“The weaponization of ‘disinformation’ pseudo-experts and bureaucrats” is being exposed by the House Judiciary Committee in a new report on the federal censorship of Americans’ political speech leading up to the 2020 election. 

The government appears to have partnered with Stanford University to conceal content it deemed harmful in complete disregard of the First Amendment. Following the 2016 election, the report alleges, “efforts to combat so-called foreign influence and misinformation quickly mutated to include domestic — that is, American — speech.”

The report, released Monday by the Judiciary Committee and the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, draws upon evidence presented in a federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden. That case, which the Supreme Court has agreed to hear, concerns a “coordinated campaign” between federal officials and social media platforms to suppress public speech on issues such as Covid lockdowns and Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

The congressional report is yet another chapter in the unraveling of the federal censorship regime that the district judge in Missouri, Terry Doughty, likened to “an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” The committee’s groundbreaking discovery is that an elite American university directly coordinated with the federal government to silence public officials, influential private figures, and “an untold number of everyday Americans of all political affiliations.”

“The new evidence shows deep collaboration between CISA and allegedly private organizations to censor Americans on social media,” the founder of the civil rights group representing four of the plaintiffs in Missouri, Philip Hamburger, of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, tells the Sun. “This is grossly unconstitutional and probably a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights.”

In summer 2020, cybersecurity officials at the Department of Homeland Security and “disinformation” academics at Stanford founded the Election Integrity Partnership, a multi-agency group within the Department of State. The group was created upon the request of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which, Judge Doughty said, believes the “most critical” infrastructure “is our ‘cognitive infrastructure.’” 

“The EIP,” the report explains, “provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.” Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the group pressured platforms to target lawful speech that included statements from President Trump and speculative tweets about election integrity from both public officials and private citizens. 

The coordination was swift and simple. So-called misinformation reports were submitted to the EIP’s analysts by federal agencies or organizations. Those analysts then searched social media platforms for similarly questionable content. The posts deemed the most “offending” were sent to top technological companies with recommendations on how to stifle the content, from temporarily suspending accounts to deleting thousands of posts.

In addition to Mr. Trump, the public officials targeted by this campaign include Senator Tallis, Speaker Gingrich, Governor Huckabee, Congressman Thomas Massie, and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Among the censored media personalities are Sean Hannity, Mollie Hemingway, and Candace Owens. The news media company Newsmax and the satire website Babylon Bee were also censored.

“These censorship laundering schemes are as nefarious as it gets,” the chairman of the House oversight subcommittee that produced the documents from Stanford, Congressman Bishop, says in a post on X. “We’ll continue to expose and root them out wherever we see them.”