(Tom: This article was published a year ago but worth reading. That is, if you like your truth unadulterated.)<\/p>\n
Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.The size, scale and speed of DHS\u2019s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:<\/p>\n
22 Million tweets labeled \u201cmisinformation\u201d on Twitter;
\n859 Million tweets collected in databases for \u201cmisinformation\u201d analysis;
\n120 analysts monitoring social media \u201cmisinformation\u201d in up to 20-hour shifts;
\n15 tech platforms monitored for \u201cmisinformation\u201d often in real-time;
\n<1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
\nDozens of \u201cmisinformation narratives\u201d targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
\nHundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to \u201cmisinformation\u201d Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and \u201chuge regulatory pressure\u201d from government.
\nThe citations above are from just the DHS censorship network\u2019s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.<\/p>\n