Quote:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Following the 2016 presidential election, a sensationalized narrative emerged that foreign “disinformation” affected the integrity of the election. These claims, fueled by left-wing election denialism about the legitimacy of President Trump’s victory, sparked a new focus on the role ofsocial media platforms in spreading such information.1 “Disinformation” think tanks and “experts,” government task forces, and university centers were formed, all to study and combat the alleged rise in alleged mis- and disinformation. As the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have shownpreviously, these efforts to combat so-called foreign influence and misinformation quickly mutated to include domestic—that is, American—speech.2

The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly limits the government’s role in monitoring and censoring Americans’ speech, but these disinformation researchers (often funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars) were not strictly bound by these constitutional guardrails. What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex.

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. Created in the summer of 2020 “at the request” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA),3 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.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the American public and lawmakers debated the merits of unprecedented, mid-election-cycle changes to election procedures.4 These issues, like all contemporary discourse about questions of political import, were extensively discussed on the world’s largest social media platforms—the modern town square. But as American citizens, including candidates in these elections, attempted to exercise their First Amendment rights on these platforms, their constitutionally protected speech was intentionally suppressed as a consequence of the federal government’s direct coordination with third-party organizations, particularly universities, and social media platforms.5

Speech concerning elections—the process by which Americans select their representatives—is of course entitled to robust First Amendment protections.6 This bedrock principle is even more critical as it relates to speech by political candidates.7 But as disinformation “experts” acknowledge, the labeling of any kind of speech is “inherently political”8 and itself a form of “censorship.”9

This interim staff report details the federal government’s heavy-handed involvement in the creation and operation of the EIP, which facilitated the censorship of Americans’ political speech in the weeks and months leading up to the 2020 election. This report also publicly reveals for the first time secret “misinformation” reports from the EIP’s centralized reporting system, previously accessible only to select parties, including federal agencies, universities, and Big Tech. The Committee and Select Subcommittee obtained these nonpublic reports from Stanford University only under the threat of contempt of Congress. These reports of alleged mis- and disinformation were used to censor Americans engaged in core political speech in the lead up to the 2020 election.

As this new information reveals, and this report outlines, the federal government and universities pressured social media companies to censor true information, jokes, [memes] and political opinions. This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefitted one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as “misinformation” while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors. The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives.

...



Who was being censored?

President Donald J. Trump
Senator Thom Tillis
Speaker Newt Gingrich
Governor Mike Huckabee
Congressman Thomas Massie
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene
Newsmax
The Babylon Bee
Sean Hannity
Mollie Hemingway
Harmeet Dhillon
Charlie Kirk
Candace Owens
Jack Posobiec
Tom Fitton
James O’Keefe
Benny Johnson
Michelle Malkin
Sean Davis
Dave Rubin
Paul Sperry
Tracy Beanz
Chanel Rion
An untold number of everyday Americans of all political affiliations

What was being censored?

• True information
  
• Jokes and satire
  
• Political opinions
  

D. The State Department’s Direct Participation in the EIP’s Censorship Operation (pg 61)

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is a multi-agency organization housed within the State Department, which Elon Musk has described as “[t]he worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”149 The GEC and GEC-funded entities have, on multiple occasions flagged content to social media platforms that included Americans engaged in constitutionally protected speech.

Unlike CISA’s pretext of peripheral non-involvement, the EIP openly admitted that the GEC “reported tickets” to the EIP in its final report looking back on the 2020 election cycle.151 In fact, according to that report, the GEC was one of the most frequently tagged organizations in the EIP’s Jira system.152

On October 15, 2020, Adela Levis, an “Academic and Think-Tank Liaison” with the GEC, sent an email invitation to a meeting with the title “GEC/Election Integrity Partnership.”153 In the body of the email, Levis wrote that the meeting was “to discuss a concrete idea we have for possible support of the EIP effort.”
....

EPILOGUE (pg 93)

It is no surprise that Stanford University attempted to refuse to turn over documents responsive to the Committee’s subpoena: they reveal that the EIP was not a non-partisan “school project” comprised of students and researchers interested in combatting misinformation online. Instead, from start to finish, the EIP operation worked directly with the federal government and disproportionally targeted conservative-oriented speech.

After the 2020 election, what others have deemed the “censorship industrial complex,” played out as expected. After President Trump fired CISA Director Chris Krebs in November 2020, Mr. Krebs created the Krebs Stamos Group with Alex Stamos, the head of the EIP and the SIO, in January 2021. Matt Masterson left CISA at the end of 2020 and took a position as a non-research fellow with Stanford, working with the SIO and its Virality Project.

With the election over and the American people questioning the wisdom of lockdowns and the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, the EIP reconstituted itself as the Virality Project. Again working with the federal government, the SIO launched the Virality Project as a “a global study aimed at understanding the disinformation dynamics specific to the COVID-19 crisis.” The Virality Project again used Jira tickets. Though Stanford was less explicit and specific in its recommendations for censorship as it was under the EIP model, social media platforms still dutifully removed content flagged by Stanford:

Quote:

APPENDIX I

The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have obtained documents and information from Stanford University, pursuant to a subpoena, which reveal that EIP analysts and staff made explicit recommendations to social media platforms for specific enforcement measures on at least 75 occasions in just a four-month span in the lead-up to and during the 2020 election. This appendix compiles those 75 recommendations in order of their EIP Jira ticket number. The entire Jira ticket, including comments from social media platforms, can be found by cross-referencing the archived Jira ticket data provided in Appendix II.

EIP-166 “Hello Google, . . . We recommend this ad be removed.”

EIP-321 “Recommended actions: Ban sharing links to the following sites:”

EIP-396 “Hi Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter . . . we recommend it be removed from your platforms.”

EIP-461 “Hi Twitter team – there are a number of high-profile individuals, including the President, making accusations of voter fraud . . . Given the large audiences and Pennsylvania’s swing state status, we’d recommend this content be actioned.”

EIP-511 “We recommend labeling this content and monitoring for Chinese-language keywords like election fraud and QAnon terms for action on future content.”

Quote:Appendix II is the EIP and Virality Project Jira ticket data provided to the Committee and Select Subcommittee. If the Department of Homeland Security, among others, had the ability to see what American speech was being targeted and censored, so too should the American people.

Quote:Core Mission: To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.

"Vision: A data-driven Mission Center leading U.S. inter-agency efforts to proactively address foreign adversaries’ attempts to use disinformation and propaganda to undermine U.S. interests.

The GEC

(11-07-2023, 08:34 PM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: