ANALYSIS – Even as Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) publicly shuttered its stillborn ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ (aka Ministry of Truth) after a huge outcry, new evidence shows that Team Biden is still trying to use DHS to collude with Big Tech to censor Americans on social media.
The latest information uncovered through an investigation by The Intercept points to a Facebook-designed portal that government officials could use to flag content they deem objectionable and request that the platform remove it.
According 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.
That the federal government believes it can directly help control what views and news can be disseminated online is beyond reprehensible.
As The Intercept notes:
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.
In other words, governments don’t decide what is valid information and what isn’t.
Instead, that is what politics, a free media and the marketplace of ideas are for.
But Big Brother, especially under Democrats, is relentless in its appetite for control. (RELATED: Congressional Leaders Expose Scheme to Pump Liberal Misinformation Network Into Classrooms)
The Intercept continues to describe this Orwellian effort:
Key Takeaways:
* 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.
And all this has been corroborated by official documentation and other news reporting.
Earlier, NewsBusters reported that:
DHS continued its counter-“disinformation” work in a more cloaked fashion, and that the government specifically intended to target certain content areas including COVID-19, election security and “domestic violent extremism.”
Considering how much ‘accepted’ information about COVID was later proven false or questionable and how the FBI and DOJ have been falsely hyping the otherwise minor ‘domestic violent extremism’ threat, this effort is highly concerning.
Meanwhile, a DHS Office of Inspector General report recommended that DHS “develop a unified strategy to counter disinformation campaigns that appear in social media.”
All this portends an extremely dangerous trend that must be stopped in its tracks.
It is critical that a GOP-controlled Congress investigate and help dismantle all these insidious DHS ‘disinformation’ efforts as soon as possible.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.