Politics
Judicial Watch Reveals California Urged Big Tech to Censor 2020 Election
California pressured social media companies to censor posts about the 2020 presidential election, according to Judicial Watch. The conservative legal organization announced the news Tuesday after it obtained over 500 pages of documents.
The documents include “misinformation briefings” sent via email from SKDK, a communications firm whose biggest 2020 client was the Biden campaign.
The records were obtained after Judicial Watch formally requested the documents from the Office of the California Secretary of State under the California Public Records Act (CPRA).
Judicial Watch requested the records after a December 2020 report showed that California “surveilling, tracking, and seeking to censor the speech of Americans.”
The Office of Election Cybersecurity in the California Secretary of State’s office monitored and tracked social media posts, decided if they were misinformation, stored the posts in an internal database coded by threat level, and on 31 different occasions requested posts be removed. In 24 cases, the social media companies agreed and either took down the posts or flagged them as misinformation, according to Jenna Dresner, senior public information officer for the Office of Election Cybersecurity.