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The federal government 'laundered' requests to censor Americans through the Election Integrity Partnership, according to the House Judiciary Committee.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an interim staff report Monday evening revealing that agencies of the federal government under former President Donald Trump conspired with Stanford University to target conservative media personalities for social media censorship recommendations in the runup to the 2020 presidential election.

The report details how, in the summer of 2020 leading up to Trump’s reelection campaign against current President Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) worked with Stanford and other entities to establish the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).

The EIP was essentially a system by which “external stakeholders,” including various federal agencies and entities that receive taxpayer funding, submitted “misinformation” reports that triggered searches for similar offending content, and then submitted censorship recommendations to major online communication platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. 

The report describes this system as essentially a way for the government to “launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.” It targeted content “across the political spectrum, but essentially conservatives,” including Trump, Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, conservative news outlet Newsmax, conservative satire website The Babylon Bee, The Federalist editors Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway, Fox News host Sean Hannity, conservative attorney Harmeet Dhillon, and more. Targeted content ranged from truthful but politically inconvenient information, political opinions, and even jokes.

“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,” the report notes.

The revelations illustrate the government collusion with Big Tech’s efforts to politically slant information on their platforms and censor, suppress, or otherwise discriminate against ideologically opposed users have been going on far longer than previously known, and were in fact another instance of executive agencies and officials working against Trump politically while he still headed the executive branch of the federal government.

Since 2020, Biden has been even more direct about using federal influence to bring about private censorship. In 2021, the president declared that Facebook was “killing people” by not censoring more COVID-19 “misinformation” and then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted that the administration had been “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.”

Next year, the U.S. Supreme Court is slated to hear Murthy v. Missouri, which concerns whether the White House’s encouragement of private censorship constitutes a violation of the First Amendment, and will have wide-ranging implications for activities like those exposed by the Judiciary Committee.