America’s speech police are reassembling to once again influence our elections. At the same time the security state is creating potential pretexts for renewed censorship by issuing warnings of cyberattacks that could “hinder public access to election information,” they are also reprising old claims of coming Russian election interference on behalf of Donald Trump.
The little-noticed development comes in a report from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) on the DOJ’s efforts to “Coordinate Information Sharing About Foreign Malign Influence Threats to U.S. Elections” — a euphemism for the chief law enforcement agency’s prior censorship activities.
During the 2020 election, as revealed in litigation, congressional oversight, and reporting, national security and law enforcement agencies used the threat of foreign misinformation and disinformation on social media to U.S. elections as a pretext to surveil and suppress domestic news and opinions deemed derogatory to our ruling regime.
An alphabet soup of agencies coerced, cajoled, and colluded directly and via cutouts with social media companies to get those companies to squash all manner of wrongthink on election integrity and outcomes at mass scale.
While the OIG explicitly omitted the “FBI’s information sharing with social media companies with respect to domestic actors” from its report, the DOJ’s response to the office’s recommendations will likely have substantial bearing on Americans’ speech.
That response, appended to the report, comes in the form of a DOJ memo revealing that the law enforcement agency has now codified its protocols for reporting purported “foreign malign influence” information with social media companies, and
