Going back to when Trump was in office, we know conservatives have been censored online.
A new report by the House Small Business Committee paints a far more complete picture of how badly they were censored, and it ties the State Department to it all.
Talking Points…
- Censorship of conservatives
- Report ties State Department into censorship efforts
- Analysis
After Donald Trump won the presidency, there was clearly a concentrated effort to censor conservatives. I can tell you flat out from a media perspective that we were shut down on Facebook, with reach being decreased by about 90% overnight. It completely changed the way conservative news outlets were able to get readership. Years of time and money spent developing loyal followings were literally flushed overnight.
It got even worse once Biden got into office, as it was generally believed at the time that the government was influencing what could and could not be posted on social media. Of course, we now know that anything challenging the government's stance on the pandemic was immediately erased and accounts suspended.
Unfortunately, when the case came before the Supreme Court regarding the administration's influence on such issues, the court ruled in favor of the administration, giving the government a ruling hand in censoring people online on issues such as this.
The report has been ongoing for more than a year, and it was conducted by the House Small Business Committee. It found that an agency housed within the State Department, The Global Engagement Center (GEC), actually went against its own mission to censor. GEC's mandate is funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space." The focus is supposed to be on international disinformation, but the GEC was focused more on what it deemed to be domestic disinformation.
The agency was reportedly working with domestic "fact-checkers" "in assessing domestic press businesses' admission to a credibility organization." The Daily Caller reported:
"The GEC recently granted taxpayer money to the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, which gave a subaward to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, Inc, according to documents, the report says.
"This subaward went toward persuading international news outlets to take part in Poynter's International Fact-Checking Networks (IFCN) Code of Principles, 'a group of news and information organizations that abide by a certain set of qualities denoting journalistic standards.'"
Here is the beginning of the thread on X that breaks all this down, and it is definitely worth a read when you get the chance…
EXCLUSIVE: The State Department, joined by the likes of the Poynter Institute, Clemson University, disinfo professor Kate Starbird, and Snopes, have secretly coordinated on a "fake news" listserv targeting conservative media, according to documents obtained by @dcexaminer 🧵1/4 pic.twitter.com/AFWrqddptc
— Gabe Kaminsky (@gekaminsky) September 10, 2024
This should be the front page story on every major news outlet, but it is not getting so much as a blip on the radar right now because the media supports the administration censoring conservative outlets.
The sad reality, however, is that we are slowly but surely losing our First Amendment rights in this country, and Republicans are pretty much allowing it to happen. They are getting steamrolled by Democrats in Congress, and until they find a spine, this is not going to change. I can only imagine how much worse it will be if Harris wins this election.
