2. Parents: Your taxes pay for DHS to tell your kids to report you to Facebook for “disinformation” if you dispute gov't Covid statistics:
3. DHS formally partnered with a highly partisan "disinformation" specialist group to censor "repeat misinformation spreaders" ahead of the 2020 election.
Every single account DHS's partner targeted happened to be an influential conservative:
4. There was no subtlety in DHS's targeting of conservative voices. Their outsourced "disinformation" reporter did a *clean sweep* flagging right-of-center accounts:
5. DHS was not authorized to do this. It was tasked with countering "foreign" disinformation, then quietly pulled off a "foreign to domestic switcheroo" in the run-up to the 2020 election:
6. DHS directs a web of private companies, civil society groups and news outlets in a "whole of society" response against "disinformation".
What this means in practice is every institution in society pushing the same Internet censorship:
7. DHS was teaching election officials to set up "incident response teams" to censor social media posts all over the country for "misinformation":
8. DHS takes great pains to present as though it differentiates between "mis, dis and malinformation" -- but in reality, its own DHS conference calls instructed social media election monitors to just call everything "disinformation":
9. Incredibly, every single entity in DHS's "disinformation" partner censoring the 2020 election *for* the US government was receiving millions *from* the US government:
10. So what was a ***cybersecurity*** agency within DHS doing speech policing what US citizens could say about Covid on social media?
11. Amazingly, they got away with arguing that "disinformation" is essentially a "cyber threat" against "critical infrastructure" --- and cited elections and healthcare as critical infrastructure:
12. After changing its name from the foreign-focused "Countering Foreign Influence Task Force" to the domestic-focused "Mis, Dis and Malinformation", DHS now has carte blanche to go after any social media narrative that "undermines public trust in government":
13. But if one simply inserts Bill Gates into DHS’s "Covid disinformation" cartoon, it does not exactly inspire *public trust* in DHS’s pursuit of punishments — like permanent denial of social media access — for citizens disputing Official Truths:
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Our director @MikeBenzCyber reacts to the censorship policy proposals put forward by Donald Trump today:
2. The only policy prescriptions that work are ones that target censorship as an industry:
3. The game is that the government has the money, and civil society has the credibility, so the government gives the money to civil society to do the censorship dirty work:
2. Censorship insiders have been circling the wagons to stop transparency requests for censorship communications between DHS and mercenary universities like Kate Starbird’s UW disinfo lab.
3. After FOIA requests were fired off this fall, the Seattle Times tried to frame public records requests for Starbird’s censorship communications with DHS as “harassment”
TWITTER FILES 1.0 THREAD: A comprehensive breakdown of the first release 👇
Twitter's election censorship operation is far more extensive than yet reported. Here's how it works:
2. The first thing to understand is that the Censorship Industry has been constructed using a "Whole-Of-Society" model.
That means censorship is coordinated through the government, the private sector (tech platforms), and civil society (academia, NGOs) working together:
3. The "Whole-Of-Society" censorship model was cobbled together after the 2016 election under pretext of fighting "foreign disinformation" on Twitter and Facebook.
But after Russiagate fell apart in summer 2019, the entire infrastructure was shifted to a "domestic" focus:
THREAD: Biden's National Science Foundation spent $40 million on "misinformation" and "disinformation" grants to US colleges & universities so academics could get paid to help censor social media.
NEW: Leaked State Dept memo obtained by America First Legal reveals US gov't is producing VIDEO GAMES with taxpayer dollars for “psychological vaccination against fake news.”
Their plan is to stop populism on social media. Full report here:
2. The leaked memo shows the US gov't tapping into the virality of Buzzfeed-style cat videos to program young people's political opinions through a new video game called "Cat Park":
3. Cat Park is the 2nd video game produced by the State Dept's Global Engagement Center (GEC) targeting "political misinformation."
Here is the government promo video for GEC's 1st game, Harmony Square, rolled out just after the 2020 US election:
It is highly disconcerting that the founder of CISA (the federal agency in charge of both election security and election censorship) appeared with current Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer earlier this year to mutually promote Internet censorship
The people in charge of administering elections should never be in charge of silencing citizen discourse about elections.
Here, DHS's 'censorship godfather' Chris Krebs, with current Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer by his side, demands lawyers who challenge election issues be disbarred, just like doctors who challenged Covid protocols had medical licenses stripped