Governor Hobbs’ Campaign Coordinated With Social Media to Censor Political Opponents

August 10, 2023 ADI Staff Reporter
hobbs
Governor Katie Hobbs

More is coming to light about Governor Katie Hobbs’ coordination with social media companies to censor political opponents.

Emails obtained by Arizona Capitol Oversight reveal that Hobbs has coordinated with social media companies for at least the past three years to control free speech online.

Hours after the emails dropped, Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma (R-LD27) announced a new Ad-Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability, and Big Tech to address government censorship. State Rep. Alexander Kolodin (R-LD03) will chair the committee.

The committee will hold its first meeting on September 5 at the State Capitol. In addition to discussing potential legislation to ward against government censorship, the committee will conduct any warranted investigations.

In November 2020, Hobbs used her government email during the work week to ask Twitter to take action against those criticizing her over a 2017 tweet on her personal account comparing Trump voters to Nazis. (Hobbs was minority leader of the Arizona Senate in 2017). Hobbs requested Twitter’s intervention because those critics cited the tweet as part of their argument that she was too partisan and biased against Trump to administer the 2020 election fairly.

“The alt-right got a hold of a 3-year old tweet on my account and have been sending harassing, abusive, and threatening tweets and direct messages for the last two days,” stated Hobbs.

The day before Hobbs sent her email, her former communications director, Murphy Hebert, sent an email to Facebook flagging election-related misinformation in an effort to suppress it.

On top of contacting social media companies directly, Hobbs’ team used a favorite middle man among politicians seeking to control online speech: the Center for Information Security (CIS). Arizona Daily Independent reported on this relationship last December.

CIS is a nonprofit funded with millions from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The CIS president and CEO, John Gilligan, was formerly a senior intelligence and security advisor for the Air Force, Department of Energy, and White House Cyber Security Commission under the Obama administration.

Of interest is the advice given by a National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) official to Hebert concerning Hobbs’ desire to eradicate posts questioning the efficacy of using sharpies to fill out ballots (“Sharpiegate”). The NASS official told Hebert that Twitter couldn’t remove or moderate posts, but that CIS could.

“I would actually suggest sending [your request] to the CIS misinfo[rmation] email instead of Twitter Gov[ernment],” wrote NASS communications director Maria Benson. “Twitter Gov can’t remove or moderate posts, its more a general help type inbox.”

Meanwhile, Facebook’s southwest-focused public affairs official at the time, Jannelle Watson, promised Hebert that it had limited spread of posts concerning the Sharpiegate fiasco by making the Sharpie hashtag “unclickable” and putting warning labels on content.

Watson has formerly worked as a Young Democrats of America regional director, and an Obama White House advisor.

The referenced “misinfo” division of CIS concerns its Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), which acts as a middle man of sorts to coordinate election officials, federal government agencies, and social media platforms.

In December 2020, Hobbs’ longtime chief of staff, Allie Bones, used her secretary of state email to ask CIS to take action on a tweet by the Arizona Republican Party. CIS responded that it would forward the request to CISA, who would then submit it to Twitter.

Last August, Bones asked CIS in an email to delete a tweet criticizing Hobbs from the Arizona Republican Party. Bones classified their political opponents’ estimation of Hobbs as “failing at her current job [as secretary of state]” as “disinformation.”

In the waning weeks of former Attorney General Mark Brnovich’s administration, the Arizona Republican Party requested an investigation into Hobbs for her censorship efforts.

As Arizona Capitol Oversight noted, some of the emails pertaining to Hobbs’ coordination with social media companies were merely confirmation emails of reports received and not the reports themselves. That indicates an undiscovered trove of content moderation requests and conversations, likely existing in a secure portal existing for government officials.

A federal judge has already indicated that any governmental coordination with CIS and social media companies to control online speech is unconstitutional.

This past Independence Day, the District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Biden administration from coordinating with social media companies to censor or suppress online speech.

Judge Terry Doughty compared the government’s efforts to control online speech to an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

“The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. […] The plaintiffs have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.”

 

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