NY Post: Emails Show DHS Censored Speech! Actual Emails: Show Exactly The Opposite

Overhype

from the is-everyone-taking-crazy-pills? dept

Look, I get that Rep. Jim Jordan is going to just keep on Jim Jordaning up the joint, and making statements that are blatantly untrue in an effort to chill speech he doesn’t like. But, for fuck’s sake, the media doesn’t need to repeat it. Of course, in this case, “the media” is the NY Post, which has been prone to doing the same sorta shit, but the latest is preposterously stupid.

The NY Post has an article with the blaring headline: “New emails show DHS created Stanford ‘disinfo’ group that censored speech before 2020 election.” I read it, hoping to see these new emails, because as we’ve discussed in multiple debunkings over the last year, that’s not what any evidence to date has shown. That doesn’t mean that it’s not possible that the government sought to censor information on social media. It’s entirely possible.

But if it happened, the evidence should show it.

Given the title of the NY Post article, I assumed that they’d publish these emails that proved that DHS created a group that censored speech before the 2020 election. Except… that’s not what any of it shows? The “emails” published by the NY Post literally debunk the claims in the headline and the article.

There are three emails published. The first is from Graham Brookie from the DFRLab at the Atlantic Council, in which he notes (very informally) that the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was set up “at the request of DHS/CISA.” This… isn’t new? And it doesn’t seem to mean what they think it means. The whole setup of the EIP was the same kind of setup that CISA has organized in the past for cybersecurity issues, where there’s a central party to handle passing along information for companies to be aware of. Historically, it had been about cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and with the EIP it was about attacks on election integrity.

But… we knew that already?

And, worse, the next two emails further undermine the whole argument that this had anything to do with censorship. The next email is from Brian Scully who was at CISA, and who noted that via the EIP, accounts had been flagged to Twitter regarding “Impersonating Colorado Government.” Again, this was known. It was covered in the past. Indeed, we wrote about this exact thing a year ago in another debunking. What happened was that some Colorado (not DHS) officials found some joke Twitter accounts that were pretending to be Colorado election officials.

Given that there had been reports of attempts to interfere with voting by providing people false information about voting (something that is illegal and which a key online troll is now going to jail over), Colorado (not DHS) officials used the EIP portal to report these accounts to Twitter. Twitter was alerted. As we noted last year, it wasn’t even clear that Twitter did anything about these accounts, and this newly revealed email… says that they simply asked the accounts to “revise to meet parody account requirements, which most did.”

In other words, it appears the only actual new information in this emails is that, contrary to the implied earlier reporting, Twitter did not take down these stupid parody accounts.

So… what happened here was that Colorado officials overreacted to some stupid parody accounts, but in an abundance of caution used the EIP’s portal to alert Twitter to these accounts that claimed to be Colorado officials. Rather than take the accounts down or “censor” anything, Twitter just asked them to comply with the parody rules. For what it’s worth, that seems a lot less speech suppressive than Elon Musk, who has banned plenty of parody accounts for not being clear that they were parody accounts.

So, uh, the old Twitter received a notice that someone was violating their parody rules, and asked the accounts to comply with the rules and more clearly label their parody accounts. This is compared to Elon Musk who promises to “permanently suspend” any such accounts.

The next email is even worse. Read this email and tell me how anyone, whether it’s Jim Jordan or NY Post reporter Josh Christenson, could take this as evidence that the program was set up to censor speech:

It’s literally paragraphs of text from DHS saying (1) we’re not the originator of this information, merely the conduit through which it is passed along, (2) we’re not asking to remove it, and (3) no website will be punished if it does nothing with this info.

It’s literally saying “hey, we’re passing along this info, do with it what you want, it’s not our info, and feel free to ignore it.”

But, according to the NY Post this long disclaimer which debunks the entire premise of the article and the headline… actually shows “that CISA recognized it was on shaky legal grounds by participating in the effort.”

Um. No. That’s not what it shows at all. What it shows is that DHS/CISA knew the limits of its authority and were making it explicit to everyone else that it was not and could not demand any kind of censorship. And the companies knew that as well. The entire portal was set up for information sharing on potential election threats. And that’s what it was used for.

Yet we get release after release and article after article that is completely disconnected from this reality, pretending that this program did the opposite of what it was clearly intended to do, and then reads these emails to say the exact opposite of what they clearly say.

It’s absolutely fucking crazy that there are still people who believe it or that the NY Post thinks this story is accurate. The very emails in the article debunk the entire article.

Filed Under: cisa, dhs, eip, election integrity, information sharing, jim jordan, parody
Companies: ny post, twitter