Sunday, October 2, 2022

2020 Federally-Backed 'Election Integrity Partnership' Targeted 20 News Sites for Spreading 'Misinformation'


Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

Five men were arrested on June 17, 1972, while trying to bug the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate, a hotel and office building in Washington, D.C. A day later, Richard Nixon’s White House press secretary Ronald Ziegler famously called the Watergate break-in a “third-rate burglary.”

More than two years later, on August 8, 1974, that “third-rate burglary” led to Nixon’s resignation.

The lesson of the Watergate scandal: Sometimes, particularly in our nation’s Capital, these things take time to play out. That brings us to the effort by the Democrat Party, the Deep State, the liberal lapdog media, and Big Tech to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump in favor of Joe Biden.

One piece of the 2020 presidential election scandal became clearer this week, with news that a private consortium that reported election “misinformation” to Big Tech platforms during the 2020 election season, in “consultation” with federal agencies, targeted at least 20 news outlets for dissemination of “misinformation.”

This time, names were named, including Just the News, the primary source of this article.

In addition to Just the News, Fox News, the New York Post, Washington Examiner, Washington Times, Breitbart, and Epoch Times were identified among the 20 “most prominent domains across election integrity incidents” that were cited in tweets flagged by the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and its collaborators.

EIP defines itself thusly:

The Election Integrity Partnership was founded in 2020 as a non-partisan coalition to empower the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.

Our work, led in 2022 by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, focuses on a narrow scope of topics that are demonstrably harmful to the democratic process: attempts to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters, or delegitimize election results without evidence. We are interested in these dynamics both during the election cycle as well as after the election, when public perceptions of its legitimacy continue to be formed.

I won’t waste time pointing out every lie and example of hypocrisy in the above. But I will say this: the arrogance of the elitist left anointing itself as the sole arbiter of “right” and “wrong” — particularly from a political perspective — is off-the-charts unacceptable, not to mention dangerous to a free society.

In a weak effort to appear “fair and balanced,” the EIP also named The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN to the list. But? The group’s after-action report emphasizes most of the so-called “mainstream” media reports “were referenced as fact-checks” that played a “corrective role” against “misleading narratives.” Yep, try to control your shock and amazement.

The 21 “most prominent repeat spreaders [of misinformation] on Twitter”

Included in the Election Integrity Partnership’s “enemies list” were 21, top Twitter influencers–all of them politically classified as “right.” Twitter Boss and actor James Woods led that group, followed by The Gateway Pundit, Donald Trump Jr., and of course, President Trump. Others on the list were Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, Jack Posobiac, Eric Trump, Charlie Christ, Mark Levin, Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, and Richard Grenell. How ironically Nixonian.

As noted by Just the News, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the State Department, and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee, also flagged purported misinformation through the consortium.

Incidentally, when I first ran across the ominous term “Deep State,” some years back, it came off as a bit too Tom Clancy-ish.

Those days are long gone. How much more proof do we need that the Deep State poses a clear and present danger to America as we know it? Regardless, there’s more to come.