Whistleblower documents reveal that the Department of Homeland Security worked alongside Twitter in its failed attempt to create the Disinformation Governance Board. The documents show that the agency held a meeting with the same Twitter executive responsible for censoring stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop, the veracity of which has since become common knowledge.
As the Washington Free Beacon notes, DHS officials arranged a meeting on April 28 to request Twitter “become involved” in the new agency, which had an aim of combating “disinformation” — a goal critics argued would be a way for Democrats to crack down on right-wing speech they could label “dangerous” for purely political motives.
The meeting in question was to include Yoel Roth, the Twitter executive known for making the decision to block the New York Post’s landmark reporting on the explosive contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The story broke in October 2020, and the decision by social-media platforms to censor it was widely seen as an attempt to sway the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor by hiding information that would be damaging to his candidacy.
The whistleblower documents that reveal the meetup were publicized by GOP members of the Senate and reveal that Homeland Security had broader ambitions for the proposed disinformation agency than was supposed.
While the department made its plans to create the board public on April 27, it never stated that it planned to work with social-media companies. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said publicly that the board would essentially be a “working group” that would track disinformation on topics such as human smuggling and the Russia-Ukraine war.
According to Mayorkas, the board would have no “operational authority or capability.” The itinerary for the Twitter meeting, however, reveals that DHS viewed the board as “an opportunity to discuss operationalizing public-private partnerships between DHS and Twitter.”
Per the documents, officials from Homeland Security wanted to hand government data over to Twitter in order to facilitate the board’s work. For example, the itinerary for the meeting called on Rob Silvers, the undersecretary for strategy, to determine what data “would be useful for Twitter to receive” in order to counter disinformation.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who published the whistleblower documents on his website, along with Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) stated that the documents “raise concerns” about a combined effort by government and “social media companies and big tech” to censor political speech they disagree with.
“DHS should not in any way seek to enlist the private sector to curb or silence opposing viewpoints,” wrote the senators.
The Free Beacon notes:
The Republicans noted it is unclear whether DHS held the April 28 meeting with Twitter. Neither DHS nor Twitter responded to Free Beacon requests for comment.
Grassley and Hawley suggested in their letter to Mayorkas that Jankowicz was selected to lead the disinformation board because she had worked with Twitter’s Roth. The DHS itinerary for the April 28 meeting notes that Jankowicz and Roth knew each other.
Roth, who recently unveiled Twitter’s “crisis management policy,” came under fire for blocking access to the Post stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Roth said he made the decision after American intelligence officials told him in meetings before the 2020 election that foreign actors might release materials hacked from Hunter Biden.
Mere weeks after its establishment, the board, dubbed the “Ministry of Truth” by its critics, was put on “pause” without having even met once. Its executive director, Nina Jankowicz, resigned after being the butt of “coordinated online attacks.”
According to a Media Research Center poll, 16 percent of Joe Biden voters claim they would not have voted for him had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The intended collusion between DHS and Twitter demonstrates the way in which the Deep State, the Democratic Party, and big corporations work together as one virtually indistinguishable entity. It’s a strategy modeled on China, where the government, the Communist Party leadership, and the heads of the country’s major corporations are all different sides of the same ruling regime.
They may not have achieved that level of unison and power just yet. But they are well on their way, and their successful suppression of the Hunter Biden story in 2020 demonstrates just how effective the regime’s propaganda wing has become at controlling what the masses read, see, and believe.
