Federal agencies that originally targeted American threats are now threatening Americans’ free speech. What was intended to protect Americans is now being used against them as a means “to try and shape online discourse.” Although the Disinformation Governance Board was taken down, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down,” said Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept.
From The Federalist:
The security apparatus that was erected to keep us safe from al-Qaida, it seems, is looking for something else to do now, so it has decided to become the arbiter of what constitutes false and dangerous information, and therefore what political opinions Americans are allowed to express online. ... None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has questioned the official government narrative on Twitter or Facebook over the last two years. Did you dare to speculate online that Covid might have come from a lab leak in China? If so, then as late as December of 2020 you were promoting what NPR (among many other outlets) called a “baseless conspiracy theory” for which there is “zero evidence.” It should all outrage Americans who think the First Amendment should actually mean something, that people should be banned from the public square for expressing opinions the ruling regime dislikes. Indeed it’s hard to think of anything more un-American, and it’s not too much to say that this censorship represents a real threat to the survival of the republic.
