The federal government’s censorship-industrial complex is an existential threat to Americans’ First Amendment rights, several witnesses testified during a House subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.
The federal government “not just participated, but led this creation of … a mass flagging and censorship operation that was coordinated with a broader effort to pressure [Big Tech] platforms to do more censorship,” independent reporter Michael Shellenberger said.
Titled “Censorship Laundering Part II: Preventing the Department of Homeland Security’s Silencing of Dissent,” Wednesday’s hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability analyzed federal agencies’ extensive efforts to collude with Big Tech platforms to silence Americans online for questioning claims made by the government. During his opening statement, subcommittee chair Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., underscored the role of the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a subagency within the Department of Homeland Security, in coordinating this censorship operation.
“What is stopping DHS from overreaching its jurisdiction beyond elections to censor more Americans to ‘protect’ whatever government-deployed orthodox notions it deems ‘critical infrastructure’?” Bishop asked. “The answer is: nothing.”
Often called the “nerve center” of the federal government’s censorship complex, CISA facilitates meetings “between Big Tech companies, and national security and law enforcement agencies to address ‘mis-, dis-, and mal-information’ on social media platforms.” Ahead of the 2020 election, for example, the agency upped its censorship efforts by flagging posts for Big Tech companies it claimed were worthy of being censored, some of which called into question the security of voting practices such as mass, unsupervised
