The federal government and its allies have lost all credibility in determining what constitutes foreign election interference after using their “findings” to trample on free speech. But thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri on Wednesday, the federal government can resume shutting down Americans’ speech under the guise of preventing “foreign disinformation.”
Missouri and Louisiana argued the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech companies to silence disfavored speech violated the First Amendment. Among other things, the Biden administration asked Big Tech to censor posts that went against the government’s narrative about Covid-19.
The high court ruled 6-3 that the plaintiffs lacked standing.
As CNN explained, “the decision means that the Department of Homeland Security may continue to flag posts to social media companies such as Facebook and X that it believes may be the work of foreign agents seeking to disrupt this year’s presidential race.”
The opinion itself, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, uncritically referred to Facebook’s “measures to counter foreign interference campaigns” and the FBI’s communications to Big Tech firms warning of “pernicious foreign influence campaigns that might spread on their sites.” Even though those warnings actually served to censor an American newspaper’s accurate reporting about then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s influence-peddling, the court concluded that such censorship may continue.
It wasn’t just the bombshell story sourced to Hunter Biden’s laptop that the censors “got wrong.” Recent memory offers several examples of media, government, and tech gatekeepers weaponizing false claims of “foreign interference” to malign — and sometimes silence — opponents.
Hamilton 68
The Hamilton 68 dashboard purported to track “Russian influence activities” on Twitter — but what it actually did was smear hundreds of real right-leaning users as fake Russian accounts. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, told colleagues in 2018 that “the Hamilton dashboard ‘falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots,” as reported by Matt Taibbi.
The Washington Post in 2018 published an article citing Hamilton 68 to claim that a Twitter movement to “#ReleaseTheMemo” regarding the FBI’s surveillance on the Trump campaign was driven by “Russian disinformation” bots. As it turned out, the accounts were “neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.”
Speaking with the Post, Director of UT-Austin’s Propaganda Research Lab Samuel Woolley hinted at a need for Big Tech censorship, using the dashboard’s erroneous findings to claim social media companies need to “design for democracy.”
Notably, Woolley’s work has been funded by Open Society Foundations, which was founded by George Soros and gives grants to left-wing advocacy groups.
Hunter Biden Laptop
Weeks before the 2020 election, 51 “intelligence officials” signed onto a letter falsely suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. In part, the letter claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Then-senior adviser to Biden’s campaign Antony Blinken triggered the creation of that letter, according to former deputy director of the CIA Michael Morell, who also signed onto the infamous letter. Not only had the FBI authenticated the laptop as early as November 2019, but the laptop has since been used as evidence against Hunter Biden in a federal gun case.
Still, before the story dropped, the FBI had gone to social media companies warning them of so-called “Russian propaganda” and “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors.” Like clockwork, both Twitter and Facebook throttled the reach of the story, with the latter’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitting in 2022 that the company suppressed the story because of the FBI’s warning.
Russiagate
Back in 2016, the media and intelligence apparatus used false claims of “foreign interference” to discredit Donald Trump and his election victory.
The narrative falsely accused then-presidential candidate Donald Trump of being a Russian asset, after Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyers and the DNC commissioned a dossier of fake opposition research and then shopped it to the FBI. (The “primary sub-source” on which former British spy Christopher Steele based his infamous “Steele dossier” was an actual Russian, Igor Danchenko, who was later indicted for lying to the FBI.)
The agency — which, thanks to the Supreme Court, can now resume its censorship operations — used the “research” to illegally spy on the Trump campaign. Then-chairman of the Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes released a report in 2018 showing the FBI obtained surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page via a secret FISA court. This report was later corroborated by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
