Congressman Thomas Massie has announced HR 8519, legislation aimed at ending the practice of spending taxpayer money to fund various censorship and “disinformation” research programs.
A press release said that Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, and the subsequent publishing of the Twitter Files – a batch of internal documents showing how the government and this social platform colluded in the previous period – played a pivotal role in opening the public’s eyes to the realities of the situation.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Ever since the 2016 elections and after those in 2020, speaking about what the Twitter Files revealed about online censorship, its methods, and levels, would have been discredited as “misinformation” or a “conspiracy theory.”
And one of the things revealed is that the US federal government had informally enlisted not only tech companies but also universities to do this, many say, unlawful work.
Unless it came as a result of pressure, like any work, it had to be paid for, and Massie now wants to make sure that kind of funding is banned going forward.
In this effort, the Republican senator had the backing of only his party colleagues, with over a dozen of them originally co-sponsoring HR 8519. Since it is blatantly unconstitutional for the money to change hands in any direct way, the bill aims to stop “the workaround”: the government using taxpayer money to further its political goals via various “disinformation” research grants.
Those would typically go to groups or networks made up of “select” universities and researchers. Moreover, HR 8519 seeks to prevent the government from bankrolling “specific programs within the National Science Foundation” which have been identified by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which Massie is a member of.
The Select Subcommittee has singled out these programs as “key to the federal government’s censorship efforts,” the senator announced.
To Massie’s mind, there is no doubt that this activity is unconstitutional in that it violates the First Amendment – while Congress must see to ending it, using “the power of the purse.”
The senator made note of the fact that what was in the past treated as “misinformation” etc., on Twitter was used to censor even his own posts on the official account, which he says were accurate.
“If a Member of Congress’s account can be censored on the pretext of combating ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, or ‘malinformation’, it can be done to anyone’s account,” Massie warned.
