(PresidentialHill.com)- During the 2020 election, a private consortium reported so-called “election misinformation” to social media platforms in “consultation” with federal agencies to censor some major news outlets, including the New York Post, Fox News, and Breitbart News.
The Election Integrity Partnership is a consortium of four organizations, the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and the social media analytics company Graphika.
According to a recently published report, during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the consortium created a system that allowed federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to file “tickets” flagging news stories deemed “misinformation” so Tech platforms could either attach warning labels on the posts or suppress the posts entirely.
But government agencies weren’t the only entities permitted to “flag” “misinformation.” The Election Integrity Partnership also permitted the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-aligned groups like the NAACP and Common Cause to “flag” misinformation as well.
In addition to filing “tickets” flagging (mostly conservative) news outlets, the agencies and Democrat groups were also able to file “tickets” flagging individual social media users, including Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, Fox News host Sean Hannity, radio host Mark Levin, and, of course, then-President Donald Trump and his sons.
In total, the report lists 21 of the “most prominent repeat spreaders” of so-called misinformation on Twitter.
Among the 20 “most prominent domains” repeatedly flagged for election “misinformation” were conservative news outlets including Breitbart News, The Epoch Times, Fox News, Just the News, New York Post, Washington Examiner, and Washington Times.
According to the Election Integrity Partnership, the consortium had a 35 percent success rate in getting flagged content removed, suppressed, or labeled.
After the report made news last week, the Election Integrity Partnership issued a statement denying it coordinated with the government agencies to flag “misinformation” or that it relayed flagged content to social media companies.
