(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The House Weaponization Subcommittee released a 104-page report, detailing how Homeland Security pressured social media platforms to censor content in 2020 via a shadowy network of academic agencies and government-funded organizations.
The report noted that DHS officials knew they couldn’t directly censor the content themselves. Instead, government used proxies, the report explained.
“Enter the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a consortium of ‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) that worked directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department, to monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election,” the report stated.
“Created in the summer of 2020 ‘at the request’ of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.”
According to the report, the EIP would generate “misinformation reports,” which the DHS would then present to social media companies to encourage them to censor certain content.
The DHS would tell the social media companies that they are under no legal obligation to act on the report’s recommendations. But the DHS would also warn that the misinformation reports might be provided to other law enforcement agencies.
The Weaponization Subcommittee argued that this was an implicit threat to those companies.
“Put plainly, a lawyer for one of the social media companies would see that DHS and law enforcement agencies (such as the FBI) may know the company received the misinformation report, but only DHS committed to not take any unfavorable action against the company based on the company’s “decisions about how or whether to use this information,’” the report argued.
“[In other words] the FBI or other law enforcement agencies may take action if the social media company did not censor appropriately.”
According to the report, conservatives were most impacted by this DHS-funded scheme. Those affected include Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie—all having their social media accounts censored at some point during 2020.
“While the EIP disproportionately targeted conservatives, Americans of all political affiliations were victims of censorship,” the report added.
The report’s findings describe what journalists have deemed the “censorship industrial complex.”
It turns out, a CIA spook played a major role in establishing this network, according to an April article from Twitter Files reporter Michael Shellenberger.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
