Leaked Documents Reveal DHS Collaborated with Facebook to Target ‘Disinformation’
Facebook has created a designated portal through which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can directly report claims 0f “disinformation” to the company.
Despite shuttering its widely unpopular “Disinformation Governance Board” in early 2022, the DHS has continued its underlying plans, documents obtained by The Intercept revealed.
Among the topics which the DHS has prioritized to target include “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine,” Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang reported.
The investigation relied heavily on leaked memos, emails, and documents, as well as public documents stemming from an ongoing lawsuit. It shows that, despite the DHS’s initial backtracking of the disinformation council, it remains actively involved in lobbying tech companies over misinformation and disinformation.
“Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain,” one Microsoft exec (formerly a DHS official) texted DHS director Jen Easterly in February.
The investigation focuses on a sub-group within the DHS known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA, along with the FBI, met regularly with social-media entities as recently as August. Notes show that during these meetings, platforms such as Twitter were requested to “process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.”
Vijaya Gadde, former general counsel for Twitter who was fired this week as part of Musk’s efforts to clean house, was part of an advisory committee overseeing CISA at the time. During her tenure, Gadde helped draft a report advocating that the body expand its role in the “information ecosystem.”
One of the Intercept‘s biggest findings was that the FBI agent who played an instrumental role in pushing social-media platforms to censor the infamous New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop continued to shape DHS policy discussions.
The DHS Facebook portal remains active, and the government agency, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), and the FBI have yet to comment on the matter.
