Maybe the problem was the government all along

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.

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All souls say whatever they will. And DHS finds that dangerous.
Protecting our sensitive minds from liberating thoughts.

Thanks for the essay.

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7 users have voted.

bi-partisan brick in the wall of government. Useful to either party. With all the info gathered on us through the internet and commerce, taxpayer info, census, and now this, they see pretty much everything about us. Of course peering back through that looking glass at our leaders things become very opaque. We'll have to update the saying "You'll own nothing, and know nothing, and be happy".

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usefewersyllables's picture

@Snode

right up until we get vaporized when their military adventuring goes sideways.

On a happier note, the WaPo is quoting "anonymous military officials" as having confirmed that the US now has troops on the ground in Ukraine, supposedly "inspecting our weapons caches". Nowhere near the front lines, they say. Right.

Remember the Maine, or the Tonkin Gulf, or something like that. We'll enter the next phase of this escalation when *someone* frags the first US soldier.

No smiley. None at all.

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Twice bitten, permanently shy.

@usefewersyllables

that the US military is up to its eyeballs in clandestine affairs in remote countries?
That is just what they do. Screwing around with other nation's affairs is a specialty
of the CIA led 'change is gonna do you good' process. It sucks the big one.

[video:https://youtu.be/Ikjmz_SlGhg]

or what?

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has an article this week about warnings from both political parties that they can access your voting records, not as to how you voted, but whether you voted, implying some sort of punishment if you didn't.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/big-brother-is-watching-if-you-vote?utm_so...

What the punishment could be is intriguing.

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10 users have voted.
usefewersyllables's picture

@Linda Wood

allowing early voting, the SoS office sends an email when your ballot is picked up from a dropbox, and another when it is opened for counting. So at least here, they very definitely do know precisely when you vote- but not how. Once the ballot is pulled out of the "privacy sleeve" that is encoded with your voter information, and thrown into the stack with all the other voted ballots, it becomes anonymous.

Further, they move you from "active" to "inactive" after you miss an election, and they kill off your registration entirely after you miss 4 in a row. So there's the current punishment in this state, anyway.

I decided not to mark my ballot with a Hershey bar this time in part because I didn't want the "privacy sleeve" to smell like chocolate. I didn't want to fuck around and find out...

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9 users have voted.

Twice bitten, permanently shy.