Big Government-Big Tech Collusion
A recent report published by The Intercept reveals how DHS has been pressuring Big Tech companies to police content on their platforms.
On October 31, a report was published by The Intercept that details how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been pressuring Big Tech companies to censor and police content on their platforms. This is the latest example of the U.S. government trying to influence discourse taking place online, and as always the claim is that the goal is simply to counter the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation on social media.
Even if this attempt by our government to censor speech is well-intentioned (I’m willing to bet otherwise) it should still be rejected outright. Allowing the state to wield its authority over private companies in order to silence dissent and manipulate public discourse sets us on a very dangerous path, and although one could certainly argue we’ve been on that path for quite a while already, it’s still important to try to shed light on the issue and to scale it back where we can.
Earlier this year, DHS announced the creation of a Disinformation Governance Board with the intention of using that board to police speech online. It was quickly dissolved, however, after massive backlash from the public with many people making obvious — and accurate — comparisons to the Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. That situation showed that average citizens can have an effect on scaling back our government’s authoritarian tendencies, which highlights why it’s so important for us to remain informed on what our government is up to and be willing to speak out against it when necessary.
This recent report by The Intercept reveals that the Disinformation Governance Board was the Department of Homeland Security’s attempt to bring a covert operation out into the open, which means our government has become far too comfortable when it comes to colluding with large corporations to try to squash dissent, manipulate the public, and silence criticism of the status quo. Even if the true goal of DHS is to combat dangerous information, it is still a major violation of our First Amendment right to free speech. Private companies have the right to moderate content however they see fit, but the government influencing those decisions is, for all intents and purposes, government censorship.
According to documents obtained by The Intercept, some of the topics that DHS chose to focus its attention on were the origin of Covid-19 and the efficacy of the Covid vaccines, as well as foreign policy issues such as the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and our government’s support for Ukraine. Clearly, those are very controversial topics, and we as U.S. citizens should be allowed to express a variety of differing opinions about them without facing censorship from our own government; especially since the official narratives about all of those topics eventually proved to be incorrect.
Let me briefly elaborate on that last point: The idea that Covid-19 came out of a lab in Wuhan, China, used to be considered a racist conspiracy theory; now it’s a widely accepted possibility. The Covid vaccines were initially said to prevent infection and transmission, but not long after they were rolled out it became evident that that claim was false. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was too botched for anyone to try to pretend otherwise, but many government and military officials knew that the regime we had propped up in that country would collapse after we withdrew and lied to the American people about that probability for nearly all of the 20-year occupation. And our government’s support for the war in Ukraine is not at all about “defending democracy” so much as it’s about fighting a proxy war with Russia and lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex.
The claim that the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring and censoring online speech in order to combat misinformation falls apart once you realize that the narratives they’re attempting to defend are themselves misinformation. Government agents and bureaucrats are not concerned with private citizens believing false information, they’re concerned that those citizens might discover information that counters the government’s propaganda campaigns.
This revelation has come to light under the Biden administration, but the sub-agency within DHS that primarily conducts these programs, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), was created during Donald Trump’s term in office back in 2018. Many conservatives believe that Big Tech censorship mainly affects their side of the political spectrum, but this issue goes beyond the left/right divide of American politics as the bureaucracy that influences those tech companies has done so with approval from both major political parties. Also, examples of leftists getting censored on social media do in fact exist.
The reporting done by The Intercept has only further confirmed what many of us already knew — that the government has been using its power to collude with large tech and social media companies to control speech. That left the realm of speculation quite a while ago, but this latest report has provided concrete evidence. Aside from the Disinformation Governance Board, when the Biden administration’s DHS attempted to openly do what it had already been doing in secret, there have also been other moments where the mask slipped and revealed this unconstitutional collusion.
One of the most obvious examples was last year when then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki publicly said that the Biden administration was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” The argument in support of such an action is that, since the government merely identified misinformation and suggested to Facebook that they should remove it, it’s not a violation of the First Amendment. However, that line of thinking is naive. The government’s suggestions likely come across more as thinly-veiled threats, and more often than not, the people who run these large corporations are unwilling to face the consequences of disregarding those “suggestions.”
Another example of the government influencing online discourse was brought to light during a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience where Rogan interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company. During that interview, Zuckerberg discussed how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had warned him that they believed there was going to be a “dump” of Russian disinformation leading up to the 2020 election, and how that warning influenced Zuckerberg’s decision to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The political and media class tried for months to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s laptop, but that was yet another example of supposed “disinformation” that eventually became authenticated, which casts doubt on the idea that the government and the corporate media are capable of discerning what’s true and what isn’t.
While we’re on the topic of the government’s role in the censorship that has taken place on Facebook, it’s worth mentioning that Meta actually set up a portal for government agents to use to flag content on its platforms. According to The Intercept: “There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use.”
Facebook has also partnered with the Atlantic Council, often referred to as NATO’s think tank, to help moderate content on the social media platform. That partnership created another avenue for the government to influence what gets censored on the internet because the Atlantic Council is partially funded by the U.S. government, as well as arms manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin. This ruins the argument that Facebook is a “private company” that can censor whoever it wants because it uses a U.S.-funded think tank to help it decide who and what to censor. Facebook has essentially given the government a role in that decision-making process.
The aforementioned examples have taken place primarily on Facebook, but practically every major tech company has been pressured by the government in similar ways. Last year, journalist Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter due to tweets he put out criticizing the Covid vaccines. Berenson recently settled a lawsuit against Twitter, and as a result of that lawsuit, he obtained documents and emails which showed that Biden administration officials put pressure on Twitter specifically to ban him from the platform. It should be noted that the tweets that led to Berenson’s account being suspended contained factual information about the Covid vaccines, but since they went against the official narrative, he was banned for them anyway.
Not only has it become routine for government officials to use their authority to influence how Big Tech companies moderate content, but there appears to be a pipeline from intelligence agencies into those companies. In a series of reports for Mintpress News, journalist Alan Macleod has thoroughly detailed this trend, which includes former CIA agents working for Google and Facebook, as well as former FBI agents finding employment at Twitter. Not only has our government infiltrated these social media platforms, but according to Macleod, even former spies from Israel, the longtime geostrategic U.S. ally, end up working for large tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
Speaking of Microsoft, the recent report by The Intercept mentioned that in February a former DHS official — who now works for Microsoft — texted John Easterly, a current DHS director, to say that “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This is just another example of former government agents becoming employed by Big Tech, and then influencing those companies in ways that benefit the state.
Content moderation — or more accurately, censorship — is only one aspect of how the government influences social media companies. Another aspect (one that is directly at odds with DHS’s supposed goal of fighting misinformation) is to manipulate the content private citizens see on the internet by spreading propaganda, otherwise known as disinformation.
Last year, Newsweek published a report about how the Pentagon has created “the largest undercover force the world has ever known” and details some of the tactics used by this “secret army”. While much of the report focuses on agents carrying out assignments in the real world, it also mentions how much of the work is done online. According to Newsweek:
The newest and fastest growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing "nonattribution" and "misattribution" techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called "publicly accessible information"—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media. Hundreds work in and for the NSA, but over the past five years, every military intelligence and special operations unit has developed some kind of "web" operations cell that both collects intelligence and tends to the operational security of its very activities.
So while the DHS and the FBI collude with Big Tech to moderate content and censor speech deemed to be “misinformation”, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency (NSA) have spent the last decade creating an army of undercover agents, many of whom actively work to spread disinformation online. At first glance, these programs appear to be achieving opposite ends, but once you realize that propaganda and censorship are just two sides of the same coin — narrative management — it starts to make much more sense.
The Department of Homeland Security, much like the Patriot Act, was created after the 9/11 attacks supposedly as a means of preventing future acts of terrorism. However, it was almost immediately turned inward and has been used against U.S. citizens in the two decades since its inception. With the War on Terror being slightly scaled back in recent years, DHS has shifted its focus toward regular U.S. citizens more and more. That includes manipulating and influencing Big Tech companies as I’ve detailed here, but it also includes mass data collection and spying on average Americans.
This collusion of corporate and state power is a grave threat to our civil liberties, and this is only some of the information that has been discovered about these programs so far; imagine how much left there is to reveal.
I have a tendency to place blame on the government before anything else, which I believe is appropriate in this case, but that doesn’t mean that Big Tech companies are innocent. They have been far too willing to cooperate with the government’s unconstitutional attempts at stifling free speech, and even if they aren’t eager participants, they have still been complacent this entire time.
One thing we can do as average citizens to disrupt our government’s propaganda and censorship campaigns is to begin migrating to alternative social media platforms; ones which at least claim to be devoted to free speech. That is in no way a perfect solution, as the vast majority of people who use social media will continue doing so on the major platforms at least into the near future and it’s also very possible that alternative platforms could eventually become corrupted, but it’s at least a small step we can take on our own to try and restore free speech to the internet.
The larger issue at hand, however, is the immense amount of authority we have allowed our government to accumulate and its ability and willingness to wield that authority over both corporations and individuals to achieve its desired ends. Migrating to alternative platforms may be an imperfect short-term solution, but if we want to avoid this same problem in the future, it’s important that we actively work to scale back our massively overgrown federal government. Sooner would be better than later.
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