Seven federal agencies have pushed tech giants to censor Americans, Media Research Center says
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.
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"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.
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The Department of Defense was also found by the MRC to have pushed censorship.
"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."
Six of the agencies named did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
"The GEC does not engage in the censorship of speech. The GEC is focused on countering foreign disinformation overseas and its approach is based on providing foreign audiences with more information, not less, to empower them to make decisions for themselves," a State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Fox News Digital’s Brianna Herlihy contributed to this report.