An email surfaced by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) on Tuesday revealed Governor Katie Hobbs used government resources to facilitate a volunteer force that flagged “misinformation” ahead of the 2022 election, including on Election Day.
The legal organization explained that it revealed the email through an Arizona Public Records Law request to the Arizona Secretary of State, which requested communications between Hobbs’ office and social media platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram between January 7, 2019, and January 1, 2023.
Before becoming Arizona’s governor, Hobbs served as Arizona Secretary of State, where her office was responsible for overseeing the 2022 elections.
“In the latest tranche of documents,” which the nonprofit revealed were made available to the organization on February 1, “there is an email from the then-Secretary of State’s Communications Director sent to Google Staff, clarifying the process of reporting ‘dis/misinformation on Google or YouTube.'”
According to ACLJ, the email contains a request from Murphy Herbert, who served as Hobbs’ communications director.
In an email addressed to four contacts at Google, Herbert explained, “We are putting together our materials for the volunteers monitoring Twitter on Election Day,” and asked the Big Tech company if the procedures for reporting “dis/misinformation” had changed from the 2020 election.
Herbert remains employed at the Arizona Secretary of State and is now the deputy assistant secretary of state for Adrian Fontes.
The latest revelation about Hobbs’ volunteer force comes after her office’s coordination with Big Tech companies was exposed in a series of email releases last year.
At least eight pages of censorship requests surfaced last year, revealing Hobbs referred to the core voters of former President Donald Trump as part of a “neo-nazi” movement and complained about the “alt-right” sending her “harassing, abusive, and threatening tweets and direct messages” in response to one of her tweets.
Additionally, on at least one occasion, Hobbs attempted to direct social media companies to censor a member of the Arizona State Legislature, as she once requested Facebook to remove a post written by then-State Representative Kelly Townsend. Facebook ultimately determined Townsend’s post was “not against” its “community guidelines.”
Those revelations were released the same day a censorship probe was announced by Republicans in the Arizona House of Representatives, which is led by State Representative Alexander Kolodin (R-Scottsdale).
When the committee was announced, Kolodin called it an “opportunity” to preserve the First Amendment and noted that Arizona will be the first state to conduct “a really comprehensive legislative investigation” examining how state governments can “protect the First Amendment in this new age of machine learning and neural networks and algorithms that decide what people are served online.”
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Tom Pappert is a reporter for The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Tom on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Katie Hobbs” by Governor Katie Hobbs.Â
