On the Hill, Democrats Defend Government-Backed Censorship of Americans

By

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 4 (C-Fam) Democrats defended federal programs that were used to censor Americans under the guise of conducting research to combat terrorism and disinformation.

“The allegation that researchers are somehow committing acts of censorship by conducting independent research and sharing it is outlandish and it’s harmful,” said Nina Jankowizc, a Biden appointee to be the head of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, a short-lived initiative of the Biden administration and Microsoft that was shut down in 2022 because of how controversial it had become.

Jankowicz fiercely defended her work and had several testy exchanges with Republicans during a hearing on Tuesday.

The principal subject of the hearing was the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which was defunded by Congress in December 2024 after evidence that the program was used to censor Americans on social and traditional media. One of the issues Congress must decide is whether the U.S. State Department can continue to fund organizations that promote censorship.

Republicans are worried that censorship initiatives will once again turn against Americans. Democrats denied accusations of past censorship, calling these a “conspiracy theory.” At the same time, they said censorship was necessary to counter terrorism and misinformation.

Jankowicz specifically defended government funding for organizations that carried out censorship, but she denied that the government itself ever engaged in censorship. She called it “research” instead and described government-backed efforts to suppress content on traditional and social media as the government exercising its own right to free speech.

When asked by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA) if the government should “flag videos for social media companies or have them taken down?” Jankowicz replied, “No.”

But when Baumgartner asked if “taxpayer funded organizations” should do the same, her reply was, “Taxpayer funded orgs have right to free speech too. If they want to talk about their research and flag those videos that’s in their right to free speech.”

Rep. Keith Self (R-TX) asked Jankowicz if the federal government should engage in efforts to form public opinion, she replied, “The government has a first amendment right to free speech as well,” adding that, “research is speech, whether it is government funded or not.”

He retorted with a quote from Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, who said that “it is the absolute right of the state to form the opinion of citizens.”

Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) chided Self for citing the chief propagandist of the Nazi regime. She then characterized censorship by social media platforms and government funded organizations as completely separate from federal agencies.

“The genesis of this problem is that so many on the far right just made s… (expletive) up in the electoral context. They put stuff out there and then the social media companies said, you know we are not going to tolerate just blatant lies, blatant falsehoods on our platforms…And now the Republicans are pushing back because they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,” she said.

Janokowicz agreed adding that scientific research “all points to the fact that Republicans share more content that is more likely to be moderated. It’s not that they’re being censored. It is that they’re breaking the rules that they can read if they read the fine print.”

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter