The Intercept found that THE DEPARTMENT of HOMELAND SECURITY is expanding its efforts to curtail speech it considers harmful. The agency’s extensive effort to influence tech platforms is illustrated by years of internal memos, emails and documents from DHS.

This work is still much unknown to Americans. DHS created a “Disinformation Governance board” earlier this year to help police misinformation (false info spread unintentionally), disinformation, and malinformation (factual data shared, usually out of context with harmful intent), that may be threatening U.S. interests. The board was ridiculed and eventually rescinded. However, DHS is now focusing on social media monitoring after its original mandate, the war against terror, has ended.

The U.S. government tried to influence online discourse through pressure and behind closed doors. The meeting minutes and other records attached to a lawsuit by Eric Schmitt (a Republican running for Senate) show that discussions ranged from the scope and extent of government intervention in online discourse to how to streamline takedown requests for misleading or false information.

“Platforms need to be comfortable with the government. It’s amazing how hesitant they are,” Matt Masterson, a Microsoft executive, wrote Jen Easterly in February.

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Laura Dehmlow from the FBI, was a member of a March meeting and warned that subversive information on social networks could threaten support for the U.S. government. According to the notes of the meeting attended by JPMorgan Chase and Twitter executives, Dehmlow stressed that “we require a media infrastructure that’s held accountable.”

Twitter spokesperson said that they do not collaborate with other entities in content moderation decisions and that content is evaluated independently in accordance with the Twitter Rules.

A formal process allows government officials to flag content on Facebook and Instagram and request it be blocked or removed through a Facebook portal. This portal requires that a government email address is used. At the time of writing, the “content request system” at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live. Meta, the parent company behind Facebook, and DHS did not respond to requests for comment. The FBI declined to comment.

DHS’s mission of fighting disinformation stemmed from Russian influence in 2016’s presidential election. It began to take shape over the 2020 election and efforts to influence discussions about vaccine policy during the coronavirus epidemic. The Intercept has obtained documents from various sources including public reports and current officials to show the evolution of DHS’s more active actions.

A draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Security Review, DHS’s capstone report that outlines the department’s strategy and priorities for the next years, shows that the department intends to target “inaccurate data” on a wide variety of topics including the origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the efficacy and COVID-19 vaccines.

The report says that “the challenge is especially acute in marginalized community,” and “these are often the targets for false or misleading information such as false information about voting procedures targeting people with color.”

It is notable that the inclusion of the U.S. withdrawal in 2021 from Afghanistan is included, considering that House Republicans have pledged to investigate, should they win the majority in the midterms. Rep. Mike Johnson (Republican from Louisiana), stated that Benghazi now seems like a smaller issue and that finding answers will be a priority.

The government has not defined disinformation clearly. Furthermore, the subjective nature of disinformation allows DHS officials to make political-motivated decisions about dangerous speech.

These goals are justified by DHS, which has expanded its purview beyond foreign threats to include disinformation originating domestically. DHS also claims that terrorist threats can “exacerbated by misinformation and information spread online”. However, the noble goal of protecting Americans from harm has been often used to hide political maneuvering. Former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge said that DHS officials were under pressure by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 to increase the national threat level of terrorism. This was done to influence voters before the election. U.S. officials lie about a variety of topics, including the causes of the wars in Vietnam or Iraq and their recent obfuscations around the funding role of the National Institutes of Health for Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus research.

This track record has not stopped the U.S. government trying to be arbiters about what constitutes false and dangerous information on inherently politically-related topics. Republican Governor. Ron DeSantis signed a law, known as the “Stop WOKE Act” by his supporters. This bans private employers to prevent them from training employees in morality. Critics argued that the law was a broad suppression against speech they deem offensive. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) filed a lawsuit against DeSantis claiming “unconstitutional censorship.” Federal Judge temporarily blocked portions of the Stop WOKE Act after ruling that it violated workers’ First Amendment rights.

“Florida’s legislators might well find plaintiffs’ speech’repugnant’ but under our constitutional scheme the’remedy” for repugnant expression is more speech and not enforced silence,” Judge Mark Walker wrote in a colorful opinion shaming the law.

It is not clear how the DHS initiatives will impact Americans’ daily social media feeds. The government flagged many posts as suspicious during the 2020 election. Many of these were later taken down, according to documents cited by the Missouri attorney general’s lawsuit. A report from the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University in 2021 found that nearly 4,800 of the flagged items were technology plats.