According to a recent House GOP report, the State Department has “outsourced” their social media censorship to Stanford University researchers in advance of the 2020 elections.

According to a House Judiciary Committee report released Monday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and State Department collaborated directly with the Election Integrity Partnership to “monitor” and “censor” Americans’ online speech ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election. The EIP, led by researchers from the Stanford Internet Observatory and coordinated with Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and State Department’s Global Engagement Center to make censorship decisions for platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

House Republicans drew on Stanford’s private EIP documents, which were handed over under threat of subpoena. They found that social media firms censored facts, jokes, satire and political opinions when they felt pressure from universities and the federal government.

The report states that “this pressure was largely directed to a side that benefited from it: true information posted on the internet by Republicans and conservatives were labeled’misinformation,’ while false content posted by Democrats or liberals went largely unreported. The pseudoscience of disinformation has been and always will be a political ruse that is most often targeted at groups or individuals who hold views opposing the dominant narratives.

EIP researchers will compile a list after reviewing misinformation reports provided by federal officials. They will then submit the list to Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and Reddit. The research group will then make specific recommendations on how to best censor these posts. The actions taken include, but are not restricted to: “reducing posts’ “discoverability,”” suspending [an account]’s ability to tweet for 12 hours,” monitoring if any tagged influencers retweet a specific user, and… removing thousands Americans’ posts.”

Musk, who has been outspoken about the federal government’s censorship, tweeted in February that “obscure” GEC was “[t]he biggest offender of US government censorship & manipulation of media.”

The report states that while EIP researchers and government partners often cited the threat foreign election disinformation as a justification for their activities, it was more common to censor election related speech by Americans than foreign speech.

After questioning the validity the 2020 elections, many conservative politicians, including former President Donald Trump and former speaker Newt Gingrich were silenced. EIP researchers have also pointed out that Senator Thom Tillis, R., N.C., prematurely claimed victory in his Senate race three years ago despite the fact he won.

The investigation is a bombshell, coming several months after Missouri & Louisiana filed a lawsuit accusing Biden’s administration & federal agencies of conspiring with platforms in order to suppress free speech.

In their lawsuit, the two southern states claim that the State Department, DHS and other agencies of the Biden administration suppressed online speeches about the Hunter Biden Laptop story, the lab leak theory that caused a pandemic and the effectiveness of masks and locksdowns. They also allege that the suit was filed to protect the integrity and the election integrity for 2020. At the time, all of these claims were considered misinformation and, in some cases, disinformation.

According to the latest report, the plaintiffs in the suit also claim that YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms removed posts critical of these subjects at the government’s request. This collusion led to actions such as suspending users for indefinite periods of time on these platforms, and “shadow-banning” certain posts.

Missouri v. Biden is currently being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The investigative report says: “Today, a result the Committee and Select Subcommittee investigation, political candidates and journalists as well as all Americans can see if they have been targeted by their government and which viewpoints DHS Stanford and others tried to censor.” While the EIP targeted conservatives disproportionately, Americans of every political affiliation were victims of censorship.