Thursday, December 29, 2022

Censorship by any other name is still censorship

From Elon Musk slams CISA censorship network as 'propaganda platform' by Kanekoa The Great.  The subheading is This DHS-backed censorship network used 120 analysts to censor millions of social media posts on elections and covid-19.

This is by far the most comprehensive reporting I have seen on the US government program for censoring speech.  Some parts I already knew and others I surmised, but this seems a reasonably complete indictment.  

What’s been missing from much of this analysis is the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) role in this censorship through a consortium called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), made up of four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a social media analytics company.

The EIP published a report on its censorship of the 2020 election, The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election, which describes how the private-public censorship consortium was formed in the summer of 2020 to “monitor and correct election mis- and disinformation.”

This censorship network partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the DHS-backed Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) during the 2020 election cycle and operated as technocratic thought police forwarding tickets of "mis- and disinformation" to social media companies.

The EIP built communication portals with Big Tech platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, TikTok, Reddit, and Discord; and liberal groups NAACP, Common Cause, the Democratic National Committee, and Harvard's Defending Digital Democracy Project, cofounded by former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, throughout the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, to censor domestic “mis- and disinformation.”

They had about 120 analysts monitoring social media for 20 hours a day, forwarding tickets of misinformation to be censored, and this censorship pivoted to covid vaccines when they started the Virality Project in Feb. 2021.

That is just an appetizer.  There is much, much more, links and all.

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