The government’s mass censorship scheme targeted reporting by the Arizona Daily Independent (ADI) on the 2020 election.
Our inclusion in the government’s censorship scheme was uncovered largely through the efforts of Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan. On Monday, the congressman released a report revealing how the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) — a coalition which included the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), Stanford University’s Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center For An Informed Public, and Atlanta Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab — colluded to censor online speech surrounding the 2020 election.
BOMBSHELL REPORT ON THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
HUNDREDS of secret reports show how @DHSgov’s @CISAgov, The GEC (@StateDept), @Stanford and others worked together to censor AMERICANS before the 2020 election, including true information, jokes, and opinions.
🧵 THREAD:
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 6, 2023
Jordan dubbed the collusion, the “censorship-industrial complex.”
“The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly limits the government’s role in monitoring and censoring Americans’ speech, but these disinformation researchers (often funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars) were not strictly bound by these constitutional guardrails,” said the report. “What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the newly emerging censorship-industrial complex.”
The EIP was founded in 2020 and was also active through last year’s election. As Jordan noted through his investigation, CISA requested the creation of the EIP. The EIP functioned thus: stakeholders submit misinformation reports to the EIP, the EIP would analyze the report and search for similar content across platforms, and then the EIP would submit their findings to Big Tech companies with censorship recommendations. These recommendations included removing or restricting content, and banning users.
ADI fell victim to this censorship scheme with our coverage on “Sharpiegate.” At least one of our articles was named as the subject of EIP-recommended censorship: our Nov. 4, 2020 article “#Sharpiegate Trending As Maricopa County Voters Report Cancelled Ballots.”
That article was included in public records from the EIP’s data in Jira, a software system for creating project management assistance tickets. According to the Jira ticket data, our reporting was at first labeled as a “medium” threat, then apparently EIP escalated us to a “high” threat.
EIP internal notes remarked that our reporting and related content were “resolved” through restricting the spread and accessibility of the content across social media platforms.
EIP registered content as viral if it surpassed a threshold of 1,001 engagements.
One of the EIP apparatchiks assigned to handle Sharpiegate-related content was identified in the mass data turned over by Stanford University: an individual by the name of Carly Maya Miller.
On Nov. 4 2020, EIP issued the following messages:
“Hello platform partners – we have added you on several cases of sharpie or felt tip claims which are going viral right now. We will be consolidating the overall arc and all the content we have gathered on this ticket, it is affecting all of Youtube, FB, Twitter, TikTok. ISAC partners are added as we believe a general counter narrative is needed.”
“While the primary reports have come from Maricopa, Arizona, similar claims of felt-tipped markers being illegally used to sway election outcomes have been made across Chicago, IL and Shasta County, CA. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs also stated the morning following Election Day that ballots marked with Sharpie pens would indeed be counted, and ballot design and the canning apparatus mitigated any concerns about possible bleed-through issues stemming from the use of Sharpie-brand markers. Therefore, content popularizing this false narrative should be removed from platforms, or at the very least have ‘false information’ labels applied. Tik Tok should also limit search-ability of the hashtag ‘sharpiegate’.” (emphasis added)
ISAC refers to the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). CIS is a nonprofit funded by CISA.
All Jira tickets obtained by Congress are included in Jordan’s X post. Jordan promised that the House Judiciary GOP Committee would make more data available with time.
The American people deserve to know if they were targeted by their own government and so-called “disinformation” experts.
The Committee is making the data from these reports publicly available here: https://t.co/3FygggjckZ
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 6, 2023