Washington’s tricks to shape online discourse to its liking

Washington has worked hand-in-hand with social media platforms to censor what they consider to be «disinformation» online, The Intercept revealed, citing internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents obtained through leaks and public records requests.

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the US government has used its power to try to shape the discourses online, writes Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein in the report released on Monday. It details the close working relationships, the regular meetings, even the tools used, between the DHS and Silicon Valley dignitaries.

The DHS, created after 9/11 to coordinate intelligence and security operations, now considers monitoring «disinformation» to be a core part of its work. An official review, cited by the aforementioned medium, exposes that the Department intends to point to «inaccurate information» on topics that include: the origins of the covid-19 pandemic and the efficacy of vaccines, racial justice, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of US support for Ukraine.

This relationship between the big technology companies and Washington seems to have been cemented in the midst of the panic that arose over the outcome of the 2016 elections, generated by the conviction that Donald Trump could only have won thanks to foreign interference.

However, DHS’s focus has since broadened to domestic social media activity as well. An unnamed FBI official said that in the summer of 2020, he was «reassigned from his normal job of countering foreign intelligence services to monitoring American social media accounts».

Also, before the 2020 elections, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which reports to the DHS, held monthly meetings with companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Microsoft. This was allegedly part of an ongoing initiative between the private sector and the government to discuss how companies would «handle disinformation».

CISA meeting minutes also show, Election Security Initiative director Geoff Hale, urging the use of non-profit third parties as a «trusted clearinghouse so as to avoid the appearance of government propaganda».

Washington and the special Facebook portal

Apparently, this initiative has paid off, as Facebook created a special portal that requires an email from the security forces to access. There is also a formalized process for public officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be removed through the special portal. At the time of this writing, the «content request system» at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still active.

Likewise, according to court documents seen by The Intercept, the FBI could also have played a more important role than previously thought in the censorship of the story of the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the current president, since two bureau agents would have directly participated in the conversations that led to the removal of the story by Facebook.

These Washington officials were identified as Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), and Elvis Chan, a special agent with the San Francisco, California, field office.

Many of the documents came to light due to the lawsuit by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican currently running for the Senate. The Biden administration has sought to dismiss Schmitt’s lawsuit as lacking standing, arguing that social networks voluntarily removed the posts without any «coercive» influence from the government, which would be prohibited by the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

«If a foreign authoritarian government were to send these messages, there’s no question we’d call it ‘censorship'», said Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).