RED ALERT: Feds Paid Four Private Companies To Silence Trump, His Family, And Supporters On Social Media Around 2020 Election

(Patriot Insider) – It’s not exactly a well kept secret that the radical left in the United States has been finding ways to censor Americans on the right from being able to share information and points of view that are contrary to the narrative they want pushed by the masses, claiming that most of the stuff conservatives are sharing is “misinformation” or “fake news.”

However, Just the News uncovered that the federal government has been using a private entity to specifically target millions of social posts back in 2020, which, of course, could have played a critical role in helping to sway the outcome of the presidential election.

The story said that a network of four private companies worked in partnership with the both the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to censor a staggering number of social media posts that they considered to be misinformation during the presidential election in 2020. These groups were then rewarded with millions of dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to a series of interviews and other documentation that was obtained by Just the News.

“The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship may be expanding,” Just the News said.

“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 and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech,” the article continued.

Three liberal organizations — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause, and the NAACP — were also empowered by agencies within the federal government to file tickets that sought after censorship of content. The Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, funded by Homeland, was also given access.

“In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with ‘monitoring intensif[ying] significantly’ the week before and after Election Day,” Just the News stated.

The tickets that were filed sought to remove, throttle, and label any sort of content that might raise questions concerning mail-in ballot integrity, the “Sharpiegate” incident from Arizona, or any other election integrity issues that might be seen as concerning by conservatives (screenshot here).

The network of groups managed to create quite a high success rate concerning their mission in 2020. Just the News explained, “Platforms took action on 35% of flagged URLs, with 21% labeled, 13% removed and 1% soft-blocked, meaning users had to reject a warning to see them. The partnership couldn’t determine how many were downranked.”

The article then said, “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.”

Ex-State Department official, Mike Benz, who was actually supposed to be the department’s first-ever digital freedom ambassador, had former President Donald Trump not had his second term yanked from underneath him, found about the consortium’s work while doing research for his new Foundation for Freedom Online nonprofit organization, which advocates for free speech around the world, while also keeping a close eye on censorship here in the U.S.

Benz took an opportunity to speak with the folks at Just the News about the consortium, stating it was the largest federally-sanctioned censorship operation he’d ever seen, which was a snapshot of what was to come with the Disinformation Governance Board — now scrapped — one that’s likely to grow in future elections.

“If you trace the chronology, you find that there was actually 18 months’ worth of institutional work to create this very apparatus that we now know played a significant role in the censorship of millions of posts for the 2020 election and has ambitious sights for 2022 and 2024,” he remarked.

“Amazingly, there are now so many Ministry of Truth functionaries within the Department of Homeland Security,” Benz continued. “There are so many Ministry of Truth tasks, so many Ministry of Truth points of contact, so many different Ministry of Truth, policies for whether to remove something, reduce it, slap a fact checking label on it.”

So who, exactly, was the consortium targeting? Well, another piece by Greg Piper that was published by Just the News reveals there were a total of 20 news sites that were targeted by the groups.

“Websites for Just the News, New York Post, Fox News, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Epoch Times and Breitbart were identified among the 20 ‘most prominent domains across election integrity incidents’ that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership and its collaborators,” Piper wrote.

Weirdly, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times were also included on the list (screenshot here), though the after action report from the consortium used these sources in a “corrective role” against “misleading narratives.”

“The report also identified the 21 ‘most prominent repeat spreaders [of misinformation] on Twitter,’ all of them politically classified as ‘right.’ Actor James Woods led that group, followed by The Gateway Pundit blog (response here), Donald Trump Jr. and President Trump himself. The report emphasized 15 were verified by Twitter,” Piper continued.

Georgia Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde, who is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, referred to the revelations as “stunning” going on to say that the 2020 operation could be summed up as the federal government sanctioning and outsourcing censorship, in clear violation of the First Amendment.

“The government knows that they cannot do it by themselves because of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits it,” Clyde stated during an interview on the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show. “And then they decide to partner with another entity, a private entity. a social media platform or university.”

“And then they say, ‘Hey, we’re going to feed you information that we think is disinformation, or we want to be disinformation. And then you go ahead and you do the de-platforming. You label it as misinformation, or disinformation.'”

Clyde then went on to say that he fully expects the GOP to investigate the consortium next year should they manage to gain control of Congress in the midterm elections in November. He also revealed he’s currently working on a piece of legislation called the Free Speech Defense Act in order to tackle the issue of censorship.

“This bill would prevent the federal government from labeling anything through a proxy entity, like a social media company, as disinformation, labeling it as misinformation or labeling it as true,” he then mentioned. “And then it would also give an opportunity for those people who have been injured by it to take legal action.”

Also, we're getting the band back together (with several improvements) for the midterms — working with a range of collaborators to address rumors, misinformation, and disinformation around election processes and procedures: https://t.co/IuwvV27R1L. Follow @2020Partnership.

— Kate Starbird (@katestarbird) August 7, 2022

Our team has been working on a "threat framework" for anticipating the spread of election-related rumors. Check out the table, thread, & blog. https://t.co/0rlQuhVtLb https://t.co/d2Dq67Vk3K pic.twitter.com/UY9v7j9RBn

— Kate Starbird (@katestarbird) September 24, 2022

These organizations banded together in order to silence the voices of millions of Americans who were attempting to share need-to-know information concerning shenanigans that went down during an election that might have compromised the security and integrity of our voting system and were then financially rewarded by the Biden administration for the work they had done.

Let that sink in for a second. This didn’t happen in a foreign country. It happened right here at home. In the land of the free, the home of the brave. Our Constitution is being ignored by those in power. Showing up at the polls this November has never been more important.

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