The State Department “outsourced” its social-media censorship operations to Stanford University researchers ahead of the 2020 election, according to a new House GOP report.

The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department worked directly with a group of academics known as the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech in advance of the 2020 presidential election,” according to a report published Monday by the House Judiciary Committee and its Weaponization Select Subcommittee. Led by researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, the EIP coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to guide censorship decisions on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook in the name of protecting election integrity.

Drawing on private EIP documents that were turned over by Stanford under threat of subpoena, House Republicans found that social-media firms routinely censored factual information, jokes and satire, and political opinions under pressure from the federal government and universities.

“This pressure was largely directed in a way that benefitted one side of the political aisle: true information posted by Republicans and conservatives was labeled as ‘misinformation’ while false information posted by Democrats and liberals was largely unreported and untouched by the censors,” the report reads. “The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives.”

After reviewing misinformation reports submitted by federal officials, EIP researchers would compile a list of offending posts to submit to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and other major social-media platforms. The research group would then give specific recommendations to social-media platforms on how best to censor the posts. These actions include but are not limited to: “reducing the posts’ ‘discoverability,’ ‘suspending [an account’s] ability to continue tweeting for 12 hours,’ ‘monitoring if any of the tagged influencer accounts retweet’ a particular user, and … removing thousands of Americans’ posts.”

Several social-media accounts belonging to prominent conservatives, many of whom were mentioned in the report, were suspended indefinitely on Twitter until billionaire Elon Musk bought the company last year and later rebranded it X. Musk has been particularly outspoken of the federal government’s censorship efforts, tweeting in February that the “obscure” GEC is “[t]he worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”

While EIP researchers and their government partners frequently cited the threat of foreign election disinformation to justify their activities, they tended to censor election-related speech by Americans more often than foreign speech, the report claims.

Former speaker Newt Gingrich, former representative Jody Hice (R., Ga.), and most notably former president Donald Trump, among many other conservative politicians and commentators, were silenced on multiple social-media platforms after questioning the validity of the 2020 election. EIP researchers also flagged Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) for prematurely claiming victory in his Senate reelection three years ago, even though he did end up winning the race.

The bombshell investigation comes several months after Missouri and Louisiana filed a joint lawsuit, accusing the Biden administration and federal agencies of colluding with platforms to suppress users’ free speech.

The two southern states allege in their suit that several Biden administration agencies, including the State Department and DHS, suppressed online speech about the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election, the lab-leak theory that led to a global pandemic, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, and election integrity in 2020. All these claims and more were deemed misinformation, and in some cases disinformation, at the time.

The suit’s plaintiffs also allege YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and others took down social-media posts that were critical of these topics at the behest of the federal government — what the latest report appears to confirm. Indefinitely suspending users on these platforms and “shadow banning” certain posts, which means someone’s post doesn’t appear in their followers’ feeds, were other examples of actions that arose out of this collusive relationship.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently hearing the Missouri v. Biden case.

“Today, as a result of the Committee’s and Select Subcommittee’s investigation, political candidates, journalists, and all Americans have the opportunity to see if they were targeted by their government and what viewpoints DHS, Stanford, and others worked to censor,” the investigative report states. “While the EIP disproportionately targeted conservatives, Americans of all political affiliations were victims of censorship.”

National Review contacted Stanford for comment.