How Biden’s DHS collaborates with social media firms to target disinformation

According to a new report, the US Department of Homeland Security is conducting an extensive campaign against online “disinformation” through close partnerships with social media companies.

In a comprehensive report on Monday citing internal documents revealed by leaks and court files, The Interception described what appears to be a growing focus within DHS on mastering online discourse.

Although the Biden administration dissolved its controversial Disinformation Governance Board earlier this year after a furious response, the documents suggest DHS has quietly maintained an intense interest in police speech it deems false or dangerous.

The documents show that Facebook has a dedicated online portal for DHS and other government officials to request content moderation, and that the federal department plans to target “inaccurate information” on a wide variety of topics.

Those hot-button topics include “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. aid to Ukraine,” a statement said. draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review cited in the report.

The ambition of those plans and the inherently political nature of some of the issues in question, such as the Afghan withdrawal, are raising concerns among free speech advocates.

They fear that DHS could go overboard from overseeing foreign disinformation campaigns and into censoring opposing views.

“There is growing evidence that legislature and executive officials are using social media companies to engage in surrogate censorship,” Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, told The Intercept.

‘It goes without saying that the government cannot indirectly do what is directly forbidden to it. If government officials direct or facilitate such censorship, it raises serious questions about the First Amendment.”

Spokespersons for Facebook’s parent company Meta, Twitter and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment from DailyMail.com on Tuesday night.

Twitter told The Intercept in a statement, “We do not coordinate with other entities in making content moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in accordance with Twitter rules.”

The new report details a special portal that DHS officials can use to request that content be removed or otherwise moderated from Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta.

The portal, still active Tuesday evening, requires a pre-registered government email address to access a priority content request system.

The report indicates that most of the government’s work on disinformation takes place within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a DHS subdivision created during the Trump administration with a broad mandate to protect U.S. infrastructure. to protect.

But the domain of CISA, and the definition of “infrastructure,” appears to have expanded rapidly under President Joe Biden’s appointee to head the agency, Jen Easterly.

“You could say we’re doing critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and misinformation is, I think, incredibly important,” Easterly said at a November conference. 2021.

CISA officials have argued that it is vital to protect Americans from foreign campaigns to spread false or dangerous information.

Officials categorize that dangerous speech as misinformation (false information is inadvertently disseminated), disinformation (false information is intentionally disseminated), and bad information (factual information shared with malicious intent, often out of context).

And with midterm elections looming in a week, advocates of crackdowns on disinformation point to a documented history of foreign influence campaigns trying to deceive Americans with fake social media accounts.

Still, the dangers of such crackdowns were illustrated in the closing days of the 2020 election, when Twitter and Facebook restricted or banned sharing of the New York Post’s reports on Hunter Biden’s international business dealings.

Initially described as foreign misinformation, the contents of the abandoned laptop that formed the basis for the coverage were later verified by DailyMail.com and other news outlets as authentic.

Many of the documents cited by The Information came to light through a lawsuit filed last month by the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, who are both Republicans.

The indictment accuses the Biden administration of having worked “hand in hand” with social media giants to “censor” news reports that portray a negative image of the White House.

“During this case, we have uncovered a disturbing amount of collusion between Big Tech and Big Government,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

“This blatant attack on our First Amendment will be met with an equally sincere defense of the rights of the American people.”

Biden, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nina Jankowicz, who was meant to lead Biden’s now-defunct disinformation board, are among dozens of defendants named in the lawsuit.

The suitalleges that the Biden administration actively partnered with social media companies, encouraging them to censor “disapproved” views and speakers in violation of those individuals’ First Amendment rights.