Government attempted to use third parties to censor Americans

 Daily Wire:

U.S. House lawmakers accused the Biden Administration in a new report on Monday of conspiring with Big Tech to directly undermine American citizens’ First Amendment rights by censoring free speech through government-funded third-party intermediaries.

The House Weaponization Subcommittee released an interim staff report detailing how President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allegedly used the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to surveil and censor Americans’ speech on social media in the run-up of the 2020 election and the 2022 midterm elections.

“CISA must be reined in, as must the Biden Administration’s ‘whole-of-government’ approach to social media censorship,” lawmakers wrote in the report. “Every American has the right to express his or her opinion online, and to receive information from others. Government classifications of opinions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ do not nullify the First Amendment’s guarantees.”

The subcommittee report comes on the heels of the Twitter Files and other reports, which also accused the federal government of pressuring and colluding with Big Tech to censor certain viewpoints from American citizens, primarily those who questioned pandemic-related information or the authenticity of the 2020 presidential election.
...

According to the report, the agency exploited its connections with Big Tech and government-funded non-profits to censor by proxy — to circumvent the First Amendment’s prohibition against government-induced censorship. Such ways included creating reporting “portals” through which the government funneled so-called misinformation reports to social media platforms.

In 2021, CISA formed a since-disbanded “mis, dis, and malformation” (MDM) team, which included University of Washington Associate Professor Kate Starbird, who co-founderd the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, as well as former Chief Legal Officer of Twitter Vijaya Gadd, and former assistant general counsel and legal adviser for the CIA Suzanne Spaulding.

The subcommittee says then-incoming President Biden transitioned the agency to focus more on the newly formed team to target domestic sources in addition to countering foreign influence. By the following year, the subcommittee accused CISA of attempting to “camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely ‘informational’ role.”
...

The committee, however, argued that the most damning part of CISA’s censorship efforts was its alleged cover-up of unconstitutional activities, which it conducted by removing any wrongdoing evidence and hiding it from the American public.

Between April and May 2022, the Biden Administration attempted to create the now-infamous “Disinformation Governance Board,” which quickly disbanded after severe public backlash. Shortly after the administration pulled the plug on the group, Missouri and Louisiana Attorney Generals filed a lawsuit against the president’s administration revealing direct pressure from the White House to censor vaccine-skeptical content on social media.
...

The government tried to restrict speech by alleging misinformation and disinformation rather than just presenting an alternative narrative.  The Biden administration tried to control speech to push its agenda.