A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News
The Consortium
- The Consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika
- It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links or social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech
- 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
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
- Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called the revelations "stunning" and said the 2020 operation amounted to the federal government sanctioning and outsourcing censorship
The partnership's members published the 292-page public report in March 2021
- 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 Sean Hannity, were also targeted
- "Platform interventions" in response to "delegitimization of election results," for example, went from uniformly "non-comprehensive" in August 2020 to fully comprehensive by Election Day
The Partnership’s Purpose
- The partnership limited itself to flagging social media content “intended to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters as to election processes, or delegitimize election results without evidence”
- “This limited federal role reveals a critical gap for non-governmental entities to fill”.
- Increasingly pervasive mis- and disinformation creates an urgent need for collaboration across government, civil society, media, and social media platforms
The partners all received federal grants from the Biden administration in the next two years
- The National Science Foundation awarded the Stanford and UW projects $3 million in August 2021 to study ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation
- Graphika, also known as Octant Data, received its first listed federal grant several weeks after the 2020 election
- SIO and Graphika collaborated on the Virality Project, which tracks and analyzes purported "COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and social media narratives related to vaccine hesitancy."
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