Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:
> Truth Cops
>
> Leaked Documents Outline DHS's Plans to Police Disinformation
>
> Ken Klippenstein, Lee Fang
> October 31 2022, 2:00 a.m.
>
> The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts
> to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The
> Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and
> documents--obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as
> public documents--illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to
> influence tech platforms.
>
> The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came
> into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new
> "Disinformation Governance Board": a panel designed to police
> misinformation (false information spread unintentionally),
> disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and
> malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context,
> with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While
> the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then
> shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS
> pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate--the
> war on terror--has been wound down.
>
> Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the
> U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.
> According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit
> filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is
> also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and
> scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics
> of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally
> misleading information.
>
> Key Takeaways
>
> * Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance
> Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
> * DHS plans to target inaccurate information on "the origins of the
> COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial
> justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S.
> support to Ukraine."
> * Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners
> to report disinformation directly.
>
> "Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov't. It's really
> interesting how hesitant they remain," Microsoft executive Matt
> Masterson, a former DHS official, texted Jen Easterly, a DHS
> director, in February.
>
> In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the
> threat of subversive information on social media could undermine
> support for the U.S. government. Dehmlow, according to notes of the
> discussion attended by senior executives from Twitter and JPMorgan
> Chase, stressed that "we need a media infrastructure that is held
> accountable."
>
> "We do not coordinate with other entities when making content
> moderation decisions, and we independently evaluate content in line
> with the Twitter Rules," a spokesperson for Twitter wrote in a
> statement to The Intercept.
>
> There is also a formalized process for government officials to
> directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be
> throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that
> requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time
> of writing, the "content request system" at
> facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. DHS and Meta, the
> parent company of Facebook, did not respond to a request for comment.
> The FBI declined to comment.
>
> DHS's mission to fight disinformation, stemming from concerns around
> Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, began taking
> shape during the 2020 election and over efforts to shape discussions
> around vaccine policy during the coronavirus pandemic. Documents
> collected by The Intercept from a variety of sources, including
> current officials and publicly available reports, reveal the
> evolution of more active measures by DHS.
>
> According to a draft copy of DHS's Quadrennial Homeland Security
> Review, DHS's capstone report outlining the department's strategy and
> priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target
> "inaccurate information" on a wide range of topics, including "the
> origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19
> vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the
> nature of U.S. support to Ukraine."
>
> "The challenge is particularly acute in marginalized communities,"
> the report states, "which are often the targets of false or
> misleading information, such as false information on voting
> procedures targeting people of color."
>
> The inclusion of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is
> particularly noteworthy, given that House Republicans, should they
> take the majority in the midterms, have vowed to investigate. "This
> makes Benghazi look like a much smaller issue," said Rep. Mike
> Johnson, R-La., a member of the Armed Services Committee, adding that
> finding answers "will be a top priority."
>
> How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly
> articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes
> disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make
> politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous
> speech.
>
> The inherently subjective nature of what constitutes
> disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make
> politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous
> speech.
>
> DHS justifies these goals--which have expanded far beyond its
> original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation
> originating domestically--by claiming that terrorist threats can be
> "exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online." But
> the laudable goal of protecting Americans from danger has often been
> used to conceal political maneuvering. In 2004, for instance, DHS
> officials faced pressure from the George W. Bush administration to
> heighten the national threat level for terrorism, in a bid to
> influence voters prior to the election, according to former DHS
> Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials have routinely lied about an
> array of issues, from the causes of its wars in Vietnam and Iraq to
> their more recent obfuscation around the role of the National
> Institutes of Health in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology's
> coronavirus research.
>
> That track record has not prevented the U.S. government from seeking
> to become arbiters of what constitutes false or dangerous information
> on inherently political topics. Earlier this year, Republican Gov.
> Ron DeSantis signed a law known by supporters as the "Stop WOKE Act,"
> which bans private employers from workplace trainings asserting an
> individual's moral character is privileged or oppressed based on his
> or her race, color, sex, or national origin. The law, critics
> charged, amounted to a broad suppression of speech deemed offensive.
> The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, has
> since filed a lawsuit against DeSantis, alleging "unconstitutional
> censorship." A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of the Stop
> WOKE Act, ruling that the law had violated workers' First Amendment
> rights.
>
> "Florida's legislators may well find plaintiffs' speech 'repugnant.'
> But under our constitutional scheme, the 'remedy' for repugnant
> speech is more speech, not enforced silence," wrote Judge Mark
> Walker, in a colorful opinion castigating the law.
>
> The extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans' daily
> social feeds is unclear. During the 2020 election, the government
> flagged numerous posts as suspicious, many of which were then taken
> down, documents cited in the Missouri attorney general's lawsuit
> disclosed. And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership
> at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items,
> technology platforms took action on 35 percent--either removing,
> labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able
> to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was
> done "in consultation with CISA," the Cybersecurity and
> Infrastructure Security Agency.
>
> Prior to the 2020 election, tech companies including Twitter,
> Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and
> Verizon Media met on a monthly basis with the FBI, CISA, and other
> government representatives. According to NBC News, the meetings were
> part of an initiative, still ongoing, between the private sector and
> government to discuss how firms would handle misinformation during
> the election.
>
> The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following
> high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed
> and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and
> Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted
> to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022
> report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly
> accelerating move toward policing disinformation.
>
> From the outset, CISA boasted of an "evolved mission" to monitor
> social media discussions while "routing disinformation concerns" to
> private sector platforms.
>
> In 2018, then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen created the Countering
> Foreign Influence Task Force to respond to election disinformation.
> The task force, which included members of CISA as well as its Office
> of Intelligence and Analysis, generated "threat intelligence" about
> the election and notified social media platforms and law enforcement.
> At the same time, DHS began notifying social media companies about
> voting-related disinformation appearing on social platforms.
>
> Key Takeaways, Cont'd.
>
> * The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with
> protecting critical national infrastructure.
> * DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly
> meetings as recently as August.
> * DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that
> undermines trust in financial systems and courts.
> * The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the
> Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy
> discussions.
>
> In 2019, DHS created a separate entity called the Foreign Influence
> and Interference Branch to generate more detailed intelligence about
> disinformation, the inspector general report shows. That year, its
> staff grew to include 15 full- and part-time staff dedicated to
> disinformation analysis. In 2020, the disinformation focus expanded
> to include Covid-19, according to a Homeland Threat Assessment issued
> by Acting Secretary Chad Wolf.
>
> This apparatus had a dry run during the 2020 election, when CISA
> began working with other members of the U.S. intelligence community.
> Office of Intelligence and Analysis personnel attended "weekly
> teleconferences to coordinate Intelligence Community activities to
> counter election-related disinformation." According to the IG
> report, meetings have continued to take place every two weeks since
> the elections.
>
> Emails between DHS officials, Twitter, and the Center for Internet
> Security outline the process for such takedown requests during the
> period leading up to November 2020. Meeting notes show that the tech
> platforms would be called upon to "process reports and provide timely
> responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the
> platform where possible." In practice, this often meant state
> election officials sent examples of potential forms of disinformation
> to CISA, which would then forward them on to social media companies
> for a response.
>
> Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has
> continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign
> Influence Task force with the "Misinformation, Disinformation and
> Malinformation" team, which was created "to promote more flexibility
> to focus on general MDM." By now, the scope of the effort had
> expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to
> include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA
> official quoted in the IG report, "counters all types of
> disinformation, to be responsive to current events."
>
> Jen Easterly, Biden's appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it
> clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to
> combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media.
> "One could argue we're in the business of critical infrastructure,
> and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure,
> so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I
> think, is incredibly important," said Easterly, speaking at a
> conference in November 2021.
>
> CISA's domain has gradually expanded to encompass more subjects it
> believes amount to critical infrastructure. Last year, The Intercept
> reported on the existence of a series of DHS field intelligence
> reports warning of attacks on cell towers, which it has tied to
> conspiracy theorists who believe 5G towers spread Covid-19. One
> intelligence report pointed out that these conspiracy theories "are
> inciting attacks against the communications infrastructure."
>
> CISA has defended its burgeoning social media monitoring authorities,
> stating that "once CISA notified a social media platform of
> disinformation, the social media platform could independently decide
> whether to remove or modify the post." But, as documents revealed by
> the Missouri lawsuit show, CISA's goal is to make platforms more
> responsive to their suggestions.
>
> In late February, Easterly texted with Matthew Masterson, a
> representative at Microsoft who formerly worked at CISA, that she is
> "trying to get us in a place where Fed can work with platforms to
> better understand mis/dis trends so relevant agencies can try to
> prebunk/debunk as useful."
>
> Meeting records of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, the
> main subcommittee that handles disinformation policy at CISA, show a
> constant effort to expand the scope of the agency's tools to foil
> disinformation.
>
> In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA--which includes
> Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and
> University of Washington professor Kate Starbird--drafted a report to
> the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in
> shaping the "information ecosystem." The report called on the agency
> to closely monitor "social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream
> media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online
> resources." They argued that the agency needed to take steps to halt
> the "spread of false and misleading information," with a focus on
> information that undermines "key democratic institutions, such as the
> courts, or by other sectors such as the financial system, or public
> health measures."
>
> To accomplish these broad goals, the report said, CISA should invest
> in external research to evaluate the "efficacy of interventions,"
> specifically with research looking at how alleged disinformation can
> be countered and how quickly messages spread. Geoff Hale, the
> director of the Election Security Initiative at CISA, recommended the
> use of third-party information-sharing nonprofits as a "clearing
> house for information to avoid the appearance of government
> propaganda."
>
> Last Thursday, immediately following billionaire Elon Musk's
> completed acquisition of Twitter, Gadde was terminated from the
> company.
>
> The Biden administration, however, did take a stab at making part of
> this infrastructure public in April 2022, with the announcement of
> the Disinformation Governance Board. The exact functions of the
> board, and how it would accomplish its goal of defining and combating
> MDM, were never made clear.
>
> The board faced immediate backlash across the political spectrum.
> "Who among us thinks the government should add to its work list the
> job of determining what is true and what is disinformation? And who
> thinks the government is capable of telling the truth?" wrote
> Politico media critic Jack Shafer. "Our government produces lies and
> disinformation at industrial scale and always has. It overclassifies
> vital information to block its own citizens from becoming any the
> wiser. It pays thousands of press aides to play hide the salami with
> facts."
>
> DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas alluded to broad scope of the
> agency's disinformation effort when he told the Senate Homeland
> Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the role of the
> board--which by that point had been downgraded to a "working
> group"--is to "actually develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to
> ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does
> not infringe on people's free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil
> rights, and civil liberties."
>
> "It was quite disconcerting, frankly," he added, "that the
> disinformation work that was well underway for many years across
> different independent administrations was not guided by guardrails."
>
> DHS eventually scrapped the Disinformation Governance Board in
> August. While free speech advocates cheered the dissolution of the
> board, other government efforts to root out disinformation have not
> only continued but expanded to encompass additional DHS sub-agencies
> like Customs and Border Protection, which "determines whether
> information about the component spread through social media platforms
> like Facebook and Twitter is accurate." Other agencies such as
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Science and Technology
> Directorate (whose responsibilities include "determining whether
> social media accounts were bots or humans and how the mayhem caused
> by bots affects behavior"), and the Secret Service have also expanded
> their purview to include disinformation, according to the inspector
> general report.
>
> The draft copy of DHS's 2022 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review
> reviewed by The Intercept also confirms that DHS views the issue of
> tackling disinformation and misinformation as a growing portion of
> its core duties. While "counterterrorism remains the first and most
> important mission of the Department," it notes, the agency's "work on
> these missions is evolving and dynamic" and must now adapt to terror
> threats "exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread
> online" including by "domestic violent extremists."
>
> To accomplish this, the draft quadrennial review calls for DHS to
> "leverage advanced data analytics technology and hire and train
> skilled specialists to better understand how threat actors use online
> platforms to introduce and spread toxic narratives intended to
> inspire or incite violence, as well as work with NGOs and other parts
> of civil society to build resilience to the impacts of false
> information."
>
> The broad definition of "threat actors" posing risks to vaguely
> defined critical infrastructure--an area as broad as trust in
> government, public health, elections, and financial markets--has
> concerned civil libertarians. "No matter your political allegiances,
> all of us have good reason to be concerned about government efforts
> to pressure private social media platforms into reaching the
> government's preferred decisions about what content we can see
> online," said Adam Goldstein, the vice president of research at
> FIRE.
>
> "Any governmental requests to social media platforms to review or
> remove certain content," he added, "should be made with extreme
> transparency."
>
> DHS's expansion into misinformation, disinformation, and
> malinformation represents an important strategic retooling for the
> agency, which was founded in 2002 in response to the 9/11 attacks as
> a bulwark to coordinate intelligence and security operations across
> the government. At the same time, the FBI deployed thousands of
> agents to focus on counterterrorism efforts, through building
> informant networks and intelligence operations designed to prevent
> similar attacks.
>
> But traditional forms of terrorism, posed by groups like Al Qaeda,
> evolved with the rise of social media, with groups like the Islamic
> State using platforms such as Facebook to recruit and radicalize new
> members. After initial reluctance, social media giants worked
> closely with the FBI and DHS to help monitor and remove
> ISIS-affiliated accounts.
>
> FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee that
> law enforcement agencies needed to rapidly "adapt and confront the
> challenges" posed by terror networks that had proven adept at tapping
> into social media. Intelligence agencies backed new startups
> designed to monitor the vast flow of information across social
> networks to better understand emerging narratives and risks.
>
> "The Department has not been fully reauthorized since its inception
> over fifteen years ago," the Senate Homeland Security Committee
> warned in 2018. "As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the
> Department adjusted its organization and activities to address
> emerging threats and protect the U.S. homeland. This evolution of
> the Department's duties and organization, including the structure and
> operations of the DHS Headquarters, has never been codified in
> statute."
>
> The subsequent military defeat of ISIS forces in Syria and Iraq,
> along with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, left the homeland
> security apparatus without a target. Meanwhile, a new threat entered
> the discourse. The allegation that Russian agents had seeded
> disinformation on Facebook that tipped the 2016 election toward
> Donald Trump resulted in the FBI forming the Foreign Influence Task
> Force, a team devoted to preventing foreign meddling in American
> elections.
>
> According to DHS meeting minutes from March, the FBI's Foreign
> Influence Task Force this year includes 80 individuals focused on
> curbing "subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the
> populace and the government."
>
> "The Department will spearhead initiatives to raise awareness of
> disinformation campaigns targeting communities in the United States,
> providing citizens the tools necessary to identify and halt the
> spread of information operations intended to promote radicalization
> to violent extremism or mobilization to violence," DHS Acting
> Secretary Kevin McAleenan said in a September 2019 strategic
> framework.
>
> DHS also began to broaden its watch to include a wide array of
> domestic actors viewed as potential sources of radicalization and
> upheaval. An FBI official interviewed by The Intercept described
> how, in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, he was
> reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence
> services to monitoring American social media accounts. (The
> official, not authorized to speak publicly, described the
> reassignment on condition of anonymity.)
>
> And a June 2020 memo bearing the subject line "Actions to Address the
> Threat Posed by Domestic Terrorists and Other Domestic Extremists"
> prepared by DHS headquarters for Wolf, Trump's acting DHS secretary,
> delineates plans to "expand information sharing with the tech sector"
> in order to "identify disinformation campaigns used by DT [domestic
> terrorism] actors to incite violence against infrastructure, ethnic,
> racial or religious groups, or individuals." The memo outlines plans
> to work with private tech sector partners to share unclassified DHS
> intelligence on "DT actors and their tactics" so that platforms can
> "move effectively use their own tools to enforce user
> agreements/terms of service and remove DT content."
>
> Biden also prioritized such efforts. Last year, the Biden
> administration released the first National Strategy for Countering
> Domestic Terrorism. The strategy identified a "broader priority:
> enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme
> polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation
> often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear
> Americans apart and lead some to violence."
>
> "We are working with like-minded governments, civil society, and the
> technology sector to address terrorist and violent extremist content
> online, including through innovative research collaborations," the
> strategy document continued, adding that the administration was
> "addressing the crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often
> channeled through social and other media platforms, that can fuel
> extreme polarization and lead some individuals to violence."
>
> Last year, a top FBI counterterrorism official came under fire when
> she falsely denied to Congress that the FBI monitors Americans'
> social media and had therefore missed threats leading up to the
> attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In fact, the FBI has
> spent millions of dollars on social media tracking software like
> Babel X and Dataminr. According to the bureau's official guidelines,
> authorized activities include "proactively surfing the Internet to
> find publicly accessible websites and services through which
> recruitment by terrorist organizations and promotion of terrorist
> crimes is openly taking place."
>
> Another FBI official, a joint terrorism task force officer, described
> to The Intercept being reassigned this year from the bureau's
> international terrorism division, where they had primarily worked on
> cases involving Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, to the domestic
> terrorism division to investigate Americans, including
> anti-government individuals such as racially motivated violent
> extremists, sovereign citizens, militias, and anarchists. They work
> on an undercover basis online to penetrate social networking chat
> rooms, online forums, and blogs to detect, enter, dismantle, and
> disrupt existing and emerging terrorist organizations via online
> forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards, blogs, websites, and social
> networking, said the FBI official, who did not have permission to
> speak on the record.
>
> The Privacy Act of 1974, enacted following the Watergate scandal,
> restricts government data collection of Americans exercising their
> First Amendment rights, a safeguard that civil liberty groups have
> argued limits the ability of DHS and the FBI to engage in
> surveillance of American political speech expressed on social media.
> The statute, however, maintains exemptions for information collected
> for the purposes of a criminal or law enforcement investigation.
>
> "There are no specific legal constraints on t FBI's use of social
> media," Faiza Patel, senior director of the Brennan Center for
> Justice's liberty and national security program told The Intercept.
> "The attorney general guidelines permit agents to look at social
> media before there is any investigation at all. So it's kind of a
> Wild West out there."
>
> The first FBI official, whom The Intercept interviewed in 2020 amid
> the George Floyd riots, lamented the drift toward warrantless
> monitoring of Americans saying, "Man, I don't even know what's legal
> anymore."
>
> In retrospect, the New York Post reporting on the contents of Hunter
> Biden's laptop ahead of the 2020 election provides an elucidating
> case study of how this works in an increasingly partisan environment.
>
> Much of the public ignored the reporting or assumed it was false, as
> over 50 former intelligence officials charged that the laptop story
> was a creation of a "Russian disinformation" campaign. The
> mainstream media was primed by allegations of election interference
> in 2016--and, to be sure, Trump did attempt to use the laptop to
> disrupt the Biden campaign. Twitter ended up banning links to the
> New York Post's report on the contents of the laptop during the
> crucial weeks leading up to the election. Facebook also throttled
> users' ability to view the story.
>
> In recent months, a clearer picture of the government's influence has
> emerged.
>
> In an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast in August, Meta CEO Mark
> Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had limited sharing of the New York
> Post's reporting after a conversation with the FBI. "The background
> here is that the FBI came to us--some folks on our team--and was
> like, 'Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert that there
> was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election,'" Zuckerberg
> told Rogan. The FBI told them, Zuckerberg said, that "'We have it on
> notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump.'" When
> the Post's story came out in October 2020, Facebook thought it "fit
> that pattern" the FBI had told them to look out for.
>
> Zuckerberg said he regretted the decision, as did Jack Dorsey, the
> CEO of Twitter at the time. Despite claims that the laptop's
> contents were forged, the Washington Post confirmed that at least
> some of the emails on the laptop were authentic. The New York Times
> authenticated emails from the laptop--many of which were cited in the
> original New York Post reporting from October 2020--that prosecutors
> have examined as part of the Justice Department's probe into whether
> the president's son violated the law on a range of issues, including
> money laundering, tax-related offenses, and foreign lobbying
> registration.
>
> Documents filed in federal court as part of a lawsuit by the
> attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana add a layer of new detail
> to Zuckerberg's anecdote, revealing that officials leading the push
> to expand the government's reach into disinformation also played a
> quiet role in shaping the decisions of social media giants around the
> New York Post story.
>
> According to records filed in federal court, two previously unnamed
> FBI agents--Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent in the San Francisco
> field office, and Dehmlow, the section chief of the FBI's Foreign
> Influence Task Force--were involved in high-level communications that
> allegedly "led to Facebook's suppression" of the Post's reporting.
>
> The Hunter Biden laptop story was only the most high-profile example
> of law enforcement agencies pressuring technology firms. In many
> cases, the Facebook and Twitter accounts flagged by DHS or its
> partners as dangerous forms of disinformation or potential foreign
> influence were clearly parody accounts or accounts with virtually no
> followers or influence.
>
> In May, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took the lead in
> filing a lawsuit to combat what he views as sweeping efforts by the
> Biden administration to pressure social media companies to moderate
> certain forms of content appearing on their platforms.
>
> The suit alleges governmentwide efforts to censor certain stories,
> especially ones related to the pandemic. It also names multiple
> agencies across the government that have participated in efforts to
> monitor speech and "open collusion" between the administration and
> social media companies. It identifies, for example, emails between
> officials from the National Institutes of Health, including Dr.
> Anthony Fauci, and Zuckerberg at the beginning of the pandemic, and
> reveals ongoing discussions between senior Biden administration
> officials with Meta executives on developing content moderation
> policies on a range of issues, including issues related to elections
> and vaccines.
>
> Attorneys for the Biden administration have responded in court by
> claiming that the plaintiffs lack standing and that social media
> firms pursued content moderation policies on their own volition,
> without any "coercive" influence from the government. On October 21,
> the judge presiding over the case granted the attorneys general
> permission to depose Fauci, CISA officials, and communication
> specialists from the White House.
>
> While the lawsuit has a definite partisan slant, pointing the finger
> at the Biden administration for allegedly seeking to control private
> speech, many of the subpoenas request information that spans into the
> Trump era and provides a window into the absurdity of the ongoing
> effort.
>
> "There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch
> officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by
> surrogate," said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George
> Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit. "It is
> axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is
> prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are
> directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First
> Amendment questions."
>
> During the 2020 election, the Department of Homeland Security, in an
> email to an official at Twitter, forwarded information about a
> potential threat to critical U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI
> warnings, in this case about an account that could imperil election
> system integrity.
>
> The Twitter user in question had 56 followers, along with a bio that
> read "dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a
> parody account)," under a banner image of Blucifer, the 32-foot-tall
> demonic horse sculpture featured at the entrance of the Denver
> International Airport.
>
> "We are not sure if there's any action that can be taken, but we
> wanted to flag them for consideration," wrote a state official on the
> email thread, forwarding on other examples of accounts that could be
> confused with official government entities. The Twitter
> representative responded: "We will escalate. Thank you."
>
> Each email in the chain carried a disclaimer that the agency "neither
> has nor seeks the ability to remove or edit what information is made
> available on social media platforms."
>
> That tagline, however, concerns free speech advocates, who note that
> the agency is attempting to make an end run around the First
> Amendment by exerting continual pressure on private sector social
> media firms. "When the government suggests things, it's not too hard
> to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist," said Adam
> Candeub, a professor of law at Michigan State University. "And I
> would consider such actions, especially when it's bureaucratized, as
> essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms."
>
> "If a foreign authoritarian government sent these messages," noted
> Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties
> Union, "there is no doubt we would call it censorship."
>
> From:
> https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
>

These STASI information jannies are laughably easy to identify, and should
be bullied in the extreme. Inducing depression or psychosis ideally.