USA Today once again raised the specter of election interference to justify the Department of Homeland Security’s latest foray into election meddling in its latest sycophantic interview.
On May 8, USA Today’s Josh Meyer released a new “exclusive” interview with DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The theme of the interview was how DHS was dealing with an “unprecedented array of election threats.”
He opined, “The right to vote and the integrity of the right to vote – and therefore of the election itself – is a fundamental element of our democracy.”
Mayorkas was careful to stress, of course, that the effort was wholly “nonpartisan,” a label that was also applied to the anti-constitutional Disinformation Governance Board (DGB).
“This is a nonpartisan effort,” he claimed. “And, in fact, all our efforts across this department are nonpartisan.”
Despite Mayorkas’s assertions of nonpartisanship, the USA Today piece paints the initiative as primarily a response to anti-democratic forces on the right.
“Democrats also fear violence from those who would reject election results showing Joe Biden being reelected,” the leftist newspaper reported.
Mayorkas stressed that DHS would use its power to combat the “threat of disinformation,” just like the short-lived DGB, infamously known as the Ministry of Truth.
According to USA Today, the coordination between the DHS and local election officials has been run out of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“We’re providing best-practice security guidance to these stakeholders, and that’s where we unpack threats, but also and most importantly provide them with recommendations for what they can actually do to mitigate those threats,” said Cait Conley, senior advisor to CISA director Jen Easterly and leader of the initiative.
In order to fight these “threats,” characterized by USA Today as a result of “unsubstantiated claims of election fraud,” CISA launched Protect24, a new website that proliferates materials for local and state election officials.
The website has several pages related to “disinformation actors.” One page, titled “Tactics of Disinformation,” identifies common “tactics” used by supposed malactors.
“Disinformation actors capitalize on conspiracy theories by generating disinformation narratives that align with the conspiracy theory worldview,” the brochure reads.
The brochure also targets “alternative platforms,” that is, platforms that don’t censor their user base, as tools of subversive elements.
“Disinformation actors may seek to take advantage of platforms with fewer user protections, less stringent content moderation policies, and fewer controls to detect and remove inauthentic content and accounts than other social media platforms,” the brochure says.
Another page, titled “Election Security Rumor vs. Reality,” tries to debunk concerns around expanded voting procedures like mail-in-balloting and unsupervised ballot drop boxes.
Before the 2020 election, CISA also used its power to quash skepticism regarding voting practices such as universal mail-in-ballots. CISA worked through the Election Integrity Partnership, run out of Stanford Internet Observatory, to nudge social media companies to censor accounts that questioned election procedures.
According to Mike Benz, founder of Freedom for Freedom Online, the EIP flagged 27 million tweets to be deleted by social media companies and used DHS infrastructure to do so.
In leaked emails, Alex Stamos, the leader of SIO, described the effort as a way for the federal government to coordinate censorship.
“The EIP’s true purpose was to act as a censorship conduit for the federal government,” wrote Stamos in a Nov. 2020 email. In another email to the social media app Nextdoor, Stamos described EIP as “a one-stop shop for local election officials, DHS, and voter protection organizations to report potential disinformation for us to investigate and to refer to the appropriate platforms if necessary.”
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