Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020

[mystery-ak]

Outsourced censorship: Feds used private entity to target millions of social posts in 2020

Biden administration gave millions in tax dollars to groups after election, records show. Election Integrity Partnership says it had 35% success rate getting tech platforms to label, remove or restrict content.


By Greg Piper and John Solomon

Updated: September 30, 2022 - 6:41am

A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.

The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment's prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech. 

Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.

In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with "monitoring intensif[ying] significantly" the week before and after Election Day.

more
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/biden-administration-rewarded-private-entities-got-2020-election

[DefiantMassRINO]

"Election Integrity Partnership" ... quite the Orwellian organization name.

[mountaineer]

... the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab   ...

Interesting Twitter thread about the Atlantic Council and its ties to the phony Russiagate plan.

https://twitter.com/pepesgrandma/status/1663979925290795024

Who is this group:

... The Atlantic Council has, since its inception, stated it is a nonpartisan institution, with members "from the moderate internationalist wings of both parties" in the United States. Despite its connections, the Council is by charter independent of the U.S. government and NATO, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

In September 2014, Eric Lipton reported in The New York Times that since 2008, the US organization had received donations from more than twenty-five foreign governments. He wrote that the Atlantic Council was one of a number of think tanks that received substantial overseas funds and conducted activities that "typically align with the foreign governments' agendas".   ... Wikipedia

When I searched "Atlantic Council" here at TBR, I noticed that the name often came up whenever idjits like John Kerry were delivering speeches to the group. 

[DefiantMassRINO]

If Federal taxpayer dollars are allocated, it is Government censorship via proxy.

Did that appropriation orginate in the US House of Representatives?  If it didn't, could that expenditure by illegal, extra-Constitutional, or un-Constitutional?