The Election Integrity Partnership launched publicly in August 2020. [1] Its own final report, The Long Fuse, describes a ticket system through which partners, including CISA, election officials and civil-society groups, sent in reports. Analysts then escalated some to platforms. [2] This is not a secret uncovered by the Files; the partnership published it. What the Files and later subpoenas added was the internal texture: which posts, how often and with what wording.
House Republicans’ November 2023 report argued that the EIP was a way for the government to get around the First Amendment. It also featured a figure of some 22 million tweets. [3] The project’s response, entered into the congressional record, said the figure counted tweets in its research dataset, not posts flagged for removal, and that platforms made their own decisions. [4] Former SIO director Alex Stamos told the committee in a transcribed interview that the platforms made their own decisions. [5]
Both points can be true. A government agency connecting election officials to a university that then forwards reports to platforms is a real channel of influence, whatever the paperwork calls it. A dataset figure presented as a censorship count is still a misstatement.
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