The Trump administration has launched a review of every Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) role related to election security and so-called mis- and disinformation after CISA began censoring speech. CISA, originally established in 2018 to address cybersecurity threats, quickly transformed into a government-run censorship operation, particularly during the 2020 election.
In response, the propaganda press has been scrambling to defend CISA’s expanded role in silencing free speech for several weeks now.
VoteBeat’s Jessica Huseman wrote that “the Trump administration has begun to overhaul CISA in a way that has election officials across the country worried that U.S. elections will not be as robustly monitored and secured as they were in 2024. The process started with divisions concerned with election security and misinformation.”
Politico’s John Sakellariadis and Maggie Miller headlined their piece: “Trump continues federal purge, gutting cyber workers who combat disinformation.”
“The agency became the subject of Trump’s fury after CISA took steps to call out misinformation and disinformation during the 2020 presidential election,” Sakellariadis and Miller wrote. But CISA wasn’t calling out “misinformation and disinformation.”
Wired’s Eric Geller wrote, “The move represents the first major example of the country’s cyberdefense agency accommodating President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.”
During the 2020 election, CISA — which has been described as the “nerve center” of the government’s censorship operations — classified social media posts that raised concerns about unsupervised mail-in voting as “disinformation” before flagging them to be censored, according to documents obtained by America First Legal.
Internally, however, CISA was circulating a six-point list warning about the risks to the mail-in voting process.
In November of 2023, House Republicans released an interim report revealing that CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center “colluded with Stanford University to pressure Big Tech companies into censoring what they claimed to be ‘disinformation’ during the 2020 election,” as reported by The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood.
“At the request” of CISA, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was created to “monitor and censor Americans’ online speech” ahead of the 2020 election, according to the interim report. The EIP is made up of “disinformation academics” who coordinated with GEC and the Department of Homeland Security. The EIP, according to the House report, flagged “true information, jokes and satire, and political opinions” and then submitted the posts to Big Tech companies for censorship.
CISA “regularly facilitated meetings ‘between Big Tech companies, and national security and law enforcement agencies to address “mis-, dis-, and Mal-information” on social media platforms,’” as Fleetwood reported.
One leaked document obtained by The Intercept revealed that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted then CISA director Jen Easterly in 2022, saying, “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” Under the Biden administration, Facebook had a portal where DHS could report “disinformation,” according to The Intercept.
Easterly once explained that the agency, which has targeted so-called “malinformation” (the agency defines “malinformation” as anything “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate”) wanted to secure the public’s “cognitive infrastructure.”
Last March, the DHS and CISA partnered with Pennsylvania to target election speech it deemed a “threat,” like so-called “misinformation.”
Despite this, the propaganda press is in full defense mode, worried the days of unchecked government control over online speech may be numbered.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
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