AOC reportedly acknowledged on Tuesday that the alteration of Big Tech platforms' algorithms to boost or suppress speech can be seen as a type of 'election interference'.
Tucker Carlson described a confidential meeting on Tuesday involving officials from the Department of Justice and Ocasio-Cortez.
In a confidential briefing today, attended by officials from the Biden Justice Department, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stated that Elon had committed 'election interference' in 2022 by modifying the algorithms on X to change the results of the midterms that year. posted on X.
X CEO Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022 after the satirical website The Babylon Bee had its account suspended for months, responded to the post, saying “Actually, I made the algorithm open source and neutral to all parties, but of course that *is* ‘election interference’ by her standards.”
AOC's anger is being directed in the wrong way. Musk did not suppress a significant report before the 2020 election or shut down the Twitter accounts of journalists and White House officials who posted the story. But she's right that the individuals who did those actions and who have weaponized Big Tech algorithms in various ways to control discussions are indeed guilty of 'election interference'.
Censorship revealed in the 'Twitter Files'
Upon his takeover, Musk released a large amount of emails and data showing how Twitter was collaborating with federal agencies behind the scenes before deciding to suspend accounts, including the New York Post’s, for sharing a report sourced to Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Other documents in the “Twitter Files” revealed the Big Tech platform had been secretly shadowbanning conservatives for years, and had “created blacklists designed to prevent certain accounts or posts from trending.”
A report later released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government outlined how the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) schemed with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to pressure Twitter to target people like The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and Sean Davis for censorship.
The EIP was comprised of “‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory” that worked with CISA — the “nerve center” of federal censorship operations — and GEC to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election.
The operation sought to censor speech including “true information, jokes and satire, and political opinions.”
A Nov. 4, 2020 tweet by Hemingway in which she detailed how Georgia insiders said it was “ridiculous [the] media are refusing to admit Trump has won the state” was flagged by the operation. The tweet included a link to an Insider Advantage article that called the Peach State for Trump.
Hemingway was again flagged four days later after linking to a Federalist article entitled “America Won’t Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated.” Her post was flagged as “misinformation” by the EIP.
Davis was marked by EIP for two Nov. 4 tweets in which he reported alleged that Pennsylvania’s left-wing Supreme Court “allowed Pennsylvania Democrats to produce post-election ballots, fill them out for Biden over the next three days, and submit them without a postmark.”
His second tweet asserted “The most compelling evidence presently that Democrats, media, and Big Tech are plotting to steal the election is Big Tech censoring anyone and everyone who notices that Big Tech is using corrupt censorship to steal the election for Democrats.”
Facebook Limits ‘Dissemination’
Facebook also restricted spread of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, with policy communications director Andy Stone stating posting on Twitter the day the story was released that Facebook was “reducing its circulation on our platform.” Stone said he would not “deliberately link” to the story but said the story was “eligible” for fact-checkers to review.
The choice had the result, as per NPR, that “the platform’s algorithms won’t rank posts linking to the story as highly in people’s news feeds, decreasing the number of users who see it.”
Facebook executive Nick Clegg acknowledged on CNN in 2021 that Facebook also manipulates the algorithm to conceal what it perceives as “extreme content, hate speech and misinformation.” Naturally, Facebook treated the very real Hunter Biden laptop story as potential “misinformation,” as CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan.
After Using ‘Russia’ Lies To Interfere In 2016 And 2020, Agencies Dust Off Playbook For 2024]
“These algorithms are designed precisely to function almost like large spam filters to identify and reduce bad content,” Clegg told CNN.
Facebook’s speech control shows no signs of halting. Meta board member Pamela San Martín told Wired recently said in an interview that Facebook didn’t do “sufficient” to censor Americans ahead of the 2020 election.
“Even though we’re addressing the problems that arose in prior elections as a starting point, it is not enough,” San Martín said. “Between the U.S. election [in 2020] to the Brazilian election [in 2022], Meta had not done enough to address the potential misuse of its platforms through coordinated campaigns, people organizing, or using bots on the platforms to convey a message to destabilize a country, to create a lack of trust or confidence on electoral processes.”
San Martín admitted to Wired that Meta’s “algorithms … can play a part” in the “protection” of “electoral processes.”
Chilling Freedom of the Press
Algorithmic meddling and other forms of suppression are used to blacklist alternative media outlets too, not just individual accounts. And sometimes, corporate media outlets help the Big Tech censors.
For example, in 2020 NBC News, with the assistance of a foreign left-wing group, tried to entreat Google to demonetize sanction The Federalist. The supposed reason was that the comments section — which was managed by a third party and not moderated by The Federalist — allegedly violated Google’s policy.
Except Google didn’t notify The Federalist. Instead, NBC News published an article claiming Google had decided to demonetize the site, after which Google informed NBC News its story was false. Only after The Federalist “sought guidance” from Google did the Big Tech platform tell The Federalist that actually, the comment section would have to be changed in order to avoid demonetization.
Meanwhile organizations such as “NewsGuard,” which is funded by taxpayers, regularly target right-leaning websites like The Federalist for supposedly being untrustworthy but gives very positive reviews to liberal sources that have spread government-fed false information.
NewsGuard gave Politico, The Washington Post and USA Today “perfect 100/100 ratings” despite those outlets spreading the incorrect claim that the Hunter Biden laptop story was “Russian disinformation,” as analysis by the Media Research Center (MRC) revealed.
However, The Federalist received a 12.5/100 rating in part because, according to the MRC, The Federalist questioned “the effectiveness of masks for COVID-19.”
“NewsGuard uses its ratings as a weapon, trying to deter advertisers from working with media and organizations that have been accused of promoting so-called ‘misinformation’ or differing viewpoints on a variety of issues such as abortion, climate change, COVID-19 and elections,” the MRC explained.
“In doing so, NewsGuard essentially takes away the advertising revenue from media outlets with which it disagrees, gradually depleting their funds.”
