The Department of Homeland Security has been expanding its efforts to limit speech on social media despite the high-profile failure of its disinformation board earlier this year.
The agency has ramped up its battle against disinformation despite the negative attention brought on by the launch and subsequent backlash-fueled demise of the Nina Jankowicz-led Disinformation Board, including through meeting with Big Tech companies and attempting to push back efforts from foreign actors such as Russia and China to spread false information within the United States.
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The push includes stepped-up efforts to police “inaccurate information,” according to a DHS report draft viewed by the Intercept, including info related to “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.”
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“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 evacuation of Afghanistan is notable since House Republicans are expected to investigate it if they take a majority in the midterm elections.
The agency measures include the creation of a portal on Facebook that allows government officials to flag content on Facebook or Instagram directly to request that it be throttled or limited. It’s unclear how extensive the DHS’s influence is at this time, although it has played a role in past elections. The DHS flagged several posts as suspicious during the 2020 elections, which were then taken down, according to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General and Senate candidate Eric Schmitt.
The DHS justified its continued efforts by alleging that terrorist threats are “exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online.” The agency, however, has failed to lay out what disinformation entails, raising fears that it will make politically motivated decisions regarding what is considered dangerous speech.
Tech companies have been regularly meeting with government officials to discuss misinformation. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Wikipedia, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Verizon Media had representatives meet with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on a monthly basis, according to NBC News.
The DHS’s efforts to expand counters to disinformation and misinformation began in 2018 when former President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, which formed a new wing of the DHS to protect national infrastructure. This eventually expanded into combating misinformation, with then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen founding the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force in an attempt to combat election-related disinformation.
Those efforts have continued to expand under the Biden administration, including CISA replacing its Countering Foreign Influence Task Force with the “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team in 2021. CISA has also expanded its focus to other subjects, including conspiracy theorists attacking 5G towers.
CISA regularly discussed efforts to expand its influence over misinformation, according to minutes from the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee.
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These expanded efforts gained national attention when the Biden administration announced the DHS’s disinformation governance board in April. The board claimed its only role was to monitor disinformation from Russia, Iran, and China and not to regulate U.S. speech. Still, it faced harsh criticism because of the public persona of its chairwoman, Jankowicz, and the possibility it would police speech in the United States. The board eventually paused its development three weeks after the initial announcement and closed in July.
