New York Times Backhandedly Acknowledges Getting Censored by DHS
Also, I joined an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing in favor of free speech.
A brief note to readers:
I’m back. I apologize for the light posting recently. I’ve been traveling to visit family and for some meetings. I also spent a week on vacation. I’m looking forward to getting back to the investigative grind.
I want to promote Dissident Dialogues, a conference billed as "two days of debate, discussion, disagreement, and discovery” featuring Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Konstantin Kisin, Briahna Joy Gray, and many more. I'll also be speaking at the event, which will be held in New York City on May 3rd and 4th. You can buy tickets here.
Last month, I revealed internal Twitter and Department of Homeland Security emails showing that the agency had successfully pressured the social media platform to censor the New York Times during the 2020 presidential election. The emails showed that the agency had targeted Reid Epstein, a Times political campaign journalist, who was reporting from Wisconsin and had observed a momentary pause in the vote count while a clerk ran off to collect more printer ink.
The tweet targeted by DHS still can’t be viewed freely because it is marked as disputed or misleading content.
Yet it was impossible to get the Times to comment on my reporting that revealed that a government agency, enacted to protect national security, had muzzled one of its own. The Times spokespeople ducked and dodged my questions and Epstein said he could not provide any comment. The paper remained silent. That was the case until last week when the Times finally mentioned the issue – perhaps in the most Times way possible.
In a lengthy article that falsely paints efforts to promote free speech as orchestrated entirely by Trump supporters, the Times buried an acknowledgment of our reporting some 52 paragraphs down inside the story (emphasis added):
The idea came from a group of college interns at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA. The students suggested that research institutions could help track and flag posts that might violate the platforms’ standards, feeding the information into a portal open to the agency, state and local governments and the platforms.
The project ultimately involved Stanford University, the University of Washington, the National Conference on Citizenship, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Graphika, a social media analytics firm. At its peak, it had 120 analysts, some of whom were college students.
It had what it considered successes, including spotting — and helping to stop — the spread of a false claim that a poll worker was burning Trump ballots in Erie, Pa. The approach could misfire, though. A separate, but related, CISA system flagged a tweet from a New York Times reporter accurately describing a printer problem at a voter center in Wisconsin, leading Twitter to affix an accuracy warning.
In some ways, this isn’t new. The Times is notorious among journalists for its shameless refusal to credit rival publications. But the backhanded way in which the Times finally noted that the government had suppressed the speech — in an article that essentially argues that free speech is a dangerous right-wing plot — reflects the institution's changing nature.
Many in the public may view the paper as a beacon of the free press. After all, the most important Supreme Court case enshrining media rights was New York Times v. U.S., the 1971 case that made it clear that journalists have the right to publish even classified documents. Many Times decisions in the decades since have upheld that spirit. The once mighty Times media critic David Carr frequently wrote unsparingly of any government move that might stifle the freedom of the press.