Prepare for the new digital censorship regime

A House panel held a hearing last month to examine how the Biden White House colluded with Big Tech platforms to censor speech about COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election.

Revealing these past abuses was a good start for the House Select Subcommittee on the Militarization of the Federal Government. But today, the same forces are reforming to impose a new regime of digital censorship ahead of this fall’s elections.

Indeed, America’s tech, government, and nonprofit elites are determined to repeat the sins of 2020.

Congress and the states stand in the way. To ensure the integrity of the upcoming elections, they must refocus their efforts on dismantling the new censorship apparatus.

The first step should be to reach out to private organizations that are asking big tech platforms to remove or limit content they characterize as disinformation or election disinformation.

In an open letter, more than 200 of these groups demand that Facebook, X, Instagram and other major platforms reinstate “election integrity policies, including content moderation around the big lie” and change algorithms to ” promote factual electoral content.”

It won’t be easy. These groups benefit from the support of powerful political interests.

According to a recent report from the Media Research Center, at least 45 of these groups raised $80.8 million between 2016 and 2022 from liberal financier and philanthropist George Soros.

And they’re not the only ones pressuring Big Tech to censor.

Initiatives like the State Department-backed Global Disinformation Index and ratings company NewsGuard are partnering with Big Tech to starve so-called “fake news” sites of ad dollars and user engagement. But their ratings are deeply biased.

A Media Research Center analysis found that NewsGuard on average rates the trustworthiness of liberal media outlets 27 points higher than conservative media outlets. The Global Misinformation Index is also biased. It maintains a “dynamic exclusion list” of websites that it subjectively determines to be “high-risk” purveyors of “disinformation,” including at least 10 conservative-leaning media outlets.

In 2022, Microsoft-owned advertising platform Xandr partnered with the Global Disinformation Index to fund so-called disinformation groups. Following public review, Microsoft has temporarily suspended its GDI subscription.

Even so, Microsoft has integrated the NewsGuard rating system into “many products,” including the company’s Edge browser, news aggregators, Bing search, and various AI-based assistants.

In November, Microsoft announced that it would partner with NewsGuard and other groups to “deliver information from authoritative sources” and ensure that “queries about election administration will appear on reputable sites.”

This push is accompanied by efforts at the state and federal levels to shape public discourse in collusion with dominant technology companies.

The FBI, for example, recently confirmed that it had resumed discussions with social media platforms about so-called “misinformation.” According to an article in The Federalist, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as the “nerve center” of government censorship operations, have refused to say whether they intend to put pressure on technology platforms to “remove messages containing so-called “disinformation”. .’”

Meanwhile, California’s Secretary of State’s office agreed with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter (now Social media companies are submitting reports to the attorney general’s office detailing efforts to combat so-called hate speech.

At the same time, Washington and Oregon hired censorship watchdog group Logically to help monitor so-called election misinformation. And Arizona’s secretary of state has created a dedicated position to identify and report “particularly egregious messages” on big tech platforms.

To counter these efforts, Congress and state lawmakers should insist on transparency, which is essential to addressing concerns about collusion.

For example, Congress should investigate new government attempts to collude with big tech, particularly in the states and within the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Law enforcement authorities should also investigate ongoing relationships between large tech companies and outside researchers to determine whether they are violating state or federal law.

Big Tech platforms may violate election laws if they enforce content moderation policies in a way that favors certain political candidates. This includes censoring posts on behalf of partisan groups.

Without shining a light on Big Tech’s notoriously opaque practices when it comes to political speech, there’s no way to know for sure.

Congressional investigations into past collusion between government and big tech are admirable. But the same collusion is happening before our eyes.

Policymakers must act, and quickly, if they want to avoid a repeat of 2020.