▶ 0:00:27uh for our witnesses and everybody else. Uh we're clearly not quite at critical mass yet. I know the Republicans and the Democrats both have conference meetings that they're coming out of. So, we're going to give it a couple of minutes yet. So,
▶ 0:04:05The uh subcommittee on South and Central Asia will come to order. And the purpose of this hearing is to examine the State Department's previous efforts to facilitate censorship of Americans and the importance of establishing permanent first amendment safeguards for any future State Department activities. With this ca this committee will be passing into law a comprehensive reauthorization of the State Department for the first time in over 20 years. That was in 2002 was the last time that was done.
▶ 0:04:33And as part of this critical endeavor, uh, this subcommittee is tasked with, uh, examining the public diplomacy functions of the State Department, commonly referred to as the R family of bureau, uh, of bureaus and offices. In December of 2024, Congress terminated an office within that family, the the Global Engagement Center, also known as GEK, uh, after its exposure coming out of an investigation that was done by this committee.
▶ 0:05:01Uh, the GEK was initially authorized for the statutory purpose of countering foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts. Despite that mandate for years, the GEK instead deployed its shadowy network of grantees and subgrantees to facilitate the censorship of American voices, especially if those voices were conservative and refused to align with the left-leaning establishment politics. Worst of all, this was being done using US taxpayer dollars, your dollars.
▶ 0:05:31The same month the GEK was terminated, the Biden State Department restructured the office into a quote counterforeign manipulation and interference hub, also known known as our uh FEMI. The question we will be exploring today is whether this restructuring is actually a name only.
▶ 0:05:51Uh, put simply, whether you call it GECK or our uh FEMI, the State Department should never, and if I can help it, will never again be in the business of silencing American voices. Freedom of speech is a God-given right enshrined in the First Amendment of our nation's Constitution. It is a right that President Trump and his administration are committed to zealously protecting. On his first day in office, President Trump signed the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship Executive Order.
▶ 0:06:20This executive order makes clear that no federal government employees or taxpayers dollars may be used to engage in or facilitate the unconstitutional censorship of American citizens. And as the chairman of this subcommittee, I plan to introduce legislation that will codify that executive order. I'm hopeful that my colleagues will join me in enshrining these vital first amendment projections protections into law. I thank uh want to thank the panel for being here today.
▶ 0:06:47Uh, Miss Jenkowitz, uh, thank you for your time and you publicly supported and even spearheaded censorship efforts under the previous administration's um, uh, previous administration out of what some called the Ministry of Truth as as some had labeled you, the disinformation ZAR. I guess technically it should be Zarina. Um, the uh, it is crucial that the American public receive answers and accountability for the actions taken by their own government to silence their voices. Uh, Mr.
▶ 0:07:18Taibbei and Mr. Wearden, uh, your valiant reporting helped unearth the GEK's role in the censorship of Americans. Mr. Taibbe, your groundbreaking work on the Twitter files pulled back the curtain on how the federal bureaucracy colluded and in some cases uh, pressured social media companies to target American citizens engaged in protected political speech. Mr. for Wine Garden.
▶ 0:07:41Your impactful work has unearthed how the GECK and its implementing partners deployed blacklists to obliterate conservative news publication publications that the Biden administration disagreed with. Well, we as Americans and as policy makers must never allow these dark days of mass censorship to happen again. And that is my goal. And uh with that, I am going to yield five minutes to the gentle lady from California for her opening statement.
▶ 0:08:11Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here for our first South and Central Asia subcommittee hearing. I look forward to working with the chair in a bipartisan way on the critical issues that we are charged with overseeing. Unfortunately, we are not having a hearing about any of those issues.
▶ 0:08:34Instead, this subcommittee is wasting taxpayer time and resources on the fifth such hearing Republicans have held across multiple committees on the so-called censorship industrial complex.
▶ 0:08:49The majority is relitigating a madeup conspiracy theory about a part of the State Department that no longer exists to distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy this administration is pursuing and elevating a serial sexual harasser as their star witness in the process. Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record two articles about the Republican witness Matt Taibbe.
▶ 0:09:16The first is a Chicago Reader article entitled, "20 years ago in Moscow, Matt Taibbe was a misogynist a-hole and possibly worse." And a Washington Post article titled, "The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow." Without objection. This hearing could not be more out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans. People's retirement savings are being decimated as Trump's arbitrary temper tariffs tank the stock market.
▶ 0:09:45They are staring down the barrel of cuts to their Social Security and Medicare because the Republican majority wants to give a tax break to billionaires like Elon Musk who have deep financial ties to our adversaries. Meanwhile, Trump is siding with Putin against our national security interests and risking the lives of American soldiers in a signal group chat. I've been to the State Department and I do have concerns about censorship.
▶ 0:10:09censorship of the employees who are terrified to say the wrong thing, to say anything or have the wrong word in their job title and be terminated by an administration that publicly relishes punishing people for their speech. If we want to talk about censorship, we should begin with Trump's unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and rule of law. Here are a few examples that should send shivers down all of our spines.
▶ 0:10:35Trump banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office in Air Force One because they kept using the name Gulf of Mexico, something that none of us would have hesitated to do a few months ago. And by the way, the Gulf of Mexico, it was assigned that name at birth. Trump signed executive orders targeting law firms for representing clients that opposed or investigated him, upending the fundamental principle that lawyers should not fear to represent their clients.
▶ 0:11:00And most terrifying, Trump ordered ICE agents to arrest and detain Mammud Khalil, a green card holder, and snatch off the street a TUS University student and visa holder, Rumé Our for protesting and writing an op-ed for exercising their right to free speech. I would like to play a video. Dean of the latest Trump government crackdown on pro Palestinian students. Plain clothes.
▶ 0:11:28Immigration officers surround a Turkish graduate student, Raasa Osuk. Her screams alerting residents. Is this a kidnapping? Her crime, it's unclear, but she co-authored a pro Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper. So now we're raiding college campuses to silence thought and descent of the students.
▶ 0:11:51As you can see, Trump is brazenly weaponizing the government to intimidate and silence any part of American society that disagrees with him. Countering disinformation from hostile foreign powers should not be a partisan issue. Yet, this administration has crippled our capacity to respond to these threats while aiding, abetting, and amplifying our adversaries influence operations.
▶ 0:12:14The PRC has invested billions in pumping out propaganda, weaponizing the world's largest online disinformation operation to silence critics, discredit lawmakers, and harass US companies who are at odds with China's interests. And Russia maintains a sophisticated and sprawling disinformation apparatus to manipulate American public sentiment to Putin's advantage, even paying conservative influencers to create and amplify pro- Kremlin content. And how has Trump confronted these threats?
▶ 0:12:43He shut down independent media broadcasters like USAGM and Radio Free Asia, a move that was actually celebrated in Chinese state media. And he dismantled the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, which his own administration first created in 2017 to uncover disinformation and propaganda targeting Americans. We should be exploring more real partisan solutions to this pressing national security on behalf of the American people instead of perpetuating cultural wars and divisions.
▶ 0:13:13Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield back. Gentle lady yields back. And uh I had done a brief introduction to our uh to our witnesses prior. I do want to note that the gentle lady well knows we have done a a series of roundts uh within the jurisdiction of this uh of this subcommittee and yes this is the first hearing that that this Congress is doing on this particular issue.
▶ 0:13:40Um and uh obviously our witnesses you can see the tone and tenor of what's going to be happening today here sadly but um Mr. Taibi, I'm going to give you a brief moment to uh to to answer some charges that were uh put against you here, but I also want to uh to note that um there are some who don't believe that the censorship industrial complex exists. In fact, I think our other witness this morning on Blue Sky had said, quote, uh I'm going to tell them it doesn't exist.
▶ 0:14:09It's a lie pedled by those who seek power and profit and a dangerous distraction from the real threats we face. Um I won't I won't won't bring up the descent cables that weren't uh allowed to be sent out of Afghanistan and a number of other things that happened in the last administration. But Mr. Taibbe uh uh there are those who don't believe that this actually exists and is going on. Can you explain what the election integrity partnership is and what its relationship to GEK is?
▶ 0:14:39If you can turn your mic on, please. Sorry, Mr. Chairman. Thank you. Um the election integrity partnership was uh an organization run out of Stanford University. It had four non-governmental partners. Uh there was a Stanford Internet Obser Observatory. Uh there was a company called Graphica. There was the uh center for an informed public from University of Washington. Um and a fourth I'm sorry I'm blank.
▶ 0:15:07I'm sorry the digital forensic research labs of the Atlantic Council. Uh they also partnered with the global engagement center um and if I'm remembering correctly uh the cyber security and infrastructure security agency uh at DHS and uh we came across EIP in uh when we first got access to the Twitter files um when those documents were uh made known to us.
▶ 0:15:37Uh we didn't have any guidance at all. We didn't know what we were looking at. We just simply saw um a big how you uncovered it literally right and you just uncovered it. You came across this. They just said you can start searching and gave us access to a a search engine. We started looking at um various documents.
▶ 0:15:58We found these complaints that would um essentially be referrals from this non-governmental organization that was partnered with governmental organizations about various types of content related to the 2020 election. uh and these complaints would go into what was called the Jira ticketing system after which there would often be a recommendation to remove or deamplify or place some kind of restriction on the account.
▶ 0:16:28Uh so I would characterize the inte election integrity partnership um as a a widescale uh organization designed to funnel complaints to multiple internet platforms at once. Mr. Mr. Taibbe, I'm so sorry. I I made a terrible mistake on this uh where I I had fully missed just missed it. uh caught up in the moment. It's okay.
▶ 0:16:58Uh we needed to go and have each one of you do an opening statement for 5 minutes. So my my apologies. Uh my yes, I have some confused colleagues up here. My apologies on that. Uh so uh we're we're going to go to those opening statements. Um I will uh then go into the questions that we have. I will take some time off of my uh of of my time. Um but uh I do uh apologize to uh to the uh to the folks on the panel and to my colleagues for that.
▶ 0:17:29Um all right, the uh committee recognizes the importance of the issues before us and is grateful that you're here today. Uh your full statements will be part of the record and I ask that you keep each of you keep your spoken remarks to uh five minutes in order to allow for those time. So, Miss Jenowitz, uh, if you would please, uh, take five minutes and, uh, we'll have your opening statement. Chairman Heisinga and Ranking Member Cam Lagard Dove, I appreciate the invitation to speak with you today.
▶ 0:17:58I believe it's my patriotic duty to do so because the premise of this hearing, the so-called censorship industrial complex, is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on my life and safety, but on our national security. More alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech and stying critical research that protects our country.
▶ 0:18:22I want to acknowledge the irony we're having this discussion as we witness an assault on the First Amendment we have not seen in decades. The Trump administration has directed far more egregious violations of our Constitution than the imagined actions of the Biden administration on which this hearing is premised. Each one is chilling, but as a Fulbright alumna, the recent arrest of Romesia Ourk, a Fulbright PhD student at Tus University especially disturbed me.
▶ 0:18:52The Secretary of State seemingly revoked Miss Ourk's visa for publishing an op-ed in TU's campus newspaper for using her constitutionally protected right to free speech. She was spirited away by plain clothes ICE officers in broad daylight. This is what I'm used I'm used to observing in authoritarian countries that I study. And if this had happened in a country in this subcommittee's portfolio, I think you'd issue a statement of concern.
▶ 0:19:22But it happened here. So yes, we do need some first amendment protections at the State Department, but not for imagined transgressions of previous administrations. We need those protections from this administration today. In pursuing investigations and hearings on the censorship lie, Congress has punted its responsibility on national security, opting instead for political theatrics that are high on fantasy and low on facts.
▶ 0:19:51Congress used government resources to attack disinformation researchers, deliberately misconstring their work, burying them with requests for documents and depositions, and stoking the fires of public rage against them. These tactics echo the dark days of McCarthyism, but with a chilling 21st century twist.
▶ 0:20:12Even as America faces unprecedented threats in the information space, from our adversaries increasing capabilities to the exponential growth of emerging technologies, committees, including this one continue to waste valuable time and taxpayer dollars targeting American citizens who are doing work in the public interest. I know this intimately.
▶ 0:20:35In my written testimony, I explain in detail the lies that upended my life when my appointment to lead the DHS Disinformation Governance Board was announced. As demonstrated by both the board's founding documents and my five-hour sworn testimony before your colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, the board's mission was to protect civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment, the very subject of this hearing.
▶ 0:21:02Many continue to lie that the board was a censorship body because it's politically useful to them. That lie was the first chapter in the tall tales about the so-called censorship industrial complex that have since emerged. They've been buoied by the Twitter files, which falsely alleged that Twitter executives were colluding with government to censor disfavored content.
▶ 0:21:23The Twitter files crafted almost endless fiction based on selectively edited email and text excerpts between researchers, platforms, and federal agencies. They're riddled with errors and outright falsehoods. The allegation that researchers are somehow committing acts of censorship by conducting independent research and sharing it is outlandish and it's harmful. Research is speech, governmentfunded or not.
▶ 0:21:50The only reason the censorship lie has been perpetuated is because it's politically and financially beneficial to those who pedal it. Actions like this hearing are a dangerous distraction from the real threats we face. My organization, the American Sunlight Project, has identified plenty of foreign interference we could be talking about today, including a pro-Russia content aggregation network po pushing out 3.6 6 million pieces of content a year, poisoning LLM powered chat bots.
▶ 0:22:21China and Iran are also actively targeting the US as we sit here. But our capacity to respond to these threats has been eviscerated based on conspiracy theories, sending a signal to our adversaries that America is weak. Beijing, Thrron, and Moscow interpret these partisan attacks on counterdisinformation work as a sign that their interference is likely to succeed. Our adversaries use information operations to undermine democratic values.
▶ 0:22:50We must act not only as the staunchest defender and guarantor of those values abroad, but fight just as hard to preserve them at home. Thank Time has expired. Uh Mr. Taibbe, you have five minutes. The foreign mentioned uh Twitter files, author, founder of Racket News, you have five minutes. Mr. Chairman, um madame ranking member, uh thank you. My name is Matt Taibbe.
▶ 0:23:15I'm the editor of the independent site Racket and I've been covering digital censorship issues since 2018, the fictional ones. Um, on March 14th, 2016, Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13721, developing a new integrated global engagement center to support governmentwide counterterrorism communications activities directed abroad.
▶ 0:23:37It directed the Secretary of State to create a new body, the GEC or GEK, to quote, "Counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations, including ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other violent extremists abroad." Seven years later, while working on a story involving internal communications at Twitter, I found myself reading emails between GEK officials and Twitter executives about subjects ranging from COVID 19 to the 2020 election to Donald Trump.
▶ 0:24:07Once chairman, you uh you were Mr. Chairman, you were right to point out that they were once focused abroad. Uh but by this time, GEK officials were largely concerned with domestic English language accounts, people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with adversary nations like Iran, China, or When I went back this weekend through those documents to find examples of GECK pressuring Twitter to remove or deamplify Americans accused of misinformation, I found an exchange
▶ 0:24:38that we Twitter files reporters missed. In 2023, a lawyer at the company asked several other executives if they had any quote appetite for writing GEK a letter to ask them to stop going to the media with sensationalist claims about epidemics of foreign bots. One of the company's senior communications executives gave a remarkably candid answer. From my chair, it would be very helpful, he wrote, referencing a well-known Washington reporter.
▶ 0:25:05He went on, the pre-briefed Ellen Nakushima article in the post on Bernie and this Corona virus story, no heads up, are making me worry a little about how good faith these players will be through the press into 2020. So, it wasn't just conservatives, it was also Bernie Sanders. The date on that email was fe February 24th, 2020.
▶ 0:25:293 days after the Washington Post ran a devastating feature titled, "Bernie Sanders briefed by US officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign. This was an extremely impactful story that opened the floodgates on a conspiracy theory uh that Sanders was the recipient of Russian help. It claimed bots helping Bernie online were part of quote Russia's broader interest in sewing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of elections.
▶ 0:25:57In response to this odd sequel of claims about Russian bots aiding Donald Trump, the company's head of trust and safety, Yolo Roth, gave an unflattering description of Gex methods. quote, "They use Brandwatch to monitor a handful of openly Russian accounts, for instance, RT and an unspecified number of accounts that they baslessly assert are inauthentic." This is the exact formula we previously found found behind another often used online tool called Hamilton 68,
▶ 0:26:28whose founders were also quoted in the post piece. Hamilton 68 mixed a smattering of real Russian accounts with a crowd of mostly American, mostly anti-establishment accounts uh to create a dashboard that synthesized falsely the appearance of Russian social media backing for everything from the Devon Nunes memo uh to the Parkland shooting.
▶ 0:26:50Although many of the most controversial stories about GECK involved their their funding of commercial media scoring operations that downranked conservative news outlets, the GEK also pressured Twitter about left-leaning figures like Sanders, anti-war accounts, libertarians, and independents as well as conservatives. They managed this by using a trick that gave domestic propaganda the appearance of a counterterrorist operation.
▶ 0:27:16GEX sent out reports that would first identify a few social media accounts with real ties to Russia or China or Iran. Then it would separately list accounts they called highly connective to that country country's propaganda ecosystem. These would be American or European citizens with inconvenient views.
▶ 0:27:34For instance, GEK identified the Twitter accounts of former Italian Prime Minister Jeppi Kee and former Italian Democratic Party Secretary Nicole Zingeri, who was often compared to Bernie, as being highly connective to Russia. All you had to do to to do to get on the list was retweet what they called anti-US propaganda or GEK's subjective definition of pro-Russian propaganda. No actual connection was required.
▶ 0:27:58Through this means, the GEK exactly rehabilitated the fellow traveler concept used by infamous smear artists and witch hunters from history from Leontrosky to the House on American Affairs Committee. It was a way to accuse someone who hasn't done anything wrong of guilt by ideological association. And I'll just wrap up on gone over my time, but they weren't looking for misinformation and disinformation. They were looking for orthodoxy and unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience.
▶ 0:28:26The idea behind GECK in particular was finding a way to propagandize American citizens and encourage acceptance of official policy the way we always done to foreign populations. It's a flagrant violation of First Amendment ideals and should be eradicated from the government completely. No one should have this tool. Not Democrats, not the Trump administration, nobody. Gentleman's time has expired. Thank you. Yeah. Uh with that, uh Mr.
▶ 0:28:51Wearden, uh investigative journalist and columnist, you have five Chairman Heisenga, ranking member Kamlager Dove, and esteemed members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. The censorship industrial complex poses a mortal threat to our republic. The sprawling whole of society regime has sought to purge unauthorized opinions and inconvenient facts on mass under guise of combating mis and malinformation.
▶ 0:29:18Today's hearing highlights one of the regime's most insidious manifestations, the turning of federal agencies that are supposed to target foreign adversaries instead on Americans and our core political speech. The Global Engagement Center was a key cog in such efforts through its cultivation of hundreds of ostensibly non-governmental counterdisinformation players. Two players the GEK funded and promoted were risk raiders, so-called NewsGuard and GDI. These relationships should have raised immediate alarm bells.
▶ 0:29:48The GEK stated mission was to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts as the chairman noted. Yet, NewsGuard aims to systematically defund sources of harmful misinformation, foreign and domestic. NewsGuard does so by raiding and reviewing thousands of outlets for reliability and creating exclusion lists, that is blacklists, to feed advertisers for use in determining where not to place ads.
▶ 0:30:12GDI likewise seeks to reduce disinformation by removing the financial incentive ad revenue it says lurks behind it. GDI too arms advertisers with a dynamic exclusion list reportedly containing 2,000 risky publications including again American ones. Perversely then a foreignfacing inter agency entity both funded and gave the federal government's impromater to non-governmental wouldbe destroyers of disfavored domestic outlets.
▶ 0:30:40Those outlets appear to be disfavored for ideological reasons. NewsGuard generally lavishes significantly higher scores on left-leaning sources over right-leaning ones. Its Kafka-esque correspondence with dissident outlets broadly who have challenged seemingly unmmerited scores, largely in vain, further suggests a bias. GDI's 2022 report on disinformation risk among US sources betrays a similar bent.
▶ 0:31:05There it lists among its 10 least risky publications, nine liberal to progressive corporate media outlets, and the Wall Street Journal. Its 10 riskiest publications include nine conservative or libertarian outlets, and Real Clear Politics. Evidence suggests the risk raers profiles grew substantially after receiving federal support. Their ubiquity in the ad marketplace reportedly drove declines of tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue annually for outlets on their deacto blacklists.
▶ 0:31:33Some disfavored sources report reduced traffic, diminished search visibility, and lost operational partners. RealCar's experience with the risk raiders is uniquely perverse. Real Clear Politics's bread and butter is curating compelling analysis from sources left and right, corporate and independent, on key issues of the day, so readers can weigh both sides. Consequently, media bias raider all sides positions RCP in the ideological center alongside Reuters, The Hill, and the Wall Street Journal.
▶ 0:32:00Despite our pursuit of fairness and quality journalism, NewsGuard gives RCP a 62 on its 100point scale as determined by their journalists rating a sample of our journalist's work. NewsGuard dings us in part for our purported undisclosed conservative bent. The implication is that it either dismisses viewpoint diversity as a feature or sees it as a bug. Real Clear Investigations likewise curates deep dives and publishes original content from journalists with diverse perspectives. NewsGuard has branded us biased, too.
▶ 0:32:31Albeit while giving RCI an 80 rating. Our bias is to pursue stories competitors miss or angles competitors ignore. Shouldn't that be celebrated? As for GDI, RCP may be on its secret blacklist, too. And Real Clear has thrived despite the risk raers's best efforts, but the censorship industrial complex the GEK helped foster has made a tough business tougher and disadvantaged us. Our ad revenue has declined materially.
▶ 0:32:54We've seen a meaningful drop in certain search rankings and we've taken a reputational hit by being branded with the digital scarlet letter R for risky. Even if the risk raers were unobjectionable, the fact remains through funding and supporting such entities, government abridge speech by proxy. The Trump administration and its state department have indicated these efforts are over. But the speech police have neither laid down their arms nor recanted for past abuses, suggesting they will at best lie and wait during Trump 2, only to come back with a vengeance thereafter.
▶ 0:33:24So the time to act is now. Congress should codify the president's first day executive order restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship to permanently starve the censorship industrial complex of the federal funding and direction that are its lifeblood. Congress should prohibit grants and contracts to institutions engaged in domestic censorship activities. and Congress should erect a strict firewall between the US government and our body politic Allah Smith Munt.
▶ 0:33:48To overcome our adversaries, we must not emulate them by casting dissent from ruling class orthodoxy is dangerous and surveilling and silencing the dissenters. Instead, let us restore the free and open mark open public square on which our republic rests. Thank you. Thank you. With that, uh we will return to questioning. I'm going to give myself three minutes. Uh it eaten up some of that time in a very fortunately on my part.
▶ 0:34:15So again, my apologies to the uh to the panel for any confusion there. Enthusiastic. I was enthusiastic. Yes, the ranking member reminds me. So um I think it was your spirited opening that may have brought me along that path. Uh well uh with that uh I I'm going to take three minutes and and Mr. Uh, Taibbe, you had started to explain and and did in your opening statement about the election integrity partnership and I appreciate that. Mr.
▶ 0:34:42Weine Garden, you were talking about um an advertising blacklist uh and uh the GDI Newsgard used these blacklists to censor American speech and I am curious um you know those blacklists, how did they treat the right-leaning outlets versus the left-leaning outlets? And were outlets punished for even attempting to provide ideological balance? I mean, you wrote Real Clear Politics was one of those that was on the list.
▶ 0:35:10I think the Real Clear Politics case study is instructive in that if you go to our website, you see sources left and right. And the whole purpose is let's provide a balanced diet of opinion and analysis and let the American people decide because we have faith in the American people that they have agency and they can decide for themselves. And the fact of the matter is that RCP and then some on the right, libertarian, conservative, and even anti-establishment leftist publications have found themselves dinged by these so-called risk raiders.
▶ 0:35:39And that risk, by the way, is that they may be brands who advertise on these sites may be targeted for boycots and attacks generally by progressive groups. So this whole sort of apparatus exists out of coercion essentially from the left and as a consequence ad revenue streams have died for many of these companies and it threatens their their viability. Yeah.
▶ 0:35:59And and how would these blacklists treat uh a publication that had the audacity of suggesting that COVID 19 virus may have originated from a lab leak which actually turned out to uh to to be a legitimate and true theory. Um I don't know about the rest of uh my colleagues or the panelists but I know people who were canceled over putting out such theories and even threatened with their job and their livelihood uh on that.
▶ 0:36:25So how how talk talk to me a little bit about very quickly about co 19 in realclar's reporting we saw that at least one source that put forth uh questions about all manner of issues from the origins of COVID to mitigation measures and beyond. They get attacked because or they got attacked because they desented from what was public health orthodoxy at the time. And as we know that public health or orthodoxy that consensus has shifted.
▶ 0:36:50But if you differed from consensus, you were dinged and you had essentially no recourse or real due process to get off a blacklist for just presenting an opinion or a substantiated analysis. Uh I'm going to move quickly here and I I know Mr. Taibbe, you're not the only controversial person here. Uh uh Miss Jenkowitz is as we talked about some of her posts uh uh some of this uh saying that the uh fairy tale about Hunter Biden's laptop is out there.
▶ 0:37:18Uh and uh the Chris Steele provides some great historical context about the evolution of disinformation. So without objection, I'm going to put those into the record as well. Um, I find it ironic that something called the American Sunlight Project is actually a dark money group that won't uh that won't release its uh its donors. Um, the uh certainly that uh that doesn't bode well. Um, I'm going to Mr. Tabby, I'm going to give you the last moment here.
▶ 0:37:45Uh, can you explain exactly how GEK colluded with social media companies specifically through the election integrity partnership? Mr. Mr. Chairman, um GEK's actual relationship to the election integrity partnership was not clear. Um it was uh made plain uh in the EIP's own website.
▶ 0:38:10Uh Secretary of State Blinken mentioned uh that it was cooperating with the EIP when he visited Stanford. Also uh there was a story that um that it was actually interns from the State Department who came up with the idea for the EIP. though uh but they they were one of the two major uh government uh organizations that was working with the IP. My time is expired.
▶ 0:38:36With that I give yield to the uh to the representative from So, a central claim of this hearing is that states GEC first set up under the Trump administration and championed by then Senator Marco Rubio supported organizations that censored conservative speech and worked to discredit conservative outlets.
▶ 0:39:01Uh, Miss Jenovitz, to your knowledge, has State Department funding ever gone towards suppressing domestic speech? Thank you, Ranking Member. Uh, you know, Mr. Taibbe said when he was first searching through these so-called Twitter files, he didn't know what he was looking at. Well, he still doesn't. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works. And let me tell you, there was no censorship going on at the Global Engagement Center or the State Department. You uh may have heard Mr.
▶ 0:39:29Wearten kind of make the inference that all of these lists GDI and NewsGuard are making, you might have thought that they were funded by the State Department. They were not. Do you know what the State Department was funding for those two organizations? Something I think the Republicans on this committee would be very interested in. Tracking and countering Chinese state propaganda targeting Americans. Now, I used to manage State Department grants early in my career. I know that that is a huge fiduciary responsibility.
▶ 0:39:56You have to account for every single penny that you're spending on travel, on staff time, on supplies, and you have to do it multiple times a year. So for folks to sit here and say that grants dedicated to countering CCP propaganda were somehow spent on conservative blacklists is is just ridiculous. And I'll also add that that is those organizations speech to be able to do research and and you know categorize news sites as they see fit.
▶ 0:40:22Uh a a letter sent to the Senate last week shows that actually a lot of conservative uh organizations including the Heritage Foundation, the Wall Street Journal, Reason, uh Kato Institute, and the Washington Free Beacon all received great uh ratings by Newsgard, while the Daily Coast only got a 45 out of 100. So this nonsense about uh about bias is is just frankly not true. And it's also rings a little bit like a restaurant tour who got a bad review in the Washington Post, mad that nobody wants to eat there anymore.
▶ 0:40:52H So you you brought up China. Um so let's stay there for a second. Can you give us a snapshot of the kinds of harmful information operations China and Russia wage against the United States and maybe how this administration is dismantling our ability to protect Americans from foreign propaganda and manipulation? Absolutely. I'd love to. Ranking member.
▶ 0:41:16So, uh, the Chinese Communist Party continues to be extraordinarily active in the information space, using all manner of influence operations to target Americans, including the famous spamlage campaign, which is fake social media profiles masquerading as Americans, exacerbating tensions, and there are certainly plenty of those to go around right now. The fact that we're here uh in such a polarized, politicized setting, I'm sure there's somebody in Beijing watching this hearing thinking about what they can tweet about it, right?
▶ 0:41:45We have to think about that we are doing our adversaries work for them. And in with Russia, you know, I'd say something that we just discovered at the American Sunlight Project is that there's a large network, a growing network of a content aggregation platform that is pointing at pushing out 3.6 million pieces of pro-Russia content a year. I'm not talking about, you know, Russia is great. I'm talking about the massacre in BHA. It did not happen. That sort of thing. Falsehoods, right?
▶ 0:42:11And they are doing that not to infect uh you know to to to get human readership. They're doing it to infect chat bots, chat GPT, all of these chat bots that we're now using that we're being told are going to be the next great frontier in research. Uh and that's being shown to people who are asking questions about Russia and Ukraine. Our capacity to respond to these threats, the only office that was dedicated to looking at foreign state propaganda in the State Department now doesn't exist anymore.
▶ 0:42:39and RFI it's uh you know uh organization that came after it doesn't even have a website on the state department. So I'm not worried chairman you said is this just a a geck by a different name. I'm not worried about that because they're not even talking about what they're doing and our adversaries are absolutely taking notice. They think it's open season on the United States. Hm.
▶ 0:43:00Another falsehood the majority witnesses have perpetuated is that Democratic government officials and lawmakers colluded with social media companies to suppress content they disagreed with. Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record a Rolling Stone article titled Twitter kept entire database of Republican requests to censor posts without objection. This article describes how the Trump administration and congressional Republicans routinely asked Twitter to take down posts they objected to.
▶ 0:43:28In the minutes we have left, Miss Jenkoitz, what is the difference between content moderation and censorship? The difference between content moderation and censorship is that these platforms are private platforms. They have the uh the right to enforce their terms of service how they see fit. And Mr. Taibbe himself uh you know cited an email from Yoel Roth in which he was throwing shade on the GEX analysis. Sounds like he wasn't listening to them to me. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield back. Gentle lady yields back.
▶ 0:43:57Uh the representative from Pennsylvania is recognized for Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Miss Jenkoit, since you brought it up, have you read the Venona intercepts? Uh again, sorry. Venona, are you familiar? I'm not, sir. You brought up McCarthy and I'd just encourage you to go ahead and read through yet through that.
▶ 0:44:17You might, as many people disagree with his methods, but you can't disagree with the facts that the people that he listed turned out to all be subversive communists working in our government. With that, I'll turn to Mr. Weine Garden.
▶ 0:44:34Your statement notes that GEC's $100 million in grants since 2016 funded 400 plus projects, including NewsGuard and GDI, which blacklisted 2,000 US outlets costing $128 million in ad revenue by 2022. You have any other concrete Well, before we get into the other concrete examples because we got a difference of opinion on both sides of the deis here.
▶ 0:45:03You said 2,000 US outlets. Are those US outlets Chinese? Maybe they are. So, I'm just asking. Are they owned by the Communist Party of China, Iran, Russia, or are they US information purveyors? As a factual matter, to my knowledge, none of those are foreignowned publications and certainly not by our adversaries. So, this is 2,000 US outlets, hundred million dollars in grants.
▶ 0:45:32Where where do you suspect that grant money came from? Uh well the the grant money came from taxpayers. Oh my goodness. Really? Taxpayers? Taxpayers paying $100 million to blacklist 2,000 US outlets. Is that is that fiction? I've heard it's fiction. Is it fiction or not fiction? It's not fiction. Let me be clear. The 2 is the total list. I'm not sure if it's all US, but certainly a substantial percentage of them. Okay.
▶ 0:46:03Is that a conspiracy theory? No, sir. I didn't think so. Um, what can you give us any concrete examples? Cuz $100 million in grants, $2,000 US outlets costing $128 million by your account and ad revenue. Um, can you give us any concrete examples how the GEC funding directly hit American outlets, speech or revenue other than the ones you already have?
▶ 0:46:31Well, as the the lawsuit against the State Department from the Federalist and Daily Wire indicates, their businesses were the viability was uh dramatically damaged after uh GDI and NewsGuard ended up targeting them. And and it's obvious why because if all of the advertisers say don't put your ads on our websites, it saps a revenue stream.
▶ 0:46:57And let's also note, by the way, that beyond NewsGuard and GDI, there was funding for dozens of other organizations that were involved in things like misde and malinformation detection and such. And all of this was fueling an ecosystem that existed ultimately to clamp down on speech, whether from individuals or outlets. And that's US tax dollars ultimately funding the silencing of ourselves. And that's unamerican. Yeah.
▶ 0:47:21US tax dollars through grant programs to create a censorship empire on American citizens under the guise of this global engagement center which was meant to Look, I agree with Miss Jenkowitz. We want to be dealing with China, Russia, Iran, foreign adversaries, but that's not what this was. Mr.
▶ 0:47:40Taibbe, your Twitter files analyze 3.8 8 billion US tweets and uh the metrics expose GEC's ties to the election integrity project which flagged 22 million election post in 2020. Can you highlight the information you found that exposes GEC's efforts to push platforms to censor Americans and how many accounts were affected? Certainly. First I'd like to respond to something that Miss Jenko said.
▶ 0:48:10Um, she she mentioned that uh Yol Roth, who was the head of trust and safety uh at Twitter, threw some shade at um at GEK. And indeed that was actually uh a chief narrative that we were we found in the Twitter files which was that uh Twitter's chief content moderation officers uh had too many government officials trying to call them on the phone and they did not want to add another group uh particularly one that
▶ 0:48:40they felt was incompetent and didn't understand what they were doing uh to the the trust tree. Uh ultimately however after a year of uh very um fevered interactions within the company they were forced to allow GE uh into their weekly or monthly discussions with the government what they called the industry meetings.
▶ 0:49:07Uh and there was an email that we found in the Twitter files from a former CIA officer who went to work at Twitter uh who was explaining that uh there was once a time when Twitter would have been able to say no to uh that kind of request, but our window on that is closing. Thank you, sir. My time is expired. I yield. Gentleman's time has expired. Uh with that, uh the representative from California is recognized for five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
▶ 0:49:35Um I've been in Congress for a while now. So I was in Congress um during the time that the Global Engagement Center was was formed. And part of the rationale for forming it um and you mentioned it in your opening statement, Chibbe, to counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations including ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other violent extremists.
▶ 0:49:59And the reason it was created was we saw how effective ISIL or ISIS was at recruiting folks um using their messaging, using the internet um the threat that it was to our homeland in terms of creating homegrown threats as well and we saw you know some um domestic terror attacks. So just a yes no question outside of you know what it may or may not have morphed into we still need a tool like that that would would you agree with that Mr.
▶ 0:50:28for wine Garner to counter that message. I believe we should use every means to counter our adversaries lawfully and that would include you know China and Russia. Same thing Mr. Hy that we we do need an effective tool to counter messaging recruitment terrorism domestic terrorism whether that's the GEC or not we do need to be able to counter misinformation disinformation I don't think that's a yes or no answer Mr.
▶ 0:50:55Congressman and uh for instance we we talk about counterterrorism with Anmar alaki. Is it appropriate for the United States to assassinate a foreign citizen uh without due process even you know an American citizen? Uh in this case uh what became the GEC started off as a counterterrorism program but it was as was explained to me excuse me sir uh by a former GEK employee.
▶ 0:51:22So again, maybe we still need some mechanism to Miss Janowitz. Absolutely. This should be a bipartisan uh issue and it's crazy that you even have to ask the question, Congressman. Right, Miss Janowitz? Um is this threat going to get worse with the evolution of AI? Oh, absolutely. We are seeing this threat guess get get worse with the evolution of AI already.
▶ 0:51:45Not just uh the poisoning or grooming of LLM chat bots like I've already me mentioned, but there's evidence from Open AI and their threat team that China is using AI models in order to more effectively translate Chinese propaganda from Chinese into English and other languages as well. So this shouldn't be a partisan issue. I mean, when we get sworn into Congress, our most important duty is to protect our homeland, protect against domestic risk.
▶ 0:52:11And, you know, with the advent of internet, social media, now AI, um, information and misinformation, you know, radicalization, self-radicalization, those are going to be hugely important issues. And how we do that within protecting First Amendment rights um, is not going to be very easy.
▶ 0:52:31And again, I would urge Democrats and Republicans in a nonpartisan way to protect our homeland to try to figure this out, inviting in the private sectors while inviting in those social media companies um to try to get this right. I don't disagree that we saw a lot of um politicization around CO. I'm a doctor and you know, I I'm agnostic on CO origins. I can make the case that it was a lab leak. Um I can make the case that it was and that's legitimate debate and we shouldn't censor any of that debate.
▶ 0:53:00we should have that debate. You know, um obviously it was a novel virus. We're still fighting those fights and I think it's counterproductive for us as a nation and us as a institution in Congress. I think we do have to put that aside because these threats are very real and I do worry about um you know what's going to happen with AI. Miss Jack, what's in the final minute that I have, what would your recommendations be taking politics out of this and how we would structure something?
▶ 0:53:28You know, it's really interesting, Congressman, because a lot of the functionalities that you've just described, coordination within the government, uh, you know, following these threats, making sure that we're a breast of them, coordinating with industry, uh, that was the job that I was brought in to do at the disinformation governance board in DHS despite it being widely lied about. So, I think we do need some sort of coordinating function.
▶ 0:53:49And if Congress is concerned about the way that, you know, uh, social media companies are moderating and implementing their policies, the the solution is not to bandandy about conspiracy theories. It's to pass some oversight and transparency regulation, which I think um, we've been a little bit late on here in the United States. I would love to see that happen. Great. which I would hope, you know, if we are going to do a state department authorization bill, um, that we as Democrats and Republicans on this subcommittee would actually take a thoughtful approach, invite folks in.
▶ 0:54:18You know, maybe if we get it done under a Republican administration, we can take some of the politics out of it. But let's do our job. This is about protecting our country. This is about protecting our influence around the world and fighting against our adversaries. With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll yield back. Gentleman yields back. Uh, the representative from Texas, Mr. Self, is recognized for five minutes. Uh thank you, Mr. Chairman.
▶ 0:54:42Um you really have to admire the the opposition here diverting our attention from the issue at hand to the current days because we are trying to do oversight on the Biden administration that did do the work of our adversaries for four years. uh it ruined our credibility around the world.
▶ 0:55:11so given your your recent testimony uh Miss Jenkovitz u so should and you were in the government so for 11 weeks so should the government have a part in enforcing free speech law enforcement should the government have some role in it? Uh, Congressman, I believe the First Amendment is sacriinct.
▶ 0:55:38I am the granddaughter of a man that was in a goolog uh deported to a goolog by the Soviet Union. So, I am pretty intimate with these things and uh they're a part of my bread and butter. I don't think that uh we should be arresting people for uh exercising their speech. Um and I think that's something that you all should be exercising your oversight over.
▶ 0:55:59So on April the 16th, 2022, you said we need platforms to do more and we frankly need law enforcement and our legislators to do more as well. Uh so if we move past that to the right of the state, the mission of the state, the state to form public opinion, uh where would you stand on that given your role in in what you've what you've been involved
▶ 0:56:29in? Uh thank you, Congressman. I believe that quote, judging by the time frame, was about uh responses to online harms, which I'm happy to talk about here today, not the subject of the hearing, but uh a lot of people for expressing their First Amendment protected speech online deal with threats. I've dealt with them myself. My my my family and I were doxed. Uh we were threatened. I was advised to leave my home. And you know what? That's why I was talking about law enforcement. Congressman, that is a quote from you. Yes.
▶ 0:56:57talking about online harms and threats against people online for exercising their because I have a limited time. Please answer my next question. Your next question that I've already given you, you haven't addressed it yet. Please repeat it, sir. What is the mission of the state, the right of the state to form public opinion? Because we're talking about uh our government has has been involved in doing that for the last few years.
▶ 0:57:24Uh, in my opinion, the government has a first first amendment right to free speech as well. And Scotas has just affirmed that with a case last June. We just heard a case that uh came in federal court in New York that actually showed that uh NewsGuard was not acting as a an envoy of the state. So what is the role of the government? The role of the government can express its free speech, right? Uh and citizens have a right to their free speech as well. I'm not I don't really understand your question, sir. I'm not sure the point.
▶ 0:57:54I'm asking you what is the role of government in public opinion because we're talking about actions here that have tried to form public opinion on the Hunter laptop on the Russia disinformation all of that I'm asking you what is the role of government in that matter absolutely congressman so the the government is allowed to express its own opinions its viewpoints as we're seeing this administration do as we saw the previous administration do what is their role when it is absolutely wrong.
▶ 0:58:24The Hunter laptop is probably the best example we could roll out here. I actually disagree with that because when Twitter decided to uh add friction to the Hunter Biden laptop case, it actually got more views. You've also heard Mr. Tibbe talk about, you know, 22 million tweets, millions of of things censored through the GEC to uh the election integrity partnership. You know, how many emails went between the GEC and the EIP? 15. You can look it up in Chairman Jordan's documents that he released at the end of last year. 15 emails.
▶ 0:58:53I've sent more text messages to my husband about our toddler's potty training in the last week than emails went from the GEC to the EIP. And those were all about overt Russian propaganda, RT and Sputnik, except for one when the GEC analyst said to the folks there, "I can't comment on this one because I'm a government employee, but I think you should check it out." That's all that happened, sir. So, I'm going to leave you and I'll yield back a little bit of my time. A direct quote from Joe Joseph Gable Gerbles.
▶ 0:59:22It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion. And I think that may be what we're discussing here. And yield back. Gentleman yields back. Uh with that, the representative from Texas, Miss Johnson, is recognized for five Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. Um I want to respond to what my colleague from Texas just said.
▶ 0:59:46when you're quoting Joseph Gobles um about uh state, the role of state in the public debate, we have a big problem. Ain't that right, Mr. Ju? I mean, that's alarming as hell to me when that becomes the gold standard of of Hitler and uh all that was going on in Russia, I mean, in German atrocities during World War II, when that becomes the quote of this hearing.
▶ 1:00:12Um, I also want to respond to another comment uh where said that uh Biden ruined our credibility around the world. I would argue that Mr. Trump is doing that right now. Cancelling USAD contracts, breaching our promises and our agreements to our friends and allies across the world and making our country less safe. Um that is the that is why we find us in this role.
▶ 1:00:35You know, I'm really disappointed that we're devoting this first hearing um to a conspiracy theory that the State Department, out of some larger sinister motive, routinely censors free speech. Uh today's Republican hot topic roulette has us talking about an agency that the Republicans let this Congress expire. Um it's it's my understanding that the GEC's mandate is to address foreign propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.
▶ 1:01:00Miss Jen, I would think that that would be a fundamental priority for the United States that we should not want our adversaries putting misinformation into our public D discord in order to adversely affect elections and other things. Wouldn't you agree? I would absolutely agree. And you know, I'll note also that the GEC was created through a bipartisan bill, the Portman Murphy uh counterdisinformation bill.
▶ 1:01:27And uh many of the actions that have been referenced so far in this hearing took place under the Trump administration, under a Trump appointee, Leah Gabriel, who was an intelligence analyst, a fighter pilot, and a former Fox News host as well. Right. Exactly. You know, I think that this this whole notion that we want to try to regulate the speech of people in our country and online social media companies.
▶ 1:01:52Did I did I understand your your testimony correctly that um you do believe that private businesses have a right to regulate the content on their platform? Absolutely. We sign up to terms of service when we share our cat pictures or our kid pictures or whatever it is that my co-witnesses share online. Uh we sign up to those terms of service and sometimes those terms of service say things like you can't share terrorist content. You can't share child sexual abuse material.
▶ 1:02:19And if we decide it, you can't share what we deem disinformation also. And we being the social media platforms there, right? And they have a right to do that. But what what's genesis this problem is is that so many on the far right just made up in the electoral context, put stuff out there, and then the the social media platform said, you know, we're not going to tolerate just blatant lies, blatant falsehoods on our platforms. There has to be some basis of reality.
▶ 1:02:46Um, and now the Republicans are pushing back because they got their hand in the cookie jar on that, right? Well, the scientific research from universities like New York, uh, Indiana University, and Yale all points to the fact that Republicans share more content that is more likely to be moderated. It's not that they're uh being censored. It is that they're breaking the rules that they can read if they read the fine print. Right. Thank you so much for your testimony today. I yield back.
▶ 1:03:13gentle lady yields back and the chair will remind uh people to direct their comments uh especially curse words at the chair rather than at our at our uh witnesses. So Mr. Chair, yes ma'am. I um given the fact that um we just uh reheard a quote from uh uh Joseph Gobles, chief propagandist for the Nazi party.
▶ 1:03:35I request unanimous consent to enter into the record my letter urging Secretary Rubio to fire Darren Bey for his dangerous anti-American pro-CCCP white nationalist ideology. Without objection. Thank you. I will note that I believe Mr. Self's uh comment and quote was his assert his assertion that this government has been doing that and following or the last administration.
▶ 1:04:03So not as a admiration but as a rebuke. So um with that uh the uh congressman from Indiana, Mr. Shre is recognized for five minutes. Thank you uh Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the witnesses for this very interesting hearing. Uh this uh is my first uh subcommittee hearing on on free speech, not my fifth, and I don't come to the table having this all figured out.
▶ 1:04:31uh in part of these hearings is an opportunity to to listen, learn, uh to ask questions and I appreciate this this opportunity. Um we agree broadly both both both sides of the aisle that the first amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy that censorship runs contrary to the first. That when it's wielded by private individual groups, it's inappropriate.
▶ 1:04:59When a government entity is tasked with upholding the constitution and may in some fashion weaponize censorship, it's a problem. The GE played a role in facilitating censorship and protected speech by Americans prior to its authority uh sunsetting at the end of this past year. An example under investigations of the GEK's involvement in suppressing dissenting voices in the leadup to the 2020 election. We've established that. Uh Mr.
▶ 1:05:29Taibbe noted that uh it was established under EO by uh Mr. Obama. Its mission was to counter the messaging and reduce influence of international terrorist organizations. Its scope uh countering foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts leading up to the 2020 election.
▶ 1:05:53some some within the GEK exploited its mission to target our American citizens rather than foreign threats. These efforts were part of the GEK's collaboration with the Election Integrity Project, a consortium of academic named a few uh uh and think tanks formed shortly prior to that The IP's stated goal was to monitor and correct election related misinformation and
▶ 1:06:23disinformation originating from the United States. Leading up to that election, the IP would contact social media companies identifying specific posts that they some some within the organization believed spread election misinformation. These posts were then removed from those platforms.
▶ 1:06:43And after the 2020 election, IEP officials acknowledged that the GEK had reported such cases to them and was one of the most frequently tagged organizations in the IEP's system, their their software system.
▶ 1:06:59The Gex mission creep from countering international terrorist organizations to censuring the voices of our citizens before a presidential election is a My question for Mr.
▶ 1:07:15Taibbe, as part of your Twitter files investigation, you uncover that the GEK provided over 5,000 account names to Twitter, stating that they were Chinese accounts engaged in statebacked manipulation. How long did it take you to find out that this was not the case? Uh, thank you, Mr. Congressman.
▶ 1:07:40Um, we rather quickly found that there was a heated discussion within Twitter about the so-called China list. Uh, first of all, uh, what GEK did was actually part for the course. They, uh, didn't contact Twitter first when they made up that list.
▶ 1:08:00they went straight to the media, which is why you will find uh numerous stories about an enormous quantity of uh Chinese misinformation agents that came out um in March, roughly late February and March of 2020. Uh when they Twitter did an analysis of those names, they quickly discovered that a lot of them were not in fact Chinese misinformation agents.
▶ 1:08:26there there were even three uh employees of CNN if I remember correctly uh that were on the list and there was a uh heated back and forth between GEK and uh and Twitter about that issue and in fact that was one of the reasons why the trust and safety uh department did not want to allow GEK to participate in its uh regular uh industry meetings with other platforms. So, uh, that that was a big issue. Mr.
▶ 1:08:56Chairman, I yield my last 15 Gentleman yields back. Uh, with that, the gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Mfume, is recognized for five minutes. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Uh, to you and the ranking member, I want to also thank and welcome our witnesses for appearing here today. Mr.
▶ 1:09:18Chairman, I have to uh admit that I'm quite disappointed that we're using the first hearing of this subcommittee to talk about conspiracy theories alleging that the US government was targeting conservative media outlets and their free speech. In fact, I find the hearing particularly ironic given the distinct lack of interest in the First Amendment displayed by the current administration in much more serious ways.
▶ 1:09:45My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I don't think are in a real position to allege free speech violations when the leader of their party has decided unilaterally to revoke the privileges of the Associated Press from the White House briefing room. And that's simply because that outlet did not site Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. That is sort of hypocritical to say the least.
▶ 1:10:11Far worse than that, the mass deportation of foreign students that have expressed their first amendment freedom speech uh find themselves also in that unfortunate position. And you don't even have to be a student or a foreign national or someone visiting. You can just be in the wrong party at the wrong time in the wrong place and you somehow or another are deemed to be anti-American.
▶ 1:10:38So I I have real concerns about the allegations raised uh in this hearing uh because they lack any real basis. So let's start with some of the facts which are always tricky little things.
▶ 1:10:52First of all, first and false allegations against the State Department's effort to fight misinformation and disinformation really has a real impact on our national security and our ability to counteract, malign, influence, disrupt campaigns from our adversaries.
▶ 1:11:11We really don't have the time quite frankly to entertain conspiracy theorists who are oftent times our domestic adversaries when we should I think be focused more on combating the real threat to our foreign adversaries and the threats that they pose every day.
▶ 1:11:28Uh, Miss Jenowitz, could you take a couple of minutes and give us a brief listing of the misinformation campaigns that have been carried out by foreign countries against Americans in the past few years? Absolutely, Congressman. I'd be happy to. So, uh, at the American Sunlight Project, we've identified a couple campaigns which I've talked about earlier. Uh, the one that is targeting chat bots I've already mentioned. We also identified what we call the sleeper agent network.
▶ 1:11:55This is a network of over 1100 accounts on X some of which have existed for over a decade uh to 15 years. They are automated accounts. They are AI enabled. So masquerading as citizens often with uh AI generated profile pictures. And these accounts uh repeatedly retweet overt Russian propaganda within 60 seconds of it being posted. They have generated over a 100red million tweets over their lifetime.
▶ 1:12:22And the only reason we have access to this data uh is because we uh used a data set that was available to the public before Elon Musk turned off our ability to to research Twitter without paying him,000. Why did he do that? Yeah, I think uh Mr. Musk uh doesn't like having scrutiny of his platform. You know, he had an avowed interest in getting rid of bots on the platform. We found some that had existed for over a decade and were clearly overt propaganda. uh when this story ran in a France press AFP, uh Mr.
▶ 1:12:51Musk did not take those bots down. Uh that's just one example. We've also looked at a network that is targeting left-leaning environmental groups at a mass scale. Uh of course, there are lots of instances of Chinese and Iranian propaganda as well. Uh Iran very famously hacked the Trump campaign ahead of uh the election last year. So this is a continuous threat that we need uh to be coordinating at all cylinders at once on because our adversaries are certainly doing. This is more of a threat than the Associated Press, I take it.
▶ 1:13:21Is that correct to assume? I would say so. And would it be more of a threat than a student that happens to be at a university has a position that the president does not like? Certainly more of a threat than a student publishing an op-ed in a campus newspaper. Yes. So that when I talked about hypocrisy, I don't mind having a debate. We can debate anytime, any day, anywhere. But in that debate, we've got to be equal. We've got to have some semblance of fairness. In other words, if it's good for the goose, it ought to be still good for the gander.
▶ 1:13:51But we've gotten into this slot, this slice of a slot where we point and uh hurl accusations. So, I'm I hope that uh as we move forward, the committee will spend a great deal more time focusing on the real issues uh and give us an opportunity to deal with those things in South and Central Asia and in that region that are just as much of a threat. And I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Gentleman's time has expired.
▶ 1:14:19Uh the gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Kaine, is recognized for five minutes. Uh thank you, Mr. chairman and thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today. Uh Mr. Weinearten and Mr. Taibbei, uh what is the clearest evidence that each of you can site to show that the censorship industrial complex was an attack on the first amendment by the Biden administration?
▶ 1:14:47The discovery in Missouri v. Biden, which has been dismissed here uh both at the district court level, fifth circuit court of appeals level, and among three Supreme Court justices, showed massive pressure from the federal government for social media companies to censor American speech, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop story, COVID 19, election integrity matters, or beyond. District Court judge said this was arguably the most massive attack on free speech in US history. Again, fifth circuit court of appeals had that same view.
▶ 1:15:17three Supreme Court justices did as well. And while it's been dismissed that case, the fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court specifically did not rule on the underlying merits, the thousands of pages of discovery which blew the lid open on this entire regime. Thank you, Mr. A. Uh thank you, Mr. Congressman. I I would do two quickly. Uh there's another case um uh after Murphy v. Missouri uh involving um former New York Times reporter Alex Baronson. Baronson v.
▶ 1:15:47Biden uh who was removed from Twitter after repeated uh pressure from White House officials for a tweet that was true. He said that the the COVID vaccine does not stop infection or transmission. And for that tweet, he was he was summarily removed from the platform after pressure from White House officials.
▶ 1:16:07Uh the other one was an instance in which a friend of mine, Aaron Mate, um who is no Republican, uh the the uh Ukrainian Secret Services passed on a request to the FBI to have him removed from Twitter and the FBI did it. They passed that request on to Twitter and we found uh that ask in uh in Twitter's files. Thank you. Uh Mr. Taibbe and Mr. wine garden.
▶ 1:16:36Can you please explain how the global engagement center and the federal government as a whole use coercive power to censor Americans? Well, Mr. Congressman, first of all, I would say uh that the global engagement center and this entire effort is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American system and the first amendment.
▶ 1:17:01there American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech. The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison is that the American uh people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves. They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what's true. We don't need a truth squad. And that's exactly what GEC was designed for.
▶ 1:17:28It was designed uh to suppress any information that countered national policy uh and to identify people uh who may have had opinions that were um controversial uh or unwanted uh as foreign inspired when in fact they had no connection whatsoever to foreign governments.
▶ 1:17:54which is um both slanderous and and uh detrimental to the first amendment. Thank you, Mr. Weine Garden. I would simply say that when the government comes to you, pressures you directly using the bully pulpit. The government has its awesome resources obviously in terms of its funding streams, its regulatory powers when it comes to the social media companies, specifically section 230, antitrust enforcement, etc.
▶ 1:18:21when the government comes to you and says, "Please take down this American speech. We'd really like you to do so." Or in the case of someone in the Biden administration, actually browbeats people, curses them out, and a president goes on camera and says, "Your social media platform is killing people." The government does so with the most awesome power possible. Government at the end of the day ultimately is force, and that force should not be turned on Americans and our speech. Thank you to all of our witnesses. I yield back.
▶ 1:18:51Will the gentleman yield? Yes, I yield back my time. As uh as vice chair of the financial services committee, I can tell you, Mr. Weard, you are hitting on the exact thing that regulators do repeatedly. You can go and do whatever you want, but here's what we would like you to see see you do. And it's that threat. It's that cudgel that they have that's over those that they are making the quote request to that compels them to follow the government request.
▶ 1:19:22So uh with that I yield back to the gentleman from yield back New Jersey and time has expired. So with that uh Representative Jipal is recognized for five minutes. Thank you Mr. Chairman. It is the height of hypocrisy for Republicans to hold a hearing on the so-called censorship industrial complex and the need to quote first amendment need for quote first amendment safeguards at the State Department when President Trump and Elon Musk are launching the largest attack on free speech
▶ 1:19:52in America in decades. Let's be clear. The administration is right now stripping people of the constitutional protection to free speech, to the right to dissent, to express their views if they're counter to Trump and Musk, to use cold war era statutes and ignore judicial rulings, all to suit their purpose of squashing fundamental American freedoms. And they have said they are bending institutions to their will.
▶ 1:20:20The Trump administration is using that awesome power of government that was just spoken about of the federal government to intimidate and neuter any opposition from the legal establishment, academia, prominent cultural institutions, the media, the judiciary. Essentially, they want to strip your American freedoms for their right to have absolute power. Instead of focusing on the fabricated censorship of conservatives, let's talk about real threats to free speech.
▶ 1:20:49This month, Secretary Rubio launched quote catch and revoke, a horrifying program fueled by AI to monitor student visa holders social media accounts for pro Palestinian views and mark them for deportation, saying, quote, "Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas." Like many Americans I have watched in horror as students with legal status per legal permanent residents have been detained for exercising their right to free speech like Mahmud Khalil
▶ 1:21:20who was snatched from his home in front of his pregnant US citizen wife. This is the playbook of authoritarians and dictators and no matter how you feel about this issue we should all be horrified by this violation of free speech protections. Miss Jen Kowitz, to clarify for my Republican colleagues, just a yes or no is fine. Is it true that the Constitution guarantees lawful permanent residents the right to free speech? Yes, ma'am, it's true.
▶ 1:21:46And is it true that engaging in peaceful protests is protected by the First Amendment? That's right, Congresswoman. The Trump administration is relying on cold war era language in the Immigration Nationality Act to strip students of green cards by claiming that their speech has somehow had ambiguous quote foreign policy consequences for the United States. This law has been on the books since 1952 and to my knowledge it has never been used in this way.
▶ 1:22:14Since then we've seen students exercise their right to protest against the Vietnam War, for the civil rights movement, against apartheid. Miss Jen Kowitz, is there anything that makes this moment substantively different than other protests that we've seen on campuses when the authority has not been used? No, ma'am, it does not.
▶ 1:22:32And in fact, there's Supreme Court precedent that extends First Amendment rights to uh legal residents of the United States that I think was passed in or decided in And in addition to weaponizing the immigration system to silence protective free speech, reports indicate that the Trump administration is planning to block colleges from accepting any foreign students if the school is deemed too quote pro- Hamas simply for allowing legal protest and freedom of expression on their grounds.
▶ 1:23:00As an expert that you are on authoritarian regimes, how do these attacks on higher education mirror the repression that you have observed by authoritarian dictators? and why should all Americans be concerned about this? Thank you for the question, Congresswoman. This is exactly the sort of thing that I've observed when I was studying in Russia. I'm now banned from going to Russia. Uh when you look at the Hungarian regime and authoritarian regime, which has also cracked down on uh disscent, it's closed universities.
▶ 1:23:29Uh Bellarus also closed a university that was uh you know somewhere where dissident and and civil society figures studied. The right to free speech is the right to free speech no matter if people are expressing opinions you don't like or not. Uh that right extends to legal residents and I certainly hope it extends to the folks we are inviting here fullulbright students and others to come study in our country to understand our values. How can we project those values if we're turning them on their heads and arresting people for using them uh themselves?
▶ 1:23:57And what happens when uh a president, an executive uses his or her authority to literally destroy all of the institutions that are supposed to be checks and balances on uh total power? What effect does that have on US citizens who may not be legal permanent residents? They're obviously not legal permanent residents. They're not visa holders. What effect does that have on the regular American that's out there listening? Congresswoman, I think there's a a chilling effect.
▶ 1:24:25I myself have spoken with people, students, uh people of color, women who are now afraid to speak up and voice their uh opinions online and off because of what's happening on campuses today. This is a slippery slope and we all should be calling it out. I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Gentle lady's time has expired. Uh with that, the gentleman from Washington, Mr. Bombgartner, is recognized for five minutes. Well, thank you, Mr. chair and thanks to all assembled for this uh important hearing.
▶ 1:24:55Uh you know I think at the at the uh the core interest here is trust with the American people. Uh there are real issues uh with terrorists using propaganda and social media uh to spread their nefarious aims. But what we've seen happen uh in the last uh particularly in the last four years has very much eroded uh the trust of the American people uh with the use of uh big government to censor uh disscent uh in truth here uh in the United States.
▶ 1:25:25So to start Miss uh Jangitz the organization the American Sunlight Project car uh claims to have a commitment to transparency and apparently does not extend to close to disclosing its donors. Has the American Sunlake Project received funding either directly or indirectly from the George Soros or his foundations, including the Open Society Foundation? Thank you, Congressman.
▶ 1:25:47Uh, you know, I've received a lot of threats for speaking out and so I've decided that we are going to abide by the rules that other 501c4s in our country abide by and we are not required to disclose our donors, small or large, because I frankly don't want them to be threatened the way that I have been. So, sunlight for other people, but not for your donors. If you're interested in more sunlight, I welcome you to introduce some legislation to overturn Citizens United, sir.
▶ 1:26:11So, you know, this year, in the past year, the American people knew there was something wrong uh with uh President Biden in the White House, they could see it before their uh very eyes. Uh when White House press secretary Karine Jeepierre said that videos of President Biden looking lost or being disoriented uh and scenile uh or disinformation and cheap fakes. Should the government flag those videos for social media companies or have those videos taken down?
▶ 1:26:40Congressman, I actually don't believe that the government should flag those videos or have those videos taken down. Thanks for the ability to uh to correct the record on this idea that I'm some sort of you know disinformation jar as the uh referred to me as. Should taxpayer funded organizations have flagged those videos for social medias to take them down. Uh taxpayer taxpayer funded organizations have a right to free speech. If they want to talk about their research and flag those videos, that's in their right to free speech. Sure.
▶ 1:27:06But you do acknowledge that there was a loss of trust the American people when you had the White House press secretary calling them cheap fakes and the American people could see between their very eyes that President Biden was disoriented. Uh sir, I I think in those cases there were uh nefarious editing techniques being used to make the uh effect seem worse than it actually was. And actually, you know, I I've talked to a lot of American citizens who are really disturbed about the propaganda coming out of the White House today. So I think we should focus on that in this hearing. It should be a bipartisan interest.
▶ 1:27:35But do you acknowledge that there was a change in tone after President Biden's disastrous debate performance almost as if there was an organized campaign? Congressman, I'm interested in the threats facing our country today, not what happened last what was it even September, June, I can't remember.
▶ 1:27:50But again, this gets to the very root interest here, which is you have US government officials in a coordinated fashion working with the media to uh accelerate a narrative to the benefit of one political party and it destroys trust in the American people to have uh folks be able to fight terrorism. I mean, that's if we don't have uh trust and transparency and understanding this core issue, then how can we get after the terrorists? Uh well, I would agree with that, sir.
▶ 1:28:16And I think that if you're interested in trust and transparency, again, it is the duty of Congress to pass regulations of the social media platforms that would enable that. I would love to have my hands on some more data from the social media platforms so we can talk about the facts of what's going on instead of the cherrypicked emails that Mr. Taibbe and Mr. Wearden have been uh you know referencing throughout this hearing. Um, also I I think it's a great time to bring up the Supreme Court case that uh was referenced earlier. Um, I think Mr. Weingard said that the justices didn't rule on the facts.
▶ 1:28:45Actually, Amy Coney Barrett wrote, "The plaintiff cannot rest on mere allegations, but must instead point to factual evidence. The plaintiffs didn't find factual evidence of government coercion or censorship in the Murthy v. uh Missouri case." Sir, do you believe that the 51 uh former intelligence officials who uh said that the Hunter Biden's laptop were a product of Russian disinformation? Do you think they impacted the trust of the American people and the intelligence establishment uh to uh successfully use social media to go after terrorists?
▶ 1:29:14Sir, does uh does free speech only apply when you like what's being said? Those guys were exercising their right to free speech and actually what they said was that it had bore the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign which based on the evidence at the time was true. And I just like to give you one more opportunity to disclose to the donors that fund you. I'd like to give you another opportunity to overturn Citizens United, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Gentlemen yields back. Uh, with that, I would like to thank the witnesses for their testimony today and the members for their questions.
▶ 1:29:44The members of the subcommittee may have some additional questions for the witnesses and uh, we ask that you respond to those in writing in a timely manner pursuant to committee rules. All members uh, may have five days to submit questions, extraneous materials and statements for the record subject to the length of limitations. And without objection, the committee stands adjourned.