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Democrats need to go to jail over this · Brett Keane and Eve Show

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  Nine months ago, I testified and provided evidence to the
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  subcommittee about the existence of a censorship industrial
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  complex, a network of government agencies including the
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  Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and big
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  tech media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary
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  Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored
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  views. I regret to inform the
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  subcommittee today that the scope, power, and law breaking
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  of the censorship industrial complex are even worse than we
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  had realized. Back in March 2 days ago, my
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  colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files
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  from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, which show
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  US and UK military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both
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  censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and
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  disinformation tactics developed abroad against the American
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  people. Many insist that all that we
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  identified in the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files and the CTI
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  files were legal activities by social media platforms to take
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  down content that violated the terms of service.
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  Facebook acts, formerly Twitter and other big tech companies,
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  are privately owned people point out and free to censor content,
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  and government officials are free to point out wrong
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  information, they argue. But the First Amendment
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  prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech.
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  The Supreme Court has ruled that the government may not induce,
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  encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what is
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  constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.
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  And there's now a large body of evidence proving that the
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  government did precisely that. What's more, the whistleblower
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  who delivered the CTIL files to us says that its leader a quote
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  UN quote former British intelligence analyst, was quote
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  UN quote in the room at the Obama White House in 2017 when
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  she received the instructions to create a counter disinformation
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  project to quote stop a repeat of 2016.
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  The US Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and
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  Information Security Agency, CISA, has been at the center
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  been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the
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  National Science Foundation financing the development of
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  censorship and disinformation tools, and other federal
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  government agencies playing a supportive role.
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  Emails from Sis's NGO and social media partners show that SISA
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  created the Election Integrity Partnership EIP in 2020, which
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  involved the Stanford Internet Observatory and other U.S.
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  government contractors. EIP and its successor, the
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  Virality Project, urged Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to
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  censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected
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  officials alike. The EIP reported that they had a
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  75% response rate from the platforms and that 35% of the
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  URLs that they reported were either removed, labeled, or
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  throttled or soft blocked. In 2020, the Department of
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  Homeland Security, CISA violated the 1st Amendment and interfered
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  in the election, while in 2021 CISA and the White House
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  violated the 1st Amendment and undermined America's response to
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  the COVID pandemic by demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor
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  content that Facebook said that Facebook itself said was, quote
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  UN quote, often true, including about vaccine side effects.
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  All of this is profoundly UN American one's commitment to
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  free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your
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  political enemies. In his essential new book, Liar
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  in a Crowded Theater, Jeff Coseff, a law professor at the
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  United States Naval Academy, shows that the widespread view
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  that the government can censor false speech and or speech that,
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  quote UN quote causes harm is mostly wrong.
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  The Supreme Court has allowed very few constraints on speech.
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  For example. The test of incitement to
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  violence remains its immediacy. I encourage Congress to defund
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  and dismantle the government organizations involved in
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  censorship. That includes phasing out all
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  funding for the National Science Foundation's Track F Trust and
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  Authenticity and Communication Systems and it's secure and
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  trustworthy cyberspace track. I would also encourage Congress
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  to abolish SISA in DHS. Short of taking those steps, I
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  would encourage significant guardrails and oversight to
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  prevent such cessorship from happening again.
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  In particular, it's very easy to see the line in SISA.
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  They say they're covering physical security, cyber
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  security, but they added a third one, cognitive security, which
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  is basically attempting to control the information
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  environment and how people think about the world, including the
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  stories that they tell. Finally, I would encourage
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  Congress to consider making Section 230 liability
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  protections contingent upon social media platforms known in
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  the laws, interactive computer services to allow adult users to
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  moderate our own legal content through filters that we choose
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  and whose algorithms are transparent to all of us.
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  I would encourage Congress to prohibit government officials
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  from asking the platforms to remove content which the Supreme
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  Court may or may not rule on constitutional next year when it
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  decides on the Missouri V Biden case.
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  Should the court somehow decide that the government requests for
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  censorship are constitutional, then I would urge Congress to
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  require such requests to be reported publicly
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  instantaneously, so that such censorship demands occur in
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  plain sight. Thank you very much for hearing
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  my testimony.