Good day all. Currently, there is a lawsuit by several states Attorney’s General against Twitter regarding their censorship of people who went against the Progressive views of how things should be. One of the charges is that Big Tech, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. have been working with the Biden Administration to take down content they didn’t like.
Now a story has broken, originally in the Intercept, that the Department of homeland Security was actively working to suppress the 1st Amendment rights of the people. The original story goes into great detail. Instead, I am reading a summery of the details from the Post Millennial:
The Department of Homeland Security has been working to influence big tech platforms. This became originally evident when the Biden administration launched the ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board early in 2022, but has been a focus of their efforts even beyond that now-defunct unit, and before.
I wrote about the Ministry of Disinformation that the DHS wanted to set up last spring. When this came out out, it blew up spectacularly in the faces of the Biden Maladministration. It now appears that this department was just the final step in something that had been underway for some time.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt filed a lawsuit that revealed via appended meeting minutes that former Microsoft executive Matt Masterson, who was formerly an official with DHS, told a DHS director in February 2022 that “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This according to The Intercept.
Missouri is one of the states now taking legal actions against Big Tech. One of the targets is, of course, Twitter, but that was before Elon Musk bought Twitter. I’m not sure how this will affect the current litigation, since he seems to agree with the A.G.’s goals.
Prior to 2020, it was reported that DHS met with Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other platforms in order to coordinate “content moderation” operations. These meetings were part of an ongoing initiative which saw collusion and collaboration between DHS and big tech to determine how “misinformation” would be dealt with on those platforms.
Prior to 2020? I don’t see President Trump being on board with this at all, and I suspect none of his appointees at the upper levels of the DHS knew about this. I suspect it was some Obama holdovers doing this.
Areas that came under this purview included the withdrawal from Afghanistan, undertaken disastrously by President Joe Biden in August 2021 as well as the origins of the Covid-19 virus, which became controversial enough that users were kicked off social media platforms for expressing the hypothesis that the virus originated in a Wuhan, China lab. A Senate report found last week that this was the most likely scenario. Information that could undermine trust in financial institutions was also targeted.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, signed by President Donald Trump, opened the door to this as it formed a new branch within DHS, which then undertook to deal with online “disinformation.” CISA stated its understanding that the mission of that branch of DHS was “evolved,” and meant to communicate their concerns on “disinformation” to social media companies. Social media companies took DHS’ word for it.
I have a vague memory of that bill, and I suspect it was yet another badly written load of crap that the Bureaucrats promptly went overboard with. If any of you have better information, please add to the comments. What I do remember was that this bill was supposedly meant to help deal with hackers and cyber criminals.
DHS used concerns about “marginialized communities” to justify their reach.
Ayup, as expected, a bunch of bureaucrats decided to expand their mission beyond all recognition.
Much of this effort became evidence as a result of an attempt to “fight disinformation” in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. Both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spoke about their platform’s effort to suppress and censor reporting from the New York Post. They did this, in part, because the FBI had told these platforms to watch out for a “misinformation” dump.
The Government has absolutely no authority to determine what is and what isn’t “Disinformation” and certainly not tell companies to pull down what people posted. There are no “Shades of gray” here. This is flat out forbidden as a violation of the 1st Amendment.
The government had its fingers all over social media companies. DHS would tell social media companies what they wanted off the platforms via “takedown requests,” and then the platforms would submit reports to government. They would be “called on to ‘process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.'”
Forget people needing to be fired, I want people in prison.
This was specifically done with election information, which would be flagged by state election officials, submitted to DHS, which would then tell social media companies to pull it.
The new congress, assuming that the 2022 midterm election goes as many think it will, is going to bring in a number of new members who are flat our furious at the actions of the current head of the DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas. They intend to look into his blatant ignoring of immigration laws. I think we need to add will violations of the constitutional rights of the American people to the list. It is long past time to revoke the Patriot Act and disband the Department of homeland Security. We can also look at flushing the FBI down the toilet as well.
FBI official Laura Dehmlow stated her concern in March that big tech companies were not accountable to the government, saying “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable.”
“The extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans’ daily social feeds is unclear. During the 2020 election, the government flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken down, documents cited in the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit disclosed. And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items, technology platforms took action on 35 percent — either removing, labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was done ‘in consultation with CISA,’ the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” The Intercept reports.
One of the major take downs in the 2020 election was the news regarding Joe Biden’s Junkie brat, Hunter “Hoovernose” Biden’s laptop. Big Tech, starting with Twitter, looked at the data contained on the laptop, understood that if people saw it, they would know what a crook Joe Biden actually is, and re-elect the Greatest President of the 21st Century, Donald Trump to a second, well deserved term.
They simply couldn’t have that happen. The decision was quickly reached inside Twitter to block all mention of the laptop and what it contained, and block the New York Post from being able to report to the world what they had found. Since then, many people who stupidly voted for the Worst President in History, Dementia Joe Biden, have said that if they had known about that laptop and what was on it, they wouldn’t have voted for the Senile Pedophile.
When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, revealing the Biden family’s influence peddling and shady overseas business dealings with Ukraine and China, social media platforms took the bait from the government and ditched the story. Countless other mainstream media outlets followed suit, going so far as to report on why they would not report on the story, citing “hacking,” “misinformation,” and a “Russian plot.”
We also had a bunch of “Former Intelligence” managers all say this was Russian disinformation. Every one of these scumbags wanted Trump out at any costs. After the Tainted Election of 2020, and with Bumbles Dementia Biden safely installed and President*, the truth came out that everything on the laptop was valid.
All of these were incorrect, and many outlets, including The New York Times, had to walk it back.
Interestingly, not a single one of those “50 Former Senior Intelligence” members have apologized for lying about the laptop. Many of them have doubled down on their claims.
As a result of documents revealed in Schmitt’s suit, it is now apparent that DHS officials were in fact “leading the push to expand the government’s reach into disinformation,” and that the government “also played a quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the New York Post story.” Post-election polling showed that many Americans would not have voted for Joe Biden had they known the Hunter Biden laptop story was fact and not a disinformation plot.
It isn’t just the election that Big Tech actively interfered with, they also have been suppressing any information that went against the “Official information on Covid-19.” In fact, the Biden Administration has been working with Big Tech to crush any dissenting opinions.
It alleged that President Joe Biden and other administration officials “pressured and colluded” with Big Tech companies to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story as well as information regarding the lab leak origin theory of COVID-19 and the security of voting by mail.
The suit claimed that government officials of colluded with social media and big tech companies “under the guise of combating misinformation” and that the goal, and the goal, and the result, was censorship and suppression of free speech online. This discovery shows that the Attorneys General who brought the case.
The lawsuit alleges that the federal government had violated constitutional rights to suppress free speech in “one of its greatest assaults by federal government officials in the Nation’s history.”
Yes, it has. Now in regards to Twitter, the first crack in the dam has happened, with Elon Musk buying and taking the company private. One of the first things he did was fire everyone in the upper management who was involved with actively suppressing free speech. I mentioned before that I don’t know what will happen with regards to the current lawsuit and Twitter. The people who were responsible for working with the government to suppress the 1st Amendment have been fired.
Elon Musk is continuing to clean house, (More on that later), and I suspect he is going to be actively helping Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt in finding out just how deep this goes. It may be that the former management team of Twitter could be held personally liable in any civil suits, and face actual criminal prosecutions. Obviously, this is a developing story and there is a lot more that will come to the surface.
Thatisall
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