I’m From the Government, And I’m Here to Shut You Up
By Chris Wright, 3/7/23
Your federal government is trying to shut you up. That’s very twisted, considering the purpose of government is to protect your rights, including your right to free speech.
During a congressional hearing last month, it came to light the federal government communicated through a private cloud server called JIRA with social media companies and leftist nonprofits to censor American voices in violation of the First Amendment. The federal agencies involved include DHS and the Cybersecurity and the Infrastructure Security Agency. The leftist nonprofits included the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Election Directors, and the Election Integrity Partnership whose partners include centers at Stanford University and the University of Washington. Twitter censor Yoel Roth said he could not recall being involved in JIRA, but documentary evidence showed he was. His actions converted Twitter from a private company into a state actor, an extension of the government willingly engaged in censorship.
Separately, the 17th release of Twitter files shows a government-funded entity and government officials asked Twitter to take action against 40,000 accounts, many of which were ordinary conservatives. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab made the request. The Lab is funded by the U.S. government, specifically, the Global Engagement Center which is an inter-agency group led by the State Department. Center members include the FBI, DHS, NSA, and the CIA. Its stated mission is to expose foreign disinformation. It secretly engaged subcontractors who embarked on blacklisting accounts that merely cited foreign news sources. In this case, Twitter wasn’t buying it, but media outlets were brought in to pressure Twitter in the name of stopping foreign disinformation. This was reminiscent of another government-sponsored guilt-by-association scheme targeting Americans, the Hamilton-68 dashboard revealed in Twitter file release #15. The Global Engagement Center was throwing government money around – tens of millions of dollars – giving the subcontractors every incentive to come through with phony allegations.
The Biden administration threw more tens of millions at something called the International Fund for Public Interest Media (IFPIM). It partnered with Samantha Powers’ agency, USAID, to censor Americans and free speech around the world. This information appeared in a USAID press release that has since been taken off the agency’s website. One of IFPIM’s founders is BBC Media Action. The BBC also founded the Trusted News Initiative which includes such media outlets as the Associated Press, Washington Post, and Reuters. The Initiative appears to have been an extension of government engaged in suppressing truthful information about COVID around the world.
That’s four really big government censorship schemes you can stack on top of the wide-ranging government censorship enterprise being investigated in federal court by the Missouri and Louisiana state attorneys general. But there’s more. Another State Department official asked Twitter to delete accounts the official claimed were controlled by the Russians when they were not. The State Department also gave money to a radical Leftist group based in London, the Global Disinformation Index, which attempted to steer advertising dollars away from conservative news outlets in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere in the name of fighting disinformation. The New York Post was among the conservative outlets targeted.
And don’t forget DHS had started up a Disinformation Governance Board before it was found out and shut down.
Connect the dots and what do you get? A picture of a rogue, out-of-control federal government that is, not only not protecting your rights, but is actively engaged in trying to take them away. All in the name of the truth, of course. But there are very good reasons we don’t want the government in the business of deciding for others what is true and what is not. One of those reasons is that the government can be dead wrong, the most recent example being how spectacularly wrong the federal government was in its bone-headed COVID masking and lock-down policies. Think about that the next time jack-booted authoritarian government thugs say they need to suppress information to save you.
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