Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights a government agency involved in the censorship business.
On Oct. 7, 2020, a Twitter account by the name of “nodrog danarb” issued a warning about the coming election.
“All conservatives vote in person,” the account tweeted, tagging the official Twitter account of the Washington Office of the Secretary of State. “Don’t trust the mail.”
Such posts were a dime a dozen in the lead-up to the 2020 election, as concerns about the COVID pandemic fueled an unprecedented spike in mail-in voting. This tweet, though, caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), whose remit includes election infrastructure.
The agency had received an email from the Washington secretary of state’s communications director, Kylee Zabel, flagging the post as “potential misinformation.” CISA had solicited such communication, and within 20 minutes, the agency had forwarded the complaint to Twitter. By 8 a.m. the next day, Twitter had taken the tweet down.
The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of the many examples of government jawboning discussed in a new report on CISA by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
As early as 2018, the report reveals, CISA was holding meetings with social media companies about alleged misinformation—both foreign and domestic—on their platforms. And in 2020, CISA directed state election officials to report false or misleading posts to the agency so that it could forward those reports to social media companies, a practice known as switchboarding.
CISA never identified a statutory basis for these practices, according to the report. The most forthright defense of the agency’s actions came from former CISA director Jen Easterly, who said in 2021 that “the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.” …
… Titled “The Mechanics of Government Censorship: How the Biden Administration Converted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency into the Thought Police,” the report, released Monday, describes how a federal agency created with bipartisan support became a tool of progressive censorship.
