(ConservativeJournal.org) – A recent report from the House Judiciary Committee has unveiled communications indicating that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) played a role in the establishment of a “disinformation” group at Stanford University. This group aimed to influence and restrict Americans’ speech leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
The report, encompassing 103 pages and compiled by the House panel, highlighted the way this group – Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – collaborated with DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and prominent tech companies to identify, suppress, and delete specific online content.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, emphasized how the communications revealed that both the federal government and universities had pressured social media platforms to censor content, encompassing truthful information, humor, and political opinions.
This pressure was seemingly skewed in favor of one side of the political spectrum. Real content posted by Conservatives and Republicans was tagged as “misinformation,” while false information from liberals and Democrats was not touched or reported by moderators.
The report argued that the concept of disinformation was essentially a political maneuver, frequently deployed against individuals and communities that held viewpoints at odds with In May 2020, DHS conveyed its inability to openly endorse a misinformation flagging system. Two months later, in July 2020, Stanford’s EIP initiated a similar effort.
An email sent on July 31, 2020, by a senior director at the Digital Forensic Research Lab from Atlanta, a partner of EIP, described the role of CISA in this censorship campaign. Graham Brookie described their partnership with DHS/CISA, focusing on election integrity issues and weekly communications regarding disinformation.
The report revealed that CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force employed a practice referred to as “switchboarding,” a process in which the federal government forwarded requests from state and local election officials to social media platforms for content removal.
Several CISA emails featured in the report contained disclaimers asserting that their requests were “voluntary” and that the agency did not have the ability to suppress online content.
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