Report Exposes Stanford University Colluding With the DHS to Censor Online Speech in the Lead Up to the 2020 Election
Jose Nino
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A recently republished House Judiciary Committee report has exposed emails pointing to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) forging a Stanford University partnership to surveil and potentially restrict public discourse heading into the 2020 elections.
The committee’s interim document is over 103 pages long. It exposes how this Stanford-based alliance, called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), teamed up with DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and leading technology companies to single out and often censor online content.
The EIP was allegedly involved in suppressing expressions on social media platforms that were occasionally factual or even satirical. Unsurprisingly, the censored content was mainly from conservative figures, which included high-profile targets such as former President Donald Trump and several Republican elected officials. This selective censorship enforcement has led to accusations of this alliance engaging in censorship that is partisan in nature.
Brian Scully was a leading official within CISA who was mentioned in the report for the role he played in this “switchboarding” program. Under this process, social media removal requests went through the agency to social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter.
Instead of pursuing a more centralized censorship strategy, the DHS outsourced this censorship task to the Stanford organization.
On top of that, the report highlighted how students from Stanford were simultaneously working for both the EIP and CISA, which raised concerns about conflicts of interest and the overall integrity of the task force’s operations. In response to these revelations, CISA’s executive director, Brandon Wales, has stressed the agency’s stance on not allegedly carrying out censorship, highlighting its alleged commitment to protecting Americans’ free speech while defending election infrastructure from undue foreign influence and misinformation.
All told, elite institutions across the nation are working day and night to destroy any form of dissenting thought, especially discourse coming from the nationalist Right.
Should Republicans gain another trifecta, they should make it a point to conduct thorough investigations of private-public collusion and punish these actors for their infringements launched against Americans’ basic civil liberties.
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