According to Judicial Watch, the amazingly patriotic legal organization without which we would know far less about how Barack Obama and the politicized FBI worked to depose the duly-elected Donald Trump, Big Tech has been caught colluding with California's Democratic leaders to censor pre-election posts of American users who were obviously on the 'wrong side' of the political spectrum.
In recent days, the organization noted in a press release it has "received 540 pages and a supplemental four pages of documents from the office of the Secretary of State of California revealing how state officials pressured social media companies (Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube) to censor posts about the 2020 election.
"Included in these documents were 'misinformation briefings' emails that were compiled by communications firm SKDK, that lists Biden for President as their top client of 2020," the press release continues.
"The documents show how the state agency successfully pressured YouTube to censor a Judicial Watch video concerning the vote by mail and a Judicial Watch lawsuit settlement about California voter roll clean up."
Judicial Watch attorneys filed their requests for the information following a December 2020 report that was made public showing that the secretary of state's office was surveilling, tracking and attempting to censor Americans' political speech, a basic violation of the First Amendment:
The Office of Election Cybersecurity in the California Secretary of State’s office monitored and tracked social media posts, decided if they were misinformation, stored the posts in an internal database coded by threat level, and on 31 different occasions requested posts be removed. In 24 cases, the social media companies agreed and either took down the posts or flagged them as misinformation, according to Jenna Dresner, senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity.
“We don’t take down posts, that is not our role to play,” Dresner said. “We alert potential sources of misinformation to the social media companies and we let them make that call based on community standards they created.”
Right.
Of course, one person's definition of 'misinformation' or 'fake news' is very often different that someone else's definition. Clearly, the left has used arbitrary, loose definitions to justify taking down content that is factual and well-documented but harmful to the left's political causes and issues.
And in fact, Dresner proves the point.
In a California Secretary of State communication with YouTube, officials wrote: “We wanted to flag this YouTube video because it misleads community members about elections or other civic processes and misrepresents the safety and security of mail-in ballots.”
An accompanying chart quotes Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton as making a statement regarding the organization's lawsuit settlement with Los Angeles County that mandates they clean up their voter registration rolls as well as how a state court in Michigan "changed the rules" regarding deadlines for 2020 ballots and ballot harvesting (a highly controversial ruling that was overturned in October 2020).
In addition, the document shows that Golden State officials made direct contact with YouTube to have the video taken down Sept. 24, 2020; the platform agreed and did so three days later, Judicial Watch notes.
Besides YouTube, the California Secretary of State's office also communicated similar 'concerns' to Twitter and Facebook, both of which also acted on the false claims that Judicial Watch was not providing accurate information about its own cases. The results were the same: Content was removed by those platforms.
“These new documents suggest a conspiracy against the First Amendment rights of Americans by the California Secretary of State, the Biden campaign operation, and Big Tech,” said Fitton. “These documents blow up the big lie that Big Tech censorship is ‘private’ – as the documents show collusion between a whole group of government officials in multiple states to suppress speech about election controversies.”
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