<\/strong>said in her opening statement at a fractious hearing that exposed the width of the chasm between Republicans and Democrats on the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cMore alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech and stymieing critical research that protects our country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI want to acknowledge the irony that we\u2019re having this discussion as we witness an assault on the first amendment we have not seen in decades. The Trump administration has directed far more egregious violations of our constitution than the imagined actions of the Biden administration on which this hearing is premised.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She singled out the detention and attempted deportation of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, who wrote an opinion article critical of Israel\u2019s bombardment of Gaza, which she compared to the actions of authoritarian regimes in Russia, Belarus and Hungary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Republicans have used their control of the House and Senate to stage a series of hearings in different congressional committees on the alleged existence of a censorship complex \u2013 whose name derives from the military industrial complex described by president Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell speech before leaving the White House in 1961. Opponents dismiss the notion as a conspiracy theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The committee hearings have coincided with the Trump administration\u2019s dismantling of safeguards designed to stop the spread of influence and disinformation in cyberspace by Russia in particular, but also widely attributed to China and Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even before Trump returned to office, the Republican-controlled Congress declined last December to renew the mandate of the state department\u2019s global engagement center (GEC), the leading government agency fighting Russian and Chinese propaganda.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Huizenga, a representative from Michigan, called on two other witnesses, Matt Taibbi and Benjamin Weingarten, to support the Republican contention that the body had been subverted to instead suppress rightwing opinion in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As evidence, Taibbi, a former Rolling Stone journalist who was among the recipients of the so-called \u201cTwitter files\u201d released by Elon Musk, the platform\u2019s owner, to show evidence of alleged censorship, cited the case of Alex Berenson, a former New York Times journalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berenson had been expelled from platform following White House pressure after posting that the Covid-19 vaccine did not prevent infection or the virus\u2019s transmission, Taibbi claimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Weingarten, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a rightwing thinktank, condemned the GEC as a \u201ctruth squad \u2026 designed to suppress any information that countered national policy and to identify people who may have had opinions that were controversial or unwanted as foreign inspire\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Democrats lined up to denounce the hearing as \u201chypocrisy\u201d and \u201cwaste of taxpayers\u2019 money\u201d in light of the Trump administration\u2019s attempts to deport foreign students who had expressed pro-Palestinian views, moves that Jankowicz said violated the US constitution\u2019s first amendment, which protects free speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sydney Kamlager-Dove, the subcommittee\u2019s ranking Democrat, said the hearing was \u201cout of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been to the state department, and I do have concerns about censorship \u2013 censorship of the employees who are terrified to say the wrong thing, to say anything, or have the wrong word in their job title and be terminated by an administration that publicly relishes punishing people for their speech,\u201d she said. \u201cIf we want to talk about censorship, we should begin with Trump\u2019s unprecedented assault on the first amendment and rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keith Self, a Republican representative from Texas, provoked anger among Democrats by appearing to liken the Biden administration\u2019s anti-disinformation efforts to steps by the Nazi to construct public opinion in 1930s Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cA direct quote from Joseph Goebbels [the Nazi propaganda minister]: \u2018It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion,\u2019 and I think that may be what we\u2019re discussing here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
theguardian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nina Jankowicz, who led DHS\u2019s disinformation unit under Biden administration, pointed to restrictions under Trump A Capitol Hill hearing held to explore supposed government censorship under Joe Biden was based on a \u201cfiction\u201d, a leading expert on countering online disinformation told members of Congress on Tuesday. Nina Jankowicz, head of the American Sunlight Project, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":40497,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[32867,32868,1169,30430],"class_list":["post-40496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-censorship-industrial-complex","tag-fiction","tag-biden","tag-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40498,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40496\/revisions\/40498"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}