honest sense of the word. When democracy is a threat to their power, it simply gets redefined.
Another word that’s undergone a 180-degree redefinition is racism. No longer is it considered racist to treat someone differently based on his or her skin color, and not racist to value all human beings equally. Instead, if you’re not promoting theories that “remedy … past discrimination [with] present discrimination,” as critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi suggests, you are clearly a racist according to the left’s new dictionary. Do you believe in meritocracy? Racist. Think people are responsible for their own choices, and it’s neither possible nor beneficial for the government to dole out equivalent outcomes to everyone by force? Doubly racist. The new liturgy says that true equality lies in teaching some children that they’re part of a hopelessly oppressive system and other children that they’re hopelessly oppressed.
On the subject of pitting people against each other, the term “vaccine” has been ridiculously redefined to cover for the incompetence of the people who profit from them. After the shot that was promised to protect people from Covid transmission and infection failed to ward off either, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention simply changed the definition of “vaccine” to fit the narrative. “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” was quietly altered to “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Barely a week later, Merriam-Webster followed suit by changing the definition of “anti-vaxxer” from someone who opposes vaccines to someone who doesn’t believe the government should mandate Covid shots.
Just last week, as part of the trans-crazed campaign to redefine what a woman is, Merriam-Webster added“having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” to its definition of “female.” Categories such as “men” and “women” that are based in biological reality don’t suit the agenda that seeks to abolish those realities from minds and bodies. So rather than advocate their agenda within the bounds of reality, the left simply attempts to redefine reality itself. It’s apparent in the push to call women by the objectifying terms “pregnant persons,” “menstruating people,” etc. We saw it when then-Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson told Congress she couldn’t define what a woman is, and it’s obvious in the attempts to put confused men in women’s prisons, shelters, and bathrooms. The reality of womanhood is in the way, so it’s being redefined out of existence.
And while abortion advocates lately have been willing to defend the act of killing a baby in the womb even with the understanding that it takes a human life, for years they’ve pushed their agenda by redefining an unborn baby as a “clump of cells” or some other dehumanizing description.
On any of those topics and more, leftists and their allies in Big Tech also persistently redefine any dissenting opinions or perspectives as disinformation,using that disingenuous label to erase opposition from channels of discourse.
Of course, many people who hear them prattle about “disinformation,” “birthing persons,” “anti-racism,” “threats to democracy,” and their host of other buzzwords know those words are nonsense. We can tell, as George Orwell wrote in 1946, that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
But, as he noted, “the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” The danger is in allowing these redefinitions of reality to be said, unchallenged, until enough people forget they could ever be challenged at all.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,”he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”
You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”
“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”
And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.
“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the organized left’s hard work.
The New York Post’s exclusive story dropped like a grenade less than a month before Election Day, providing “smoking-gun emails” showing that the younger Biden introduced his father “to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The emails, the Post explained, were obtained from a computer dropped off and apparently forgotten at a repair shop in Delaware. Under the terms of the repair agreement, the store’s owner took possession of the laptop when it was deemed to be abandoned. Twitter and Facebook, though, determined without any evidence that the emails were actually “hacked materials” and thus distributed in violation of their terms of use agreements.
Facebook quickly acted to limit the reach of the story, while Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking the Post’s account and preventing other users from sharing its story or even pictures from it. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Joe Biden presidential campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s, and the younger Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went on the record a few days later with documents that confirmed the Post’s reporting, which seemed to uncover an international bribery scheme.
It didn’t matter. Once 50 obviously partisan intelligence officials issued an evidence-free statement calling the laptop materials “Russian disinformation,” it was determined that they would be censored in both legacy and social media.
Of course, more than a year after Biden was safely elected, both The New York Times and Washington Post confirmed that the laptop was genuine, but the censorship did its job: A Media Research Center poll of swing state voters confirmed that 16 percent of Biden supporters would have changed their votes had they heard of the laptop story, including 4 percent who would have switched their vote to Trump. This obviously would have swung the entire election to Trump, but that would have been an unacceptable result for the leftist cabal intent on “fortifying” democracy by stacking the deck against him. In light of the Media Research Center’s findings, social media censorship was very possibly the most effective way they did it. And naturally they had to brag about it in Time.
“Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, the viral force of social media and the involvement of foreign meddlers made disinformation a broader, deeper threat to the 2020 vote,” Ball reported. “Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying this problem a few years ago. She piloted a nameless, secret project, which she has never before publicly discussed, that tracked disinformation online and tried to figure out how to combat it.”
She ultimately concluded that engaging with this supposedly “toxic content” or trying to debunk it was ineffective, so “the solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.”
This research armed liberal activists to pressure social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to far more aggressively and creatively enforce their rules, prompting a crackdown on “disinformation” that was in fact completely accurate. Because it was harmful to the effort to “save democracy” and defeat the “autocratic” Trump, it was censored.
“Democracy won in the end,” Ball concluded. “The will of the people prevailed. But it’s crazy, in retrospect, that this is what it took to put on an election in the United States of America.”
This reveals the real threat of Musk’s Twitter takeover: If it is no longer possible to suppress factual information in the name of rescuing democracy from its alleged enemies, then those enemies (read: Republicans) might start winning more elections. And that is simply unacceptable.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
If outfits like the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” along with Big Tech’s faceless “fact-checkers,” ever get a total monopoly on dictating reality, the result will be a 24/7 mix of falsehoods with the occasional limited hangout to cover up their lies. The icing on this fake cake is the use of conferences about disinformation, such as the recent stunt at the University of Chicago that served as cover for justifying political censorship. There former President Obama presented the perfect picture of psychological projection: a panel of propagandists accusing others of wrongthink.
The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, for example, sought to censor the reality of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal by announcing she didn’t find it “interesting.” See how that works? Truth depends upon how our elites personally feel about what should be true. But it gets much worse, because political censorship creates deep dysfunction in society. In fact, the surest way to kill a democracy is to practice political censorship under the guise of protecting society from disinformation.
Censorship causes disinformation. It’s the grandaddy of disinformation, not a solution to it. The sooner everyone recognizes this obvious fact, the better off we’ll be. Whenever a self-anointed elite sets up a Ministry of Truth, the link between censorship and disinformation becomes clear. Before long, they invent reality and punish anyone who expresses a different viewpoint.
So, it’s no small irony that those who claim to be protecting “democracy” from disinformation are the biggest promoters of disinformation and greatest destroyers of real democracy. Their dependence on censorship obstructs the circulation of facts. It prevents any worthwhile exchange of ideas.
Unchecked Censorship Isolates People
Consider what happens if a society is only permitted one propagandistic narrative while all other ideas and information are silenced. People start self-censoring to avoid social rejection. The result is a form of imposed mental isolation. Severely isolated people tend to lose touch with reality. The resulting conformity also perpetuates the censorship. This is unnatural and dangerous because human beings depend on others to verify what’s real. People weren’t able to verify reality in Nazi Germany, during Joseph Stalin’s Reign of Terror, or during Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution. All were societies in the grip of mass hysteria because of ruthless censorship to protect a narrative.
As psychiatrist Joost Meerloo noted in his book “The Rape of the Mind,” no matter how well-meaning political censorship might be, it creates dangerous conformity of thought: “the presence of minority ideas, acceptable or not, is one of the ways in which we protect ourselves against the creeping growth of conformist majority thinking.”
The only way we can strengthen ourselves against such contagion is through real freedom of speech that allows fully open discussion and debate. However, if we’re confined by Big Tech to a relentless echo chamber and punished for expressing different thoughts, we’ll just keep getting more and more disinformation. In fact, we are now drowning in the distortions produced by “fact-checkers.” Take, for example, narratives that promote the gender confusion and sexualization of children. Public school teachers routinely post TikTok videos of themselves spewing forth their gender confusion. And if someone calls out Disney for its open grooming of children, Twitter suspends them.
If we never push back against such absurdities, we ultimately end up in a state of mass delusion, each of us a cell in a deluded hive mind, obedient to commands about what to say, how to act, and what to think. To get an idea of what that looks like in a population, check out this clip from North Korea:
One of the most telling incidents of censorship over the past year was YouTube and Twitter’s take-down of virologist and vaccine inventor Dr. Robert Malone, claiming he was “spreading misinformation”—i.e., spreading a second opinion—about Covid vaccines and treatments. But big tech saw an even bigger threat in Malone’s discussion of Mattias Desmet’s study of Mass Formation Psychosis (MFP) on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. This is a big reason Spotify was under pressure to de-platform Rogan entirely. Open discussion of such things would erode the illusions big media and big tech so doggedly prop up.
Malone explained how a propaganda-saturated population can end up in a state of mass hypnosis that renders people incapable of seeing reality. He described Desmet’s theory about how social isolation, a high level of discontent, and a strong sense of free-floating anxiety are keys to the development of this psychosis.
The anxiety is so painful that it causes people to cling, trancelike, to any narrative that seems to offer stability. Once all other views are censored, people become so invested in the narrative that they cannot consider any alternative views. They will even mob anyone who endangers the narrative. This phenomenon was prevalent in the German population under Nazism. Their obedience to the propaganda rendered them incapable of understanding any opposing narrative.
Mass psychosis should not sound farfetched. There’s nothing new about it. Hundreds of instances of mass hysteria are documented. In the 19th century, Scottish journalist Charles MacKay wrote up a whole catalog of them. In 2015 medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew co-authored a compendium of popular delusions or “mass sociogenic illness.”
Most past incidents of mass hysteria have been confined to geographic regions, such as the witch trials in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. But with the internet accessible and addictive in the 2020s, the possibility of mass delusion on a global scale is upon us. Censorship—in the name of protecting “democracy” from disinformation—is the key to creating it.
Propagandists Guard Their Illusions Like Magicians
By definition, propaganda aims to psychologically affect people and change their attitudes. So, our social survival depends upon becoming aware of such phenomena. Building self-awareness about our vulnerability to crowd psychology would serve as a sort of psychological vaccine. Of course, elites do not want us even entertaining the possibility that we can be manipulated or vulnerable to social and psychological pressures. Propagandists are illusionists by nature. If their illusion falls apart, then the game is over for them. This is why they depend so heavily on the slur “conspiracy theorist” to distract us from the truth and from their use of censorship to cut us off from other ideas.
The late Nobel laureate Doris Lessing spoke against the dangers of social conformity and censorship in 1986. She noted there was a great body of knowledge that was continuing to be built about the laws of crowd psychology and social contagion. It was odd that we weren’t applying this knowledge to improve our lives. Lessing concluded that no government in the world would willingly help its citizens resist group pressures and learn to think independently. We have to do it ourselves. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and it sure looks like the keepers of this secret knowledge use it as a means of social control.
No sane person would want to live inside the boxes that the censors who claim to be fighting disinformation are building around us. If we want to escape this Twilight Zone existence, we must destroy that canard and insist on real freedom of speech everywhere.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
“They insist that women’s choices are not truly free.”
There’s nothing more offensive to me than an article that leaps off the cliff in the first sentence by dropping the “as a woman, I…” bomb.
It doesn’t matter how the sentence ends; what matters is that the author, whoever she may be, believes that on some level her gender proves her point for her.
We’re meant to accept everything that follows because to dissent is to deny not only her opinion, but her equal footing in society.
Women in America are the freest in the world, yet many feminists tell us women are oppressed. They advocate this falsehood through victim mentality propaganda and misleading statistics, such as the gender wage gap myth. In five minutes, American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers tells you the truth about feminism.
One of the biggest mistakes the GOP has ever made is to think of women as this mysterious demographic, unattainable and uncomprehending in their pearls and their Ann Taylor sweater sets. For too long, we’ve let the left control the narrative and push this toxic idea that women are somehow “less than” because of policies Republicans support.
Like Christina says in the video, women today are the “freest and most liberated in human history.” Women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the founders of the first female fraternities are remembered not because they asserted their gender as the worthiest part of themselves, but because they asserted their personhood in a world that resisted their participation in history-making.
I can’t be the only one who believes that Susan B. Anthony would literally gag on her own irrepressible anger if she saw this happening in society:
From spearheading a constitutional amendment securing the right to vote, to dressing up as vaginas and yelling at passers by about coat hanger abortions, you’ve totally come a long way, baby.
Totally.
Meanwhile, women as a group are doing great, but modern feminists are so wrapped up in their own dogma that they literally are incapable of acknowledging how far we’ve come:
These feminists hardly acknowledge women’s progress. Yes, they concede that some advances have been made, but the fact that most women reject their activist brand of feminism and think of themselves as “free” is for this crowd proof of just how entrenched patriarchy and inequality truly are. Women are so oppressed, they don’t even know it.
Feminists do everything they can—even going so far as to use flawed statistics on the gender wage gap, depression, eating disorders, and even criminal victimization—to convince women that “their choices are not truly free.”
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
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