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The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.
The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” according to the lawsuit.
Be informed, not misled.
It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
Back on September 14, the Department of Justice made an emergency Supreme Court appeal to keep the feds controlling what Americans read and see online.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) made an emergency Supreme Court appeal to avoid lower court injunctions preventing the White House and federal agencies, including the FBI, from telling internet speech monopolies which keywords, posts, and accounts to suffocate. The court granted the appeal the same day, pausing lower-court injunctions stopping the federal government from holding a gun to internet monopolies’ heads to tell them what ideas to choke from the online public square.
The Biden administration didn’t contest any of the more than 20,000 pages of court documents showing essentially every major federal agency pressuring social media monopolies to take down ideas powerful Democrats don’t like or face federal lawsuits, investigations, and the removal of their monopoly powers.
Instead, it argued that obeying the First Amendment “imposed unprecedented limits on the ability of the president’s closest aides to use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern, on the FBI’s ability to address threats to the Nation’s security, and on the CDC’s ability to relay public health information at platforms’ request.”
The Left is addicted to censorship.
Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.
During last Thursday’s Congressional hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Democratic members of Congress insisted that censorship efforts of groups like the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and the Virality Project (VP) were benign and not a violation of the First Amendment.
“It's not the First Amendment!” said Rep. Dan Goldman, “It's the [social media platforms’] Terms of Service.... And they are flagging it for the social media companies to make their own decisions. That is not the First Amendment. That is the Terms of Service.”
The CTI League, which partnered with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), aimed to implement something called “AMITT,” which stands for “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques.”
"Public" says, "Pentagon-affiliated entities are heavily involved in “anti-disinformation” work. Mitre, a major defense contractor, received funding to tackle “disinformation” about elections and Covid. The US government paid Mitre, an organization staffed by former intelligence and military personnel, to monitor and report what Americans said about the virus online, and to develop vaccine confidence messaging. This government-backed military research group, Public Discovered, was present in the EIP and VP misinformation reporting system, and in election disinformation report emails to CISA.
Regarding the current lawsuit.
This most recent lawsuit claims, "Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”
That, of course, is the "conservative press."
The U.S. Justice Department is even about to put a U.S. citizen in prison for sharing election jokes on Twitter.
Ep. 38 The First Amendment is done. Douglass Mackey is about to go to prison for mocking Hillary Clinton on the internet. We talked to him right before his sentencing. Remember as you watch that this could be you.
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 9, 2023
TIMESTAMPS:
(3:12) The Hillary Clinton meme
(4:20) Hillary’s… pic.twitter.com/MLwz2SboGr
At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.
They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.”
That delivers leftist media competitors high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.
Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite
Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist, at least in part, on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.
All outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.
Takeaway
The outcome of this lawsuit will impact all of us--- particularly conservatives and Christians.
While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”
The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.