Since Republicans retook the House, the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has been investigating the federal government's role in suppressing free speech online. Over the last year, we’ve learned the extraordinary extent to which Big Government, Big Tech, and Big Academia—the censorship-industrial complex—have colluded to successfully censor Americans.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter, we began to see just how the government had been using the company to censor speech online. Journalists, such as Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, published internal Twitter documents showing that the government was deeply involved in Twitter’s content moderation decisions. Musk even called Twitter a "crime scene."
Since then, the Select Subcommittee has obtained direct evidence showing how the government coerced and colluded with Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, universities, and others to deliberately censor certain viewpoints. For example, we uncovered how the Biden White House directly pressured Facebook and YouTube to take down posts with which the White House disagreed, including true information, memes, and other content that did not violate the companies’ content moderation policies.
The censorship was so bad that Facebook’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, protested to the Biden White House (to no avail) that the White House’s demands "represent[ed] a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US." You know things are bad when a former British Member of Parliament has a better understanding of America’s First Amendment than the Biden White House.
Internal emails show that the social media giants caved and changed their policies to censor more Americans’ speech because Facebook and YouTube needed to maintain a good relationship with the White House for other important policy decisions. There’s a word for that: coercion.
But the Biden administration’s censorship campaign didn’t end with social media—the White House even tried to censor books. The Select Subcommittee released internal Amazon emails in which company personnel, when preparing for an upcoming meeting with the Biden White House, asked: "Is the Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?" Ultimately, Amazon appears to have changed its policies because of White House pressure, censoring books questioning vaccines by enabling a feature called "Do Not Promote." What could be more un-American than the federal government telling a private company what books it can sell?
Big Government and Big Tech weren’t alone in this censorship enterprise. Big Academia was intricately involved too. The Select Subcommittee uncovered emails showing that Stanford University set up something called the Election Integrity Partnership in the summer of 2020 "at the request of" the Department of Homeland Security. This partnership submitted thousands of posts directly to Big Tech to be censored in the lead-up to the 2020 election, including true information, jokes, and even speech by Members of Congress.
As concerning as this all is, what comes next is even scarier. The government has now turned its attention to supercharging the censorship process by funding the development of AI-powered tools to do it at scale.
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Our latest report revealed how the National Science Foundation issued multi-million-dollar grants to university and non-profit research teams to develop AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools to combat alleged misinformation. One NSF-funded research team said the quiet part out loud when it told NSF that its AI-powered tool could help social media platforms more comprehensively enforce their misinformation policies and thus "externaliz[e] the difficult responsibility of censorship." Non-public documents also reveal the condescending way the censors privately talk about Americans, particularly military families, the elderly, rural and indigenous communities, and Americans who hold the "the Bible and the Constitution" as "sacred."
We’ve made incredible progress fighting government-induced censorship over the past year. Americans today can search on our website to see if they were one of the thousands of victims of the censorship-industrial complex. We owe tremendous gratitude to the many Democrats, progressive journalists, and other left-of-center witnesses who have bravely been willing to testify in front of the Select Subcommittee—even when facing baseless, personal attacks from Democrats on the Subcommittee.
Our work is not finished. We will continue to press for information and reforms. The Select Subcommittee defended free speech in an amicus brief in the landmark case currently before the Supreme Court. We attended oral arguments on Monday morning, where emails uncovered by the Select Subcommittee were discussed as evidence of government coercion.
But no matter what the Court does, Congress must act. To that end, we have introduced the Free Speech Protection Act and the Censorship Accountability Act, which will hold federal employees accountable for violating Americans’ First Amendment rights. More legislative remedies will be introduced in the coming months.
Our members understand the importance of this issue: if we lose our freedom of speech, our other cherished First Amendment rights—to practice our faith, to publish and report, to assemble peacefully, and to petition our government—are vulnerable too.
