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MRC Free Speech America Exposes TWO MORE Federal Entities Working to Censor Americans

President Joe Biden entered office with the attitude of not letting the powerful COVID-19 crisis go to waste. The pandemic was the perfect cover to unfold his coordinated censorship regime.  MRC Free Speech America recently detailed the seven censors of Biden’s federal government. Sitting atop that censorship regime, however, is the Biden White House, which attempted to push nearly every major Big Tech company to censor Americans in the name of “safety” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden, his Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Census Bureau worked alongside Meta and Google, and in the case of the White House, Twitter and Amazon as well, to push their desired narrative about the COVID-19 vaccines. In its recent report, MRC outlined seven federal entities that have worked to censor American citizens’ free speech. These include: the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, The National Science Foundation and Department of the Treasury. But there are two others that bear mentioning: The White House itself and the Department of Commerce. The White House House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has released a plethora of reports revealing the Biden administration’s relentless requests for social media companies to censor COVID-19 and vaccine-related content online. In February 2021, Facebook began coordinating with the Biden White House to censor disfavored opinions related to COVID-19. According to an internal email from Facebook, these topics included the theory that COVID-19 was a man-made virus; that the virus leaked from a lab in China; and other allegedly “false claims on Facebook and Instagram about COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccines in general.” In an email to Mark Zuckerberg, a Facebook employee revealed that Facebook's censorship of these opinions was prompted by pressure from the Biden White House. Jordan’s Facebook Files summarized that “the Biden Administration pressured the companies to censor true information, satire, memes, opinions, and Americans’ personal experiences.” The committee report explained that “internal July 2021 Facebook emails obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee show that Facebook understood that the Biden White House’s position as wanting ‘negative information on or opinions about the vaccine’ removed as well as ‘humorous or satirical content that suggests the vaccine isn’t safe.’” The Biden administration even went so far as to ask platforms to remove specific accounts. For example, internal communications at Twitter show that during one of the first meetings the White House had with the platform, it asked why Twitter had not censored COVID-19 vaccine critic Alex Berenson. In another internal note, Lauren Culbertson, then Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy recounted that “The Biden Team was not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more and to deplatform several accounts.” Culbertson further added, “They were very angry in nature.” The YouTube Files similarly show the White House pushing the Google-owned video platform to censor. On July 20, 2021, Rob Flaherty Digital Director of the White House, emailed the YouTube public policy team a tweet from CNN fact checker Daniel Dale that showed his algorithm was presenting him with “anti-vaccine content.” The White House responded confrontationally: “We had a pretty extensive back and forth about the degree to which you all are recommending anti-vaccination content. You were pretty emphatic that you are not. This seems to indicate that you are. What is going on here?” And in August, the White House asked how YouTube was “planning to promote” the Pfizer vaccine, which at the time had been just approved. In September 2021, YouTube worked with the White House to change its policies to remove content that questioned vaccines.  The most recent release of Jordan’s Amazon Files further revealed that Amazon buried 43 book titles offering information and criticism of vaccines in general. Many of the books were written long before the COVID-19 pandemic even began.  Department of Commerce via The U.S. Census Bureau The U.S. Census Bureau entered the censorship game by piggybacking off of the CDC’s obsessive control over the COVID-19 narrative, according to Louisiana Chief District Judge Terry A. Doughty’s Murthy v. Missouri July 4, 2023 court ruling. MRC Free Speech America research utilizing our exclusive CensorTrack database was cited in the complaint for the Murthy v. Missouri case.  “The CDC entered into an Intra-Agency Agreement (“IAA”) with the Census Bureau to help advise on misinformation,” Doughty wrote. “The IAA required that the Census Bureau provide reports to the CDC on misinformation that the Census Bureau tracked on social media.” Facebook had been cooperating with the CDC Director for the Division of Digital Media Caroline Crawford, the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services in their efforts to guide the platform on what speech to censor relating to COVID-19.  Crawford received biweekly CrowdTangle reports showing the top COVID-19-related content on Facebook, in January 2021. She made Census Bureau officials privy to these reports. She reportedly said that the Bureau “was asking for regular meetings with platforms, specifically focused on misinformation,” according to Doughty’s ruling.  Prior to a weekly meeting with Facebook, Crawford even sent a PowerPoint of types of content that the CDC and the Census Bureau sought to censor. “This is a deck Census would like to discuss and we’d also like to fit in a discussion of topic types removed from Facebook,” Crawford reportedly said.  “The ‘deck’ the Census Bureau wanted to discuss contained an overview of ‘Misinformation Topics’ and included ‘concerns about infertility, misinformation about side effects, and claims about vaccines leading to deaths,’”” Doughty wrote. “For each topic, the deck included sample slides and a statement from the CDC debunking the allegedly erroneous claim.”  The Bureau prepared similar slide decks for the “COVID BOLO” [Be on the lookout] meetings it arranged for Facebook with the CDC. These meetings were reportedly an effort to “be sure credible information was out there and to flag information that the CDC thought was not credible for potential removal,” according to Doughty. Each meeting “included five ‘hot topics’ (for example, vaccine shedding, death reports in the VAERS database, and various side effects of the COVID-19 vaccines) with a BOLO note for each topic.” The Bureau and the CDC even held at least one meeting with Google/YouTube on similar topics in March 2021. The ruling further notes that when the Bureau asked for more meetings with the company, Crawford “followed up with Google about using their “regular 4 p.m. meetings” to go over things with the Census. Although misinformation was not the primary topic of conversation in these meetings, they did indeed discuss misinformation.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Journalist Takes on the Goliath of Big Tech Censorship, ‘Worse Than Election Interference’

The Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway highlighted the ways Big Tech disseminates propaganda to an extent that would make even George Orwell blush. Hemingway discussed the dire implications of Big Tech’s intrinsic biases in the June 19 episode of the You’re Wrong podcast with Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi. She stressed that Big Tech’s decision to tip the scales of political discourse is a major threat to a free society, the implications of which dwarf the other forms of election interference. “Well, first of all I think violations of First Amendment rights are actually…I think that’s worse than election interference as bad as election interference is,” Hemingway said. “It’s all related to self-government, right? Like if we don’t have the ability to seek truth and argue for truth and convince other people of truth, it’s the same thing as election interference where you don’t have the right to pick your own people.” Hemingway stressed that common manipulations tactics employed by Big Tech, like biased search algorithms, have the ability to dramatically shift public opinion, ensuring that competing narratives are suffocated before they can be deliberated upon by the public. “It affects the way people think about every issue,” Hemingway argued. “Take something like trans issues. Polling shows that even the vast majority of Democrats are like ‘No, I don’t believe men should be able to play on girls’ teams,’ and yet you watch the media and you do the Google search, and everything will be like fed to you like you’re the crazy person for thinking that men shouldn’t be on girls’ sports teams and, you know, that affects who you vote for and what you think gets normalized.” Hemingway also stressed the effectiveness of Google’s suppression of true but ideologically inconvenient narratives, which the tech giant hides by burying in the search results.  “You remember that old saying about how Osama Bin Laden was hard to find and that they finally found him on the second page of Google results?” Hemingway asked. “Like, the joke being, that’s an impossible place to find anything. Well, try the 20th page of Google results, you know, where the first page is this left-wing site and that left-wing site and everything is like pushing it. And then that becomes what Wikipedia says, and that’s what feeds into the AI systems so … it’s just overwhelming.” Google has received criticism for its handling of election related search results, specifically regarding the 2024 elections. In one study, MRC Free Speech America found that Google’s search results were burying the campaign websites of prominent Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley while promoting the website of obscure candidate Will Hurd.  Google was also promoting the websites of President Joe Biden and Marianne Williamson while burying the website of Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In a separate study, MRC found that Google was hiding Trump’s website in the wake of his conviction on 34 felony counts in New York City. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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House GOP Demanding Biden State Dept Come Clean on Censorship Operations: Report

House Republicans are now pulling at another thread in the web of the Censorship Industrial Complex that has been directly funded by the American taxpayer. New reporting by Washington Examiner reporter Gabe Kaminsky unveiled that the House Small Business Committee drafted a subpoena demanding that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken appear before the Committee on June 27. The subpoena also requires that the State Department hand over “all documents and communications” related to which organizations the State Department’s Global Engagement Center funded and how much money it gave through grants, awards, or cooperative agreements from 2018 to the present.   The legal document includes a list of specific State Department funded projects that must be included in order to satisfy the subpoena’s requirement. The list included infamous website traffic cops NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index. The GDI was previously exposed by a House Judiciary investigation for authoring a “hate groups” blacklist that primarily targeted conservatives and faith-based organizations.     The subpoena additionally demanded “documents sufficient to identify each of the 366 programs featured on the GEC’s Disinfo Cloud platform, mentioned in the document named ‘2023.02.14 GEC-GDI-BLACKLIST.docx.’” Disinfo Cloud was a technology platform designed to facilitate censorship by providing a testing lab for various censorship technologies. Beyond Disinfo Cloud, the subpoena also required documents listing “the application and approval process of each program” and the aforementioned “BLACKLIST” document.  The Committee is also seeking to learn about any State Department efforts “planning for any successors to the Disinfo Cloud Platform,” which was shuttered in 2022.   The Global Engagement Center has been in the public spotlight for its role in facilitating government censorship. The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a preliminary injunction in February requesting that a federal court order the State Department to cease funding censorship operations like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.  NewsGuard in particular, which is now also under Congressional investigation for its ties to the federal government, has been exposed by MRC for a clear and persistent bias against right-leaning outlets. MRC’s latest study found that NewsGuard rated left-leaning outlets an average of 25 points higher than outlets on the right (91 percent versus 66 percent).    Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Political Activist Reveals Shocking Lack of Transparency Behind This Group’s Ban from Facebook

  The founder of a political campaign of disaffected former Democrats revealed the shocking extent of Facebook’s crackdown on the group in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 protest. Bradon Straka, the founder of the WalkAway campaign, testified during a June 9 Georgia rally convened by former Democrat-turned-Republican State Rep. Mesha Mainor. Straka discussed how in the aftermath of Jan. 6, his group along with all of its administrators were systematically purged by the social media company and had years of content, much of it of sentimental value, scrubbed with no explanation or hope of appeal. “On the morning of January 8, 2021, every member of my team woke up to find that our Facebook accounts had been deleted,” Straka testified. “Along with them, the WalkAway campaign group, now over half a million members, was gone. The WalkAway Foundation business page was gone.” According to Straka, Facebook also targeted the personal accounts of people associated with WalkAway including people who simply contracted with WalkAway but were unaffiliated politically. “And to add to our shock, the personal and business accounts of every administrator for the WalkAway group were permanently deleted,” Straka said. “In other words, even people who were non-political but did online marketing or merch management for a living on social media and, for whom, we just happened to be one of their clients, the fact that their accounts had been added as admins to the WalkAway campaign group resulted in all of them losing their personal and business accounts, preventing them from being able to do business with any other clients using Facebook.” Georgia Hearing on #WalkAway Banning, Targeting, & Censorship https://t.co/bAvahr55SG — #WalkAway Campaign (@RealWalkAway) June 14, 2024 To pour salt in the wound, Facebook also deleted all of the content stored on the accounts and provided no opportunity for group members to recover what represented years of hard work. Straka intimated at the hearing that the purged content represented a $500,000 investment by WalkAway and two and a half years of hard work. Also included were many personal memories, such as pictures of Straka and his grandmother, now deceased.  Straka also stated that these actions directly contravened Facebook’s own policies. “According to Facebook’s terms of service, users owned the content and information we posted on Facebook, and yet, we were given no opportunity to speak to anybody who works at Facebook to request copies of the pictures, videos, posts and data they disabled without any explanation,” Straka related. Straka ended his testimony with a call for accountability for Big Tech companies, who he argued have a disproportionate influence in 2024 to destroy people’s lives and businesses for seemingly flippant or self-contradictory reasons. He also demanded that the WalkAway account be reinstated and gain restored access to the purged content.  “Facebook, you need to reverse this decision and moving forward, Big Tech companies like Facebook must be made to clearly explain with specificity why accounts are suspended or banned along with providing evidence of the violation,” Straka said. “And every user deserves to have these decisions reviewed and reversed." This proposal mirrors several other laws that are already in effect. Both Florida and Texas have passed laws directing social media companies to furnish specific reasons for bans and publish the algorithm used to prioritize or demote content. NetChoice, an association of major online businesses, has challenged the constitutionality of the laws in Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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COVID Dissident Doctor Addresses Monumental Case Threatening to Invert First Amendment

A prominent doctor and leading critic of COVID lockdowns addressed the major ramifications of Murthy v. Missouri and discussed the ideal outcome for free speech and the American people. ReasonTV interviewed with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized lockdowns as a means of protecting public health. Bhattacharya discussed the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, emphasizing the importance of preventing government censorship. The case, which partially relied on research conducted by MRC, demanded legal redress over the Biden Administration’s blatant censorship requests to social media companies. Bhattacharya indicated that he found the case compelling and asserted that the government had no prerogative to censor. “What I really want is that [sic] the government to get out of the business of regulating speech online,” Bhattacharya expressed. “I think that free speech online is a tremendous opportunity for a huge flowering of scientific discussion, of connections that will be made that would never otherwise be made, and the government suppressing that is a really, really bad idea.” He added, “It’s analogous I think to the Gutenberg press being invented in, you know, 1450 or something, and the governments or the churches trying to say, ‘You can’t print books, and we’re going to need to have the right to censor the books.’”  Bhattacharya pointed out that in 2021, medical professionals like himself were censored as a result of a collusion between Big Tech and the government. He suggested the relationship between the social media companies and government was more of a junior-senior dynamic rather than an equal partnership. He cited congressionally subpoenaed emails between Facebook staffers, indicating that the Biden White House was in charge and leveraged its powers to coerce social media companies into complying with censorship. “The House did its own investigation of the Facebook Files, and what they found was that Facebook will have these internal discussions where they’d say, ‘Well, if we don’t cooperate, we’re not going to be able to get some of these legislative priorities that we really need to survive as a company,’” Bhattacharya said. “So, for instance, the EU has these privacy laws that essentially would put Facebook out of existence in the EU, and the threat was the Biden administration won’t represent American companies in trade negotiations with the EU if they don’t comply with the censorship orders.” Bhattacharya also said that had attended oral arguments for the case and was particularly dismayed by the arguments put forth by the government plaintiffs, who argued that the government should censor to protect people from harm. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson furthered this logic by bringing up the hypothetical example of a viral trend encouraging kids to jump out of windows and expressed that government censorship of said content would be desirable. “The whole analogy that this hypothetical draws is based on the premise that the government automatically knows what’s good and bad for people,” Bhattacharya said. “Like here you have an example that’s such [sic] obviously bad for kids. Kids should not jump out of windows.” But Bhattacharya argued that in the real world, harmful and benign become a lot harder to discern and cited COVID policies as a case and proof.  “Well, I mean, what actually happened during the pandemic was that the government suppressed speech that would have criticized government policy that in effect told kids metaphorically to jump out of windows, right? They closed schools, harming kids at scale. They recommended that kids, even kids as young as six months old, take a vaccine that they probably didn’t need.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Free Speech Advocate Takes Aim at This Fascist Move by Biden Admin

Former State Department official and free speech advocate Mike Benz exposed the nefarious agenda behind the legal assault that the Biden administration is waging against Elon Musk. Benz talked about the censorship industry’s ongoing war with Elon Musk in a June 6 interview on TNT Radio. During the interview, Benz addressed the long train of legal suits that President Joe Biden’s administration has brought against Musk’s companies. He characterized the suits as retribution for Musk implementing free speech policies on X (formerly Twitter). Benz even went so far as to say that the suits were entirely motivated by politics and that they were of a similar nature to the charges brought against President Donald Trump.  “[T]he Biden administration is doing the same thing to Elon in a more diversified albeit smaller scale you could say,” said Benz, comparing Musk’s lawsuits to Trump’s.  Benz went on to list the various government entities coming after Musk. “I think there’s something like seven different regulatory agencies, none of whom were troubling Musk before he acquired Twitter, that have all descended like a pack of vultures trying to feast on the Elon empire carcass, and in order, I think, to twist and capacity-cripple his operations in order to make him more pliable to negotiations around reinstalling censorship on the platform,” Benz said. Benz explained that it was a common tactic of the censorship industry to use coercion in order to achieve its aims. 20 mins of rock ‘em sock ‘em fire on censorship industry origins & updates, media hit I did today👇 https://t.co/rRwzezCuk5 — Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) June 6, 2024 “I think they understand how leverage works. I know they do because they talk about this” Benz said. “ You have to raise the cost of saying ‘no’ in order to make people more agreeable.” Benz also explained that Musk’s commitment to free speech was surprising to the government affiliated censors. He contrasted Musk’s behavior with other tech CEOs who were “running their mouth about how much they believe in free speech” while giving in to pressures to censor. “But then as soon as the bayonets come for them, as soon as the advertiser boycotts show up, as soon as the government threats show up, as soon as the bottom line starts tanking, they become ‘reasonable’ to changing their terms of service,” said Benz.   Other critics have also taken aim at the Biden administration’s targeting of Musk. Brendan Carr, Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, penned a letter of dissent responding to his own agency’s decision to deny an $885 million award to Musk’s Starlink on December 9, 2023.  Carr’s letter noted that the FCC’s decision appeared to be part of a coordinated lawfare waged in tandem with other agencies to target Elon Musk as “Progressive Enemy No.1.” Carr also quoted Joe Biden to indicate that he was the architect of this legal harassment. During a November 9, 2022 press conference, Biden expressed that “there’s a lot of ways” for the government to look into Elon Musk.  “There certainly are,” wrote Carr. “The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Disgraced Disinformation Czar Nina Jankowicz Betrays Marxist Agenda Is a Driver of ‘Disinformation Studies’

Nina “Mary Poppins” Jankowicz, the would-be director of the now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board, let the cat out of the bag, exposing disinformation studies as a ploy to promote Marxism. The Mary Poppins of disinformation appeared at a panel hosted by The 19th, a Marxist Critical Theory advocacy non-profit, on May 22. The subject of the panel was “Disinformation, Voter Registration, & Obstacles in Democracy.” Jankowicz’s comments during the panel were riddled with references to radical Critical Theory, a Marxist theory that sees all of society in terms of an eternal struggle between the marginalized and a group of entrenched privileged oppressors. She also revealed that her approach to “disinformation studies” is colored by these ideas. “[I]n addition to studying kind of the political side of disinformation, I also study gendered and sexualized disinformation,” said Jankowicz. Jankowicz claimed that people with protected intersectional identities were more likely to be targeted by disinformation campaigns. “We also found that if you were a person of intersectional identity–so if you happen to be a woman and gay or a woman who was black, et cetera–you were subjected to more compounded and vitriolic abuse,” said Jankowicz. “There are plenty of studies that also point to the fact that women who are running for office receive more vitriolic abuse and frankly, gender disinformation narratives, than the men they’re running against.” As an example of what constitutes a “gender disinformation narrative,” Jankowicz referred to common criticisms of Vice President Kamala Harris and her documented relationships with influential political characters like former California Speaker of the State Assembly Willie Brown. Jankowicz also claimed that negative criticism of female politicians was somehow part of a sinister plot to bar females from public life. “And the idea of gendered misinformation is to raise the cost of participation for women and marginalized communities,” Jankowicz said. “It is to keep us out of public life. Often it frequently targets our families.” Jankowicz also touted the claim that men are somehow insulated from scurrilous gossip in a way that women are not. “And frankly, you know, if you start a sexual rumor about a man, that tends to be kind of, oh, a chip off the old block, you know, a nice compliment for him,” Jankowicz said. “If you do the same thing about a woman, it can destroy her career. And we’ve seen that time and time again. These things haven’t gone away.” Jankowicz has been a major driver of censorship and conversations justifying censorship in the United States. For instance, last week Jancowicz was named in journalist Michael Shellenberger’s latest Twitter Files. Shellenberger revealed that Jankowicz was working with an anti-disinformation consulting firm, Alethea, that was advising Twitter on how to more effectively censor dissident voices. In addition, Jankowicz runs the American Sunlight Project, another pro-censorship advocacy organization.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.