Almost two years after the 2020 presidential election, evidence is still emerging of a coordinated and unprecedented effort to control the information that was available to voters.
A shocking expose by Just the News shows that the federal government worked closely with private left-wing groups on a wide-ranging campaign of propaganda and censorship targeting online “misinformation.”
Government censored info during 2020 election
The nexus of the campaign was a group called the Election Integrity Partnership, which boasted of the success of its “whole-of-society” effort in a nearly 300-page report recommending it as a model for future elections.
The EIP’s model involved close collaboration with government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency, “civil society” groups, journalists at liberal outlets like NBC and the New York Times, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, and even overtly partisan groups like the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP.
The structure of the project enabled the government to circumvent the First Amendment by using “tickets” to alert the EIP to monitor alleged misinformation. One of the project’s leaders admitted that it raised “very real First Amendment questions.”
Most of the tickets involved “exaggerated” election issues, but the project led to social media platforms taking action on 35% of flagged hyperlinks, with 21% labeled, 13% removed and 1% soft-blocked.
Elaborate propaganda effort
The project was conceived in June 2020, and in the days before and after Election Day, its “analysts” were working up to 20 hours a day. The core goals included not only tracking “misinformation,” but sharing “clear and accurate counter-messaging” with government officials.
The report boasts that the project led to “pre-bunking” that “helped journalists contextualize what they were seeing,” and describes the lack of a federal agency dedicated to controlling election misinformation as “a critical gap for non-governmental entities to fill.”
They even drew up lists of top offenders — all conservative influencers, of course, including Donald Trump himself — and targeted right-leaning news websites like Fox News and the New York Post.
Biden paid them off?
Since coming into power, Joe Biden has aggressively ramped up this kind of wink-and-nod censorship in collaboration with social media companies. In fact, the four different groups that comprise the EIP, the Atlantic Council, Graphika, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, have received millions of dollars in grant funding from the Biden administration to help their fight against “misinformation.”
Chris Krebs, the former CISA director who led the EIP’s censorship effort from inside the Trump administration, is the same guy often cited by the left for calling 2020 the “most secure” election in American history — an utterly preposterous statement, in view of what has come to light.
The full details of the government’s shadowy meddling with democracy, in what TIME magazine once boasted was an elaborate “conspiracy” to “fortify” the election, are still being unearthed. Nevertheless, President Biden declared in a recent speech that those who refuse to believe the 2020 election was “free and fair” are effectively enemies of the state.