We keep hearing how divided the public is, as if we arrived in this situation in a normal and natural way. Why is no one considering that our own government is working hard to keep us divided?

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.

The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests.

“Man, I don’t even know what’s legal anymore.”

Keep in mind that everything that Edward Snowden and Julian Assange revealed was considered "disinformation" that "threatened U.S. interests". What else threatens the interests of the ruling class?

DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”

In much the same way that one person's terrorists are another person's freedom fighters, what constitutes "dangerous speech" is a debate that goes all the way back to Socrates.
So isn't it convenient that the current debate is all about which billionaire owns which social media platform, and what conspiracy theories are being pushed by the other side. Rather than how many billions of our tax dollars are being spent to keep us misinformed and divided?

How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.

The inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.

So who created this monster? Obama? Biden? Pelosi? It's Trump.

The stepped up counter-disinformation effort began in 2018 following high-profile hacking incidents of U.S. firms, when Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, forming a new wing of DHS devoted to protecting critical national infrastructure. An August 2022 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General sketches the rapidly accelerating move toward policing disinformation.

From the outset, CISA boasted of an “evolved mission” to monitor social media discussions while “routing disinformation concerns” to private sector platforms.