GOP Sen Ernst says Biden in omnibus giving millions to group with website to 'police' online content

GOP Sen. Joni Ernst is accusing President Biden through the fiscal 2023 omnibus funding bill of giving over $5 million to a journalism-tech non-profit that she says acts like the "police" of online content it finds untrustworthy. 

"@POTUS is paying more than $5M to a group called Hack/Hackers which is making lists of orgs & media they think should & should not be trusted," Ernst wrote on tweeted Thursday. "They’ve basically created a naughty & nice list to police the content posted by family & friends."

Hack/Hackers has created a rating-and-categorization scale for what it considers the reliability of sources and uses to tools on Wikipedia to determine "credible sources" for readers.

The group defines itself as an "international grassroots community of people who seek to inspire and inform each other to build the future of media" and says members "believe the open flow of information is essential to democratic society and seek to ensure that the watchdog function journalists have fulfilled continues to exist, regardless of the institutions that have played that role in the past."

Hack/Hackers critics say it has a strong bias against more conservative leaning websites such as The Daily Wire, which has been marked as "unreliable." More liberal leaning outlets such as The Atlantic and The Guardian have been marked as "reliable."

"If you dare to share from the naughty list, instead of coal you’ll get trolled, Ernst said in an interview with Fox News Digital, about the software. "And instead of stockings stuffed with treats, you might just get ‘stalkings’ online and censorship under the tree,"

The omnibus bill passed Thursday in the Senate and is expected to pass a final vote Friday in the House – before the federal government at midnight technically runs out of money, which would result in the temporary shutdown of some agencies.