Funny business: A phrase used to describe something that niggles at the gut and just does not feel right. A mystery that one cannot connect the dots to solve. When the business at hand is of a politically insidious nature, exposed, and displayed for all those folks who had no proof of information suppression during the 2020 election, it may rock confidence in the electoral process. A syndicate of for-profit businesses and university people appears to be toiling on behalf of the Departments of Homeland Security and State to censor online content. This group is called the Election Integrity Project (EIP). The saga begins with Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and ends with the discovery that his administration has kept up the program, outsourcing the censorship of social media posts the government deems misleading or labels misinformation.
If one can imagine, the group has been quite successful at the task it was created to perform. For example, the EIP boasts of a 35% success rate influencing tech platforms to remove and restrict content or, if nothing else, slap a label across the post.
The Election Integrity Project
The EIP, created immediately before, and specifically for, the 2020 election, is a consortium of very liberal institutions: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. The process to utilize this bastion of genius to pressure tech platforms to censor is simple: File a complaint ticket. But, of course, not everyone is deemed worthy of ticket filing status. Federal agencies and certain other groups are empowered to lodge complaints, including Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center.
(Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
But frightening as it is to allow government agencies to curb content, this isn't quite as horrifying as also giving ticket status to three powerful political groups: The Democratic National Committee, Common Cause, and the NAACP. No Republican National Committee? What an ah-ha moment in American politics. And to add insult, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center – funded by Homeland Security and others – also had access.
It’s okay for the government to step in and censor what Americans are reading and sharing on social media, right? What could possibly go wrong? And it’s not like there is a constitutional amendment, or something, that guarantees freedom of speech.
The EIP is only gaining more strength and with no conservative counterbalances. In the project's 2020 election report, the message was posted:
“While the Partnership was intended to meet an immediate need, the conditions that necessitated its creation have not abated, and in fact may have worsened. Academia, platforms, civil society, and all levels of government must be committed, in their own ways, to truth in the service of a free and open society. All stakeholders must focus on predicting and pre-bunking false narratives, detecting mis- and disinformation as it occurs, and countering it whenever appropriate.”
At first glance, it sounds great, but a closer look suggests it might be akin to state-run media. And that is chilling. The report also claimed: “Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Tik Tok all had 75% or higher response rate on EIP ticketing.”
Mike Benz, an ex-State Department official under President Donald Trump, is the man – along with his organization Foundation for Freedom Online – who dug up most of these Election Integrity Project schemes and shone a light on a potential behemoth of a problem. He stated:
“If you trace the chronology, you find that there was actually 18 months’ worth of institutional work to create this very apparatus that we now know played a significant role in the censorship of millions of posts for the 2020 election and has ambitious sights for 2022 and 2024.”
Benz further warns of government censorship: “There are so many Ministry of Truth tasks, so many Ministry of Truth points of contact, so many different Ministry of Truth, policies for whether to remove something, reduce it, slap a fact-checking label on it.”
Big tech platforms aside, conservative news outlets such as the New York Post, Fox News, Just the News, and SeanHannity.com were also targeted.
What’s in It for Me?
One might wonder why any group, consortium, cabal, or whatever label one chooses, would commit itself to stifle content: for money, power, political agenda, or all of those reasons. After Biden’s inauguration, each partner received millions of dollars in federal grants: Stanford and UW projects got $3 million, Graphika received $5 million, and the Atlantic Council a cool $4.7 million.
Funny business? But this is about stifling free speech and influencing elections. It's really not so funny, this business, after all.
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