California Officials, Biden-Linked Firm Colluded With Big Tech to Censor Election Posts: Judicial Watch
California officials colluded with Big Tech to censor social media posts in the United States during the 2020 presidential election, government watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Tuesday.
The findings come after Judicial Watch received 540 pages and a further four pages of documents from the office of the Secretary of State of California in response to an open records request, the group said.
It had filed the request after a December 2020 report surfaced revealing that California’s Office of Election Cybersecurity had surveilled and asked the social media giants to remove or flag as “misleading” at least two dozen messages.
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California pressured social media companies to censor posts about the 2020 presidential election, according to Judicial Watch. The conservative legal organization announced the news Tuesday after it obtained over 500 pages of documents.
The documents include “misinformation briefings” sent via email from SKDK, a communications firm whose biggest 2020 client was the Biden campaign.
The records were obtained after Judicial Watch formally requested the documents from the Office of the California Secretary of State under the California Public Records Act (CPRA).
Judicial Watch requested the records after a December 2020 reportshowed that California “surveilling, tracking, and seeking to censor the speech of Americans.”
A government office created by California Democrats is monitoring hashtags, classifying political speech it opposes by “threat level”, taking screenshots of posts, and then storing the information indefinitely, before reporting the offending speech to social media companies for censorship. Jenna Dresner, the senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity, boasted that the government office maintains an internal database of online speech coded by threat level, and that its censorship calls had resulted in removals 77% of the time. Desner is a member of the Los Angeles County Young Democrats, who had formerly worked for Rep. Karen Bass, Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and other Democrat figures. The Office of Election Cybersecurity operates under Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who was chosen by Governor Newsom to replace Senator Kamala Harris. And the bill creating California’s own office of internet censorship was sponso