The department's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has been holding meetings with online platforms and has allowed these platforms to report the content for deletion which they do not agree with. This program, which was previously kept secret, led to the federal bureaucracy interfering in the 2020 election.
The documents were uncovered by the Missouri Attorney General, as well as Republican Senate campaigner Eric Schmitt, as part of an investigation he's conducting. The website The Intercept did the initial report.
The Protection of Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation Subcommittee's meetings began in the year 2020, during the presidential election. It was created and run by the administration of President Donald Trump's appointees. an organization he established in the year 2018.
In conjunction with this panel, Facebook developed a web portal that “partners” can identify material that the “partner” doesn't want distributed in the first place, and Facebook will take the content down or make it almost unattainable to distribute. The portal, facebook.com/xtakedowns/login, was in operation as this article was written.
Government intervention targets in the free speech area were classified in “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.”
This was not a small undertaking.
Prior to the election of 2020, 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 officials. As per NBC News, the meetings were part of a plan that is still in progress that brought together the private and the government to discuss how businesses could handle false information during the presidential election.
If you're interested in seeing how bureaucracy can be effectively controlled, you should look at a Harvard Business School case study. The idea was to stop “foreign” influence in elections and to dispel falsehoods that could reduce voter participation (like “vote by text”). In the lead up to elections in 2020, this kind of thing was taking place.
In the presidential election of 2020, the Department of Homeland Security, in an email sent to an official on Twitter, shared information about an alleged threat to the U.S. infrastructure, citing FBI warnings in this instance, regarding a Twitter account that could threaten the integrity of the election system.
The Twitter account who was in question had 56 followers and the bio of “dm us your weed store locations (hoes be mad, but this is a parody account),” under the banner image depicting Blucifer, the 32-foot tall demonic horse sculpture that's located at the entryway 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 an official of the state in the thread of emails, passing additional sources of account that might be mistaken for official government agencies. The Twitter rep replied: “We will escalate. Thank you for your support.”
The FBI is a major participant within the whole process. Around 80 FBI “personnel” are involved in the collection, monitoring, and analyzing social media posts that are received by Americans. They are supposed to wipe out “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.” Imagine the government securing information that causes the public to be angry about the government.
According to the records that were filed with federal courts, there were two previously not named FBI agents -the Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent at the San Francisco field office, and Dehmlow, the section head for the Department of Justice's Foreign Influence Task Force -were both involved in high-level communication which allegedly “led to Facebook's suppression” of Post's reports.
This Hunter Biden laptop story was one of the most prominent examples of law enforcement authorities threatening tech companies. In many instances, these Facebook or Twitter accounts that were flagged by DHS or its partners as potentially dangerous sources of disinformation or as potential sources of influence from foreign countries were clearly fake accounts, or accounts that had almost no followers or influence.
The most important thing to concentrate on is the fact that in the 2020 elections the FBI, a federal agency with substantial involvement from law enforcement agencies, was deciding on the extent of debate about COVID response and integrity of the election. For instance, the FBI was crucial to the removal of reports of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the basis that it was a disinformation.
It doesn't appear to be disappearing. It seems to be becoming worse.
The FBI does not have a role in fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation.” It does not have a legal power to demand an organization to take any legal content that irritates Washington bureaucrats, and the individuals they dispatch to take you down.
This should serve as a warning to any Republican who is elected president in 2024 to remind them that this bureaucratic system is an enemy. Their first task should be stopping this insanity and removing anyone who took part, even in a small way to the cause. I'm saying 2024 since by 2028, if this chaos is not addressed, that will be the way we're being ruled.
