Self: What is the mission of the state, the right of the state, to form public opinion? Because we're talking about — our government has been involved in doing that for the last few years.
Jankowicz: In my opinion, the government has a First Amendment right to free speech as well, and SCOTUS
[Supreme Court of the United States] has just affirmed with a case last June, we just heard a case that came in
federal court in New York, that, actually showed that NewsGuard was not acting as an envoy of the state.
Self: So what is the role of the government?
Jankowicz: The role of the government can express its free speech, right? And citizens have a right to their free speech as well. I don't really understand your question, sir, I'm not sure the point.
Self: I'm asking you what is the role of government in public opinion? Because we're talking about actions here that have tried to form public opinion. On the Hunter
[Biden] laptop, on the Russia disinformation, all of that. I'm asking you what is the role of government in that matter?
Jankowicz: Absolutely, congressman. So the government is allowed to express its own opinions, its viewpoints, as we're seeing this administration do, as we saw the previous administration do—
Self: Well, what is their role when it is absolutely wrong? The Hunter laptop is probably the best example we could roll out here.
[This is a reference to social media companies trying to slow the spread of the original New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop published just before the 2020 presidential election. Jankowicz was not an employee of the government at the time.]
Jankowicz: I actually disagree with that, because when Twitter decided to add friction [slow the spread] to the Hunter Biden laptop case, it actually got more views. You've also heard Mr. Taibbi talk about 22 million tweets, millions of things censored through the GEC [Global Engagement Center] to the Election Integrity Partnership [EIP]?
[Journalist Matt Taibbi, another witness at the hearing, was the lead author of the "Twitter Files," a report comprising internal Twitter documents Elon Musk gave journalists shortly after buying and taking over the social media platform.
The Global Engagement Center was an agency in the State Department founded in 2016 to combat "foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States." It folded in 2024 after the Republican-controlled Congress refused to fund it.
The EIP was a partnership of misinformation researchers between Stanford University and the University of Washington that helped track false and misleading information during the 2020 and 2022 elections. According to NPR, it faced massive conservative backlash and was the focus of claims that it was a front used by the Biden administration to suppress speech. It also folded in 2024.]
Jankowicz: You know how many emails went between the GEC and the EIP? 15. You can look it up in Chairman Jordan's documents that he released at the end of last year. Fifteen emails. I've sent more text messages to my husband about our toddler's potty training in the last week than emails went from the GEC to the EIP, and those were all about overt Russian propaganda — RT and Sputnik — except for one, when the GEC analyst said to the folks there, "I can't comment on this one because I'm a government employee, but I think you should check it out." That's all that happened, sir.
Self: So I'm gonna leave you, and I'll yield back a little bit of my time, a direct quote from Joseph Goebbels. "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion," and I think that may be what we're discussing here.
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