After using their “findings,” the federal government and its supporters have lost all credibility in determining what constitutes international election meddling. However, the Supreme Court’s decision from Murthy v. Missouri on Wednesday allows the federal government to continue censoring American talk under the guise of stopping “foreign propaganda.”
Missouri and Louisiana claimed that the Biden administration’s alleged collaboration with big tech companies to solitude dissention wederalist.com/2023/07/27/emails-biden-white-house-pressured-big-tech-censors-to-remove-vaxx-memes-tucederalist.com/2023/07/27/emails-biden-white-house-pressured-big-tech-censors-to-remove-vaxx-memes-tucker-carlson-videos/” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>ker-carlson-videos/”>as against the First Amendment. The Biden administration requested, among other things, that Big Tech judge articles that conflicted with the government’s opinion of Covid-19.
The higher court ruled 6- 3 that the defendants lacked standing.
According to CNN,” the choice means that the Department of Homeland Security may remain to flag content to social media platforms like Facebook and X that it believes may be the job of international providers trying to destroy this year’s presidential contest.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s mind blindly referred to Facebook’s “measures to store foreign interference strategies” and the FBI’s communications to Big Tech companies warning of “pernicious international control campaigns that might spread on their sites.” The court ruled that such repression perhaps continue despite the fact that those warnings did serve to delete an American paper’s accurate reporting about Joe Biden’s influence-peddling.
It was n’t just the bombshell story sourced to Hunter Biden’s laptop that the censors “got wrong”. New storage offers numerous examples of media, government, and tech gatekeepers weaponizing bogus claims of “foreign interference” to malign — and often silence — opponents.
Hamilton 68
The Hamilton 68 platform was supposed to track” Soviet influence actions” on Twitter, but what it did was truly flag plenty of real right-leaning users as fake Russian accounts. Twitter’s former head of confidence and security, Yoel Roth, told colleagues in 2018 that” the Hamilton screen ‘ falsely accuses a bunch of genuine correct- leaning accounts of being Soviet bots”, as reported by Matt Taibbi.
The Washington Post in 2018 published an article citing Hamilton 68 to claim that a Twitter movement to”# ReleaseTheMemo” regarding the FBI’s surveillance on the Trump campaign was driven by” Russian disinformation” bots. As it turned out, the accounts were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.”
Speaking with the Post, Director of UT- Austin’s Propaganda Research Lab Samuel Woolley hinted at a need for Big Tech censorship, using the dashboard’s erroneous findings to claim social media companies need to “design for democracy”.
Notably, Woolley’s work has been funded by Open Society Foundations, which was founded by George Soros and gives grants to left- wing advocacy groups.
Hunter Biden Laptop
Weeks before the 2020 election, 51 “intelligence officials” signed onto a letter falsely suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. The letter asserted in part that the laptop possessed” all the traditional markings of a Russian information operation.”
According to former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, who also signed onto the infamous letter, the then-senior adviser to Biden’s campaign, Antony Blinken, who later initiated the creation of that letter. The FBI confirmed the laptop’s authenticity in a federal gun case as early as November 2019 and it has since been used as evidence against Hunter Biden.
Still, before the story dropped, the FBI had gone to social media companies warning them of so- called” Russian propaganda” and “hack- and- leak operations” by” state actors”. Like clockwork, both Twitter and Facebook throttled the reach of the story, with the latter’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitting in 2022 that the company suppressed the story because of the FBI’s warning.
Russiagate
Back in 2016, the media and intelligence apparatus used false claims of “foreign interference” to discredit Donald Trump and his election victory.
After Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyers and the DNC commissioned a dossier of fake opposition research, the narrative falsely claimed that then-president Donald Trump was a Russian asset before selling it to the FBI. ( The “primary sub- source” on which former British spy Christopher Steele based his infamous” Steele dossier” was an actual Russian, Igor Danchenko, who was later indicted for lying to the FBI. )
The agency— which, thanks to the Supreme Court, can now resume its censorship operations — used the “research” to illegally spy on the Trump campaign. In 2018, then-chairman of the Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes reported that Carter Page’s surveillance warrants were obtained by the FBI through a covert FISA court. Inspector General of the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz later corroborated this report.
The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman is a correspondent for elections.
