Rob Flaherty – Kamala Harris campaign’s deputy manager (originally a member of the team put together for the now failed Biden reelection bid) – has spoken about what that campaign is doing about “misinformation.”
That’s one of the favorite subjects – and often tools of political pressure – of the current Biden-Harris administration, and Flaherty is no stranger to any of it.
In the past, he served in the Biden administration as director of digital strategy and played a prominent role in exerting persistent pressure on Big Tech, to get these companies to censor even more content.
Now, Flaherty tells Politico that the Harris campaign’s handling of what it perceives as misinformation is “extremely aggressive” and that it is “constantly” on the lookout for it, “monitoring” the internet – again, “aggressively.”
The reason is to counter “the attacks that are coming in against the Vice President.”
That includes what Flaherty calls “deep detection of what is happening on the internet” on election day. The apparent intent is to come across as aggressive, perhaps as an intimidation tactic.
Flaherty’s other statements, such as hunting down “pockets of misinformation” (like posts that mention the wrong election date) along with threats of lawsuit speak to that.
According to him, the campaign has “a really robust legal team” that is considering its options regarding “voting misinformation” – and Flaherty says these options are many.
Regarding the channels the Harris campaign goes to, to implement “misinformation monitoring and pushing back” one is as expected – the presidential candidate’s own campaign accounts, but the other is quite controversial, yet clearly spelled out by Flaherty – traditional media.
“That’s all part of one big strategy,” the Harris aide shared.
Read more about Flaherty’s history here.
What makes these statements – snippets of the overall approach to “misinformation” apparently espoused by the vice president’s campaign – resonate is Flaherty’s troubling track record.
He was one of those earlier in the year subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, as part of the investigation into the previous instances of government-Big Tech censorship collusion.
Flaherty was asked to testify about pressure meant to result in censorship that came from him.
“The Committee has obtained documents that demonstrate the central role you played in communicating the Biden White House’s censorship efforts to social media companies, including the White House’s demands to censor true information, memes, satire, and other constitutionally protected forms of expression,” Jordan wrote to Flaherty last fall.
Pressuring Facebook, but not only – and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted this pressure was coming from the Biden White House – was one of Flaherty’s “specialties.”
