Seven federal agencies have pressured Big Tech to censor Americans, according to the report. Media Research Center,
MRC analyzed the actions of several federal agencies as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to issue its opinion. Murtha v. MissouriThe case was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to prevent the Biden administration from colluding with Big Tech companies and forcing them to censor Americans. The watchdog group found that the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation and the Treasury Department have all pushed for various forms of censorship.
“There is a shocking degree of pervasiveness and coordination within the Biden administration to use our tax money against us,” said Dan Schneider, vice president of MRC Free Speech America. “We’ve never seen an effort like this to silence ordinary, everyday Americans.” Fox News Digital,
According to the Media Research Center, seven federal agencies have pressured big tech companies to censor Americans. (MRC Free Speech America)
“The Biden administration’s justification for the censorship initiative is astonishing. In court documents and oral argument before the Supreme Court, Biden’s lawyers literally claimed that the federal government has a First Amendment right to censor citizens,” Schneider added. “This reversal of the Constitution threatens the very essence of our democracy.”
MRC Free Speech U.S. editor Gabriela Pariseau, who wrote that Biden “sits at the helm of a censorship regime composed of federal agencies that have repeatedly pressured Big Tech social media companies to crack down on people who express views that oppose their views,” detailed censorship concerns across seven federal agencies in a recap of the findings.
According to the MRC study, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “conducts one of the most robust censorship campaigns in the U.S. government in the name of fighting terrorism and foreign influence.”
The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation and the Treasury Department have all pushed for various types of censorship under President Biden, the Media Research Center said. (Getty Images)
“The agency’s objectives became publicly clear when it issued a National Terrorism Advisory System bulletin in February 2022. The bulletin claimed that one of the ‘key factors’ of the ‘increased’ terrorism threat included ‘unverified widespread election fraud and false or misleading narratives about COVID-19,’” Pariseau wrote, noting that DHS has given taxpayer money to various grantees that target “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malicious information.”
“This program, which is overseen by the infamous Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), was created during the Obama years to combat terrorism. However, it was later revamped and weaponized by the Biden administration to award grants to far-left projects aimed at establishing ‘media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives.’ These projects in turn promote censorship of conservatives, Christians, and the Republican Party,” Pariseau wrote.
“The Global Engagement Center (GEC) is the epicenter of the State Department’s censorship,” Pariseau wrote.
“GEC … worked directly with social media companies to censor speech, which often meant targeting foreign influence campaigns for censorship. But the agency often misidentified what a foreign influence campaign was,” he said, adding that “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi alleged that GEC once sent Twitter a list of names of Chinese accounts that engaged in state-backed manipulation, but many of them were actually Western government accounts.
“GEC also funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), initially a UK-based group that created a blacklist of certain media organizations that GDI claimed made money by distributing so-called misinformation,” Pariseau wrote.
According to the MRC study, the Justice Department, which was also part of the “Twitter Files,” was “flagging content for social media companies to censor.”
“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and extensive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi posted in 2022. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
“Twitter Files” author Michael Shellenberger also revealed what he called an “influence campaign” by the FBI that ultimately “worked” when Twitter imposed censorship. Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop,
Republican senator brushes off concerns about skeptical judges in censorship Supreme Court case
The New York Post’s explosive reporting during the 2020 presidential election was snubbed by Big Tech. Twitter censored the Post’s reporting before the 2020 election. (Getty Images | New York Post)
The MRC found that the Department of Defense was also promoting censorship.
“The Department of State funded and worked with GDI through GEC, which actively worked to blacklist right-wing media sources and stop their funding. The Department of Defense worked with NewsGuard, a biased so-called media ratings firm that allegedly rates media according to their credibility. However, NewsGuard has shown itself to be incredibly biased in favor of the left,” Pariseau wrote.
“For three years in a row, MRC has highlighted the firm’s left-wing bias. In the most recent report, the average credibility rating for left-wing media outlets (identified by AllSides) was 91 percent, while the average credibility rating for right-wing media outlets was 65 percent,” he said. “These ratings have hardly fluctuated over the past few years and have remained relatively consistent.”
The conservative Media Research Center also found censorship problems at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Murtha v. Missouri case, brought by the state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, accused high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies “under the guise of combating misinformation,” which ultimately led to the censoring of speech on topics such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of COVID-19, and the effectiveness of face masks.
According to the MRC study, the case “highlighted the Department of Health and Human Services’ role in censoring Americans online.”
The MRC found that the National Science Foundation also “engaged in state-sanctioned censorship” as it awarded $13 million in grants to organizations developing AI-generated tools to combat “so-called mis- and disinformation.”
The Treasury Department also did not receive any permission from the MRC.
“The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on Arming the Federal Government released a 36-page interim report in March detailing the extent of the government-run financial espionage effort,” Perisseau wrote.
They said, “A document shared by federal law enforcement with financial institutions ‘noted that Americans who have expressed opposition to firearm regulation, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists,’ even if they were not suspected of committing any specific crime.” “The House report concluded that federal law enforcement used this Stasi-esque logic to ‘order’ financial institutions to conduct sweeping searches of Americans’ financial data.”
Six of the named agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“GEC does not engage in censorship of speech. GEC is focused on countering foreign disinformation abroad and its approach is based on providing foreign audiences with more information, not less, so they are able to make their own decisions,” a State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
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Fox News Digital’s Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.
