Judiciary House – US Government
By Interim Staff Report of the
Committee on the Judiciary
and the
Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government
November 6, 2023
Following the 2016 presidential election, a sensationalized narrative emerged that foreign
“disinformation” affected the integrity of the election. These claims, fueled by left-wing election
denialism about the legitimacy of President Trump’s victory, sparked a new focus on the role of
social media platforms in spreading such information.
“Disinformation” think tanks and
“experts,” government task forces, and university centers were formed, all to study and combat
the alleged rise in alleged mis- and disinformation. As the House Committee on the Judiciary and
the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have shown
previously, these efforts to combat so-called foreign influence and misinformation quickly
mutated to include domestic—that is, American—speech.2
The First Amendment to the Constitution rightly limits the government’s role in
monitoring and censoring Americans’ speech, but these disinformation researchers (often
funded, at least in part, by taxpayer dollars) were not strictly bound by these constitutional
guardrails. What the federal government could not do directly, it effectively outsourced to the
newly emerging censorship-industrial complex.