A whistleblower has come forward to expose disturbing new details about plans made by Biden’s highly controversial disinformation board.
The board, which was put on “pause” by the Department of Homeland Security after a wave of negative backlash, was planning to coordinate directly with big tech companies to fight their broad definition of “misinformation,” according to the whistleblower.
Republican Sens. Josh Hawley and Chuck Grassley wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas regarding documents that reveal the DHS had considered partnering with social media companies like Meta and Twitter to monitor disinformation.
Previously, Mayorkas had stated that the board will not infringe on free speech and would specifically focus on “disinformation that presents a security threat to the homeland.”
In a May interview on “Fox News Sunday,” the secretary vehemently insisted that the board would only be focused on fighting disinformation from foreign actors including Russia, China, and Iran and from drug cartels south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“This is a working group that takes best practices to make sure that in addressing disinformation that presents a threat to the homeland, our work does not infringe on free speech, does not infringe on civil rights, civil liberties. It’s not about speech, it’s about the connectivity to violence,” Mayorkas claimed at the time.
31 pages of DHS documents released by the whistleblower, however, confirm that the Biden administration had much bigger plans for the board.
“DHS documents show that the DGB was designed to be the Department’s central hub, clearinghouse and gatekeeper for Administration policy and response to whatever it happened to decide was ‘disinformation,'” Hawley and Grassley wrote.
The documents show, for example, that the Biden administration considered “conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections,” “disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks,” and “falsehoods surrounding U.S. government immigration policy” to present “serious homeland security risks” that the board should combat.
Mayorkas had also reportedly met with Twitter executives Nick Pickles, head of policy, and Yoel Roth, head of site integrity, in April to discuss “public-private partnerships” and how Twitter could exchange analytics with the disinformation board.
Hawley and Grassley warned that the federal government was partnering with social media companies to censor users.
“The First Amendment of the Constitution was designed precisely so that the government could not censor opposing viewpoints – even if those viewpoints were false. DHS should not in any way seek to enlist the private sector to curb or silence opposing viewpoints. It is therefore imperative for DHS to provide additional clarity regarding its policies and procedures for identifying and addressing ‘MDM,’ as well as its efforts to ‘operationalize’ public-private partnerships and the steps it is taking to ensure that it does not infringe on the constitutional rights of American citizens,” the letter states.
The senators went on to demand answers from the DHS regarding the information revealed by the whistleblower, pressing the DHS to “provide additional clarity regarding its policies and procedures for identifying (mis-, dis- or mal-information), as well as its efforts to ‘operationalize’ public-private partnerships and the steps it is taking to ensure it does not infringe on the constitutional rights of American citizens.”
