House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio has officially subpoenaed the anti-online free speech organization the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for documents and other information relating to the group's communications with the federal government.
The subpoena gives the CCDH until the end of September to produce the necessary communications with the White House since Jan. 1, 2020 regarding "content moderation" that occurred "as a result of the government's influence.
"It is necessary for Congress to gauge the extent to which the federal government or one of its proxies worked with or relied upon CCDH to censor speech," wrote Jordan in the subpoena's accompanying letter to CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed. "The scope of the Committee's investigation includes intermediaries who may or may not have had a full understanding of the government's efforts and motivations." (Related: Imran Ahmed from CCDH censorship organization facing congressional inquiry over "Disinfo Dozen" report.)
Jordan's subpoena against the CCDH comes after the organization allegedly refused to "comply voluntarily" with requests for the aforementioned records. These requests were made by the House Judiciary Committee in early August when it began its investigation on how the administration of President Joe Biden is attempting to influence efforts to moderate online content.
"By declining to produce anything of substance in response to the Committee's request, CCDH is hindering the Committee's ability to fulfill its constitutional oversight obligations," wrote Jordan.
CCDH claims Jordan's subpoena is "pointless"
In his response to Jordan's subpoena, Ahmed called the latest inquiry "a pointless, time-wasting attack on our work and an attempt to silence our efforts to study and hold social media companies accountable."
"After we explained to the Committee that we engaged with both Republican and Democratic administrations, this request oddly shrunk to focus almost entirely on our communications with the current administration," said Ahmed in a statement. "We look forward to continuing to engage on a bipartisan basis with political parties in the United States and elsewhere in productive conversations on preventing the spread of disinformation that harms human life, but this request looks increasingly like a wild goose chase."
In a letter responding to Jordan sent by a lawyer representing the CCDH, the organization claimed that it "may not have a clear understanding of CCDH's mission or work."
The letter claims that the CCDH has a 501(c)(3) designation as a charitable entity and is therefore obligated to remain nonpolitical and nonpartisan. The letter reiterates Ahmed's claims that it works with both Republican and Democratic officials, pointing out that it in the past collaborated with former President Donald Trump's administration.
The CCDH, a British nonprofit funded by a variety of individuals and organizations including investment groups linked to China, came to prominence as the origin of Biden's "disinformation dozen," the administration's nickname for 12 Facebook accounts that the CCDH identifies as the top sources of so-called disinformation on the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
Biden used the CCDH's research to call on Facebook's parent company Meta to censor the accounts of those responsible for spreading so-called disinformation and accusing the social network of "killing people" by allowing these accounts to continue posting freely. One of the "disinformation dozen" is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Biden's leading opponent in the Democratic presidential primary.
For its work, the CCDH has also been the target of multiple legal battles. One lawsuit, filed by the organization America First Legal, claimed that the CCDH has colluded with Democrat attorneys general to censor speech online. Another, filed by Twitter parent company X Corp, alleged that the CCDH "unlawfully" scraped data from the platform and hurt the company's revenue by influencing advertisers to pause spending on the site.
For more news about the government's censorship efforts, head over to SpeechPolice.news.
Watch this clip from the Next News Network discussing how Jordan is planning to subpoena other individuals, including people within the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service, to learn more about the Hunter Biden scandal.
This video is from the News Clips channel on Brighteon.com.
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