The House Judiciary Committee issued a report on Monday showing the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security with an "anti-disinformation" group that recommended content to social media platforms to censor.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a DHS subdivision, helped create the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a supposedly independent agency that established an "information exchange" to identify online misinformation.
But EIP's "independence" was a mirage. Emails discovered by the Judiciary Committee tell a different story. At the very least, CISA was aware of EIP's efforts to get social media companies to flag or censor content.
BOMBSHELL REPORT ON THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 6, 2023
HUNDREDS of secret reports show how @DHSgov’s @CISAgov, The GEC (@StateDept), @Stanford and others worked together to censor AMERICANS before the 2020 election, including true information, jokes, and opinions.
🧵 THREAD:
Using the EIP, groups including CISA, the Democratic National Committee and the NAACP, could submit “tickets” reporting possible election misinformation, which EIP would then pass on to social media companies following an investigation. The EIP released a 2021 report describing its endeavors to address misinformation in the 2020 election, revealing it had shared hundreds of posts with online platforms, with “35% of the URLs we shared with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube […] either labeled, removed, or soft blocked.”
Days before the 2020 election, a CISA official contacted Twitter flagging a post that had been reported by local officials, emails show. The official referenced a ticket number from EIP’s “Jira” system for the flagged content, despite CISA personnel not being allowed to access the system.
Censoring opinions as "misinformation" is a frightening use of the government's power to control information. And it runs directly contrary to the most fundamental reason for the First Amendment's existence.
CISA was very cautious in trying not to show its hand in censorship efforts. Emails to social media companies included a disclaimer that “DHS affirms that it neither has nor seeks the ability to remove what information is made available on social media platforms” but “information may also be shared with law enforcement or intelligence,” according to the report.
But the House Judiciary Committee report says, “While CISA did not directly report content to the EIP, CISA had complete visibility on what was being reported to the EIP and at the same time was reporting the same content directly to the social media platforms.”
“While CISA had ‘no official role,’ CISA knew what reports were being submitted to the EIP, received Jira ticket reports and notifications via email, had personnel with direct access to the EIP ticketing system, and was in direct contact with the social media platforms,” the report says.
It's a travesty that an arm of the federal government worked with a supposedly independent agency to censor online content — not all of which was "misinformation" or even objectionable.
But it's disheartening to see how social media companies knuckled under to a government agency and did its bidding so willingly.
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