Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Tuesday labeled recent reports about government-led censorship prior to the 2020 presidential election as a “big deal.”
What Happened: Musk took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to express his concern over alleged attempts by the government to “censor” Americans’ speech in the lead-up to the 2020 elections.
“This is a big deal,” Musk wrote in response to Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) series of posts on social media platform X, which revealed the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) involvement in the creation of a “disinformation” group at Stanford University.
Jordan said the federal government and universities exerted pressure on social media platforms to censor certain content in the lead-up to the 2020 election. “True information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors,” the report shared by Jordan read.
The House Judiciary Committee’s interim report, spanning 103 pages, contained emails and internal communications that detailed how a group known as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) worked with the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to suppress and remove certain online speech.
Prominent figures such as then-President Donald Trump, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich reportedly had their social media postings marked as “misinformation.”
The report claimed the federal government’s effort, under the influence of CISA's Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, was to “censor Americans engaged in core political speech in the lead up to the 2020 election.”
Why It Matters: GOP members have repeatedly made claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was rigged and that the Federal departments conspired with big tech to censor social media accounts of vocal critics, including that of the former president.
In 2020, days before the election, Twitter and other platforms famously censored stories about Hunter Biden‘s laptop. The account of Trump's press secretary was also temporarily suspended for sharing a link to Biden's laptop story. The actions sparked debates about the role of social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, in regulating content during the election period.
Meanwhile, a majority of Americans are fearful that artificial intelligence (AI) will be a major catalyst for spreading misinformation in the upcoming 2024 presidential election, according to a recent poll.
Photo by Frederic Legrand – COMEO on Shutterstock
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