DHS censorship machine targeted 22 million tweets, used 120 speech flaggers, scrubbed 15 platforms, and throttled dozens of "emerging election narratives" using a chat app.
#DHSLeaks was just the tip of an iceberg. Full report here:
2. Here is a highly disturbing fact that is not widely to the American public: The same DHS cyber agency in charge of securing elections is also in charge of censoring elections.
3. CISA has kept a very low profile by appearing to the outside world as just a boring cybersecurity bureau. A place where even the professional hackers are tasked with humdrum IT maintenance jobs.
4. In the summer of 2020, CISA pulled off a trick. By classifying "election misinformation" as threat to "election security," its police powers extended from the tech side of elections to anyone simply *talking* about elections.
5. But CISA had a problem. It's called the First Amendment. The US government is not allowed to sandblast millions of voters off the civilian Internet because of their speech about elections.
CISA needed private sector partners to do dirty work. And that's where EIP stepped in:
6. CISA "lacked the funding and the legal authorizations" to do grand-scale censorship and get away with it. So CISA partnered with EIP, who "filled the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves."
7. EIP bills itself euphemistically as a "disinfo research” collective, but it's important to understand EIP does more than “research”: they manually flag posts, throttle narratives, and pressure platforms at every level.
That is active censorship, not passive research:
8. CISA -- your federal government -- is not just partnering with a few zealous individuals. The scale here is institutional. For the 2020 election alone, EIP had 120 people staffed on taking down lawful US citizen speech about an in-process US election:
9. This clip, one week after the 2020 election, shows EIP openly plotting ways to coerce tech platforms to censor additional topics beyond elections. EIP cited their power cards as "huge regulatory pressure" from government insiders and ginning up bad press:
10. EIP relies on advanced monitoring AI to map out entire networks of people who spread a narrative they want to ban out of existence. Here you can see a walkthrough of how EIP effectively stalks every chain in an election belief to censor the whole belief system at scale:
11. In this photo, DHS, EIP and the tech platforms are all coordinating systematic censorship of US citizen speech, in the heat of an election, that voiced concerns about being given sharpie markers to vote.
Look how they secretly clamped a speech ban behind the scenes:
12. Notice the redacted “Government partner” didn't even fully dispel the narrative being throttled for “misinformation.” They actually appear to somewhat confirm concerns about kicked-back ballots, but simply presume poll workers must have followed ideal procedures after that:
13. This whole seamless web of censorship was all planned months ahead of the 2020 election.
After partnering with DHS, EIP lined up all the major platforms in advance so EIP could "find disinformation and report it quickly and then collaborate with them on taking it down."
14. All of EIP's top targets of election censorship, during a hotly contested ongoing election, belonged to the exact same side of the political aisle.
CISA gave them absolute power to censor, so they censored absolutely:
15. The topics EIP censored on a day-by-day basis tracked perfectly with pre-censorship of challenges to a pending "red mirage, blue shift" scenario.
Right out gate, its #1 censorship topic was mail-in ballots, then hard-pivoted to censoring ballot counting on Election Day:
16. One of the explicit goals of their censorship activities, according to their own formal framework, was to stop people from being mobilized to put up legal challenges:
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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