This shit violates the 1st Amendment and the Separation of Powers.
The private consortium that reported election “misinformation” to tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in “consultation” with federal agencies, targeted several news organizations in its dragnet.
Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 “most prominent domains across election integrity incidents” that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators.
The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN also appeared on the list, though the consortium’s after-action report emphasizes most of the mainstream media reports “were referenced as fact-checks” that played a “corrective role” against “misleading narratives.”
The report also identified the 21 “most prominent repeat spreaders [of misinformation] on Twitter,” all of them politically classified as “right.” Actor James Woods led that group, followed by The Gateway Pundit blog, Donald Trump Jr. and President Trump himself. The report emphasized 15 were verified by Twitter.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, think tank Atlantic Council, and social media analytics firm Graphika claimed their consortium had a 35% success rate getting flagged content removed, throttled or labeled.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the State Department, and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee, also flagged purported misinformation through the consortium.
“No news organization should be subjected to an enemies/censorship list for reporting newsworthy facts” Just the News Editor in Chief John Solomon said in a statement. “It’s even more egregious that this censorship machinery was prodded, aided and sanctioned by the federal government.”
Individuals and organizations named on the lists told Just the News they put no stock in the designations.
“Gateway Pundit is reviewing its legal options,” General Counsel John Burns wrote in an email, calling the “fascist, public-private partnership … a very simple nexus or entwinement case, with deep Supreme Court precedent.”
“How is this any different from what happens in Communist Party-controlled China?” publisher Jim Hoft said. “The scary thing is, the EIP is only a single office within the greater government-wide Ministry of Truth.”
“We noticed a massive drop off on and around the 2020 elections. It got really bad after [Jan. 6, 2021],” paired with apparent “increased leftwing bot activity,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk wrote in a text message.
“Compared to my engagement on every other platform, there’s no question that this new revelation fits with our lived experience on Twitter,” he said. “That tax payer dollars are being spent to censor half the country is a travesty and whoever is behind this must be held accountable.”
“The definition of ‘disinformation’ is now any reported facts that go against the world view of the political establishment,” Breitbart News Editor in Chief Alexander Marlow wrote in an email.
The consortium “relies on innuendo and insinuation to imply we are not trustworthy and thus should be censored” rather than accusing Breitbart “of publishing inaccurate stories,” he said. The company is being targeted for “having a massively powerful platform that leads the political conversation every single day.”
“We’re in the middle of what I would call the ‘Great Suppression,'” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told Just the News. He was suspended by Twitter for several months for comments on hydroxychloroquine.
“Censorship is a civil rights issue,” he wrote in a text message. “Not only do we have the right to speak, but we have the right to petition the government and be free from retaliation.”
“This is the destruction of American liberty right before our eyes,” conservative activist Pamela Geller wrote in an email. She called it “more than just campaign rhetoric … This is a fascist regime aiming to criminalize political dissent.”
Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec said “the crooked scumbags that run the regime target me so often” because they are “terrified” of him.
“We are not going to stop fighting for freedom until their entire edifice [is] torn down,” he vowed.
The consortium report said it identified domains that were “linked to by more than 500 tweets or retweets” in multiple incidents, and further explained the role some of them allegedly played in an appendix on “additional partisan news outlets.”
……The appendix says Just the News “produced stories that applied political commentary to narratives asserting election fraud and was involved in spreading the Nevada Whistleblower narrative,” referring to an affidavit alleging that county supervisors ignored mismatches between names and signatures on mail-in ballots.
“The documents indicate we were flagged for reporting on a sworn declaration that prompted litigation in Nevada,” noted Solomon. “The allegations were widely reported, including in the Washington Post and local news sites. One voter admitted she was registered four times because of faulty signature detection. The allegations even prompted a judge to let the Trump campaign review one of the signature verification machines.”
The allegations “also were bolstered by a local reporter’s claim he was able to fool the election system and register multiple times under different names with the same signature,” Solomon continued. “In the end, the lawsuit was dismissed. Just the News covered this saga. Coverage of a public court case cannot and should not be censored, flagged or labeled as disinformation. We are exploring our legal options.”
The report is particularly harsh on the Epoch Times, accusing it of “spreading mis- and disinformation in the Chinese-language media sphere” such as “Hunter Biden’s alleged ties to the Chinese government.”
Memos from the partnership that the presidential son operated with a prominent Chinese business executive, however, show that the Biden family pursued more than 20 major deals during the Trump administration for Chinese interests seeking U.S. energy assets.
House Oversight Committee Ranking Member James Comer (R-Ky.) recently told Just the News he has secured cooperation from two former business associates of Hunter Biden.
Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.
In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with “monitoring intensif[ying] significantly” the week before and after Election Day.
The tickets sought removal, throttling and labeling of content that raised questions about mail-in ballot integrity, Arizona’s “Sharpiegate,” and other election integrity issues of concern to conservatives.
……The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any laws that abridge free speech, and courts have ruled that prohibition extends to federal agencies funded by the legislative branch. Participants were acutely aware that federal agencies’ role in the effort strayed into uncharted legal territory.
……It wasn’t just blogs and individual social media users whose content was targeted for removal and throttling as “repeat spreaders” of misinformation. News and opinion organizations, including the New York Post, Fox News, Just the News and SeanHannity.com were also targeted.
Questioning election integrity and pointing out that Hunter Biden’s own emails revealed his connections to ChiCom business partners and his Chinese mistress to the Chinese government, makes you a target for the DHS and Big Tech.
Big Tech helped rig the 2020 election by using their symbiotic relationship with the Dems to control the narrative; which for many low information voters, Dems especially, is not difficult. Facebook meddled with the 2020 election by manipulating algorithms that diverted readers away from journalism and news, to deliver more ‘updates’ from their friends and family. The change was disguised as friendly suggestions to make sure users didn’t miss stories from friends. But the main result was to reduce the number of interactions Facebook users had with credible journalism outlets.
Both Facebook and Twitter tried to suppress reporting in October 2020 about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter went on a suspension orgy over the New York Post articles that exposed Hunter Biden’s emails and the Biden Crime Family involvement with Ukraine.
All 3 Big Tech CEOs have decided on a global censorship database. The goal is to suppress the free speech of people, groups, and organizations they hate.
The impact of the Biden family corruption on policy and national security is abetted by their praetorian guards in the DHS, FBI, and the DOJ.
Related articles:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-deals-china-military-documentary
Related post:
https://sfcmac.com/federal-court-big-tech-has-no-freewheeling-first-amendment-right-to-censor/