The Dept. of Homeland Security and executives from Facebook and Twitter often met to discuss censorship on a variety of subjects, including the Afghanistan departure, the covid-19 virus, and “racial justice,” according to papers that were leaked. This included the recently fired director of trust & safety Vijaya Gadde.
The material was obtained via leaks to the Intercept, as well as files and minutes made public as part of Missouri AG Eric Schmitt’s lawsuit against Biden’s Administration, which alleges government complicity with Big Tech to undermine Americans’ First Amendment rights.
According to the document, DHS intends to target claimed misinformation regarding “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccinations, the United States’ exit from Afghanistan, racial justice, and the nature of the United States’ support for Ukraine.”
The article also exposes an established government method for reporting “misinformation” to Facebook.
According to the Intercept:
“There is also an established method in place for government authorities to report information on Instagram or Facebook and request that it be throttled or censored using a specific Facebook site that needs a law enforcement or government email address to access. The “content request mechanism” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still operational as of this writing. DHS and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, did not reply to requests for comment. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.”
Kate Starbird, the socialist academic who oversees the “Election Integrity Partnership,” attended several of the talks between social media leaders and the administration.
According to the Intercept:
“In June, the same DHS advisory council for CISA, which includes Twitter’s head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and Kate Starbird, issued a report to the CISA director urging the government to have a larger role in creating the “information ecosystem.” According to the paper, the agency should keep a careful eye on “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, network news, hyperpartisan media, talk radio, and other internet resources.” They urged that the agency should take action to stop the “spread of misleading and false information,” with an emphasis on material that damages “important democratic institutions, such as the financial system, courts, or public health initiatives.”
The EIP offered tools to the federal government and Democratic Party organizations to suppress “misinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election, and targeted different conservative media outlets for censorship.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the consortium developed a mechanism in which state actors such as DHS and the State Dept. could file “tickets” alongside news pieces, identifying them so that Big Tech platforms might block or label them.
Aside from this obvious instance of a private-public censorship alliance, the EIP also participated in party politics, which enabled the DNC, the NAACP, and Common Cause, to submit tickets through the system.
Breitbart News, the New York Post, Fox News, and the Epoch Times were among the news sources targeted by the EIP, as were the social media accounts of notable conservatives Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, Tom Fitton, Sean Hannity, and James O’Keefe, among others.
A Twitter spokeswoman told the Intercept that “we do not cooperate with other parties when making content moderation actions, and we independently analyze content in accordance with the Twitter Rules.”
