Quote:Seven federal agencies have pressured Big Tech to censor Americans, according to the Media Research Center.

The MRC analyzed actions of several federal agencies as the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hand down its opinion on Murthy v. Missouri, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to prevent the Biden administration from colluding with and coercing Big Tech companies to censor Americans. The watchdog group found that the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, National Science Foundation, and Department of the Treasury have all pushed for various forms of censorship.

"There is a shocking degree of breadth and coordination within the Biden administration to use our tax dollars against us. We have never seen this kind of effort to silence regular, everyday Americans," MRC Free Speech America vice president Dan Schneider told Fox News Digital.

"The Biden administration's justification for its censorship initiative is astonishing. In court documents and in oral argument before the Supreme Court, Biden's lawyers literally claimed that the federal government has a First Amendment right to censor citizens," Schneider continued. "This inversion of the Constitution threatens the very essence of our democracy."

MRC Free Speech American editor Gabriela Pariseau, who wrote that Biden "sits atop a censorship regime made up of federal agencies that has repeatedly pressured Big Tech social media companies to clamp down on those who express views in opposition to his own," detailed censorship concerns at seven federal agencies in a recap of findings.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "has one of the most entrenched censorship operations in the U.S. government disguised as fighting terrorism and foreign influence operations," according to the MRC study.

The Media Research Center said that the Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of Health and Human Services, National Science Foundation, and Department of the Treasury have all pushed for various forms of censorship under President Biden.
"The agency’s aims became publicly apparent when it released a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin in February 2022. The bulletin claimed that one of the ‘key factors’ of a ‘heightened’ terrorism threat included ‘false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19,’" Pariseau wrote, noting that the DHS has given taxpayer money to various grantees that target "misinformation," "disinformation" and "malinformation."

"The program, which is overseen by the infamous Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3), was created under Obama to combat terrorism. However, it was later revamped and weaponized by the Biden administration to award grants to far-left projects for the purposes of establishing ‘media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives.’ The projects in turn push for censorship of conservatives, Christians and the Republican Party,’" Pariseau wrote.

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) "is the State Department’s nucleus for censorship," Pariseau wrote.

"GEC… worked directly with social media companies to censor speech, which often meant targeting whatever it deemed foreign influence campaigns for censorship. But the agency often misidentified what constituted a foreign influence campaign," she continued, noting that "Twitter Files" journalist Matt Taibbi alleged that the GEC once sent Twitter a list of names believed to be Chinese accounts engaged in state-backed manipulation but many of them were actually Western government accounts.

"GEC also funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), initially a U.K.-based group that created a blacklist of certain media organizations that GDI claimed make money by distributing so-called disinformation," Pariseau wrote.

The Department of Justice, which was also part of the "Twitter Files," was "flagging content for social media companies to censor," according to the MRC study.

"Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, 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" writer Michael Shellenberger also revealed what he called an "influence campaign" by the FBI that eventually "worked" when Twitter censored Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop.

"The State Department through the GEC funded and worked with the GDI, which actively worked to blacklist and defund right-leaning media sources. The Department of Defense worked with NewsGuard, a biased so-called media ratings firm that allegedly rates media according to their reliability. NewsGuard, however, has shown itself to be incredibly biased in favor of the left," Pariseau wrote.

"Three years running, MRC has exposed the firm for its leftist bias. In the most recent report, the average reliability rating for left-leaning media outlets (identified by AllSides) was 91 percent, whereas the average reliability rating for right-leaning media outlets was 65 percent," she added. "These ratings have barely fluctuated over the last few years and have remained relatively the same."

The conservative Media Research Center also found censorship issues with the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Murthy v. Missouri case brought by state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana accused high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies "under the guise of combating misinformation" that ultimately led to censoring speech on topics that included Hunter Biden’s laptop, COVID-19 origins and the efficacy of face masks.

The case "highlighted the Department of Health and Human Services' role in censoring Americans online," according to the MRC study.

The MRC found that the National Science Foundation has also "been involved in government-sanctioned censorship" after it provided $13 million in grants to entities developing AI-generated tools designed to combat "so-called mis- and disinformation."

The Department of Treasury didn’t receive a pass from the MRC, either.

"The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a 36-page interim report in March outlining the extent of a government-run financial spying effort," Pariseau wrote.

"One document shared with financial institutions by federal law enforcement ‘noted that those Americans who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the ‘deep state’ may be potential domestic terrorists,’ despite them not having to be suspected of committing any specific crimes," she added. "The House report concluded that federal law enforcement used this Stasi-esque line of reasoning to ‘commandeer’ financial institutions to conduct sweeping searches of Americans’ financial data."

None of the agencies named immediately responded to a request for comment.

(06-20-2024, 08:41 AM)pally Wrote: Do you think it is a coincidence that a conservative organization found that conservatives were victims here? I would be shocked if they didn’t

(06-20-2024, 09:15 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: This part really sticks out to me in this article from Faux. Throw out a bunch of spin and the way I read it Biden awards grants to "projects for the purposes of establishing ‘media literacy and online critical thinking initiatives.’" That sounds like a Faux nightmare for sure, and for right wing media in general since most copy Faux.

Yes stuff you post on the internet can get you put on lists. If you don't know that. That's on you. Yes if you matched the description of someone who broke into the capitol with zip ties ready to take hostages and overthrow our government and pooped on the floor. They might look at you.

Yes the government should try to combat misinformation. One of the main ways our adversaries attack us.

They keep saying censorship. Where is the censorship?

Quote:Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow are afraid that, if he wins in November, Trump will use his power as president to cancel their shows.


“I think that he is so vindictive that he will go after … however he has to, through the IRS maybe, or even through sponsors to get us off the air,” Behar whined to Maddow during Tuesday’s episode of “The View.”


The unfounded concerns ignore the fact that, in the four years Trump was president, their shows carried on uninterrupted. Trump didn’t attempt to silence any of his critics through the IRS or advertiser boycotts.

The duo’s worries appear to be a case of left-wing projection, as the political left have been much more complicit in the suppression speech they don’t agree with than conservatives have been.

Behar’s specific example of advertiser boycotts is a hallmark of left-wing advocacy groups like Sleeping Giants, who before they faded into irrelevancy by departing from Twitter, dedicated their platform to pestering advertisers to stop working with Fox News.

Another group erected by one of Sleeping Giants’ co-founders triumphantly blasted their victory horns when Fox News parted ways with Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson. The group’s founder Nandini Jammi claimed Carlson’s scalp for herself, writing an article titled “How we took Tucker Carlson Tonight off the air.”

But advertiser boycotts are simply surface-level efforts of suppression when compared to the left’s more insidious shadow campaigns to censor conservative speech.

In 2022 the Twitter Files revealed that Democrats engaged in suppression of legitimate information and viewpoints that undermined their preferred narratives and political goals.

The sweeping and comprehensive investigative work journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger conducted after Elon Musk granted them access to Twitter’s internal files revealed, among other things, the great lengths Twitter employees went to in order to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.

“Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation,” Taibbi tweeted in 2022. “There were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right,” he said.


Their investigations also revealed that intelligence agencies, left-leaning nonprofits and Biden’s State Department had a direct pipeline to Twitter staff to ask them to censor and remove content at their behest, requests Twitter often complied with.

“Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system,” Taibbi testified to Congress in 2023. “It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”

Most recently, the Biden White House has cynically claimed that legitimate videos of him appearing increasingly more senile and frail are digitally altered disinformation.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called one video of President Biden wandering away from world leaders during the G7 Summit in Italy a “cheap fake.”


The president has also claimed executive privilege to stop the release of audio recordings of his interview with Special Council Robert Hur. The special council’s written record of the interview revealed that Biden struggled to remember the dates of his son’s death and his own vice presidency.

In her struggle session with Maddow, Behar also spoke of Richard Nixon’s enemies list, another bout of projection from the left.

In 2020 Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for Trump allies to be archived “for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future.”


The McCarthy Red List-like suggestion was so abhorrent it drew condemnation from her congressional colleagues, including Republican North Carolina Rep. George Murphy.

“The fact that this far-left radical wants to put people on lists is un-American and flies in the face of our Constitutional rights,” Murphy said in a statement at the time. “This is a direct attack on the foundation of our democracy. I strongly condemn these deeply divisive words.”

But Behar’s own co-host Sunny Hostin rejected the notion that putting Trump allies on a list was akin to McCarthyism.

“I don’t think that they should be forgotten, I don’t think we should look the other way,” Hostin said in 2020. “We need to remember because if you don’t remember things then past becomes prologue. I don’t think it’s reminiscent of McCarthyism at all.”

While Behar stuck up for specific individuals like short-lived Trump Press Secretary Anthony Scaramucci, she ultimately concurred with Hostin that there should be a list.

“I think you have to be specific about who you’ll target as collaborators,” she quipped.

While Maddow and Behar shudder to think of a world in which Trump takes them off-air, they completely ignore their own complicity in a system that seeks to destroy all dissent and push us ever-faster into a culture where only one worldview is allowed.

(06-20-2024, 09:35 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Denialism, burying one's head in the sand and pretending that it isn't really happening.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/after-years-of-working-to-silence-conservatives-liberal-tv-hosts-are-terrified-trump-could-shut-them-down/ar-BB1oy1qW?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=6e6de7d4b19447eaad79141e93ff8fb0&ei=56

(06-20-2024, 09:47 AM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: Daily Caller opinion piece isn't going to sway me.

Who is the victim? Who got censored? Who chose to do the censoring?

(06-20-2024, 09:35 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Denialism, burying one's head in the sand and pretending that it isn't really happening.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/after-years-of-working-to-silence-conservatives-liberal-tv-hosts-are-terrified-trump-could-shut-them-down/ar-BB1oy1qW?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=6e6de7d4b19447eaad79141e93ff8fb0&ei=56

(06-20-2024, 10:15 AM)pally Wrote: so you quote an OPINION piece from another right-wing organization to support the idea that your original right-wing organization's conservative slant Is the correct one

(06-20-2024, 10:19 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Opinion piece, yes. However, the author referenced proven specific examples in the piece.

(06-20-2024, 10:46 AM)pally Wrote: The conclusion is his opinion using carefully curated quotes to support it

(06-20-2024, 08:41 AM)pally Wrote: Do you think it is a coincidence that a conservative organization found that conservatives were victims here? I would be shocked if they didn’t

(06-20-2024, 12:24 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Why left leaning people would try and claim the left doesn't censor people is beyond me.  They flat out admit they do it.  Look at Australia, whose censorship Tsar demanded that TwitterX take down a video so that no one on Earth could see it.  New Zealand made it a criminal offense to read or disseminate the manifesto of the mosque shooter.  In the UK people are literally jailed for voicing their opinion.  Canada wants to impose censorship on big tech, of course they get to determine what is, or is not, harmful.

But SSF, none of those examples are in the US.  Quite correct, as we have a first amendment that prohibits such overt government interference.  The other countries in the anglosphere do not, and we see the results.  The article in OP literally quotes Biden's government claiming the government has a first amendment right to censor, an argument they made in front of SCOTUS.  So why are you scrambling to defend this or pretend it's not happening?  The government is admitting they're doing it and you're saying, nuh uh.

You'd think censorship imposed by our government would be a topic that people of all political leanings could stand up and shout, NO!  But I guess it's "ok when we do it", eh?

(06-20-2024, 12:43 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: It won't be a big deal to people on the left, until it's their voices, thoughts and expressions that are the ones being silenced.

(06-20-2024, 12:50 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Any government censorship of private citizens is unacceptable to me, and it should be unacceptable to anyone else.  As you say, what you use against your opponents now will be used by them, against you, later.

(06-20-2024, 12:24 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Why left leaning people would try and claim the left doesn't censor people is beyond me.  They flat out admit they do it.  Look at Australia, whose censorship Tsar demanded that TwitterX take down a video so that no one on Earth could see it.  New Zealand made it a criminal offense to read or disseminate the manifesto of the mosque shooter.  In the UK people are literally jailed for voicing their opinion.  Canada wants to impose censorship on big tech, of course they get to determine what is, or is not, harmful.

But SSF, none of those examples are in the US.  Quite correct, as we have a first amendment that prohibits such overt government interference.  The other countries in the anglosphere do not, and we see the results.  The article in OP literally quotes Biden's government claiming the government has a first amendment right to censor, an argument they made in front of SCOTUS.  So why are you scrambling to defend this or pretend it's not happening?  The government is admitting they're doing it and you're saying, nuh uh.

You'd think censorship imposed by our government would be a topic that people of all political leanings could stand up and shout, NO!  But I guess it's "ok when we do it", eh?

(06-20-2024, 02:00 PM)pally Wrote: I don't agree with censorship by either side.  I had a problem with the source and the tone.  And nothing is sillier than using opinion pieces to support opinions

(06-20-2024, 02:00 PM)pally Wrote: I don't agree with censorship by either side. I had a problem with the source and the tone. And nothing is sillier than using opinion pieces to support opinions