The Biden administration’s war on so-called disinformation included a federal initiative to censor “malinformation,” information that is true but inconvenient to the Democrat ruling regime.
On Monday, lawmakers on the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government published an interim report on the Department of Homeland Security’s “disinformation” programs within the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). According to the report, CISA “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media,” and has steadily expanded the scope of its censorship since 2018.
“In 2022 and 2023, in response to growing public and private criticism of CISA’s unconstitutional behavior, CISA attempted to camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely ‘informational’ role,” the report reads.
CISA ultimately outsourced its dystopian censorship regime to third-party nonprofits and colluded with Big Tech companies to suppress information deemed incorrect or harmful to regime narratives. CISA, lawmakers wrote, “exploited its connections with Big Tech and government-funded non-profits to censor, by proxy, in order to circumvent the First Amendment’s prohibition against government-induced censorship.”
“This included the creation of reporting ‘portals’ which funneled ‘misinformation’ reports directly to social media platforms,” the report says.
The government’s disinformation efforts extended to the censorship of “malinformation,” defined by CISA as “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
“In other words, malinformation is factual information that is objectionable not because it is false or untruthful, but because it is provided without adequate ‘context’ — context as determined by the government,” lawmakers explained.
According to their report, CISA tried to “disguise the true nature” of the agency’s work by “removing references to surveillance and censorship” from its website. President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice also interfered with CISA public records requests to stonewall congressional oversight. The select subcommittee is still waiting on CISA’s compliance with subpoenas.
The select subcommittee held a hearing on the federal government’s disinformation efforts in March featuring two journalists behind the “Twitter Files,” Substack reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.
“American taxpayers are unwittingly financing the growth and power of a censorship industrial complex run by America’s scientific and technological elite, which endangers our liberties and democracy,” Shellenberger told lawmakers. “The censorship industrial complex combines established methods of psychological manipulation, some developed by the U.S. military during the global war on terror with highly sophisticated tools from computer science.”
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, the DHS, the HHS, DoD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA,” Taibbi added. “A focus of this fast-growing network … is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations or sympathies are deemed misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. That last term is just a euphemism for ‘true but inconvenient.'”
Lawmakers made clear in their report Monday that the committee “will continue to investigate CISA’s and other Executive Branch agencies’ entanglement with social media platforms.”
The Department of Homeland Security isn’t the only agency in the Biden administration engaged in the censorship industry. The Biden State Department funded a “Disinformation Index” that blacklisted conservative websites from major advertisers.
