The Big Government-Big Tech censorship collusion over the last four years has at this point been well documented, regarding a number of federal entities and third parties involved.
Now reports based on responses to state-level freedom of information legislation in Maine show that “small government” was very much participating in efforts to pressure social media to censor speech.
Roundabout or not, and regardless of how many intermediary actors and steps they involve, these instances represent a violation of the US Constitution’s provisions protecting people from government censorship.
According to the Maine Wire, the emails this outlet has seen thanks to the state’s Freedom of Access Act (FOAA) reveal that the Secretary of State’s Office flagged posts and pressured Facebook and Twitter/X to remove them.
This was happening in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, and in some cases, those posts would disappear from Facebook within hours.
The Maine bureaucracy doesn’t seem to have bothered with its own third parties but went with the one used by the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA – the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a non-profit.
The “flagger” who sent reports to the “misinformation portal” set up by CIS was Emily Cook, the communications director for Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.
The key explanation for the reason to repeatedly try to get Facebook and X to delete content, as ever, is “misinformation,” including about ballot stuffing, a form of election fraud, and allowing “new,” i.e., illegal voters.
And the emails show that a number of discussions on these subjects were swiftly stifled by Facebook, after receiving Cook’s reports via CIS.
Cook – that is, Maine’s Secretary of State’s Office – was less successful in getting X to cooperate.
Several emails now published, all from the first half of 2024 and signed by either Twitter or X Support, informed the official that the posts she had flagged did not violate the platform’s rules.
In at least one instance, Cook went directly to the social media company – emailing, in April 2024, X’s government affairs and public policy head Wilfredo Fernandez to ask why a post from 2022 had not been removed.
