The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is accused of having an advisory panel set up to respond to online “disinformation” that was also in the habit of dismissing legitimate censorship concerns as coming from critics that were supposedly “bad faith actors.”
The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) is reporting about this as an exclusive piece of news, explaining that the DHS committee on “misinformation” went after its critics in private.
The goal may have been to intimidate them by painting – and discrediting them instantly – as “malign actors.”
Once again, it is the DHS’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) that takes the center stage in this story, as the advisory body, and directly its subcommittee, the one on Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation.
The report builds on a previous one the DCNF published, that alleges the subcommittee not only had openly left-wing members, but also sought to enlist more, third party collaborators of the same political and ideological provenance.
All this was, according to the report, happening “privately” – but no less daringly for the critics of the subcommittee’s work who happened to suspect there was government-driven censorship going on. But how about being labeled a “bad faith actor” in return?
The subcommittee’s “store front” was all about recommending ways to CISA last summer on countering threats to democracy, public health and financial systems, and other core components of a country.
But the DCNF reports suggest that behind the scenes, much more was going on: shady measures such as CISA involvement in speech curtailing as bad actors, all under the guise of combating “misinformation.”
As previous reports indicated – the subcommittee went beyond having people like former suspected “Twitter Hunter Biden Censorship story suppression in-chief” figure, the company’s ex chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, and a number of others clearly ideologically progressive/left-wing members – but wanted to expand that to third parties.
“These censorship laundering schemes involving the federal government, social media companies, and other private and quasi-governmental actors are unlawful and an affront to the First Amendment,” is how Republican Representative Dan Bishop, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Oversight subcommittee, commented on the situation for the DCNF.
“Those who perpetuate these schemes seem dead set on destroying freedom of speech and suppressing any speech that they perceive as ‘harmful’ to their preferred narrative,” Bishop is quoted as saying.
