Whistleblower disclosures suggest the government sought to ‘operationalize’ social media sites to combat supposed disinformation
FILE PHOTO: The Department of Homeland Security logo is seen during a joint news conference in Washington, DC. © AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
The Joe Biden administration previously had wide-ranging goals for its planned Disinformation Board, including using social media platforms to remove posts the government deemed false, according to leaked documents obtained by Republican lawmakers.
In an open letter to Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas published on Wednesday, GOP Senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Josh Hawley (Missouri) pressed for details on the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, citing the whistleblower files.
The department “planned to coordinate efforts to leverage ties with social media platforms to enable the removal of user content,” the senators said in a press release, adding that it sought to use Big Tech sites to “enforce its agenda.”
While the project was recently paused due to public a backlash after it was first floated in April – with critics likening it to a state-run ‘Ministry of Truth’ – the lawmakers nonetheless said the documents raised “serious concerns” about the effort.
“The DGB was established to serve as much more than a simple ‘working group’ to ‘develop guidelines, standards, [and] guardrails’ for protecting civil rights and civil liberties,” they wrote. “In fact, 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.’”
Grassley and Hawley argued that the Biden administration has offered no clear definition of “disinformation,” and that the DHS board had shown serious bias even in its earliest stages, despite assurances it would remain apolitical. In particular, they pointed to the official tapped to lead the DGB, Nina Jankowicz, claiming she is “a known trafficker of foreign disinformation and liberal conspiracy theories.”
Jankowicz, moreover, may have been hired chiefly due to “her relationship with executives at Twitter,” the senators claimed, adding that the leaked materials show the White House planned to “operationalize” connections with social media companies to “implement its public policy goals.”
Draft briefing notes prepared in late April indicate that a senior DHS official, Robert Silvers, planned to meet with Twitter executives to discuss the disinformation board, though it remains unclear whether the scheduled meeting ever took place.
READ MORE:
Truth isn’t in the eye of the beholder, but it will be if Biden’s ‘Minister of Truth’ gets her way
The two senators urged Mayorkas to divulge more information about the department’s goals for the DGB, including whether it ever asked social media firms to “censor, flag, add context to, or remove” user posts or ban accounts. They also requested documents and communications related to Jankowicz, and called on the government to give its definition for actionable disinformation, saying it should “identify who exactly is ultimately responsible for making this determination.”
