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🚨THREAD: @MikeBenzCyber speaks with @TuckerCarlson about the Department of Homeland Security-backed censorship consortium that censored millions of social media posts during the 2020 election and COVID-19. The 2020 election and COVID-19 were the two most censored events in American history. Mike Benz outlines how the government established a permanent domestic censorship office under the pretext of countering misinformation. and disinformation. Initially considered for the State Department, CIA, and FBI, the censorship office found its home in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), utilizing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). DHS classified elections as critical infrastructure and online misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation as cybersecurity attacks. The original goal of countering Russian disinformation shifted to suppressing domestic dissent and the populist movement led by President Trump. Examining the 2020 election's censorship strategy, Benz details CISA's collaboration with Stanford University, University of Washington, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council through the Election Integrity Partnership. The censorship consortium employed coercive tactics, leveraging its deputized status to pressure tech companies through government threats. A critical element was the seven-month pre-censorship campaign before the 2020 election. The consortium compelled social media companies to introduce a new "delegitimization" violation, targeting content challenging faith in mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot drop boxes. The overarching goal was narrative control, preventing doubts about a Biden victory and avoiding a crisis akin to the 2000 Bush-Gore election. Anticipating Biden's victory hinging on mail-in ballots, early voting, and ballot dropboxes, the consortium precensored any questioning of the election's legitimacy, particularly if Trump appeared to win on election night but later lost due to late-arriving mail-in ballots. The so-called "Red Mirage-Blue Shift event." The thread continues below.👇
2/ The DHS outsourced censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), comprised of four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika. During the 2020 election: •120 analysts monitored 15 tech platforms •22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” •Entire “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling The EIP claimed every "repeat spreader of election misinformation" was a supporter of President Trump.
3/ This Orwellian speech control consortium also flagged popular populist-right YouTube channels, including @scrowder, @BlazeTV, @JudicialWatch, and even the @GOP War Room, as “mis- and disinformation” spreaders. The @FFO_Freedom report comprehensively details the US government’s role in outsourcing censorship to this public-private network. Founder @MikeBenzCyber extensively documented the individuals involved and the flow of taxpayer funds ($40M) to domestic censorship.
4/ The DHS quietly corrupted CISA's mission when it designated domestic disinformation as cyber attacks on "critical cognitive infrastructure." @FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber @TuckerCarlson
5/ But CISA had a First Amendment problem. The US government cannot sandblast millions of voters off the Internet because of their speech about elections. CISA needed private sector partners to do dirty work. And that's where EIP stepped in: "CISA at the time lacked the funding and legal authorizations to go do the kinds of work that would be necessary to truly understand how election disinformation was operating... We were able to pull together pretty quickly a project between these four different institutions to try to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves." @FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber @TuckerCarlson
6/ So, who are these unelected bureaucrats who get to play judge, jury, and executioner and control the thoughts of millions of Americans? “The main character in the CISA side of this story is its then-director, Chris Krebs.” Krebs's political bias and his affinity for domestic censorship: •Called Trump a national security threat •Pleased with #BidenLaptop censorship •Passionately censored covid-19 and elections •Wanted lawyers and doctors disbarred •Wanted conservative media bankrupted @FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber
7/ Alex Stamos, a former Facebook exec, is the founder of the EIP censorship network and Krebs' business partner. Stamos is a member of the CFR, a member of the Aspen Institute, and the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and he loves censoring his political opponents.
8/ In Jan. 2021, Alex Stamos compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS. He called on Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to block OANN and Newsmax and said: “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.”
9/ Kate Starbird is the head of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public director and CISA’s “disinformation” advisor subcommittee. US government grants have funded her work on domestic censorship since 2013.
10/ The EIP's Starbird used advanced monitoring AI to map out entire networks of people who spread a narrative. This allowed the EIP to stalk every chain in what they deemed a "false narrative" and to systematically censor entire belief systems at scale: @MikeBenzCyber @FFO_Freedom @TuckerCarlson
11/ In October 2018, Starbird told her Facebook followers to vote Democrat to hold Trump responsible for "corruption and collusion" and his "racist, anti-LGBT agenda." Starbird claimed Trump's “nationalism” didn’t stand for “patriotism” but instead stood for “white supremacy." She implored her Facebook followers to vote Democrat to stop "the rise of fascism and white nationalism." "Your children's lives depend upon it," she explained. "We are facing a wholly different kind of threat." This was one of the people in charge of censoring the 2020 election.
12/ Kate Starbird heads CISA's disinformation advisory panel with Vijaya Gadde, the former top lawyer at Twitter, who famously banned the former President and opposed @elonmusk proposal to roll back Twitter censorship policies.
13/ Graham Brookie is the figure who led the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and a previous Obama White House National Security Council member. The Atlantic Council is a NATO think-tank with seven living CIA directors as members. Brookie, a government-funded disinformation expert, dedicated much of his time during President Trump’s years in the White House to promoting the false narrative that the President of the United States was a Russian agent controlled by Vladimir Putin. In Oct. 2020, Brookie would call the #BidenLaptop “laundered unverified misinfo.” When DNI John Ratcliffe stated that the laptop was legitimate, Brookie publicly condemned Ratcliffe’s “credibility” and accused him of “politicizing intel.”
14/ Incredibly, the Atlantic Council's disinfo lab tasked by the DHS to censor the 2020 election tweeted its director's disdain for President Trump days before the election. "Trump is hands down the most significant accelerant and amplifier for disinformation in the election."
15/ Ben Nimmo, a Facebook exec, leads the censorship role at Graphika and is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab. He was a NATO press officer and was briefly listed as a senior fellow at the UK Institute for Statecraft. “Donald Trump is right that someone is trying to rig the US election, but it is not Hillary Clinton: it is the Kremlin, and Trump is an accomplice, whether or not he realizes it,” Nimmo lamented in 2016. The Pentagon awarded Graphika $5 million in 2021 for more censorship of "disinformation."
16/ In June 2019, at an Atlantic Council conference, Nimmo trained journalists on how to spot “disinformation” in Trump tweets and Brexit ads. Senior journalists were encouraged to hold up placards reading “Bullsh*t” to Trump tweets and Brexit slogans. @MikeBenzCyber @TuckerCarlson @FFO_Freedom
17/ The EIP defined "delegitimization" as speech that “casts doubt” on the election process or outcome. This accounted for 72% of the censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the posts throttled by narrative, focusing on voting machines and vote-by-mail. @MikeBenzCyber @FFO_Freedom
18/ In effect, the left was allowed to discuss the vulnerabilities of voting machines after the 2016 election, and the right was banned from social media platforms for discussing those very same vulnerabilities after the 2020 election.
19/ The EIP collaborated with its Big Tech partners to systematically censor any delegitimization of vote-by-mail as disinformation. In effect, they sided with Joe Biden against Donald Trump and pre-banned criticism of vote-by-mail at the narrative level seven months before the 2020 election.
20/ The political establishment and the left used the COVID-19 crisis to push for nationwide mail-in voting, which increased the number of ballots cast by mail from 28.8 million in 2016 to 66.4 million in 2020, a massive 131% increase. The percentage of Democrats voting by mail rose from 26% in 2016 to 60% in 2020, while Republican voters only saw a rise from 21% to 32%. In short, the extra 37 million ballots cast by mail during the 2020 election swung the election to the EIP's preferred candidate. In Europe, 74% of nations ban mail-in ballots for citizens living inside their country. Brazil, Russia, Israel, Mexico, and a host of additional developed nations have also banned mail-in voting due to security concerns. In 2012, the NYT wrote, "All the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots." In 2016, Slate wrote, "The only voting fraud schemes with the potential to actually swing elections involved mail-in ballots." <a target="_blank" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3666259" color="blue">t.co/MWEkGsVfqD</a> <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html" color="blue">t.co/u2GwumYCZq</a> <a target="_blank" href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/09/voter-fraud-exists-through-absentee-ballots-but-republicans-wont-stop-it.html" color="blue">t.co/um9MaTTaPN</a>
