California Officials, Biden-Linked Firm Colluded With Big Tech To Censor Election Posts: Judicial Watch
California Officials, Biden-Linked Firm Colluded
With Big Tech To Censor Election Posts: Judicial Watch
BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, APR 28, 2021 - 11:20 PM Authored by Isabel Van Burgen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
California
officials colluded with Big Tech to censor social media posts in the United
States during the 2020 presidential election,
government watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Tuesday.
The
findings come after Judicial Watch received 540
pages and a further four
pages of documents from the office of the Secretary of State of
California in response to an open records request, the group said.
It had filed the request after a December 2020 report surfaced
revealing that California’s Office of Election Cybersecurity had surveilled and
asked the social media giants to remove or flag as “misleading” at least two
dozen messages.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that SKDKnickerbocker, a
communications company linked to President Joe Biden’s election campaign, was
involved in the censoring of speech during last year’s election period.
The company did this by sharing its “Misinformation Daily
Briefings” with California officials, who then passed them on to social media
giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google for dissemination, according to Judicial
Watch.
“These new documents suggest a conspiracy against the First
Amendment rights of Americans by the California Secretary of State, the Biden
campaign operation, and Big Tech,” Fitton said.
He
added, “These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship
is ‘private’—as the documents show collusion between a whole group of
government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election
controversies.”
Jenna Dresner, senior public information officer for the Office
of Election Cybersecurity, responded to the December report at the time saying
that “we don’t take down posts, that is not our role to play.”
“We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social
media companies and we let them make that call based on community standards
they created,” Dresner said.
According to Judicial Watch, the documents it obtained show how
officials pushed big tech companies to censor social media posts.
Google’s
YouTube was contacted directly by a state official to remove a Judicial Watch
video on the platform on Sept. 24, last year, according to the group.
“YouTube seemed to respond by deleting the video on September
27, 2020,” Judicial Watch said.
In another instance, a Facebook user who implied having voted
twice with multiple ballots had their post removed on Oct. 31, 2020.
Other posts removed by social media giants included claims of voter fraud,
receiving multiple ballots in the mail, and finding thousands of alleged
unopened ballots in a dumpster.
Meanwhile, a Twitter post from Fitton that said “Mailing 51
million ballots to those who haven’t asked for increases risk of voter fraud of
voter intimidation,” was flagged by SKDKnickerBocker as part of its
“Misinformation Tracker.”
Washington-based SKDKnickerBocker said
in a statement last November that it developed the Biden
campaign’s vote-by-mail program in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Arizona.
The communications firm and California’s Office of Election
Cybersecurity didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment by The Epoch
Times.
Big Tech companies have drawn intense scrutiny for perceived
political bias and alleged unbalanced moderation of users’ content. Critics say
much of the companies’ moderation in the past year has unfairly targeted
conservative speech and speech from individuals deemed to be supporters of
former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, groups on the other side of the aisle have been
taking issue with how social media companies are operating, claiming that the
Silicon Valley companies have failed to adequately address misinformation that
is being proliferated online.
Janita
Kan contributed to this report.
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