(Credit: The Intercept)
America First Legal, the advocacy organization led by former Trump White House official Stephen Miller, has launched a multi-state investigation into collusion between Democrat attorneys general and the leftist Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) to censor Americans.
Funded by a pro-China investment entity, the CCDH is a British nonprofit that became infamous during the Biden administration as the origin of the “disinformation dozen,” a group of Facebook accounts the nonprofit identified as the top sources of “COVID misinformation.”
Joe Biden used the CCDH’s research to call on Facebook to censor the accounts, accusing the social networking platform of “killing people” by allowing the accounts to continue posting.
The accounts in the “disinformation dozen” included Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now the leading opponent to Biden in the Democrat presidential primary.
America First Legal has now launched a series of state Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests into Democrat attorneys general who allegedly colluded with CCDH to add to the pressure on social media companies to censor Americans.
The attorneys general called on the social media networks to “effectively root” “out fraudulent information about coronavirus vaccines.” The evidence is that they prepared this letter in coordination with the CCDH. CCDH describes itself as a “not-for-profit non-governmental organization” that “works to stop the spread of online hate and disinformation through innovative research, public campaigns and policy advocacy.”
On March 24, 2021, CCDH published a list of “twelve anti-vaxxers who play a leading role in spreading digital misinformation about Covid vaccines,” and urged social media platforms to “establish a clear threshold for enforcement action” and “to deplatform the most highly visible repeat offenders, who we [CCDH] term the Disinformation Dozen.” The list consisted entirely of Americans, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. AFL launched an investigation into potential government collusion with this list.
On the same day, these twelve state attorneys general sent a letter stating, “Twitter and Facebook have yet to remove from all their platforms the accounts of prominent ‘anti-vaxxers’” such as the “12 ‘anti-vaxxers’ personal accounts and their associated organizations, groups and websites [that] are responsible for 65% of public anti-vaccine content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.”
In a statement announcing the investigation, America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton branded the actions of the attorneys general tantamount to collusion with a foreign-influence campaign.
“In 2021, in an extraordinarily anti-American move, twelve state attorneys general did the bidding of an organization with extraordinary foreign ties to pressure social media companies to censor Americans’ speech. We are going to obtain any and all communications between those offices and anyone associated with CCDH so that the American people can see for themselves the extent of this foreign-influence operation at the state level,” said Hamilton. (Breitbart, 8/17/2023) (Archive)