The State Department was “recommended” by the Department of Homeland Security to contact a group it later partnered with on pressuring social media platforms to suppress speech from conservatives before the 2020 election, emails show.
On Oct. 14, 2020, hours after the New York Post published a story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that Twitter blocked from being shared online, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center reached out to “misinformation” researchers behind the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration between universities, left-wing think tanks, social media companies, and the U.S. government to thwart alleged falsehoods online in the lead-up to the presidential election. That outreach from the GEC, a foreign-focused office Republican lawmakers are investigating for its ties to anti-speech projects in the United States, was apparently thanks to guidance from the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to internal documents.
The newly unearthed coordination underscores the major role that CISA, an agency under scrutiny from the House GOP for allegedly colluding “with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans” in 2020, played in the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP. Both CISA and Alex Stamos, who directed the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Stanford University office behind the EIP, have appeared to downplay CISA’s role in the partnership despite some since-released records indicating a closer relationship than previously known, the Washington Examiner reported.
Moreover, news of the government coordination will likely lead to lawmakers raising further concerns about why the State Department’s GEC, which is tasked with countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation,” would get involved with the EIP in the first place. Notably, FBI agent Elvis Chan, who was accused in a lawsuit by Republican state attorneys general of helping to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, testified in 2022 that GEC officials did not “have the same type of legal training” on First Amendment protections as he did at the FBI, calling the GEC “primarily a foreign-focus agency.”
To Republicans, Chan’s testimony highlighted why it was fundamentally wrong for the GEC to participate in the EIP or similar apparent domestic “censorship” operations. But according to an Oct. 14, 2020, email reviewed by the Washington Examiner, then-GEC academic and think tank liaison Adela Levis reached out to Renee DiResta and Shelby Grossman of the Stanford Internet Observatory, as well as co-founder Jevin West of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which also helped launch the EIP.
The University of Washington’s office is led by “misinformation” researcher Kate Starbird, who testified to Congress last year that she personally advised social media companies on crafting content moderation policies. Starbird told the Washington Examiner in April that social media platforms in 2017 began to “reach out to me, seeking insights based on my academic research to help them better understand how rumors and disinformation spread online.”
Writing in October 2020 to the trio of Stanford and University of Washington personnel, Levis said the GEC was “looking to connect with someone at the EIP [in] the coming days” and asked if DiResta, Grossman, or West would be available or have a good point of contact.
