President Joe Biden's administration has been lambasted for its efforts to suppress speech such as in the Missouri v. Biden and Jordan's investigation into the CCDH's potential role in the big government's censorship regime on August 3, 2023. CCDH was ordered to submit records to the Committee detailing its interactions with the U.S. government and the executive branch, however, it refused to comply. So, now the group has been subpoenaed and must respond by September 29.
#NEWS:@Jim_Jordan subpoenas the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
CCDH has admitted to directly engaging with the Executive Branch and Big Tech about content moderation. pic.twitter.com/yME4Sdlr2X
— Weaponization Committee (@Weaponization) August 30, 2023
In a series of September 5 tweets, Jordan wrote: "The UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed that Robert Kennedy Jr. & 11 others were responsible for 65 percent of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media. But CCDH's absurd claim about the so-called 'Disinformation Dozen' was itself disinformation." He continued: "First, that 65 percent stat? CCDH was off by quite a bit. Facebook knew the actual number was closer to 0.05 percent. Second, despite attacking Robert Kennedy Jr. and the others as the so-called 'Disinformation Dozen,' a lot of their accounts were 'completely benign' according to Facebook."
He added that FB admitted internally that a lot of the accounts were just Americans expressing 'vaccine hesitancy,' which is often 'not misinfo,' even under FB's policies. But Biden's White House did not stop repeating the fake stat every chance they got. According to him, former WH Press Secretary Jen Psaki reiterated the disinformation almost verbatim, which was published on March 24, 2021. Jordan went on with the thread saying that by April 2021, the social media platform employees were preparing a draft memo to its CEO Mark Zuckerberg about 'pressure from … the White House' to remove the Disinfo Dozen even though they did 'not believe we currently have a clear path for removal' …
"Facebook was stunned that the Biden White House seemed to actually believe the CCDH's obviously false stat and was relying on these foreign activists' 'data' to 'guide major governmental policy decisions," he said emphasizing that Biden didn't just want Zuckerberg's platform to censor the Disinformation Dozen's posts. The administration actually wanted EVERYTHING censored, across all social media platforms.
Psaki even said: "If you're banned on one social media platform, you should be banned on the other social media platforms." And that was not all, they also wanted FB to remove all URL links to off-platform websites, which would 'remove significant amounts of benign content posted by regular users, such as … personal experiences or government criticism,' he said and concluded: "Foreign activists at the CCDH feed false info to Biden. His admin then uses the full weight of the federal govt to coerce Facebook to censor Americans, Biden's critics and political opponents, and the truth." (Related: Direct government censorship of the Internet is here.)
Big Tech and Big Government's censorship collusion
Between the documentation obtained through a recent lawsuit against the White House and the Twitter files released by Elon Musk, it has been exposed that every facet of the U.S. government, including its intelligence agencies, has been involved in illegal and unconstitutional censorship, Dr. Joseph Mercola, a passionate advocate of natural medicine and a wellness champion, wrote on his website. He, too, was a victim of the censorship conspiracy.
In May 2022, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry, along with the New Civil Liberties Alliance and a few individual plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against Biden (Missouri v. Biden), arguing the White House is engaged in illegal suppression of protected speech.
Democratic Presidential aspirant Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had also filed a class action lawsuit but it was later consolidated into Missouri v. Biden. The White House did not initially cooperate and fought to keep communications secret, but on September 7, 2022, Judge Terry Doughty rejected the government's claim and ordered it to hand over any and all relevant records. And from there, at least 67 government employees across more than a dozen agencies have been found to have engaged in illegal censorship activities. The evidence also showed that these agencies and tech giants, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Wikimedia Foundation, attended Unified Strategies Group (USG) monthly meetings at which topics to be censored and suppressed were discussed.
The top topics they targeted were "COVID-19 jab refusal, especially those involving military refusals and consequences thereof, criticism against COVID restrictions and their effects on mental health, posts talking about testing positive for COVID-19 after getting the jab, personal stories of COVID-19 jab side effects, including menstrual irregularities, and worries about vaccine passports becoming mandatory."
In July, Doughty granted the plaintiffs' injunction, prohibiting federal agencies and Biden administration officials from working with social media companies to limit protected speech. The defendants appealed, but on September 8, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's injunction banning the White House, surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from influencing social media companies to remove so-called "disinformation."
The appellate court also found that the FBI had illegally coerced social media companies to remove content. "Given the record before us, we cannot say that the FBI's messages were plainly threatening in tone or manner," the judges wrote. But "we do find the FBI's requests came with the backing of clear authority over the platforms."
Check out Censorship.news to learn more about how big government uses its influence to suppress the First Amendment.
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