When Did Censoring Begin?
So Zuckerbergs letter made a big splash among the Rights Social Media Influencers. The Big Confession they called it
I really don’t know there was anything new there. If it was a confession it was akin to a Murderer after being caught on tape shooting the victim pleading Guilty
Yeah, Zuckerberg censored. Big Whoop. Duh. Didn’t we see that in real time?. Didn’t we see the Twitter Files and didn’t SCOTUS say its ok for the Government to express concern about content (not that I agree).
To elaborate a bit more, Zuckerberg said he censored the Hunter Biden Lab Top because THE FBI warned them about Russian Disnformation and he Censored COVID because BIDEN OFFICIALS pressured him
Of course, he did not detail the nature of this pressure, and failed to mention that both the Hunter Biden Lap Top and COVID were censored during the Trump Administration.
Because of the political nature of the lawsuit originally named Biden vs Missouri the defendants presented little evidence of censoring on Social Media in 2020. This was one reason SCOTUS was unable to find that Biden violated the First Amendment and caused material to be censored by Facebook and others since they were already censoring in 2020 before Biden took office
April 2020-Facebook
Facebook is changing how it treats Covid-19 misinformation after a damning report into its handling of the virus.
Users who have read, watched or shared false coronavirus content will receive a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation's website.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive, defended his company's work in an online post saying: "On Facebook and Instagram, we've now directed more than two billion people to authoritative health resources via our Covid-19 Information Center and educational pop-ups, with more than 350 million people clicking through to learn more.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52309094
YouTube has pledged to delete misleading claims about coronavirus vaccines as part of a fresh effort to tackle Covid-19 misinformation.
It said any videos that contradict expert consensus from local health authorities, such as the NHS or World Health Organization, will be removed.
It follows an announcement by Facebook that it would ban ads that discourage people from getting vaccinated.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54541517
Dec 3, 2020
Facebook is to begin removing false claims about Covid vaccines, the company has announced,
It is the strongest move yet by Facebook to prevent its platform from being used to promote anti-vaccination rhetoric.
So anyways, what was the purpose of Zuckerbergs letter? Its an attempt to make you think once Biden/Harris are gone there will be no worries about Censorship. In other words, they are the patsies (not to say they are not blameless)
That said, below is a Timeline I dug out from an earlier post that should show that Censorship Industrial Complex has been under development for quite awhile by both parties. Censoring is only part of it, its part of an overall strategy of Cognitive Warfare or Mind War. The Blob wants to manage what you think and shape your reality. This is a key part of 5th Generation Warfare. You are the enemy population, or at least one of them.
https://pete843.substack.com/p/information-war
NOTE TO THOSE READING VIA EMAIL: This article may exceed the length that can be sent by Substack. In which case, please click on the headline and it will take you directly to the Substack article.
2005- The Central Intelligence Agency was a big and early fan of what it called “open source intelligence”—information that it could grab from the public Web: videos, personal blogs, photos, and now posts on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+.
In 2005, the agency partnered with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to launch the Open Source Center, dedicated to building open-source collection tools and sharing them with other federal intelligence agencies.
Through its In-Q-Tel venture capital fund, the CIA invested in all sorts of companies that mined the Internet for open-source intelligence. It invested in Dataminr, which would one day bring access to Twitter data and analyze people’s tweets to spot potential threats.
It backed “a social media intelligence” company called PATHAR that monitored Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for signs of Islamic radicalization. And it supported a popular product called Geofeedia, which allowed its clients to display social media posts from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram from specific geographic locations, down to the size of a city block.
All these CIA-backed companies would pay Facebook, Google, and Twitter for special access to social media data—adding another lucrative revenue stream to Silicon Valley.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
2005- Memetics: A Growth Industry in US Military Operations, Michael Prosser, now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps, proposed the creation of a “Meme Warfare Center.”
Prosser noted that memes were not acknowledged or accepted components of military strategy at the time, but that, “under the rubric of Information Operations and Strategic Communications both currently offer a multi-faceted meme generation and transmission capability to US military commanders.”
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA507172
https://governamerica.com/documents/2006_memetics-a-growth-industry-in-us-military-operations.pdf
2006 -Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War,, Keith Henson defined memes as “replicating information patterns: ways to do things, learned elements of culture, beliefs or ideas.”
https://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/46-4/3
2006, DARPA commissioned a four-year study of memetics by Dr. Robert Finkelstein, founder of Robotic Technology Incorporated.
The term “meme” as later appropriated by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff—a leading cyberpunk, friend of Timothy Leary and a teacher at Esalen—who claimed memes were a type of media virus.
Activists count on the use of a meme to disrupt the unconscious thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular advertising and bring about a détournement in the Situationist sense. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke are behavioral change and political action.
There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyvwdk/meme-warfare
2007
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
"Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it is a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.
"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
"Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next....
"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.
Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as icons set against geographical maps.
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi. Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed Martin among its private sector clients.
The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science Foundation to develop SEAS.
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received, despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.
https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/
2008, Cass Sunstein, a law professor who would go on to become Obama's information "czar," co-authored a paper entitled "Conspiracy Theories," in which he wrote that the "best response" to online "conspiracy theories" is what he calls "cognitive infiltration" of groups spreading these ideas.
"Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action. In one variant, government agents would openly proclaim, or at least make no effort to conceal, their institutional affiliations. [...] In another variant, government officials would participate anonymously or even with false identities."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
2011 DARPA created the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC)
The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base.
In particular, SMISC will develop automated and semi‐automated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion to accomplish four specific program goals:
1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and (b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations.
With the spread of blogs, social networking sites and media‐sharing technology, and the rapid propagation of ideas enabled by these advances, the conditions under which the nation’s military forces conduct operations are changing nearly as fast as the speed of thought.
DARPA has an interest in addressing this new dynamic and understanding how social network communication affects events on the ground as part of its mission of preventing strategic surprise.
The general goal of the Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program is to develop a new science of social networks built on an emerging technology base. Through the program, DARPA seeks to develop tools to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information, reducing adversaries' ability to manipulate events.
https://time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/fact-sheet-7-9-14.pdf
2011 CENTCOM awarded a $2.8 million contract to a company, Ntrepid, for the purpose of creating “sockpuppets” to spread pro-American propaganda on social media networks
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion/
2012- EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates) was the product of a contest organized by Jason Matheny, an associate director of the government’s Office for Anticipating Surprise and a program manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).
The independent contractor that measures the accuracy of EMBERS’s forecasts is a nonprofit research facility called MITRE, a collection of government-funded research centers.
MITRE, for its part, has deep connections to the nation’s defense, security and intelligence apparatus.
According to MITRE, Terry Reed, the information systems engineer in MITRE’s Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute, represents the Department of Homeland Security’s information security chief on a committee within the National Security Systems Working Group focused on policy issues related to classified information systems.
EMBERS conducts what is called Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), collecting data for intelligence purposes from “overt” or publicly available sources, like social media, satellite imagery and more than 200,000 blogs. It mines up to 2,000 messages a second and purchases open-source data such as Twitter’s “firehose,” which streams hundreds of millions of real-time tweets a day. “Anytime you tweet or post on Facebook, you are becoming a part of the big data economy,” says Ramakrishnan.
According to Ramakrishnan, “A lot of analysts can give you forecasts for the coming year, but when we do forecasts, we’re talking about specific dates.”
Since EMBERS inception in April 2012, an average of 80 to 90 percent of its forecasts have turned out to be accurate. The project was first put to work examining open-source data streams in Latin America. It accurately predicted the impeachment of Paraguay’s president in 2012, the World Cup protests in Brazil in 2013, and the 2014 violent student protests in Venezuela.
The program monitors 20 countries in Latin America and is beginning to venture into the Middle East and North Africa, covering Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Libya.
https://dac.cs.vt.edu/research-project/embers/
2013, Obama signed legislation that changed the U.S. Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948, also known as the Smith-Mundt Act.
The amendment made it possible for some materials created by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the nation’s foreign broadcasting agency, to be disseminated in the U.S.
2015-The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is a forum for fact-checkers worldwide hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.It launched in September 2015,
2016-Portman-Murphy Countering Foreign Propaganda Act passed which will fund media organizations willing to spread the feds’ preferred propaganda.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countering_Foreign_Propaganda_and_Disinformation_Act
March 2016 Obama-era Executive Order establishing what was called the “Global Engagement Center”, or “GEC.” And when the funding and the E.O. came together to begin “operations,” in fiscal year 2017. The GEC was run by interests tied to the Department of Defense, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and others.
2016-November, Prop or not goes online. Promoted by National Media. A weapon subsequently used by social media for censorship
The PropOrNot organization involves Polygraph (a government-funded Voice of America outlet), the Interpreter (the Institute for Modern Russia’s magazine), the Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Research Lab
2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html
2017- DoD partners with Twitter
https://mobile.twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1610394297727082499
2017 March, the Omidyar Network provided the “critical seed capital” need to launch the ADL’s “new Silicon Valley center aimed at tackling this rising wave of intolerance and to collaborate more closely with technology companies to promote democracy and social justice.”
That Omidyar-funded ADL center allowed the ADL to team up with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft — all of whom also collaborate with the Trust Project — to create a Cyberhate Problem-Solving Lab. Since then, these companies and their subsidiaries, including Google’s YouTube, have relied on the ADL to flag “controversial” content.
2017-The Trust Project launched after 3 years of development is a complex international consortium involving approximately 120 news organizations working towards greater transparency and accountability in the global news industry. It would later work closely with Newsguard which would use its developed indicators
2018-March 2018, Brill and fellow veteran journalist and entrepreneur, Gordon Crovitz, again partnered to form a new company, NewsGuard,which fights fake news by providing reliability ratings for over 7,500 U.S. websites to help online readers distinguish between legitimate news sources and those allegedly designed to spread misinformation.
NewsGuard was launched on August 23, 2018. NewsGuard is also announcing that Microsoft Corp. will sponsor its news literacy program, and that it's adding seven charter members of its advisory board, including Tom Ridge, Richard Stengel, retired Gen. Michael Hayden, Don Baer, Elise Jordan, John Battelleand Jessica Lessin.
https://www.axios.com/2018/08/22/newsguard-launches-first-product
NewsGuard,, was awarded nearly $750,000 from the Department of Defense in 2021 according to publicly available records.”
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_FA864921P1569_9700_-NONE-_-NONE-
2018-March, -The Atlantic Council in February put out a paper insisting media producers had a “duty of care” to not “carry the virus” of misinformation.
Noting bitterly “the democratization of technology has given individuals capabilities on par with corporations,” the council warned that even domestic content that lacked “context” or “undermines beliefs” could threaten “sovereignty.”
2018-April 6, In a job request posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, the main contracting website used by the federal government,
As part of its "media monitoring," the DHS seeks to track more than 290,000 global news sources as well as social media… The successful contracting company will have "24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc."
in order to "identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event."
"Any and all media coverage," as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes "online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media."
The database will be browsable by "location, beat and type of influencer," and for each influencer, the chosen contractor should "present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer."
One aspect of the media coverage to be gathered is its "sentiment."
DHS says the "NPPD/OUS [National Protection and Programs Directorate/Office of the Under Secretary] has a critical need to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach Federal, state, local, tribal and private partners."
NPPD's mission is “to protect and enhance the resilience of the nation’s physical and cyberinfrastructure."
• For each influencer found, present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer
https://web.archive.org/web/20180407150852/
https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=d9457031df47f06feec110d18dfbc7ef
2018-April 6
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Earlier this week, announced the social networking site would remove "more than 270 pages and accounts operated by a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency" in an effort "to protect the integrity of elections around the world."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michellefabio/2018/04/06/department-of-homeland-security-compiling-database-of-journalists-and-media-influencers/
2018-On May 17th, Facebook announced it would be working with the Atlantic Council.
https://fortune.com/2018/05/17/facebook-atlantic-council-election-propaghanda/amp/
2018, June, Biden co-founded the Transatlantic Commission on Election Integrity (TCEI), whichformally partneredwith the Atlantic Council in 2019 to use “rapid response” counter-disinformation teams to scrub targeted voices off of Ukrainian social media.
Incredibly, EIP which would be formed in 2020, of which the Atlantic Council is a part, bills itself as a “rapid response” counter-misinformation team to do the same to US social media as was done to Ukrainian social media — but partnered with Trumps DHS instead of Biden's group, TCEI.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/insight-impact/foreign-interference-in-ukraines-election/
June 2018-DisinfoPortal had just been created by the Atlantic Council, working directly with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and 23 participating organizations for censoring election narratives ahead of 2019's European elections.
https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/news-and-notes-14/
2018, July DOD issued a Joint Concept for Operations in the Information Environment. According to this document, the IE comprises and aggregates numerous social, cultural, cognitive, technical, and physical attributes that act upon and affect knowledge, understanding, beliefs, world views, and, ultimately, actions of an individual, group, system, community, or organization.
The IE also includes technical systems and their use of data. The IE directly affects and transcends all operating environments.
https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/concepts/joint_concepts_jcoie.pdf
2018 Aug 23-FireEye, a cybersecurity company that has been involved in a number of prominent investigations, including the 2016 attack on the Democratic National Committee, alerted Facebook in July that it had a problem.
Security analysts at the company noticed a cluster of inauthentic accounts and pages on Facebook that were sharing content from a site called Liberty Front Press. It looked like a news site, but most of its content was stolen from outlets like Politico and CNN.
The small amount of original material was written in choppy English.
FireEye’s tip eventually led Facebook to remove 652 fake accounts and pages. And Liberty Front Press, the common thread among much of that sham activity, was linked to state media in Iran, Facebook said on Tuesday.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/technology/facebook-political-influence-midterms.html
2018-Facebook’s October 11th sweep, which quickly became known as “the Purge” in alternative-media circles.
The October 11th deletions included media figures with significant followings. Many of these sites would also be removed from other platforms like Twitter virtually simultaneously.
October 2018-Chris Krebs gave a talk to the Atlantic Council titled “Protecting The US Election” , just one month before Krebs was made the founding director of the newly created CISA. That same month before he got the CISA job, Krebs made a video to DisinfoPortal explaining why disinformation is important to him.
2018-The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a sub-committee within the DHS that is responsible for “routing disinformation concerns” to private platforms, which can take the form of sending emails to platforms like Twitter to take certain accounts under “consideration,” and is a key part of the agency’s quiet efforts to curb speech it finds problematic, according to The Intercept.
It was established on November 16, 2018, when President Donald Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_and_Infrastructure_Security_Agency_Act_of_2018
December 2018-Senate Intelligence Committee report alleging Russia undermined the integrity of the 2016 election. In its report, Graphika claimed to have uncovered “unusually rich detail the scope of Russia's interference not only in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but also in our day-to-day democratic dialogue.”
Graphika has historically been funded by government grants from DARPA and from the Defense Department's
https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/senate-reports-russian-disinformation-social-media-trump.html
2018 -December ,The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019 P.L. 115- 232 tasked the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts....”
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10771/9
2019, May 30- FBI stated Conspiracy Theories were motivating Domestic Terrorism Threats and linked conspiracy theorists to mental illnesses
https://news.yahoo.com/fbi-documents-conspiracy-theories-terrorism-160000507.html
2019-Secretary of State Pompeo has now got the State Department’s Global Engagement Center fully operational as stipulated in the 2016/2018 NDAA. The Integrity Initiative claims that it is now fully engaged with State’s GEC. Todd Leventhal is a duel staffer at State and the Integrity Initiative. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative is also working with the Center for Naval Analysis and the Center for European Analysis. It has also worked extensively with the State Department/Ukrainian intelligence collaboration known as StopFake. It is working with far-right groups in Ukraine and the Baltics and mapping a full-scale attack on the Russian Orthodox Church, according to the documents posted by Anonymous.
The Integrity Initiative is a network of UK military and intelligence operatives, academics and journalists spreading anti-Russia information and news. It includes “specialist Army Reserve units” linking to “very senior civilian experts” including “hedge fund managers” and “senior bankers” who have volunteered as “patriots.”
The Initiative is run under the Institute for Statecraft, a British NGO which receives 95% of its funding from the British government, NATO, and the U.S. State Department
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2019-000092_EN.html
October 2019-Then-head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner (D-VA), had a panel discussion with Chris Krebs at a DHS-CISA conference in DC.
In that panel, SenatorWarner boasted to Chris Krebs that he had just had dinner with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg the night before the CISA panel.
For that dinner, Senator Warner claimed he assembled fellow Senate Intelligence Committee to effectively threaten Mark Zuckerberg with heavy-handed regulation if Zuckerberg didn't do what was expected of him — especially on “content moderation” (read: censorship) on the platform
October 2019-P.L. 116-92 created a Principal Information Operations Advisor within DOD to coordinate and deconflict its operations with the Global Engagement Center in the State Department, who is the lead.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10771/6
The U.S. Department of Defense named the undersecretary of defense for policy as the point person for information operations to counsel the defense secretary on information operations.
Report issued on “Information Operations: DoD Should Improve Leadership and Integration Efforts” that was mandated by Congress
The report is classified.
December 2019, Krebs, then head of CISA, traveled from Washington, DC to California (when Stamos's Stanford lab was just three months old) for a personal roundtable with Stamos and his new “misinformation” team at Stanford (they specifically discussed “election security” for the 2020 election, which includes “misinformation”).
January 2020 , National Security Council (NSC), which advises the president on security issues, ordered that all high level meetings regarding COVID BE CLASSIFIED Orders reportedly came directly from the White House
April 6,2020 -In the face of COVID-19, social media platforms are adopting various approaches to govern their users’ behaviors. Most platforms are carrying on with typical response techniques they believe to be effective, like blocking users, removing content, or using automated enforcement for bulk removal. However, some progressive platforms are taking pro-social approaches to address COVID-19.
https://law.yale.edu/justice-collaboratory/collab-action-cia/pro-social-media-and-covid-19-disinformation
MAY 2020-Cisa Warning
Taking Vit C for COVID is dangerous disinformation
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CISAInsights-COVID-19_Disinformation_Activity_508.pdf
August 2020, GEC Russian COVID disinformation REPORT
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-Russia%E2%80%99s-Disinformation-and-Propaganda-Ecosystem_08-04-20.pdf
Much of what follows is taken from Mike Benz and his Foundation for Freedom Online, linked to below
September 2020 is exactly when CISA formally beganits censorship partnership with EIP.
September 2020-Atlantic Council's “Forward Defense” / “Future Of DHS” blueprint report formally posited DHS transition from a counterterrorism focus to a focus on “non-kinetic” threats such as social media misinformation.
CrowdTangle is making it easier to track public content on Facebook and Instagram through a new US Elections Hub. The US Elections Hub is comprised of more than 25 Live Displays and is publicly available for anyone to use (not just CrowdTangle users) to provide more transparency into the public content driving conversation around the upcoming election.
https://www.crowdtangle.com/blog/election2020hub
October 2020, the Atlantic Council hosted a livestream discussion of this new proposed domestic censorship role for DHS with three former DHS Secretaries (and that discussion has some remarkable moments).
Virtually every senior figure at CISA and across the other EIP entities involved in censoring the 2020 election has directly participated in Atlantic Council events, tying the networks together personally and professionally.
October 2020-DHS Homeland Threat Assessment
COVID-19 Influence Narratives
Russian online influence actors are advancing misleading or (what they perceive as) inflammatory narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic probably to stoke fear, undermine the credibility of the U.S. government, and weaken global perceptions of America.
Moscow probably will study the American public’s reaction to its COVID-19 disinformation to improve future influence campaigns aimed at shaking public confidence in Washington, which it can unleash opportunistically during a crisis, hostilities, or a period of degraded relations.
• Russian online influence actors have claimed that the U.S. President is incapable of managing the COVID-19 crisis and sought to exacerbate public concerns by amplifying content critical of the U.S. response to the public health crisis and the economic downturn. In contrast, the actors highlighted China’s and Russia’s alleged success against the COVID-19 outbreak and praised
President Putin’s COVID-19 plan and Russia’s ample supply of tests.
• Russian online influence actors spread misinformation and conspiracy theories about the origin of COVID-19, claiming it is a U.S.-engineered biological weapon that U.S. military officials spread in China.
Chinese operatives probably are waging disinformation campaigns using overt and covert tactics—including social media trolls to shift responsibility for the pandemic to other countries, including the United States. China might increase its influence activities in response to what it views as anti-China statements from the U.S. Government over China’s role in the pandemic.
• Since August 2019, more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts have been involved in a coordinated influence campaign with suspected ties to the Chinese Government.
Among these are hacked accounts from users around the world that post messaging and disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and other topics of interest to China.
• China’s Foreign Ministry, state media, and official Twitter accounts promote overt narratives claiming the coronavirus may have originated in the United States, criticize the U.S. pandemic response, and publicize China’s COVID-19-related medical assistance to U.S. cities and states. China has doubled the number of official government posts disseminating false narratives about COVID-19 and has carried out persistent and large-scale disinformation and influence operations that correlate with diplomatic messaging.
• China most likely will continue amplifying narratives supportive of its pandemic response while denigrating U.S. official criticism that Beijing views as tarnishing its global image.
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2020_10_06_homeland-threat-assessment.pdf
November 2020-after the 2020 election, EIP changed its name and re-branded as an entity called the “Virality Project” (VP).
A bit more on DHS-CISA censorship. CISA preferred to use private entities to make censorship requests. In 2020 it was the Election Integrity Project (EIP) for Election matters and then transitioned to the Vitality Project (VP) for COVID
Both are interesting in their naming. Integrity as in “Integrity Initiative” perhaps?. And Virality. VIRALITY is
“The state or condition of being viral; tendency to spread by word of mouth.”
Suggesting that words are a virus to be eradicated. People must be inoculated against the truth (censored)
Here is the Virality Project Report. Interesting reading.
https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:mx395xj8490/Virality_project_final_report.p
Both EIP and VP are basically run by the same folks : Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika
Each of the four entities is also deeply connected to the US military and foreign policy establishment. These four institutions further came into the 2020 election cycle with deep pre-existing connections to the major social media companies' content moderation teams,having worked together on censorship issues since the field first began developing in 2017.
There are a lot of fascinating details here. Mike Benz has done a good job exposing it
https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/11-9-22.html
December 3, 2020, Facebook announced it would “start removing false claims about these vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts.” Twitter, Google, TikTok, and Nextdoor all up- dated their policies in quick succession to explicitly address misleading information about the COVID-19 vaccine.
December 2020-When Chris Krebs was terminated from CISA after the 2020 election, Chris Krebs immediately started a two-man business consultancy firm with Stamos in January 2021 called Krebs-Stamos Group. Krebs the government side, Stamos the private sector side.
December 2020, CDC officials started regularly communicating with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google over "vaccine misinformation." At various times, CDC officials would flag specific posts by users on social media platforms such as Twitter as "example posts."
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/how-the-cdc-coordinated-with-big-tech-to-censor-americans/
January 2021, DHS’s “Countering Foreign Influence Task Force” was renamed to the generic, domestic catch-all, “Mis-, Dis- and Malinformation,”
FEBRUARY 2021-CrowdTangle
Latest report (1/27-2/10)
Suggesting this was active in 2020
Launching CrowdTangle COVID-19 Vaccine Live Displays
https://business.facebook.com/gpa/blog/launching-crowdtangle-covid-19-vaccine-live-displays
April, 2021-Krebs's seat at the head of CISA is now occupied by Jen Easterly, a former military intelligence official who was deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA) for counterterrorism. She appears to be taking her military intelligence experience squashing foreign terrorists from Tehran and using it to squash American populists on Twitter.
July 2021, Jen Psaki’s July remarks that senior White House staff are “in regular touch” with Big Tech platforms regarding posts about COVID. She also said the surgeon general’s office is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread.”
https://nypost.com/2021/09/06/federal-government-using-social-media-giants-to-censor-americans/
October 2021, Easterly and Krebs held a 30-minute taped discussion for CISA's “Cybersecurity Summit 2021: Continuity of Excellence” summit, in which they mutually agreed that Krebs's construction of a “counter-misinformation” conglomerate with the private sector was among the top structures to preserve and expand at DHS going forward.
December 2021, with Jen Easterly at CISA's helm, Stamos was directly made a member of CISA's private sector advisory committee, where he has regular meetings with CISA brass.
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