DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events

   by Mike Benz
   November 9, 2022

SUMMARY

   Network throttled millions of posts ahead of 2020 election, blocked “emerging narratives” from reaching a “virality threshold.”

   Censors boast on video of getting tech companies to ban entire categories of election speech under threat of “huge regulatory pressure.”

   Months before the 2020 election, censors systematically targeted all speech categories that could challenge a future “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario.

Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:

       22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;

       859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;

       120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;

       15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;

       <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;

       Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and

       Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.

The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.