DHS Panel Courted Left-Wing Agents To Aid In ‘Misinformation’ Crackdown

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory panel helping the federal government crack down on misinformation pushed to enlist left-wing entities and individuals in its efforts, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) Cybersecurity Advisory Committee’s (CSAC) Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation and Disinformation subcommittee was convened in December 2021 to provide CISA with recommendations for how to address misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (MDM) ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. However, internal meeting minutes, emails and notes obtained by the DCNF through a public records request reveal committee members frequently pushed to enlist outside left-wing groups and individuals linked to Democratic causes to further their efforts.

The subcommittee included DHS officials, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, University of Washington professor Kate Starbird and former DHS official and Center of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) adviser Suzanne Spaulding.

Gadde was frequently criticized for the censoring of conservatives on Twitter during her time at the platform. Moreover, she played a key role in Twitter’s censoring of the New York Post’s true story on business dealings by President Joe Biden’s son Hunter after the newspaper obtained a copy of the younger Biden’s laptop, according to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi.

Starbird, meanwhile, has vocally pursued left-wing activism, urging her followers to vote for Democrats in a Facebook post excoriating Republicans and former President Donald Trump, the latter of whom she described as speaking with “undertones” of “white supremacy and ethno-nationalism.”

These members, along with the rest of the subcommittee, were tasked with guiding CISA on how to combat mis- and disinformation perceived as threatening “critical functions” of democracy, including public health measures, the financial system, elections and the court system, according to the committee’s initial recommendations published in June 2022. These recommendations included detecting “threats,” working with “non-governmental” sources to mitigate mis- and disinformation and bankrolling research; CISA partially accepted many of the recommendations, while declined to proactively identify threats, instead choosing to rely on the intelligence community.

The subcommittee’s resources to inform their work included “misinformation” research from partisan organizations. The subcommittee also planned to recruit “progressive” researchers to “socialize” the committee’s work, and suggested enlisting a major Democratic donor to fund CISA’s efforts.

And, while the DHS does not formally censor content itself, it advises its partners, including social media companies, on how to combat information deemed threatening, and flags examples of disinformation to these platforms, according to the agency’s website and reporting from The Intercept. Tech companies also hold regular meetings with CISA and intelligence agencies on the topic of misinformation, according to The Intercept.

However, a CISA spokesman denied the agency formally requested content to be removed in a statement to the DCNF.

“CISA provides broad guidance on foreign influence and disinformation tactics, mitigates the risk of foreign influence and disinformation by sharing accurate information, and amplifies the voices of state and local election offices on issues of election security,” the spokesman said.

“Government working with behind-the-scenes actors to censor speech should alarm everyone – regardless of political affiliation,” Republican Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, who sued the Biden administration over its alleged censorship during his time as Missouri’s attorney general, told the DCNF. “The Department of Homeland Security has no business suppressing Americans’ freedom of speech.”

Research And Resources

A list of CSAC resources, identified as “for official use only” and obtained by the DCNF, includes groups such as the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) that help censor conservatives online.

GDI, a U.K.-based company that aims to “disrupt the business model of disinformation,” works to demonetize conservative news sites, according to the Washington Examiner, through providing blacklists to ad tech companies which can then “defund and downrank” the worst offenders of disinformation.

These blacklists overwhelmingly contain conservative news organizations, the Washington Examiner reported, citing internal documents. GDI received funding from the U.S. State Department, a DCNF investigation revealed.

The CISA document referred to GDI as a “recently-funded research [project] that include[s] activities (such as detecting/analyzing disinformation campaigns) that align with CISA’s mission.”

The document also attached that label to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a State Department-funded organization that routinely advocates for censorship of right-leaning speech, a previous DCNF investigation revealed.

For instance, the group categorizes as misinformation the comparison of abortion to murder, “climate delayism,” or the idea that climate change should not be addressed as urgently as some believe, and the “misgendering” of transgender individuals, the DCNF reported. ISD’s funders include left-wing billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to its website.

“We have not directly shared our research with CISA, and have never received funding from them,” ISD spokesman Tim Squirrell told the DCNF.

The resources also included a report from the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, which strongly advocated for social media platforms to censor misinformation even more aggressively, such as by demonetizing content, manually reviewing posts from “influencers with repeat bad behavior,” implementing a “strikes” policy with escalating responses for each violation of platform rules and even blocking entire web domains.

The Aspen Institute’s commissioners for the report included several left-wing activists and pro-censorship advocates, a previous DCNF investigation found.

For example, the commission included Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change; Color of Change is a major donor to, and advocate for, left-wing causes, notably “reform” prosecutors, such as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and receives funding from well-known liberal donors like Soros. The group also routinely attempts to demonetize and censor conservatives.

“Every day more and more evidence emerges appearing to demonstrate we have a growing censorship industrial complex composed of government and private actors that seem to interpret dystopian novels like ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’ not as warnings but as how-to guides,” Michael Chamberlain, director of government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust, told the DCNF. “Instead of seeing the First Amendment and free speech rights as foundational to our system of government, they seem to view them as threats, and to such an extreme that even truthful information must be suppressed.”

‘Socializing’ The Committee

The subcommittee members also sought to enlist third-party groups in their efforts, according to meeting minutes first revealed in the ongoing censorship lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, as well as communications obtained by the DCNF.

In a May 24 meeting, subcommittee members discussed recruiting a “subject matter expert” from a “progressive civil rights and civil liberties angle” to provide input on the subcommittee’s recommendations. Twitter’s Gadde later brainstormed a list of progressive actors to recruit, according to action items in the meeting notes, and in a June 7 meeting suggested reaching out to a list of “civil society” groups.

Spaulding and Starbird later agreed to reach out to the groups before the June 22 recommendations were made public to “notify them of the subcommittee’s interest and intent in seeking their input in the future.”

The list of groups to whom the members were referring appears to be found in an email, obtained by the DCNF, sent from Gadde to the other members on June 7 at 8:07 a.m., and includes the aforementioned Global Disinformation Index, Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, First Draft, the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab and several other organizations. Earlier in the email exchange, Starbird referred to the groups whom the committee would contact as “key stakeholders” but noted they wouldn’t be helping the subcommittee make initial recommendations.

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