Journalist Michael Shellenberger testified in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee on Thursday, claiming military contractors for the United States and the United Kingdom have used disinformation tactics against Americans.
Shellenberger said the tactics and silencing of people who disagreed with a certain point of view were worse than he had predicted in front of Congress in March. The alleged silencing included censorship on major social media platforms during the 2020 presidential election.
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT CHINA'S NEW SPIKE IN RESPIRATORY ILLNESSES AND 'IMMUNITY DEBT'
"Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from 'The Cyber Threat Intelligence League,' which show U.S. and U.K. military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics, developed abroad, against the American people," Shellenberger told the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Shellenberger, who helped release the Twitter Files, claimed the federal government, including an office in the Department of Homeland Security, played a role in violating the First Amendment through its censorship of people who held differing political views.
"The First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech," Shellenberger testified. "The Supreme Court has ruled that the government 'may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,' [but] there is now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that."
The hearing cited evidence of censorship in Twitter's (now called X) response to the Jan. 6 riots and the subsequent banning of former President Donald Trump from the platform. The Twitter Files is a collection of documents and internal communications from inside the company that details the behind-the-scenes decision-making of some of the social media platform’s top executives to suppress news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
"The abuses of power my colleagues and I have documented go well beyond censorship. They also include what appears to be an effort by government officials and contractors, including the FBI, to frame certain individuals as posing a threat of domestic terrorism for their political beliefs," Shellenberger said. "All of this is profoundly un-America. One’s commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies."
CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Shellenberger, who testified alongside fellow journalist Matt Taibbi, encouraged Congress to ban government officials from asking social media platforms to remove content and "defund and dismantle the governmental organizations involved in censorship," including DHS's Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency.
The first Twitter Files report was published on Dec. 2, 2022, but the project has since spread to 19 installments across multiple social media companies. The releases fell between December 2022 and March 2023, and the series sparked debate over company moderation policies and censorship often targeted toward conservative voices.