[House Hearing, 118 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                 CENSORSHIP LAUNDERING: HOW THE U.S. DE-
                  PARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY ENABLES 
                  THE SILENCING OF DISSENT

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                              BEFORE THE

                            SUBCOMMITTEE ON
                       OVERSIGHT, INVESTIGATIONS,
                           AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                                OF THE

                     COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
                        HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS

                             FIRST SESSION

                               __________

                              MAY 11, 2023

                               __________

                           Serial No. 118-11

                               __________

       Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
                                     

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        Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
        
                               __________

                                
                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE                    
54-079 PDF                  WASHINGTON : 2023                    
          
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------             

                     COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY

                 Mark E. Green, MD, Tennessee, Chairman
Michael T. McCaul, Texas             Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi, 
Clay Higgins, Louisiana                  Ranking Member
Michael Guest, Mississippi           Sheila Jackson Lee, Texas
Dan Bishop, North Carolina           Donald M. Payne, Jr., New Jersey
Carlos A. Gimenez, Florida           Eric Swalwell, California
August Pfluger, Texas                J. Luis Correa, California
Andrew R. Garbarino, New York        Troy A. Carter, Louisiana
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Shri Thanedar, Michigan
Tony Gonzales, Texas                 Seth Magaziner, Rhode Island
Nick LaLota, New York                Glenn Ivey, Maryland
Mike Ezell, Mississippi              Daniel S. Goldman, New York
Anthony D'Esposito, New York         Robert Garcia, California
Laurel M. Lee, Florida               Delia C. Ramirez, Illinois
Morgan Luttrell, Texas               Robert Menendez, New Jersey
Dale W. Strong, Alabama              Yvette D. Clarke, New York
Josh Brecheen, Oklahoma              Dina Titus, Nevada
Elijah Crane, Arizona
                      Stephen Siao, Staff Director
                  Hope Goins, Minority Staff Director
                       Natalie Nixon, Chief Clerk
                     Sean Jones, Legislative Clerk
                                 ------                                

     SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT, INVESTIGATIONS, AND ACCOUNTABILITY

                  Dan Bishop, North Carolina, Chairman
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia      Glenn Ivey, Maryland, Ranking 
Mike Ezell, Mississippi                  Member
Dale W. Strong, Alabama              Shri Thanedar, Michigan
Elijah Crane, Arizona                Delia C. Ramirez, Illinois
Mark E. Green, MD, Tennessee (ex     Yvette D. Clarke, New York
    officio)                         Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi 
                                         (ex officio)
                  Sang Yi, Subcommittee Staff Director
           Lisa Canini, Minority Subcommittee Staff Director
                   Luke Jennette, Subcommittee Clerk
                           
                           
                                C O N T E N T S

                              ----------                              
                                                                   Page

                               Statements

The Honorable Dan Bishop, a Representative in Congress From the 
  State of North Carolina, and Chairman, Subcommittee on 
  Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability:
  Oral Statement.................................................     1
  Prepared Statement.............................................     3
The Honorable Glenn Ivey, a Representative in Congress From the 
  State of Maryland, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on 
  Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability:
  Oral Statement.................................................     5
  Prepared Statement.............................................     7
The Honorable Bennie G. Thompson, a Representative in Congress 
  From the State of Mississippi, and Ranking Member, Committee on 
  Homeland Security:
  Prepared Statement.............................................     9

                               Witnesses

Mr. Benjamin Weingarten, Investigative Journalist and Columnist:
  Oral Statement.................................................    10
  Prepared Statement.............................................    12
Mr. Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., Epidemiologist and Biostatistician:
  Oral Statement.................................................    22
  Prepared Statement.............................................    24
Ms. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Ph.D., Professor, School of Public 
  Affairs and School of Education, Founding Director, 
  Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, 
  American University:
  Oral Statement.................................................    32
  Prepared Statement.............................................    34
Mr. Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, The 
  George Washington University:
  Oral Statement.................................................    40
  Prepared Statement.............................................    41

                             For the Record

The Honorable Dale W. Strong, a Representative in Congress From 
  the State of Alabama:
  Image..........................................................    65
The Honorable Dan Bishop, a Representative in Congress From the 
  State of North Carolina, and Chairman, Subcommittee on 
  Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability:
  Image..........................................................    69
The Honorable Glenn Ivey, a Representative in Congress From the 
  State of Maryland, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on 
  Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability:
  Article, March 8, 2023.........................................    73
  Article, May 14, 2022..........................................    77

 
  CENSORSHIP LAUNDERING: HOW THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY 
                    ENABLES THE SILENCING OF DISSENT

                              ----------                              


                         Thursday, May 11, 2023

             U.S. House of Representatives,
                    Committee on Homeland Security,
                Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, 
                                        and Accountability,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:02 p.m., in 
room 310, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. Dan Bishop 
(Chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
    Present: Representatives Bishop of North Carolina, Greene, 
Ezell, Strong, Crane, Ivey, Thanedar, Ramirez, and Clarke.
    Mr. Bishop. The Committee on Homeland Security, 
Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, 
will come to order.
    Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare the 
committee in recess at any point.
    The purpose of this hearing is to receive testimony from an 
expert panel that will outline how the Government-sponsored 
censorship laundering enterprise operates, the price the 
American people are paying for the Department of Homeland 
Security's role in the censorship laundering enterprise, and 
the legal and Constitutional implications of the Department's 
role in censoring American voices.
    I now recognize myself for an opening statement.
    Good afternoon. Welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight, 
Investigations, and Accountability's hearing titled 
``Censorship Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland 
Security Enables the Silencing of Dissent.''
    Today's hearing will examine the Department of Homeland 
Security's role as the nerve center of the Government scheme to 
censor the on-line voices of millions of Americans, laundering 
its efforts through a veil of ostensibly independent 
nongovernmental organizations.
    Freedom of speech and open debate are essential features of 
a free society. Efforts to censor public discourse under the 
guise of countering misinformation, disinformation, and 
malinformation threaten this fundamental right.
    To clarify, no one would argue or is arguing that hacking 
voting machines or posting incorrect voting locations to 
prevent people from voting would ever be acceptable.
    This committee recognizes that CISA has a monumental task 
and supports CISA's critical mission to secure our Federal 
networks and critical infrastructure.
    But as our witnesses today will attest, CISA has deviated 
from this core mission and risks losing the trust of Congress, 
the American people, and its vital private-sector partners.
    What was initially a limited effort to counter foreign 
disinformation on elections metastasized into a sprawling 
effort that directly or indirectly censors Americans' discourse 
and debate that are the hallmark of our democracy.
    In 2018, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security 
Agency, CISA, was charged with protecting election 
infrastructure, which CISA decided unilaterally included 
countering election misinformation from foreign malign actors.
    By the 2020 election, mission creep found CISA pivoting 
away from foreign sources to focus on domestic 
``misinformation.'' But the Government knew this would raise 
huge Constitutional concerns, so it helped create non-
Governmental entities, such as the Election Integrity Project, 
to do for the Government what the Government could not do on 
its own--and they knew it.
    Listen to the head of the EIP.
    [Video of Alex Stamos, director, Stanford Internet 
Observatory, Cyber Policy Center, shown:]

Mr. Stamos. This is not because CISA didn't care about disinformation, 
but at the time they lacked both kind-of the funding and the legal 
authorizations to go do the kinds of work that would be necessary to 
truly understand how election disinformation was operating.
So because of the feedback and the ideas from this group, we were able 
to pull together pretty quickly a project between these four different 
institutions to try to fill the gap of the things that the Government 
could not do themselves.

    [End of video.]
    Mr. Bishop. So Government supported and funded NGO's to try 
to fill the gap of the things the Government could not do 
themselves. That is just incredible.
    In a matter of a few months, CISA helped set up this 
censorship infrastructure. CISA acted as a switchboard, to use 
their words, to flag what they called misinformation and notify 
social media platforms, who could--independently, they say--
decide whether to remove or modify the content.
    All told, according to one source, during the 2020 election 
this scheme resulted in 859 million tweets collected for 
misinformation analysis, 22 million tweets and retweets 
categorized as misinformation subject to censorship, 21 Twitter 
users--Americans, domestic sources--identified and stigmatized 
as, ``the most prominent repeat spreaders of disinformation,'' 
all of whom--perhaps coincidentally--were on the political 
right.
    It's not just for elections. The same network, using the 
same tools, censored dozens of purportedly false COVID-19 
narratives, many of which have subsequently been acknowledged 
as being true.
    So where is this headed? What is stopping DHS from 
overreaching its jurisdiction again to censor more Americans on 
whatever it deems critical infrastructure? In fact, who can say 
that it's not being done right now?
    We know DHS wants to expand this activity. Just last year, 
they tried and then retreated under ridicule from creating a 
Disinformation Governance Board. DHS documents suggest that 
CISA wants to target issues as wide-ranging as racial justice, 
the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, and 
financial markets.
    The current CISA director has given us a clue as to what 
the ultimate goal might be. Listen to her.
    [Video of Jen Easterly, director, Cybersecurity and 
Infrastructure Security Agency, shown:]

Ms. Easterly. If you think about it, you know, our mission is critical 
infrastructure. The most important critical infrastructure--excuse me, 
critical infrastructure there is, is our cognitive infrastructure. And 
so building that resilience is, you know, part of the mission set, in 
my view.

    [End of video.]
    Mr. Bishop. George Orwell called and he wants his dystopian 
future back.
    I'm gravely concerned with CISA's efforts in this space. 
How on Earth was this censorship laundering enterprise allowed 
to metastasize? Where are the civil liberties protectors within 
DHS and what are they doing?
    It is obvious that there has been an abject failure of 
leadership within DHS to allow this expanded role of this 
nature to occur.
    This scheme of censorship by proxy represents an attempt by 
the Government to accomplish, indirectly and in secret, what it 
would not have the power to do openly. It should give all 
Americans who care about civil liberties, who care about 
freedom of speech and association, great pause.
    I look forward to the testimony today. I thank you all for 
joining us.
    [The prepared statement of Chairman Bishop follows:]
                    Statement of Chairman Dan Bishop
                              May 11, 2023
    Good afternoon and welcome to the Subcommittee on Oversight, 
Investigations, and Accountability's hearing titled, ``Censorship 
Laundering: How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Enables the 
Silencing of Dissent.''
    Today's hearing will examine the Department of Homeland Security's 
role as the nerve center of the Government's scheme to censor the on-
line voices of millions of Americans, laundering its efforts through a 
veil of ostensibly independent non-governmental organizations.
    Freedom of speech and open debate are essential features of a free 
society. Efforts to censor public discourse under the guise of 
countering misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (MDM) 
threaten this fundamental right.
    To clarify, no one is arguing that hacking voting machines or 
posting incorrect voting locations to prevent people from voting is 
acceptable.
    This committee recognizes that CISA has a monumental task in front 
of them and supports CISA's critical mission to secure our Federal 
networks and critical infrastructure.
    But, as our witnesses today will attest, CISA has deviated from 
this core mission and risks losing the trust of Congress, the American 
people, and its vital private-sector partners. What was initially a 
limited effort to counter foreign disinformation on elections has 
metastasized into a sprawling effort that directly or indirectly 
censors Americans' discourse and debate that are the hallmark of our 
democracy.
             the rise of the censorship laundering complex
    In 2018, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency 
(CISA) was charged with protecting election infrastructure, which CISA 
decided unilaterally included countering election misinformation from 
foreign malign actors.
    By the 2020 elections, mission creep found CISA pivoting away from 
foreign sources to focus on domestic ``misinformation.'' But the 
Government knew this would raise huge Constitutional concerns, so it 
helped create nongovernmental entities such as the Election Integrity 
Project (EIP) to do for the Government what the Government could not do 
on its own.
    And they knew it, listen to the head of EIP:

``This is not because CISA didn't care about disinformation but at the 
time they lacked both kind-of the funding and the legal authorizations 
to go do the kinds of work that would be necessary to truly understand 
how election disinformation was operating. So because of the feedback 
and the ideas from this group, we were able to pull together pretty 
quickly a project between these four different institutions [e.g., EIP] 
to try to fill the gap of the things that the Government could not do 
themselves.''\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ Alex Stamos, leader of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) 
https://rumble.com/v1kp8r9-eip-and-cisa-unclear-legal-authorities.html 
[At 0:00--0:27].

    So Government supported and funded NGO's ``to try to fill the gap 
of the things the Government could not do themselves''--That is just 
incredible.
                          so what did they do?
    In a manner of a few months, CISA helped set up this censorship 
infrastructure. CISA acted as a ``switchboard''--their words--to flag 
what they called misinformation and notify social media platforms who 
could ``independently'' decide whether to remove or modify the content.
    All told, during the 2020 election, this scheme resulted in
   859 million tweets collected for ``misinformation'' 
        analysis;
   22 million tweets and retweets categorized as 
        ``misinformation'' subject to censorship;
   21 Twitter users--Americans--identified and stigmatized as 
        ``the most prominent repeat spreaders [of disinformation]'' all 
        of whom were on the political right.
    And it's not just for elections. The same network using the same 
tools censored dozens of purportedly false COVID-19 narratives, many of 
which have recently been acknowledged as being true.
                         where is this headed?
    What is stopping DHS from overreaching its jurisdiction again to 
censor more Americans on whatever it deems ``critical infrastructure.'' 
In fact, who can say that it's not being done right now?
    We know DHS wants to expand this activity. Just last year they 
tried, and thankfully failed, to create a Disinformation Governance 
Board. DHS documents suggest CISA wants to target issues as wide-
ranging as racial justice, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and 
financial markets.
    The current CISA director has given us a clue as to what the 
ultimate goal might be:

``If you think about it, you know our mission is critical 
infrastructure. The most important critical infrastructure there is, is 
our cognitive infrastructure. And so building that resilience is you 
know part of the mission set in my view.''\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ Fireside chat with Jen Easterly, from The Tortoise Cyber Summit 
(30 September 2021--confirm) https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=vox8zYvVQjc&t=33s [At 18:10--18:27].

    George Orwell called, he wants his dystopian future back.
                               conclusion
    I am gravely concerned with CISA's efforts in this space. How on 
earth was this censorship-laundering enterprise allowed to metastasize? 
Where are the civil liberties protectors within DHS?
    It is obvious that there has been some abject failure of leadership 
within DHS to allow this type of behavior to occur.
    This scheme of censorship by proxy represents an attempt by the 
Government to accomplish indirectly and in secret what it would not 
have the power to do openly. It should give all Americans who care 
about civil liberties pause.
    I look forward to the testimony today. Thank you all for joining 
today.

    Mr. Bishop. I now recognize the Ranking Member, the 
gentleman from Maryland, Mr. Ivey, for his opening statement.
    Mr. Ivey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I welcome all the witnesses. Good afternoon.
    I'd like to take a moment to express my condolences for the 
families of the 8 people who were killed and at least 10 who 
were injured when an SUV deliberately slammed into a crowd at a 
city bus stop near a shelter for migrants in Brownsville, 
Texas.
    I would also like to acknowledge the tragic act of targeted 
violence at an outlet mall that left 8 people dead, including 3 
children and 7 injured in Allen, Texas.
    Texas is 1 of 2 states in the United States that have seen 
17 mass shootings so far this year.
    I want to say with respect to this hearing, I had initially 
thought that the focus of the hearing would be on--because it 
is the Homeland Security Committee--dealing with false 
information, misinformation, disinformation that is aimed at--
frequently by foreign parties, but not solely, we have domestic 
issues as well--disinformation and false information that is 
aimed at undermining the United States and creating additional 
problems for the United States to be used against us.
    Some of that is domestic. Certainly, with respect to 
President Trump and the election denial issues, I thought that 
that might be the kind of thing we would talk about, since it 
represented a fundamental threat to democracy. It's still on-
going, I guess, as we saw on CNN last night. He's still saying 
that he won the election.
    But from the information standpoint, the lead-up to the 
election was the President at the time and many of his 
representatives in the White House and colleagues in the 
Republican Party saying basically that if he lost the election 
it would be because it was stolen.
    Then we know that, based on the investigation that's been 
going on in Georgia and other places, that he called the 
Georgia secretary of state, Mr. Raffensperger, and pressured 
him to find, quote/unquote, find 11,780 votes so he could claim 
victory.
    We have other variations of that too. We've got even people 
here in Congress who can't bring themselves to admit that 
President Trump didn't win the election even though there are 
courts in those States that have already declared that there 
was no fraud or theft of the election in those States.
    We have on-going variations of that, for example, in 
Arizona. I guess Ms. Lake is still saying that the election was 
stolen from her even though that it's clear, according to the 
officials in the State, that that was not the case.
    Also, I thought that we might take a look at other issues 
of misinformation and disinformation. For example, this 
committee has heard frequent testimony about the issues of the 
Sinaloa Cartel using misinformation, disinformation, false 
information with respect to the United States and with respect 
to migrants who might want to come to the United States, to 
trick them into thinking that they can come here and find work 
easily or whatever in order to bring them to the country.
    Then frequently, my colleagues suggest, that they use them 
as then mules to bring drugs into the country, and then also 
might use them--and we're aware of this as well--to trap them 
in work or sexual prostitution and other activities. But 
they're using misinformation and disinformation to encourage 
them to come.
    One of the things that DHS has been, I think, trying to 
figure out how to do correctly and more extensively is to get 
the message out to those people in those countries that they 
shouldn't come to the United States; in other words, to fight 
against the disinformation that the cartel is pushing.
    We have examples in the United States. We can go through 
the active shooter mass killing scenarios at some point if we 
want. But many of these are lone-wolf individuals who have been 
hopefully tricked, but maybe that's just the way they viewed 
it, into believing that they should follow principles of Nazism 
or white supremacy or other lines like that.
    That leads them to become active shooters. Usually they act 
alone, they're lone wolves. But I think frequently we've seen 
in the aftermath of these killings the statements they make on-
line about their beliefs, and many of them, especially those 
who have been drawn into terrorism, the information that 
they've got that persuaded them to become involved in terrorism 
in the United States. And that we need to try and find ways to 
address that in the United States so we can quell that effort 
to turn people against us in our own country.
    Then we have, with respect to the January 6 rioters, we've 
got on-going misinformation and false information about these 
people being peaceful protesters or tourists even, even though 
I think it's clear--I think they've got 650 people-plus have 
been convicted of breaking the law on that day, some as serious 
as seditious conspiracy.
    We've got domestic groups like the Oath Keepers and the 
Proud Boys, who actually they just were convicted a few days 
ago and were spewing this kind of misinformation as well. 
Clearly, it creates a domestic threat to us that I thought we 
could take a look at from the standpoint of misinformation and 
disinformation.
    Then there was Russia, and with respect to their thinking 
about it. As they were preparing to invade Ukraine, they tried 
to do false flag information and information that was 
misleading, I think in an effort primarily to try and shatter 
the NATO coalition. And we took steps.
    I thought the Biden administration handled that well, 
especially by doing preemptive releases of information that we 
gathered, the reconnaissance that we gathered through our 
foreign assets and assistance and also our domestic agencies, 
in order to show that what the Russians were putting out was 
false information. That was critically important because it 
helped to preserve the NATO coalition in the war against 
Ukraine.
    I thought that those were the kind of things we were going 
to talk about. I guess, Ms. Miller-Idriss, I guess you are 
going to talk some about that.
    With respect to the censorship issue--which is fine. We can 
address it, I suppose. Although I'll note that, even though 
it's an important issue, it's not really primarily within our 
jurisdiction, which is why the Judiciary Committee already had 
a hearing on this, I think, dealing with some of the same 
issues. I guess we'll get into the Twitter Files and the like 
in a few minutes.
    I believe Section 230 was referenced in maybe your 
testimony, Mr. Turley, with respect to the points that you want 
to make, and that's fine.
    But the censorship issue, which we can talk about, is kind-
of tangential to the primary mission of this committee, in my 
view, which is protecting the homeland. I think that's why, in 
large part, those issues have been separated out from our 
jurisdiction here in the Congress and given to the Judiciary 
Committee and, to some extent, Energy and Commerce, which also 
had a hearing on this too.
    We can talk about those issues. But for the witnesses, to 
the extent you're up for it, one of the things I will be asking 
you is how do we try and deal with the sort of issues that I 
just mentioned.
    I think, Mr. Turley, you reference in your testimony--I 
want to say it was on page 11--that you recognize that there 
are problems that can come from disinformation. The focus of 
your testimony and your paper is on censorship, but I do want 
to hear, though, with respect to dealing with these issues, how 
do we address those? Some of those could be the same topics 
that we just raised.
    I think Ms. Miller-Idriss will say--and I share this view--
that censorship isn't the way to address those national 
security issues and domestic security issues. We need to try 
and find a way to address the misinformation and false 
information, frequently by using counter-pushes on information 
and the like, which I thought was what the board was set up to 
do.
    We'll talk about Nina Jankowicz at some length later in the 
hearing today too. But I hope we can talk about those issues as 
well.
    Mr. Turley, I don't know if you testified in the Judiciary 
Committee previously on this issue--you did. OK. So I 
appreciate your views on that.
    Gentlemen, I know you have strong views about what happened 
to you personally with respect to that issue.
    But I do hope that we'll find a way to talk about the 
homeland security angles of these issues and what we need to do 
to protect ourselves and our citizens from false information 
that is being used against us as a Nation and is creating 
domestic and foreign relations problems for us.
    With that, I yield back.
    [The statement of Ranking Member Ivey follows:]
                 Statement of Ranking Member Glenn Ivey
                              May 11, 2023
    I would like to take a moment to express my deepest condolences for 
the 8 people who were killed and at least 10 injured when an SUV 
deliberately slammed into a crowd at a city bus stop near a shelter for 
migrants in Brownsville, Texas.
    I would also like to acknowledge the tragic act of targeted 
violence at an outlet mall that left 8 people dead, including 3 
children and 7 injured in Allen, Texas. Texas is 1 of 2 States in the 
United States that has seen 17 mass shootings so far this year.
    I'm heartened that next week, this subcommittee will be discussing 
politically-motivated violence since the Texas shooter wore a ``right-
wing death squad'' patch and had potential ties to white supremacist 
and extremist groups. Such violence can be stoked by misinformation, 
disinformation, and mal-information (MDM)--the topic of this 
afternoon's hearing.
    I certainly think it is critical that we look at the impact of 
false information on our country. For example, election denialism 
pushed our democracy to the brink in 2020. It led former President 
Trump to falsely claim that he had actually won the Presidential 
election. And to call election officials like Georgia Secretary of 
State Brad Raffensperger to pressure him into ``find[ing] 11,780 
votes'' so he could claim victory. President Trump wasted taxpayer 
dollars on unnecessary recounts.
    Worse still, it's an on-going problem nationally, election 
officials across the country are now planning public education 
campaigns so the public is harder to fool with these kinds of false 
election claims. We still have people here in Congress, on this 
committee no less, who cannot bring themselves to admit that Trump lost 
fair and square--even though they represent States in which Federal 
judges (some of them Trump appointees) have expressly found that the 
elections were not stolen and that the elections were fair and 
accurate.
    Donald Trump also created what I call verdict denialism, which 
undermines the rule of law. He's already started saying that the jury's 
verdict that he sexually assaulted Jean Carroll is a ``disgrace'', and 
that the $5 million award is somehow unfair. This is just another one 
of his endless ``witch hunt'' claims, even though judges keep rejecting 
his denials and more indictments are likely to come.
    He's not alone. Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been charged for 
defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors out of $25 million dollars, 
under the false pretense that all the monies raised for the ``We Build 
the Wall'' campaign would be spent constructing the U.S.-Mexico border 
wall.
    Then there is Alex Jones, who used his media empire to say that the 
massacre at Sandy Hook was staged by Democrats and that the grieving 
parents were actually lying. He was told by a jury that he was the one 
actually telling the lies. But he denies the verdict and ducks paying 
over $1 billion in damages claims.
    Then there are my colleagues and conservatives who still claim that 
January 6 rioters were merely tourists. That they were merely peaceful 
protestors, even though 5 officers died and countless more were 
injured. More than 1,000 of those supposedly peaceful protestors have 
been charged, 541 have pleaded guilty, and 14 have been convicted or 
pleaded guilty of seditious conspiracy (basically an attempt to 
overthrow the 2020 election). This is the kind of false information 
that has been rejected by countless judges and juries, but the 
falsehoods continue to be pushed. Even by my colleagues who know 
better.
    Let's move on to the false and misleading information issued before 
Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia's goal was to splinter the NATO 
coalition so it could attack Ukraine with impunity. Fortunately, the 
United States countered the false information with reconnaissance that 
showed the world that the Russians were lying, which held the coalition 
together and gave Ukraine the international support it needed to impose 
repeated defeats on the supposedly superior Russian military. This is 
the kind of capability we need to meet the international threats that 
we face as a Nation.
    We also need to bolster our ability to fend off false information 
from other dangerous actors in the world, including China and the drug 
cartels who are flooding America with fentanyl. This is the kind of 
focus that the House Homeland Security Committee should have. 
Unfortunately, it appears that Republicans do not want to focus on 
these dangers to our country.
    When it comes to protecting our homeland, we all have an interest 
in ensuring that the public has access to the accurate information they 
need to keep their communities safe. I am looking forward to hearing 
from the Democratic witness, Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who will 
provide this subcommittee with information on preventative approaches 
to combatting misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information.

    Mr. Bishop. Thank you, Ranking Member Ivey.
    Other Members of the committee are reminded that opening 
statements may be submitted for the record.
    [The statement of Ranking Member Thompson follows:]
             Statement of Ranking Member Bennie G. Thompson
                              May 11, 2023
    I wholeheartedly agree with Ranking Member Ivey about how critical 
it is that we examine the impact of false information on our Nation. 
The spread of misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information--
including that tied to extremism--has been growing on-line, 
particularly on social media, where there are little to no guardrails 
to stop it. Unfortunately, false information and extremism don't just 
stay on-line. They have real-world, often dangerous, and even violent 
consequences.
    So, let's discuss how the rampant spread of false information has 
diminished public confidence in our democratic institutions and why 
there is an appropriate role for DHS to counter disinformation when 
carrying out its mission.
    Disinformation regarding the 2020 Presidential election outcome led 
to a violent attack against the Capitol aimed at preventing the 
peaceful, lawful transfer of power.
    Disinformation has similarly undermined the response to the COVID-
19 pandemic, frustrated disaster relief efforts, and exacerbated 
political and social divisions.
    When discussing disinformation, Republican Members might want to 
look inward and at their own colleagues. Those on the other side have 
spread lies about the integrity of our elections, promoted falsehoods 
surrounding the COVID pandemic, called climate change a hoax, and 
perpetuated disinformation about the border smugglers to line their 
pockets, just to name a few.
    Now, instead of using this subcommittee to focus on real challenges 
facing DHS, they want to discuss the defunct DHS Disinformation 
Governance Board. Republicans have spent more time discussing the Board 
than it actually existed.
    DHS announced the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, 
paused the Board in May, and dissolved it in August. The idea behind 
the Board was important--to identify disinformation that threatens the 
homeland and disseminate accurate information to DHS components and 
other stakeholders. Indeed, even though the Board was dissolved, the 
Homeland Security Advisory Council and the Office of Inspector General 
both underscored the legitimacy and criticality of DHS efforts to 
address inaccurate information that may undermine its mission of 
protecting the homeland.
    The Department must be able to identify, analyze, and, where 
necessary, address certain inaccurate information that could undermine 
public safety and manipulate the American public, while ensuring 
transparency and protecting civil liberties. It is imperative that the 
Department continue to exercise its authorities to make timely and 
accurate information regarding critical homeland security matters 
available to the public. This responsibility is an outgrowth of DHS's 
longstanding efforts at enhancing homeland security information sharing 
stemming from the breakdowns leading to 9/11.
    I hope today's hearing will examine solutions to the challenges DHS 
is encountering and how Congress can provide the resources and tools 
needed to protect our homeland.

    Mr. Bishop. I'm pleased to have a distinguished panel of 
witnesses before us today on this very important topic. I ask 
the witnesses please to stand and raise your right hand.
    [Witnesses sworn.]
    Mr. Bishop. Thank you. Please be seated.
    Let the record reflect that the witnesses have answered in 
the affirmative.
    I'd now like to formally introduce our witnesses.
    Mr. Ben Weingarten is an investigative journalist and 
columnist.
    Dr. Martin Kulldorff is an epidemiologist and 
biostatistician and a professor of medicine on leave at Harvard 
University.
    Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor at the School of 
Public Affairs and School of Education at American University.
    Mr. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Chair for Public 
Interest Law at George Washington University.
    I thank the witnesses for being here today.
    The Chair will now recognize each witness for oral 
statements. Each oral statement will be limited to 5 minutes, 
but submitted written statements by witnesses will appear in 
the hearing record in their entirety.
    I now recognize Mr. Weingarten for 5 minutes for his 
opening statement.

STATEMENT OF BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST AND 
                           COLUMNIST

    Mr. Weingarten. Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member Ivey, and 
Members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to 
testify.
    Government's first charge is to defend the life and limb of 
the governed. DHS and CISA have vital roles to play in this 
regard. Because their mission is so critical, we are compelled 
to scrutinize them in good faith. I offer today's testimony in 
this spirit.
    Our Republic rests on the inalienable right to free speech. 
That right is under assault by those working to toss their 
political foes into the digital gulag in defense of our 
democracy.
    Disturbingly, the Federal Government itself appears to be a 
key culprit. Overwhelming evidence suggests Federal agencies, 
top White House officials, and lawmakers, colluding with big 
tech and often Government-coordinated and -funded 
counterdisinformation groups, have imposed a mass public-
private censorship regime on the American people.
    This regime has suppressed opinions that diverge from its 
orthodoxy and even facts inconvenient to its agenda on an ever-
growing number of topics, starting with elections, moving to 
COVID-19, and now covering many other contested issues, all 
under the guise of national security and public health.
    CISA is core to these efforts. CISA has served as a 
censorship conductor, driving regular meetings between security 
agencies and social media companies aimed at encouraging the 
platforms to combat purported mis- and disinformation; that is, 
to censor disfavored speech, as the Government so deems it and 
by the Government that regulates them, and they have.
    CISA has served as a censorship switchboard, in its words, 
collecting purported misinformation from Government and non-
Government actors in the form of tweets, YouTube videos, and 
even private Facebook messages, and relaying the flagged 
content to the platforms to squelch it.
    CISA has served as an architect of the broader public-
private censorship regime, helping originate, consult, network, 
and partner with often Government-linked third parties who 
themselves serve as First Amendment-circumventing, mass 
surveillance, and mass censorship enterprises.
    These systematic speech-stifling efforts, often targeting 
core political speech and intensifying during elections, seem 
tantamount to a conspiracy to violate the First Amendment and 
running domestic election interference. In short, we've 
unwittingly been paying unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats 
to silence ourselves.
    We're told these speech police are pursuing thought crimes 
for our own good. Authorities say MDM, mis-, dis-, and 
malinformation, fuels extremism and, therefore, that it must be 
purged. They ask us to ignore the selective and cynical linking 
of speech they disapprove of to terror, and they allied their 
mandate to suppress truth, malinformation being based on fact, 
by CISA's own definition, but the intent or impact of which our 
betters disapprove of.
    Never discussed are questions like: Who determines what 
constitutes MDM? Should it be the state, which itself has cast 
as MDM that which it later acknowledged was settled science, or 
we the people?
    If the state justifies speech regulation on national 
security or public health grounds, what are the standards for 
determining when wrong-think is sufficiently dangerous to rise 
to the level of censorship?
    If skepticism about mail-in balloting, which Jimmy Carter 
and The New York Times once shared, or skepticism about COVID 
policies that, if more widely heard, might have saved lives and 
liberties, amount to violent extremist threats to critical 
infrastructure, as DHS has indicated, making such speech ripe 
for suppression, what about anti-cop sentiment or pro-abortion 
sentiment or radical environmentalist sentiment?
    If wrong-think must be verboten, why stop at censoring it 
on social media? Why not pull every TV network that propagates 
wrong-think off the air, or review every text in every library 
and bookstore for wrong-think and burn the offending titles?
    Why not censor wrong-thinkers' chats and emails? Why not 
ban them from the internet and suspend their mail service 
altogether? While we're at it, why not make it illegal for 
wrong-thinkers to possess pens and pads too?
    Would proponents of the censorship regime trust their worst 
political foes with these powers? We may believe our fellow 
Americans hold bad ideas, if not ideas that are plain wrong. 
But the worst idea of all is that Government should be the 
arbiter of what we're allowed to speak and hear.
    We're a free people capable of judging ideas on their 
merits, citizens, not subjects. Eviscerating the First 
Amendment will neither make us more democratic nor more safe. 
It would be the stuff of tyranny.
    Congress has a responsibility to stand athwart history 
yelling: Stop! With another election season looming, censorship 
tools likely becoming more powerful, and the censorship 
regime's ambitions only growing while it stonewalls and scrubs 
evidence of its past doings, this subcommittee's oversight 
efforts are most urgent.
    This body should endeavor to fully expose DHS's role in 
censorship, past and present and directly and by proxy, curtail 
funding, implement legislative remedies, and hold accountable 
all those who engaged in unconstitutional acts in connection 
therewith.
    Thank you, and I look forward to taking your questions.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Weingarten follows:]
               Prepared Statement of Benjamin Weingarten
                              May 11, 2023
                            i. introduction
    Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member Ivey, and Members of the 
subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.\1\ It is 
an honor and a privilege to appear before you to discuss the Department 
of Homeland Security's (DHS) enabling of the silencing of dissent.
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    \1\ I appear today on my own behalf, and my views do not 
necessarily reflect those of the media or other organizations with 
which I am affiliated.
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    Government's first charge is to defend the life and limb of the 
governed. DHS generally, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure 
Security Agency (CISA) specifically, have vital roles to play in this 
regard. Given the criticality of their mission to protect the homeland, 
these agencies must be held to exacting standards. Should they 
experience mission creep, in so doing wielding powers in ways violative 
of the Constitutional rights they are meant to secure for all 
Americans, it compels good faith scrutiny. I offer today's testimony in 
this spirit.
    Our republic rests on the inalienable right to free speech. That 
right is currently under assault by those working to consign their 
political foes to the digital gulag in defense of ``our democracy.'' 
Disturbingly, the Federal Government itself appears to be a key 
culprit. Overwhelming evidence \2\ suggests that Federal agencies--led 
by, among others, CISA,\3\ \4\--buoyed by senior Executive branch 
officials and lawmakers, colluding with Big Tech, and a coterie of 
often Government-coordinated and Government-funded \5\ ``counter-
disinformation'' organizations, have imposed nothing less than a mass 
public-private censorship \6\ regime on the American people.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ See generally Missouri v. Biden and Special Assistant Attorney 
General for the Louisiana Department of Justice D. John Sauer's related 
testimony before the House Judiciary Committee's Weaponization 
Subcommittee at https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/
republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf; 
Hines v. Stamos; and https://report.foundationforfreedomonline.com/11-
9-22.html.
    \3\ DHS's Inspector General has reported that the agency's Office 
of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) was also involved in counter-
disinformation efforts during the 2020 election season. Other DHS 
components in the last several years have also worked to ``counter 
disinformation originating from foreign and domestic sources.'' 
[Emphasis mine] See https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/
2022-08/OIG-22-58-Aug22.pdf#page=7. These efforts extend to other 
agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), 
Department of Justice (DOJ), and Office of the Director of National 
Intelligence (ODNI). Senior Executive branch officials and Federal 
lawmakers have also publicly and privately exerted pressure on social 
media companies to more aggressively police speech--at times under 
threat of adverse regulatory or legislative action. See generally 
Missouri v. Biden; https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-constitution-
from-big-tech-11610387105; https://www.newsweek.com/taxpayer-dollars-
must-not-fund-government-led-censorship-regime-opinion-1792828.
    \4\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-
had-strange-first-mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-
mirage-blue-shift-election-events/.
    \5\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/bidens-national-science-
foundation-has-pumped-nearly-40-million-into-social-media-censorship-
grants-and-contracts/.
    \6\ I use censorship herein broadly to encompass ``terminating 
speakers' accounts, deplatforming speakers, temporarily suspending 
accounts, imposing warnings or strikes against accounts to chill future 
disfavored speech, `shadow banning' speakers, demonetizing content or 
speakers, adjusting algorithms to suppress or de-emphasize speakers or 
messages, deboosting speakers or content, promoting or demoting 
content, placing warning labels or explanatory notes on content, 
suppressing content in other users' feeds, promoting negative comments 
on disfavored content, and requiring additional click-through(s) to 
access content, and other methods,'' as plaintiffs in Hines v. Stamos 
define it. See: https://aflegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Doc-1-
Complaint.pdf#page=9.
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    Authorities, led by the Federal Government, tell us this censorship 
is for our own good--that we suffer from a pandemic of ``mis-, dis-, 
and mal-information'' (MDM);\7\ that MDM fuels domestic terrorism;\8\ 
\9\ and therefore that America must undertake a whole-of-society effort 
to combat MDM.\10\ For its part, the censorship regime has equated MDM 
with Wrongthink--dissenting opinions from its orthodoxy, and even facts 
\11\ inconvenient to its agenda, on an ever-growing number of 
subjective and contentious issues.\12\ It conflates, cynically and 
purposefully, genuine political difference with ``extremism,'' which it 
links to danger and violence to justify speech policing.\13\ In turn, 
the regime has surveilled the wide expanse of the digital public square 
to identify such Wrongthink, and proceeded to suppress it under guise 
of national security and public health.\14\
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    \7\ CISA has defined ``Misinformation'' as that which ``is false, 
but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.'' It has 
defined ``Disinformation'' as that which ``is deliberately created to 
mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or 
country.'' It has defined ``Malinformation'' as that which ``is based 
on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.'' 
See: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/mdm-
incident-response-guide_508.pdf. Setting aside the question of who is 
to be the arbiter of truth in CISA's MDM paradigm, on what grounds, and 
whether and to what extent Government ought to intervene accordingly, 
the matter of intent baked into these definitions makes MDM a largely 
subjective concept.
    \8\ https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-
system-bulletin-february-07-2022.
    \9\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 189520.268.0.pdf#page=88.
    \10\ See for example the Biden administration's ``National Strategy 
for Countering Domestic Terrorism'' at https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2021/06/National-Strategy-for-Countering-Domestic-
Terrorism.pdf.
    \11\ https://nypost.com/2023/03/17/private-federal-censorship-
machine-targeted-true-misinformation/.
    \12\ The targeting began largely with a focus on skepticism of the 
integrity and outcome of the 2020 election; it expanded to encompass 
derogatory views to those of Federal authorities--including those 
ultimately proving true and even known to be true contemporaneously--
concerning virtually every aspect of COVID-19, and particularly around 
mitigation efforts and their efficacy; since, Federal officials have 
shown their intent to expand such targeting to cover ``abortion, 
climate-related speech, `gendered disinformation,' economic policy, the 
financial services industry, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 
war in Ukraine, and other[]'' topics, per recent testimony from 
litigation counsel in Missouri v. Biden, Special Assistant Attorney 
General for the Louisiana Department of Justice D. John Sauer. See: 
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf.
    \13\ https://www.newsweek.com/biden-domestic-terror-strategy-
codifies-woke-war-wrongthink-opinion__1605341.
    \14\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-
had-strange-first-mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-
mirage-blue-shift-election-events/.
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    Notably, the public-private speech police have targeted, for 
example, skepticism about the integrity of mass mail-in balloting that 
used to be shared on a bipartisan basis and was never linked to 
``domestic violent extremism;''\15\ and skepticism about COVID-19 
mitigation efforts that often proved not only justified, but which in 
some instances, if more widely heard and understood, might have saved 
lives and liberties. Given authorities have asserted, but not 
necessarily established a clear and compelling nexus between the mere 
expression of such views and wide-spread or dire threats of violence--
and certainly not threats justifying suspension of the First Amendment 
to quell them, for which this non-lawyer witness finds little 
precedent; and given that authorities show little equivalent concern or 
zeal for suppressing a virtually limitless array of other views that 
can be linked to violence--anti-cop sentiment to attacks on law 
enforcement and widespread riots,\16\ pro-abortion sentiment to attacks 
on pro-life centers and threats to judges,\17\ environmentalist 
sentiment to attacks on relevant targets by eco-terrorists, etc.--this 
indicates the speech-muzzling is rooted in politics, not the public 
good. Understood in this light, the censorship regime's efforts start 
to look like they are intended more for its own benefit, than ours.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \15\ https://www.wsj.com/articles/heed-jimmy-carter-on-the-danger-
of-mail-in-voting-115865-57667.
    \16\ https://archive.is/SA9H1.
    \17\ https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/25/
frustrated_by_police_in- action_the_pro-
life_movement_takes_up_the_work_of_law_enforcement_877348.html.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The regime's systematic speech-stifling, targeting core political 
speech and intensifying during recent Federal election cycles, seems 
tantamount to a conspiracy to violate the First Amendment,\18\ 
viewpoint discrimination, and running domestic election interference--
ironically borne of claims of foreign election interference.
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    \18\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 189520.268.0.pdf#page=7.
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    In short, Americans have unknowingly and unwittingly been paying 
unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to, directly and by proxy, 
silence ourselves.
    CISA has been described as a ``nerve center'' of these Federal 
Government-led censorship efforts. It has served as a key facilitator 
of, and participant in, meetings between Federal authorities and 
technology companies aimed at encouraging the latter to combat 
purported misinformation and disinformation. It has served as a 
clearinghouse for social media content flagged for censorship by third 
parties--Governmental and non-Governmental--relaying the parties' 
censorship requests on to social media companies, and flagged perceived 
problematic speech for the platforms directly.\19\ And it has helped 
foster the development of the broader public-private censorship 
architecture through consulting, partnering with, and networking often 
Government-linked third-party organizations to themselves serve as 
First Amendment-circumventing,\20\ mass-surveillance and mass-
censorship clearinghouses for content flagged by, among others, 
Government partners.\21\ It is perhaps incalculable how many people 
have been bereft of their right to speak, and listen, by way of these 
censorship efforts--and at what cost.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \19\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 
189520.214.1_1.pdf#page=278.
    \20\ As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in 
Biden v. Knight, a private entity violates the First Amendment ``if the 
Government coerces or induces it to take action the Government itself 
would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful 
viewpoint.'' Further, ``The Government cannot accomplish through 
threats of adverse Government action what the Constitution prohibits it 
from doing directly.'' See: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/
20pdf/2009197_5ie6.pdf#page=11.
    \21\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.pdf- ?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2.
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    Remarkably, we would know little of such efforts were it not for a 
billionaire's decision to purchase a social media platform,\22\ and 
then empower a handful of journalists to expose the Government-tied 
censorship efforts in which it had been implicated;\23\ and the legal 
action of vigilant State attorneys general, who, alongside the 
silenced, sued implicated Federal authorities, and through discovery 
began to untangle this twisted censorship web.\24\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \22\ https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-completes-twitter-
takeover-11666918031.
    \23\ https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter.
    \24\ See Missouri v. Biden.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As its role in the censorship regime has started to come into 
focus, CISA has gone about scrubbing evidence of its associated 
efforts;\25\ it has reorganized related entities;\26\ and it has 
stonewalled Congressional investigators\27\--while maintaining that, as 
the agency's Director, Jen Easterly put it in recent Congressional 
testimony, ``We don't censor anything'' or ``flag anything for social 
media organizations at all.''\28\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \25\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/flash-report-dhs-
quietly-purges-cisa-mis-dis-and-malinformation-website-to-remove-
domestic-censorship-references-2/.
    \26\ https://www.racket.news/p/homeland-security-reorganizes-
appearing.
    \27\ https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2023-04-28-jdj-to-
easterly-cisa-subpoena-cover-letter.pdf.
    \28\ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnbWb5ZFN8s&t=4673s.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    It is hard to fully square this position with what we have learned 
to date. Congress can and should help resolve this seeming dispute. At 
minimum, the troubling evidence suggests the national security 
apparatus's apparent interest in Americans' speech warrants oversight, 
without which, if merited, there can be no accountability and reform. 
This subcommittee's engagement, therefore, alongside other committees 
with relevant jurisdiction,\29\ is most welcome and necessary. It is 
also most urgent, with the 2024 elections looming, censorship tools 
becoming more sophisticated and powerful,\30\ and the censorship 
regime's ambitions only growing--alongside its footprint.\31\ \32\ \33\
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    \29\ https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-
jordan-subpoenas-cdc-cisa-and-gec-documents-and-communications.
    \30\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/the-national-science-
foundations-convergence-accelerator-track-f-is-funding-domestic-
censorship-superweapons/.
    \31\ https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/
1651355243722973186?s=20.
    \32\ https://twitter.com/DFRLab/status/1654500447816654849?s=20.
    \33\ https://theintercept.com/2023/05/05/foreign-malign-influence-
center-disinformation/.
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    To help inform this subcommittee's efforts, I will briefly address 
how CISA came to take on a pivotal role in this censorship regime, 
detail its associated actions, and offer recommendations for further 
oversight.
 ii. how cisa became a ``nerve center'' of america's censorship regime
    The plaintiffs in the landmark pending case, Missouri v. Biden, 
allege, and have revealed a trove of information substantiating the 
claim that there is a ``massive, sprawling Federal `Censorship 
Enterprise,' which includes dozens of Federal officials across at least 
11 Federal agencies and components, who communicate with social-media 
platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of 
private speech on social media--all with the intent and effect of 
pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech 
that Federal officials disfavor,'' in violation of the First 
Amendment.\34\ The plaintiffs identify CISA specifically as a ``nerve 
center'' of Federal Government-led speech policing, which began in 
earnest in the run-up to the 2020 election.\35\
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    \34\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189- 520.268.0.pdf/.
    \35\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.pdf?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2.
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    Several key developments help to explain how a DHS sub-agency 
tasked with preventing cyber attacks and defending physical 
infrastructure would come to occupy a central role in this censorship 
effort. Among them are that: (i) Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential 
election. (ii) His victory came to be seen by many as being enabled by 
(a) Social media and (b) Russian interference on social media aimed at 
elevating Trump's candidacy. These developments would both escalate to 
a matter of national security ``content moderation''--a euphemism for 
speech regulation up to and including deplatforming--and fuel the 
creation of America's mass public-private censorship regime.\36\ (iii) 
In partial response, in January 2017 out-going DHS Secretary Jeh 
Johnson designated election infrastructure as a critical infrastructure 
subsector, putting elections ultimately under CISA's purview.\37\ \38\ 
(iv) That same year, the State Department established the Global 
Engagement Center (GEC), tasked with leading Federal efforts to 
``counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation 
efforts aimed at undermining United States national security 
interests.''\39\ The FBI also established its Foreign Influence Task 
Force (FITF) to ``identify and counteract malign foreign influence 
operations targeting the United States,'' with an explicit emphasis on 
voting and elections.\40\ (v) Following suit, in 2018 DHS stood up a 
Countering Foreign Influence Task Force comprised of CISA's Election 
Security Initiative division, and Office of Intelligence and Analysis 
(I&A) staff. Its purpose, according to a recent DHS Office of Inspector 
General (OIG) report, was to focus on ``election infrastructure 
disinformation.''\41\ (vi) On top of this counter-disinformation 
mobilization, certain Federal lawmakers increasingly chided social 
media platforms for dithering on ``content moderation,'' including but 
not exclusively pertaining to foreign adversaries.\42\ (vii) Amid the 
Government's growing counter-disinformation push, a constellation of 
sometimes state-funded non-Governmental counter-disinformation 
organizations grew alongside it.\43\
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    \36\ For a more comprehensive treatment on both the theory and 
practice of our censorship regime, see https://www.tabletmag.com/
sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-
looking-disinformation.
    \37\ See https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/01/06/statement-secretary-
johnson-designation-election-infrastructure-critical and https://
www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jjohnson-
032118.pdf. In the designation, Sec. Johnson describes election 
infrastructure as ``storage facilities, polling places, and centralized 
vote tabulations locations used to support the election process, and 
information and communications technology to include voter registration 
databases, voting machines, and other systems to manage the election 
process and report and display results on behalf of State and local 
governments.''
    \38\ https://www.cisa.gov/topics/election-security.
    \39\ https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/2943/
text.
    \40\ https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/the-fbi-launches-a-
combating-foreign-influence-webpage.
    \41\ https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2022-08/
OIG-22-58-Aug22.pdf#page=7.
    \42\ See https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/
1610372352872783872?s=20 and https://www.wsj.com/articles/save-the-
constitution-from-big-tech-11610387105.
    \43\ For an extensive accounting of the theory and practice behind 
this burgeoning disinformation industrial complex, see https://
www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-
century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation and https://
judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/
files/evo-media-document/shellenberger-testimony.pdf#page=8.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    This by no means exhaustive list of developments, combined with two 
shifts in the posture of key players within the looming censorship 
regime, would create the conditions for, and leave CISA uniquely 
positioned to serve as a linchpin of it. First, Federal authorities and 
their future private-sector partners \44\ would train their sights 
increasingly on domestic Wrongthinkers over foreign adversaries as key 
disinformation threat actors--or at minimum focus on the content of 
speech over the country of origin of the speaker. Second, they would 
begin to treat words critical of institutions as threats to those 
institutions.
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    \44\ https://rumble.com/v1gx8h7-dhss-foreign-to-domestic-
disinformation-switcheroo.html/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In CISA's case, under its first Director Chris Krebs, who served 
through the 2020 election cycle, that meant targeting speech dubious of 
election administration and outcomes as a threat to election 
infrastructure. Under his successor, infrastructure would come to 
comprise nearly every significant institution, and now, even our 
brains. Director Easterly would argue that the American mind--``our 
cognitive infrastructure''--is ``the most critical infrastructure,'' 
obligating authorities to ``protect'' such infrastructure.\45\ One way 
to do so would be through controlling the information space by 
suppressing disfavored narratives--hence the efforts she would take to 
``grow and strengthen my misinformation and disinformation team.''\46\ 
\47\
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    \45\ https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/580990-cyber-agency-
beefing-up-disinformation-misinformation-team/.
    \46\ Ibid.
    \47\ The Biden administration in fact would incorporate this view 
into its first-of-its-kind National Strategy for Countering Domestic 
Terrorism, in calling for Government to ``accelerat[e] work to contend 
with an information environment that challenges healthy democratic 
discourse'' as part of its effort to ``confront long-term contributors 
to domestic terrorism.'' See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/
uploads/2021/06/National-Strategy-for-Countering-Domestic-
Terrorism.pdf#page=29/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Accordingly, CISA would come to equate first the American public's 
skeptical tweets on subjects like mail-in voting with attacks on 
election infrastructure, and later a growing list of dissident views on 
other issues as threats to relevant infrastructure, and arrogate unto 
itself the power to neutralize the threats through helping orchestrate 
a public-private censorship regime.
            iii. cisa's leadership in the censorship regime
    In fact, CISA would not only help orchestrate widespread censorship 
efforts, but would actively participate in them. During the 2020 
election, and in some instances continuing and expanding thereafter, 
findings from Missouri v. Biden and additional supporting evidence 
demonstrate that CISA officials contribute to censorship efforts 
directly and by proxy.
CISA's Direct Censorship-Related Efforts
    Among other direct actions CISA officials have taken with respect 
to countering MDM, personnel:\48\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \48\ Since much of the available record details CISA activities 
prior to the 2022 midterm elections, it is not entirely clear in some 
instances whether certain activities persist. This only further 
underscores the need for Congressional oversight.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Convene and coordinate meetings between national security 
        and law enforcement agencies, and technology companies--
        including not just social media platforms Facebook/Meta, 
        Google, Twitter, and Reddit, but also Microsoft, Verizon Media, 
        Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Wikimedia Foundation \49\--aimed at 
        combating purported misinformation and disinformation. These 
        meetings occur more frequently in the run-up to elections.\50\ 
        CISA is party to at least five sets of recurring confabs with 
        social media platforms touching on MDM and/or policing of 
        speech on said platforms, separate and apart from the many 
        bilateral such meetings CISA hosts.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \49\ See https://twitter.com/MSFTIssues/status/
1293623288262987777?s=20. While much of this testimony focuses on the 
actions of social media platforms, the inclusion of other technology 
companies in conversations with U.S. Government agencies about MDM 
suggests oversight need be done on the actions of these companies in 
conjunction with the Federal Government as well.
    \50\ Officials from CISA, DHS's I&A division, ODNI, FITF, and other 
agencies attend the meetings. See: https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-
source/press-releases/212-3-proposed-findings-of-
fact.pdf?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=218.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     In 2020 meetings with social media companies, CISA and 
            other officials warned of potential foreign ``hack-and-
            leak'' operations to come during the election. Major social 
            media companies would proceed to censor the New York Post's 
            reporting on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop--
            indicating Biden family influence peddling--weeks from the 
            2020 Presidential election, on false grounds that it was 
            the product of such a ``hack-and-leak.''\51\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \51\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.- pdf?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=274.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     It has been reported that Government warnings about 
            ``hack-and-leaks'' led platforms to change their terms of 
            service in the run-up to the 2020 election to suppress 
            related content. In CISA-convened industry meetings, 
            content moderation policies are a regular topic, and CISA 
            regularly communicates with social media platforms about 
            such policies.\52\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \52\ https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf#page=18.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   ``Switchboard'' reports of purported misinformation and 
        disinformation from State and local authorities, among others, 
        beginning in 2018 and expanding through the 2020 election. 
        Switchboarding entails receiving and then forwarding reports of 
        offending content to social media platforms for censorship. 
        Officials did so without assessing whether the content came 
        from foreign or domestic speakers. Among other notable points 
        about these efforts:
     CISA staff switchboarded misinformation reports, for 
            example, flagging tweets for censorship alleging election 
            fraud, that ballots were not counted, and mail-in voting 
            was implemented to benefit Democrats. One such report 
            forwarded by a CISA official to Twitter called for ``swift 
            removal of . . . posts and continued monitoring of the 
            user's account'' because said user had ``claimed . . . that 
            mail-in voting is insecure,'' and that ``conspiracy 
            theories about election fraud are hard to discount.'' 
            Twitter reported back to CISA it had taken action pursuant 
            to its policy on Civic Integrity.\53\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \53\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 
189520.214.1_1.pdf#page=267.
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     Staffers also switchboarded misinformation reports 
            flagging obviously satirical social media accounts for 
            censorship, including one Colorado Twitter account with 56 
            followers ``UnOfficialCOgov.'' The user's biographical 
            information read: ``dm us your weed store location (hoes be 
            mad, but this is a parody account).''\54\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \54\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 189520.209.15.pdf#page=11.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     A CISA switchboard tracking spreadsheet from 2020 suggests 
            that in certain instances, officials from both CISA and DHS 
            I&A were the originators of flagged content ultimately 
            conveyed by CISA staff to social media companies for 
            review.\55\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \55\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 189520.214.35.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Switchboarding efforts at times would even touch on 
            private postings on social media platforms.\56\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \56\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.- pdf?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=271.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Social media companies would often report that they would 
            ``escalate'' CISA-switchboarded requests and revert to CISA 
            once addressed.\57\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \57\ Ibid.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Brief state officials about content CISA considers 
        misinformation, which those officials often then flag for 
        social media platforms for censorship; fact-check 
        ``misinformation'' reports for social media platforms;\58\ and 
        publish ``debunks of social-media narratives, knowing . . . 
        platforms will use this information to censor,'' per litigation 
        counsel in Missouri v. Biden.\59\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \58\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.- pdf?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=269.
    \59\ https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf#page=19.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Coordinate with public and private-sector partners, 
        including social media companies ``on a variety of projects to 
        build resilience against malicious information activities,'' as 
        well as supporting ``private-sector partners' COVID-19 response 
        efforts via regular reporting and analysis of key pandemic-
        related MDM trends.''\60\ This is part and parcel of what 
        CISA's Cybersecurity Advisory Committee has described as a 
        ``burgeoning MDM effort'' that includes ``directly engaging 
        with social media companies to flag MDM.''\61\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \60\ https://web.archive.org/web/20211231181148/ https://
www.cisa.gov/mdm.
    \61\ https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23175380/dhs-
cybersecurity-disinformation-meeting-minutes.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The coordination referenced above comes from a bulletin CISA posted 
on its website detailing the work of its MDM team--the successor to its 
Countering Foreign Influence Task Force. The creation of that team 
formally codified the transition that had already taken place during 
the 2020 election cycle, from a focus on foreign to domestic 
speech.\62\ In February 2023, CISA pulled down that site, redirecting 
viewers to a ``Foreign Influence Operations and Disinformation'' page 
that makes no mention of domestic actors. One can only speculate as to 
why CISA made this change.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \62\ https://web.archive.org/web/20211231181148/ https://
www.cisa.gov/mdm.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    CISA would also expand its focus to encompass not just MDM around 
elections, or COVID-19 vaccine efficacy under banner of defending 
public health infrastructure,\63\ but ``all types of disinformation, to 
be responsive to current events,'' according to an official quoted in 
an August 2022 DHS OIG Report.\64\ Evidence collected in Missouri v. 
Biden indicates CISA has been involved in combatting ``misinformation'' 
with respect to the on-going Russo-Ukrainian War,\65\ and on an 
initiative in conjunction with the Treasury Department to address MDM 
regarding the financial services industry.\66\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \63\ https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf#page=25.
    \64\ https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2022-08/
OIG-22-58-Aug22.pdf#page=9.
    \65\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.pdf- ?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=280.
    \66\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.pdf- ?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=283.
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    In a January 2023 deposition taken in connection with Missouri v. 
Biden, the chief of CISA's MDM Team, Brian Scully, asserted that his 
team had a mandate that was almost limitless, in pursuing MDM that 
could affect ``critical infrastructure in a number of ways,'' including 
causing ``reputational risk [that] could come about if the integrity or 
the public confidence in a particular sector was critical to that 
sector's functioning.''\67\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \67\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.pdf- ?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=282.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    It is also possible CISA's efforts have extended beyond social 
media companies, and perhaps the other technology companies with which 
it and other Federal agencies have regularly met in connection with 
combatting MDM. A June 2022 report from CISA's Cybsersecurity Advisory 
Committee Subcommittee on Protecting Critical Infrastructure from 
Misinformation and Disinformation (``MDM subcommittee'') suggests that 
CISA should approach the mis- and dis-information problem ``with the 
entire information ecosystem in view.'' This means focusing not just on 
social media platforms, but ``mainstream media, cable news, hyper-
partisan media, talk radio, and other on-line resources.''\68\ CISA 
would, as with its MDM webpage, scrap its MDM subcommittee, as first 
publicized in a late 2022 summary of an advisory board meeting.\69\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \68\ https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/
June%202022%20CSAC%20Re- commendations%20%E2%80%93%20MDM_0.pdf#page=2.
    \69\ https://www.racket.news/p/homeland-security-reorganizes-
appearing?utm_source=post-email-
title&publication_id=1042&post_id=110070633&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=e
mail.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As significant as CISA's MDM efforts have been, DHS's counter-
disinformation operations spread far beyond the sub-agency. According 
to the aforementioned August 2022 DHS OIG report, numerous components 
inside DHS have in recent years been targeting MDM foreign and 
domestic. What's more, the report details that DHS planned to target 
``inaccurate information'' on myriad topics including ``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.''\70\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \70\ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-
disinformation-dhs/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Corroborating the OIG Report, one document revealed in connection 
with Congressional inquiries into DHS's stunted Disinformation 
Governance Board (DGB) indicated that myriad ``DHS components are 
already engaged in countering disinformation,'' alongside ``excellent 
work being done by interagency partners, the private sector, and 
academia--particularly concerning identifying and analyzing 
disinformation,'' which ``DHS should leverage.''\71\ A subsequent 
memorandum would indicate that the DGB would ``support and coordinate . 
. . MDM work with other departments and agencies, the private sector, 
and non-Government actors.'' The purpose of creating the DGB, in other 
words, was not so much to establish a ``Ministry of Truth,'' but, as 
plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden aptly describe it, ``to impose a 
bureaucratic structure on the enormous censorship activities already 
occurring involving dozens of Federal officials and many Federal 
agencies''--that is, to oversee many such ministries.\72\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \71\ https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2022-06/
2022-06-07%20DOCS%20- 
ONLY%20CEG%20JH%20to%20DHS%20%28Disinformation%20Governance%20Board- 
%29%5B1%5D.pdf.
    \72\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 189520.268.0.pdf#page=106.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
CISA's Proxy Censorship-Related Efforts
    Not all of these ministries are to be found within the Federal 
Government. CISA officials coordinate and partner with non-Governmental 
entities who both mass-surveil social media content for purported MDM, 
and serve as clearinghouses for receipt of flagged content, which they 
then relay to social media platforms for censorship--in an apparent bid 
to circumvent the First Amendment via cut-out.
    CISA has primarily partnered with three non-Governmental entities, 
beginning during the 2020 election cycle, to facilitate the flow of 
problematic content for potential censorship to social media platforms: 
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) and its CISA-funded Election 
Infrastructure--Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC); and 
two consortia: The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), and a 
successor organization folding in additional partners, the Virality 
Project (VP).
    CIS is a nonprofit that collects and forwards reports of 
disinformation from State and local government officials to social 
media platforms, and which continued to do so during the 2022 election 
cycle.\73\ As CISA's switchboarding activities became too labor-
intensive for it, CISA would direct election officials to report 
content to be flagged for social media platforms to CIS. CISA would 
also help connect CIS, and various election official groups, with EIP.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \73\ https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf#page=19.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    EIP is a non-Governmental ``anti-disinformation'' consortium that 
was conceived by and created in consultation with CISA officials in the 
run-up to the 2020 election. Its stated purpose was to fill the 
``critical gap'' created by the fact no Federal agency ``has a focus 
on, or authority regarding, election misinformation originating from 
domestic sources within the United States.''\74\ That lack of 
``authority'' may have included both an inability for Government 
agencies, to access social media platform data--as EIP did--as well as 
``very real First Amendment questions'' regarding EIP's work, as a key 
player in the consortium, Renee DiResta, would acknowledge.\75\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \74\ https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-
Report.pdf#page=9.
    \75\ https://ago.mo.gov/docs/default-source/press-releases/212-3-
proposed-findings-of-fact.- pdf?sfvrsn=739f8cbf_2#page=265.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    EIP's four partner organizations, ``leading institutions focused on 
understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media 
landscape,''\76\ sharing pervasive ties to the Federal Government, 
include the:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \76\ https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-
Report.pdf#page=20.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO).--Founded in June 2019 
        by former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos, several 
        of SIO's students came up with the idea for EIP while serving 
        as CISA interns.\77\ Stamos serves on CISA's Cybersecurity 
        Advisory Committee. He and Chris Krebs, CISA's director through 
        the 2020 election, formed a consultancy in late 2020 called the 
        Krebs/Stamos Group. CISA's top election official through 2020, 
        Matt Masterson, who was involved in the establishment of EIP, 
        joined SIO as a fellow after leaving CISA in January 2021. 
        SIO's Research Manager, the aforementioned DiResta, served as a 
        Subject-Matter Expert for CISA's Cybersecurity Advisory 
        Committee's since-abolished MDM subcommittee.\78\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \77\ Ibid.
    \78\ https://www.racket.news/p/homeland-security-reorganizes-
appearing?r=5mz1&utm_cam- paign=post&utm_medium=web.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public.--
        Founded in December 2019, its cofounder Kate Starbird served as 
        the chairperson of the since-abolished MDM subcommittee--
        serving incidentally alongside former Twitter executive Vijaya 
        Gadde, a leader of its censorship efforts prior to her ouster 
        under new owner Elon Musk.\79\ UW's Center, along with SIO, 
        would share in a $3 million National Science Foundation grant 
        awarded in August 2021 to ``study ways to apply collaborative, 
        rapid-response research to mitigate on-line 
        disinformation.''\80\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \79\ https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/28/twitter-
vijaya-gadde-free-speech-policies-technology-social-media-429221.
    \80\ https://www.cip.uw.edu/2021/08/15/national-science-foundation-
uw-cip-misinformation-rapid-response-research/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab.--
        Founded in 2016, it receives substantial taxpayer funding from 
        a variety of agencies.\81\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \81\ https://www.google.com/url?q= https://
foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-had-strange-first-
mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-mirage-blue-shift-
election-events/
&source=gmail&ust=1683295935068000&usg=AOvVaw0KqPf31iTuGK3TncCZZwjc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Graphika.--Founded in 2013, it reportedly has historically 
        received funding from DARPA and the Defense Department's 
        Minerva Initiative.\82\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \82\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-
had-strange-first-mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-
mirage-blue-shift-election-events/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Collectively, these groups sought to ``fill the gap'' by creating a 
mass-surveillance and censorship-flagging platform aimed at ``content 
intended to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters as to 
election processes, or delegitimize election results without 
evidence.''\83\ In practice, this meant targeting for suppression 
speech dubious of an unprecedented election given the sweeping, 
pandemic-driven changes made to the voting system that cycle, whereby 
the razor-thin final results in key States did not materialize for 
days.\84\ EIP did so in part through lobbying social media platforms to 
adopt more aggressive content moderation policies around election 
rhetoric, and flagging relevant content including entire narratives via 
``tickets'' for suppression by social media platforms under their often 
EIP-influenced terms. EIP analysts--some 120 of whom worked on the 
project in the waning days of the 2020 election--both identified 
content for flagging via tickets, and incorporated requests from 
``trusted external stakeholders.''\85\ It lists three such Governmental 
stakeholders: CISA,\86\ CISA-backed EI-ISAC, and the State Department's 
GEC. EIP in fact connected ``Government partners'' with ``platform 
partners''--understood to be the social media companies--to enable the 
former to debunk flagged content directly for the latter.\87\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \83\ https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-
Report.pdf#page=23.
    \84\ Former Trump State Department Cyber official Mike Benz would 
observe that CISA, ``tasked with election security,'' via EIP ``also 
gained the power to censor any questions about election security.'' 
See: https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-had-
strange-first-mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-mirage-
blue-shift-election-events/.
    \85\ https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/2023-03/Sauer-Testimony.pdf#page=19.
    \86\ It is worth noting that CISA and EIP's relationship went both 
ways. At times, evidence suggests, CISA would forward reports of 
misinformation received directly from EIP on to social media platforms 
for their review.
    \87\ https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.- 189520.209.2.pdf#page=47.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Some raw numbers concerning EIP's efforts during the 2020 election 
cycle alone illustrate the size and scope of its effort. EIP:
   Collected 859 million tweets for ``misinformation'' 
        analysis.
   Flagged for Twitter tweets shared 22 million times 
        ultimately labeled ``misinformation,'' a disproportionate 
        percentage of which were dinged for ``delegitimization,''\88\ 
        which Twitter adopted as a standard for suppression.\89\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \88\ EIP cites as an example of delegitimization ``Claims of fraud 
or malfeasance with inaccurate or missing evidence.'' See: https://
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.209.2.pdf#page=25.
    \89\ Alex Stamos has challenged this characterization in terms of 
tweets EIP ensnared. The competing arguments can be seen here: https://
twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644110224150736897?s=20.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Influenced platforms to take action on 35 percent of all 
        URLs flagged--21 percent slapped with a warning label where 
        content remained visible, 13 percent removed, and 1 percent 
        ``soft-blocked'' with a warning one would have to bypass to 
        view the content.\90\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \90\ https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-
Report.pdf#page=57.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Pushed platforms to target dozens of ``misinformation 
        narratives'' for throttling.
   Impacted hundreds of millions of posts and videos across 
        major social media platforms via the terms of service policy 
        changes for which EIP lobbied. EIP members openly boasted that 
        technology companies would never have modified their terms 
        accordingly without EIP's insistence and ``huge regulatory 
        pressure'' from Government.\91\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \91\ https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-
had-strange-first-mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-
mirage-blue-shift-election-events/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Further demonstrating the interconnection between EIP and CISA, the 
group featured former CISA Director Chris Krebs at the launch seminar 
associated with the report in which it divulged some of these figures.
    Of note, EIP coded less than 1 percent of its tickets for having an 
element of foreign interference. EIP characterized all 21 of the ``most 
prominent repeat spreaders'' of election integrity ``misinformation'' 
on Twitter as ``conservative or right-wing.''\92\ Of the civil society 
groups that submitted tickets to the EIP, many had a left-leaning 
bent--including the DNC itself.\93\ None appear to have been right-
leaning.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \92\ https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-
Report.pdf#page=205.
    \93\ https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/DHS-
Censorship-Letter-11022022.pdf/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mike Benz, a former State Department Cyber official during the 
Trump administration, has found that many principals in EIP leadership 
were heavily invested in the idea that Russia interfered in the 2016 
Presidential election, to President Trump's benefit, and that they or 
the organizations with which they were affiliated were critical 
generally of Trump and Western populist movements. In an associated 
report, he concludes that given the backgrounds of EIP's principals, 
when originally conceived in June 2020 it should have been understood 
to be ``a partisan, powerfully connected political network, panicked 
that Americans might push back on the use of mail-in ballots months in 
the future,'' convened ``to stop that pushback from happening by 
unleashing censorship of the internet on a scale never before seen in 
American history.''\94\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \94\ https://www.google.com/url?q= https://
foundationforfreedomonline.com/dhs-censorship-agency-had-strange-first-
mission-banning-speech-that-casts-doubt-on-red-mirage-blue-shift-
election-events/
&source=gmail&ust=1683295935068000&usg=AOvVaw0KqPf31iTuGK3TncCZZwjc.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Though the EIP's efforts would re-emerge in the 2022 election, in 
the interim it also launched a successor effort called the Virality 
Project, targeting MDM spreading in relation to COVID-19, such as 
``narratives that questioned the safety, distribution, and 
effectiveness of the vaccines.'' Its leaders, including Stamos 
communicated with CISA officials about their efforts, as they did 
during the original EIP operation. DiResta would serve as principal 
executive editor of its final April 2022 report, and contributors 
included herself alongside Kate Starbird and Matt Masterson. Several 
current and former CISA interns are also listed as ``researchers and 
analysts'' who monitored social media platforms in connection with the 
project.
    The VP's stakeholders included Federal health agencies, working 
alongside social media platforms to combat, for example, vaccine-
related ``misinformation.'' All told, the Virality Project tracked 
content with 6.7 million engagements on social media per week--or over 
200 million during the 7 months over which the project transpired.
    Much of what the VP cast as ``misinformation'' included true facts 
to the extent they portrayed narratives with which the project's 
leaders--and certainly its Government partners--disapproved of, from 
reports of vaccine injuries to discussion of ``breakthrough'' cases and 
``natural immunity,'' to discussion of potential then-hypothetical 
vaccine mandates. VP particularly targeted the speech of ``health 
freedom'' groups, and like EIP, overwhelmingly targeted right-leaning 
figures.
                             iv. conclusion
    We may find much of the speech that social media platforms have 
suppressed in recent years under Government coercion, cajoling, and/or 
collusion to be wrongheaded or objectionable. But infinitely more 
wrongheaded, objectionable, and indeed dangerous for a free society 
than the proliferation of ``bad ideas'' is perhaps the worst idea of 
all: That Government should be the arbiter of what we are allowed to 
think and speak.
    The notion that to ensure the health and safety of the country, the 
public and private sectors must work together to silence those who 
express unauthorized opinions, that such opinions are to be treated as 
threats to an infinitely flexible definition of ``critical 
infrastructure,'' and those who hold them as actual or would-be 
domestic terrorists, is the stuff of tyranny.
    That the state itself has treated as dangerous MDM that which 
ultimately often has become settled science--indicating Government 
officials and their partners en masse should have been deplatformed 
themselves by their own standards--illustrates the folly of this 
project.
    To turn over to the state and its private sector ancillaries a 
monopoly on narrative would ultimately give these partners a monopoly 
on power, reducing us from citizens with agency to hapless subjects.
    We are a free people capable of evaluating information and ideas 
for ourselves to discern fact from fiction, and separate good ideas 
from bad.
    Historically, we would have held in utter contempt authorities who 
would suggest we are incapable of thinking for ourselves, and that for 
our own benefit, since the authorities know best, that they will do the 
thinking for us--while silencing those who dare dissent.
    No American should stand for it today.
    If, as the foregoing suggests, CISA, and perhaps other DHS 
components, have played an integral role in imposing a mass public-
private censorship regime on the American people, it is incumbent upon 
this and other relevant Congressional bodies to get to the bottom of 
it.
    This subcommittee can help develop a comprehensive picture of the 
``public'' side of the regime within DHS by using its oversight powers 
to, over a time line beginning from CISA's inception in November 2018, 
pursue the following questions:
   Which offices and personnel within CISA \95\ are or have 
        been engaged in social media censorship efforts, or related 
        efforts to impact any other part of the ``information 
        ecosystem'' as CISA has defined it?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \95\ Plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden assert that ``On information 
and belief, CISA maintains a number of task forces, working groups, and 
similar organizations as joint Government-private enterprises, which 
provide avenues for Government officials to push for censorship of 
disfavored viewpoints and speakers online.'' See: https://
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/- gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/
gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.268.0.pdf#page-87.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Which other DHS agencies, and/or Federal, State, county, and 
        local government entities have CISA coordinated with in 
        connection with social media censorship efforts, or related 
        efforts to impact any other part of the ``information 
        ecosystem'' as CISA has defined it?
   Which entities within DHS, independent of CISA, if any,\96\ 
        engaged in social media censorship efforts, or related efforts 
        to impact any other part of the ``information ecosystem'' as 
        CISA has defined it?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \96\ An August 10, 2022 DHS Office of Inspector General report 
indicates that several other DHS components have engaged over ``the 
last 3 years to counter disinformation originating from foreign and 
domestic sources.'' [Emphasis mine] See https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/
default/files/assets/2022-08/OIG-22-58-Aug22.pdf#page=10.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   What specific policies and practices has each DHS entity 
        developed and undertaken in connection with each respective 
        censorship effort?
   Is there a comprehensive list of all communications, 
        technology, media, educational, non-profit, and any other non-
        governmental agency with which DHS broadly engaged in fostering 
        its censorship efforts?
   What level of Federal funding has each DHS entity received 
        to carry out such censorship efforts?
   What level of Federal funding has each private-sector entity 
        with which DHS interacted in its censorship efforts received?
   What have been the qualitative and quantitative impacts of 
        such censorship efforts during periods leading up to and 
        immediately following the 2020 and 2022 elections?
   What censorship efforts are CISA and/or any other DHS 
        agencies engaging in at present, and/or planning for in 
        anticipation of the 2024 elections?
    Only with full transparency can Congress and the American people 
understand the full size and scope of this portion of the censorship 
regime and determine what if anything Congress ought to do about it--be 
it in terms of withholding funding, curtailing operations, and/or 
holding malefactors to account.
    If indeed we have had a mass public-private censorship regime 
foisted upon us, defunding, dismantling, and deterring Government 
officials from participating in, or funding such an apparatus ever 
again, would seem to be of the utmost importance.
    Congress should be commended for efforts already under way to 
prevent such behavior.\97\ I hope it will do more.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \97\ https://www.Congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/140/
text.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Once again, thank you for the honor of appearing before you to 
discuss these important issues, and I would be happy to answer any 
questions from the committee.

    Mr. Bishop. Thank you, Mr. Weingarten.
    I now recognize Dr. Kulldorff for 5 minutes for his opening 
statement.

   STATEMENT OF MARTIN KULLDORFF, PH.D., EPIDEMIOLOGIST AND 
                        BIOSTATISTICIAN

    Mr. Kulldorff. Thank you all for having me here.
    Censorship can be deadly. Freedom of speech is always 
important, but it is especially important during a national 
emergency, such as a pandemic. No authority is infallible. When 
a new virus emerges, it is impossible for politicians and 
public health officials to get everything right without 
listening to discussions between a wide cast of scientists with 
different ideas and expertise and thoughts.
    I'm an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a professor 
of medicine at Harvard on leave. For over two decades I've done 
research on the detection and monitoring of infectious disease 
outbreaks and on the safety evaluation of vaccines and drugs. I 
helped build the Nation's disease surveillance systems. Despite 
this, I was censored and blacklisted during the pandemic by 
Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook.
    In early 2020, we already knew from Wuhan data that there 
is more than a thousandfold difference in COVID mortality 
between the old and the young. During the pandemic, we failed 
to adequately protect older Americans while school closures and 
other lockdown measures generated enormous collateral public 
health damage that we now must live with, and die from, for 
years to come.
    During the spring of 2020, Sweden was the only major 
Western country to keep schools and daycare open for children 
ages 1 to 15. Among those 1.8 million children, there were zero 
COVID deaths and the COVID risk for teachers was less than the 
average of other professions.
    This showed that it was safe to keep schools open. It was 
important for America to know that, but in July 2020, a New 
England Journal of Medicine article on school closures did not 
even mention Sweden. That's like reporting on a new medical 
treatment without including information from the comparison 
control group.
    Unable to publish my thoughts about the pandemic in U.S. 
English-language media, in the summer of 2020 I used my Twitter 
account to share the Swedish data and argue for open schools. 
But in July 2020, Twitter put me on their ``trends blacklist'' 
to limit the reach of my open school posts.
    In October 2020, I authored the Great Barrington 
Declaration with two fellow epidemiologists. We argued for 
better protection of high-risk older people while keeping 
schools open and letting young people live more normal lives. 
This was shadow banned by Google and censored by Reddit. Our 
Facebook page was unpublished.
    In March 2021, Twitter censored a post when I wrote that, 
quote, ``Thinking that everybody must be vaccinated is as 
scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID 
vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their 
caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. 
Nor children.'' Twitter falsely claimed that the tweet was 
misleading and it could not be replied to, shared, or liked.
    We have known about infection-acquired immunity since the 
Athenian Plague in 430 BC, and the questioning, denial, and 
censoring of such natural immunity is the most stunning denial 
of a scientific fact during the pandemic--with deadly 
consequences.
    At a time when vaccines were in short supply, we were 
vaccinating young adults and people with natural immunity who 
did not need it before many older Americans whose lives could 
have been saved by it.
    Another example. Through randomized studies and reviews, we 
know that face masks provide only marginal or no protection 
against COVID. It is then dangerous to make older high-risk 
Americans believe that masks will protect them when they will 
not, as they may go to crowded restaurants or supermarkets 
thinking that their mask is keeping them safe.
    In May 2021, I was temporarily suspended by Twitter for 3 
weeks for writing that, ``Naively fooled to think that masks 
would protect them, some older high-risk people did not 
socially distance properly, and some died from COVID-19 because 
of it. Tragic. Public health officials/scientists must always 
be honest with the public.''
    In April 2021, I participated in a scientific roundtable 
hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This was censored by 
YouTube.
    Many nurses were infected while heroically taking care of 
COVID patients, and some of them were later fired for not 
taking a vaccine even though they had stronger immunity than 
the vaccinated. In October 2021, I wrote an article urging 
hospitals to hire instead of fire nurses with natural immunity, 
as they are the least likely to infect older frail patients. 
This was censored by LinkedIn.
    The primary victim of censorship is not me and others being 
censored, but the public. As politicians, to properly serve 
your constituents, you have both the right to hear from and the 
duty to listen to a range of scientists. The public also has 
that right.
    Censorship inevitably leads to self-censoring. Some of my 
public health colleagues do not speak up for fear of being 
censored, silenced, or slandered, like I was.
    When the Bill of Rights was written, Americans had lived 
through troubled times. They did not use that as an excuse for 
censorship. I think they understood that freedom of speech is 
especially important during difficult times when difficult 
decisions must be made.
    I hope that the 118th Congress is just as wise as the first 
Congress was when it adopted the First Amendment as part of the 
Bill of Rights.
    Thank you very much for listening.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Kulldorff follows:]
                 Prepared Statement of Martin Kulldorff
                        censorship can be deadly
    Censorship can be deadly. Freedom of speech is always important, 
but it is especially important during a national emergency such as a 
pandemic. No authority is infallible, and when a new virus emerges, it 
is impossible for politicians and public health officials to get things 
right without listening to discussions between a wide cast of 
scientists with different areas of expertise and thoughts.
    I am an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a professor of 
medicine at Harvard, on leave. For over two decades I have done 
research on the detection and monitoring of infectious disease 
outbreaks and on the safety evaluation of vaccines and drugs. I helped 
build the Nation's disease surveillance systems. Despite this, I was 
censored and blacklisted during the pandemic, by Twitter, LinkedIn, 
YouTube, and Facebook.
    In early 2020, we already knew from Wuhan data that there is more 
than a thousand-fold difference in COVID mortality between the old and 
the young.\1\ During the pandemic, we failed to adequately protect 
older Americans while school closures and other lockdown measures 
generated enormous collateral public health damage that we now must 
live with, and die from, for years to come.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ Kulldorff M. COVID-19 Counter Measures Should be Age Specific. 
LinkedIn, April 10, 2020.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    During the spring of 2020, Sweden was the only major Western 
country to keep schools and daycare open for children ages 1 to 15. 
Among those 1.8 million children, there were zero COVID deaths and the 
COVID risk for teachers were less than the average of other 
professions.\2\ This showed that it was safe to keep schools open. It 
was important for America to know that, but a July 2020 New England 
Journal of Medicine article on school closure did not even mention 
Sweden.\3\ That's like reporting on a new medical treatment without 
including information from the comparison control group.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ Public Health Agency of Sweden. COVID-19 in schoolchildren--A 
comparison between Finland and Sweden, July 7, 2020.
    \3\ Levinson M, Cevik M, Lipsitch M. Reopening Primary schools 
during the Pandemic. New England Journal of Medicine, July 29, 2020.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Unable to publish my thoughts about the pandemic in U.S. English 
language media, in the summer of 2020 I used my Twitter account to 
share the Swedish data and argue for open schools. But in July 2020, 
Twitter put me on their ``trends blacklist'' to limit the reach of my 
open school posts.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \4\ Bhattacharya J. What I discovered at Twitter headquarters, 
UnHerd, December 22, 2022.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In October 2020, I authored the Great Barrington Declaration with 
two fellow epidemiologists, Dr. Sunetra Gupta at Oxford and Dr. Jay 
Bhattacharya at Stanford.\5\ We argued for better protection of high-
risk older people while keeping schools open and letting young people 
live more normal lives. This was shadow banned by Google and censored 
by Reddit.\6\ After posting in favor of prioritizing the elderly for 
vaccination, our Facebook page was ``unpublished''. (Figure 1)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \5\ Bhattacharya J, Gupta S, Kulldorff M. Great Barrington 
Declaration, October 4, 2020.
    \6\ Young T. Why can't we talk about the Great Barrington 
Declaration? The Spectator, October 17, 2020.


    In March 2021, Twitter censored a post when I wrote that ``Thinking 
that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as 
thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older 
high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural 
infection do not need it. Nor children.'' Twitter falsely claimed that 
the tweet was misleading, and it could not be replied to, shared, or 
liked. We have known about infection-acquired immunity since the 
Athenian Plague in 430 B.C., and the questioning, denial, and censoring 
of such natural immunity is the most stunning denial of scientific 
facts during the pandemic. With deadly consequences. At a time when 
vaccines were in short supply, we were vaccinating young adults and 
people with natural immunity, who did not need it, before many older 
Americans who whose lives could have been saved by it. (Figure 2)


    Through randomized studies and reviews,\7\ \8\ we know that face 
masks provide only marginal or no protection against COVID. A 
randomized study in Denmark showed no significant benefit \9\ while a 
Yale University study conducted in Bangladesh showed a reduction 
between 0 and 18 percent.\10\ It is then dangerous to make older high-
risk Americans believe that masks will protect them when they will not, 
as they may go to crowded restaurants or supermarkets thinking that 
their mask is keeping them safe. In May 2021 I was temporarily 
suspended by Twitter for 3 weeks for writing that: ``Naively fooled to 
think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did 
not socially distance properly, and some died from COVID-19 because of 
it. Tragic. Public health officials/scientists must always be honest 
with the public''. (Figure 3)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \7\ Jefferson T, et al. Physical interventions to interrupt or 
reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Cochrane Library, January 30, 
2023.
    \8\ Liu AT, Prasad V, Darrow JJ. Evidence for Community Cloth Face 
Masking to Limit the Spread of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review, Cato 
Working Paper, November 8, 2021.
    \9\ Bundgaard H, et al. Effectiveness of Adding a Mask 
Recommendation to Oher Public Health Measures to prevent SARS-CoV-2 
Infection in Danish Mask Wearers: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Annals 
of Internal Medicine, November 18, 2020.
    \10\ Abaluck J, et al. Impact of community masking on COVID-19: A 
cluster-randomized trial in Bangladesh. Science, December 2, 2021.


    Twitter also censored me for quoting and linking to an article 
about masks written by an Associate Professor of Black Studies at the 
University of California. (Figure 4)


    In April 2021 I participated in a scientific roundtable hosted by 
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This roundtable was censored by YouTube 
after being posted by a CBS-affiliated television station in 
Florida.\11\ YouTube is owned by Google.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \11\ Wilson K, Ross A. YouTube removes video of DeSantis 
coronavirus roundtable. Tampa Bay Times, April 9, 2021.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Many nurses were infected while heroically taking care of COVID 
patients, and some of them were later fired for not taking a vaccine 
even though they had stronger immunity than the vaccinated. In October 
2021, I wrote an article urging hospitals to hire instead of fire 
nurses with natural immunity, as they are the least likely to infect 
older frail patients.\12\ That was censored by LinkedIn, which is owned 
by Microsoft.\13\ Hospitals and nursing homes could have better 
protected patients if they had actively hired personnel with infection-
acquired immunity. That would have saved lives.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \12\ Kulldorff M. Hospitals Should Hire, not Fire, Nurses with 
Natural Immunity. Brownstone Institute, October 1, 2021.
    \13\ Harvard Epidemiologist Censored by LinkedIn for Defending 
Healthcare Jobs. Brownstone Institute, October 4, 2021.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    LinkedIn censored me multiple times, one other example being a 
repost of an interview with the chief epidemiologist of Iceland \14\ 
\15\ (Figures 5-9). That is, LinkedIn did not only censor public health 
academics but also government public health officials that did not 
conform to LinkedIn's view on the pandemic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \14\ LinkedIn Censors Harvard Epidemiologist Martine Kulldorff, 
Brownstone Institute, August 12, 2021.
    \15\ Tucker JA. Kulldorff Deleted: Famed Epidemiologist and Early 
Opponent of Lockdowns Banned by LinkedIn, Brownstone Institute, January 
28, 2022.
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    As a leading expert on vaccine safety, CDC asked me to serve on 
their COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group. In April 2021, CDC 
fired me from that group.\16\ If you think I was fired for questioning 
the vaccines, you are wrong. I am probably the only person fired by CDC 
for being too pro-vaccine. On April 13, 2021, CDC paused the Johnson & 
Johnson vaccine after reports of blood clots in a few women under age 
50. There were no reported cases among older people, who benefit the 
most from the vaccines. Since there was a general vaccine shortage at 
the time, I argued in an op-ed in The Hill that the vaccine should not 
be paused for older high-risk Americans.\17\ That got me fired, 
although CDC did lift the pause 4 days later. Tragically, some older 
Americans died because of this vaccine ``pause''.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \16\ Pullman J. CDC Punishes `Superstar' Scientist For COVID 
Vaccine Recommendation The CDC Followed 4 Days Later, The Federalist, 
April 28, 2021.
    \17\ Kulldorff M. The dangers of pausing the J&J vaccine. The Hill, 
April 17, 2021.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The primary victim of censorship is not me and others being 
censored, but the public. As politicians, to properly serve your 
constituents, you have both the right to hear from and a duty to listen 
to a range of scientists. The public also has that right. For example, 
how many of you knew that Sweden kept their schools open in the spring 
of 2020 without a single COVID mortality among its 1.8 million 
children? How many of you know now, that for 2020-20202 [sic] Sweden 
focused protection strategy led to the lowest excess mortality among 
western countries?\18\ Censorship deprives both you and the public from 
vital information needed to save lives.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \18\ Simmons M. Sweden, COVID and `excess deaths': a look at the 
data. The Spectator, March 10, 2023.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Censorship inevitably leads to self-censoring. Some of my public 
health colleagues did not speak up for fear of being censored, 
silenced, or slandered, like I was. I don't blame them. I was also 
forced to self-censor, to avoid being permanently banned from social 
media. (Figure 10)
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

    I have a question for you: Do we have freedom of speech because of 
the First Amendment or do we have the First Amendment because freedom 
of speech is important to preserve society and life?
    When the Bill of Rights was written, Americans had lived through 
troubled times. They did not use that as an excuse for censorship. I 
think they understood that freedom of speech is especially important 
during difficult times when difficult decisions must be made. I hope 
that the 118th Congress is just as wise as the 1st Congress was when it 
adopted the First Amendment as part of the Bill of Rights.
    Thank you for listening.

    Mr. Bishop. Thank you, Dr. Kulldorff.
    I now recognize Dr. Miller-Idriss for her 5-minute opening 
statement.

STATEMENT OF CYNTHIA MILLER-IDRISS, PH.D., PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF 
  PUBLIC AFFAIRS AND SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, FOUNDING DIRECTOR, 
    POLARIZATION AND EXTREMISM RESEARCH AND INNOVATION LAB, 
                      AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member Ivey, 
Members of the committee, I'd like to thank you for your 
service to our country and for calling attention to the 
critical issue of disinformation.
    In addition to being a professor at American University, I 
also direct a research lab there called the Polarization and 
Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, also known as PERIL.
    PERIL designs, tests, and scales up evidence-based tools 
and intervention strategies to help people recognize and reject 
harmful on-line content while safeguarding their freedom of 
speech as an alternative to security-based approaches that rely 
on surveillance, monitoring, censorship, or banning.
    We do not teach people what to think. Our work is 
nonpartisan and rooted in evidence. Our research has 
demonstrated with consistent statistical significance that 
people can learn to recognize persuasive and manipulative 
tactics in order to make more informed choices in their lives, 
especially on-line.
    Over the past 3 years, PERIL has fielded a constant stream 
of emails and calls from individuals in communities across the 
country, all asking for help confronting the impacts of 
disinformation and propaganda in their lives.
    In Michigan, a grandfather and military veteran wrote to 
ask what he could do about his grandson, who had joined an 
armed militia.
    In Texas, faith leaders asked us for ways to support 
pastors whose congregations were torn apart by partisan 
polarization and conspiracy theories.
    In Vermont, a local entrepreneur asked if the school system 
could help prevent future employees, most of whom he hired from 
the high school, from espousing propaganda that had become a 
problem in his staff.
    These stories illustrate what research evidence has also 
demonstrated: We face a national crisis rooted in the rampant 
circulation of disinformation and harmful on-line content. 
American communities are coming to us because they feel 
threatened by on-line disinformation. They aren't alone.
    As the ADL has reported, white supremacist propaganda 
efforts are at the highest level ever recorded, jumping 38 
percent over 2021 levels, following a pattern of violence that 
has been escalating for years.
    The good news is there's a growing body of evidence about 
what works to equip the public with tools that shore up their 
own capacity while protecting the right to free speech and 
reducing the need for security-based approaches.
    We found that it only takes 7 to 12 minutes of reading one 
of our intervention guides for its audience to be significantly 
better informed about harmful on-line content and the risks of 
violence, to be more empowered and confident about intervening, 
to build their own capability to intervene, and to know where 
to get more help.
    Importantly, across our work, we've found that both prior 
to and after reading our parents and caregivers guide, 
Democrats and Republicans did not significantly differ in their 
knowledge.
    Republicans scored better, significantly better, 5 percent 
better than Democrats did, in terms of knowledge of extremism 
after having read our guide, and members of both political 
parties reported being satisfied with the guide's contents and 
equally willing to intervene with a young person.
    There's also strong emerging evidence that even short 
interventions can have a lasting impact on local communities. 
We're currently studying a group of 1,500 parents in 3-month 
intervals, parents and caregivers, for a full year after 
reading our intervention tool.
    Three months after reading our guide, 11 percent, over 11 
percent said that after the intervention they either joined or 
created a group to discuss issues of youth radicalization.
    Six percent of our participants, or about 75 people, told 
us that within the 3 months after reading our guide they used 
what they learned to take direct action to prevent youth from 
encountering further harmful content.
    Overall, 3 months after reading our guide, parents and 
caregivers retained the vast majority of the knowledge and 
skills they had learned.
    Taken together, our evidence shows that it's possible to 
provide communities with tools to be safer on-line. Parents, 
grandparents, teachers, coaches, mental health professionals, 
and others deserve help confronting an unprecedented amount of 
harmful on-line content to keep their families safe and 
protected.
    We detail several policy recommendations in our written 
testimony. Most substantially, we would like to see the U.S. 
Government, like some of our allies overseas, create a central, 
national, nonpartisan center for prevention to help equip local 
communities with tools, evidence, and capacity-building 
trainings about what works.
    The crisis of domestic violent extremism that is fueled by 
disinformation and propaganda cannot be solved by law 
enforcement and security-based approaches alone. We must invest 
in upstream strategies to keep communities safe from on-line 
harms.
    We seek a world in which every community is equipped with 
the tools they need to reject harmful on-line propaganda, 
conspiracy theories, and manipulative content without the need 
for censorship, surveillance, banning, or security-based 
solutions.
    Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to your 
questions.
    [The prepared statement of Ms. Miller-Idriss follows:]
              Prepared Statement of Cynthia Miller-Idriss
                Thursday, May 11, 2023, 2 o'clock PM ET
    Chairman Green, Ranking Member Thompson, and Members of the 
committee: I would like to thank you for your service to our country 
and for calling attention to the critical issue of disinformation. My 
name is Cynthia Miller-Idriss, and I am a professor in the Department 
of Justice, Law, and Criminology and in the School of Education at the 
American University in Washington, DC, where I also direct the 
Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL)--an 
applied research lab in the School of Public Affairs. I have been 
studying education-based solutions to the prevention of violent 
extremism, including through early prevention related to disinformation 
and propaganda--for over 20 years. I want to acknowledge the support of 
my research team at PERIL, whose assistance was invaluable in preparing 
my testimony today.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ With gratitude to researchers and staff at American 
University's Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab 
(PERIL) who helped prepare this written testimony: Dr. Pasha Dashtgard, 
Dr. Brian Hughes, Laura Kralicky, Wyatt Russell, and to colleagues at 
the Southern Poverty Law Center for their support and partnership on 
many of the intervention tools and guides cited above.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, PERIL, 
develops evidence-based initiatives--such as, short-form videos, 
trainings and train-the-trainer programs, research studies, community 
toolkits and guides--to build social cohesion, reverse political 
polarization, and prevent violent extremism. Utilizing a public health 
framework and multi-disciplinary, pre-preventative approaches, we 
design, test, and scale up evidence-based tools and intervention 
strategies to help people recognize and reject harmful on-line and off-
line content, propaganda, supremacist ideologies, conspiracy theories, 
misinformation, and disinformation while safeguarding their freedom of 
speech. As widely recognized experts and leaders in the field of 
preventing extremism and radicalization, we have created effective, 
evidence-based resources to inoculate against propaganda and extremist 
content, as well as empower individuals to intervene and interrupt 
early radicalization and keep their loved ones safe from on-line 
manipulation--all as an alternative to security-based approaches that 
rely on surveillance, monitoring, censorship, or banning.
    PERIL's work focuses specifically on equipping people with tools to 
recognize on-line manipulation in order to protect themselves and their 
loved ones from disinformation that seeks to harm them (see below for 
definitions of disinformation and related terms). We do not teach 
people what to think; our work is nonpartisan and rooted in evidence. 
Our focus is on responding to community needs and on providing 
resources to help people understand the kinds of persuasive techniques 
that bad actors often use to manipulate others. For example, foreign 
influence operations, domestic and international extremist and 
terrorist groups, and scammers seeking a profit will often use 
rhetorical strategies, propaganda, and emotional tactics that are 
designed and used to convince others to believe, think, or act in a 
specific manner. These persuasive techniques manipulate observers for 
the purposes of grooming, recruiting, and building support for violent 
ideologies, tactics, strategies, or actions. Our research has 
demonstrated with consistent statistical significance that people can 
learn to recognize persuasive and manipulative tactics in order to make 
more informed choices in their lives, especially on-line.
                  scope and scale: communities in need
    The national crisis facing communities across the country is all 
too evident. Over the past 3 years, PERIL has fielded a constant stream 
of emails and calls from individuals and communities across the 
country--all asking for help confronting the impacts of disinformation 
and propaganda in their lives. In Michigan, a grandfather and military 
veteran wrote to ask what he could do about his grandson, who had 
joined an armed militia. In Texas, faith leaders asked for ways to 
support pastors whose congregations were torn apart by partisan 
polarization and conspiracy theories. In Washington State, a local 
government needed training for city employees to prevent polarization 
and reject on-line manipulation. In Vermont, a local entrepreneur asked 
if the school system could do more to ensure that his future 
employees--most of whom he hired straight from the local high school--
would stop espousing so much propaganda and conspiracy theories, which 
had become a problem for his business. A local mom wanted help with her 
middle school son, who during the pandemic had consumed so much on-line 
misogyny that he said he did not need to respect her authority as a 
parent, because she is a woman.
    These stories illustrate what research evidence has also 
demonstrated: We face a national crisis rooted in the rampant 
circulation of propaganda, dis/mis and malinformation, and other 
harmful on-line content. American communities are coming to us because 
they feel threatened by on-line disinformation. Some fall prey to 
hostile foreign influence operations by people who try to manipulate 
Americans for profit or to disrupt our democratic process. People give 
their bank information to scammers pretending to be from the IRS. 
Teenagers share intimate details of their lives with people on-line who 
they think are friends their own age, but who are not. Others come to 
believe propaganda and disinformation that lures them into what they 
think is heroic action to save their racial or ethnic group after going 
down rabbit holes of antisemitic conspiracies about demographic change 
and a supposed orchestrated replacement of white people.
    The data on this is clear. The pace, scope, and scale of violent 
extremism have probably increased and are escalating rapidly. The Anti-
Defamation League reports that white supremacist propaganda efforts are 
at the highest level they have ever recorded, jumping 38 percent above 
2021 levels to 6,751 reported cases in 2022.\2\ These incidents include 
distribution of racist, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQIA+ fliers, graffiti 
and posters, stickers, banners, and laser projections that have heavily 
targeted houses of worship and other community institutions.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ Anti-Defamation League, Center on Extremism. ``Audit of 
Antisemitic Incidents, 2022.'' March, 2023. https://www.adl.org/sites/
default/files/pdfs/2023-03/ADL-2022-Audit-of-Antisemitic-Incidents-
2021.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The repercussions of so much circulation of propaganda, conspiracy 
theories, and disinformation are abundantly clear. Between 2013 and 
2021, the number of open domestic terrorism-related cases in the United 
States jumped 357 percent to 9,049 cases, with the most violent 
incidents being committed by racially or ethnically motivated violent 
extremists during the same years.\3\ Of the 444 people killed by 
extremism in the United States between 2013 and 2022, the significant 
majority of deaths were at the hands of right-wing extremists (335 
deaths, or 75 percent).\4\ Of those killed by right-wing extremists in 
2021, 73 percent were affiliated with white supremacy, 5 percent with 
incel/toxic masculinity extremism, and 17 percent with anti-Government 
extremism.\5\ The 2022 racist shooting that killed 10 people in a 
grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, 
motivated by the false Great Replacement conspiracy theory, is just one 
tragic recent example.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \3\ U.S. Government Accountability Office, Report to the Ranking 
Member, Committee on Homeland Security, House of Representatives. 
``DOMESTIC TERRORISM Further Actions Needed to Strengthen FBI and DHS 
Collaboration to Counter Threats.'' GAO-23-104720. February, 2023. 
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-104720.pdf.
    \4\ Anti-Defamation League, a Report from the ADL Center on 
Extremism. ``Murder & Extremism in the United States in 2022.'' 
February, 2023. https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2023-02/
Murder-and-Extremism-in-the-United-States-in-2022.pdf.
    \5\ Anti-Defamation League, a Report from the ADL Center on 
Extremism. ``Murder & Extremism in the United States in 2022.'' 
February, 2023. https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/2023-02/
Murder-and-Extremism-in-the-United-States-in-2022.pdf.
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    Non-lethal attacks have also risen significantly. More than 50 bomb 
threats were made to HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and 
Universities) and predominantly Black churches in 2022. And the problem 
goes well beyond white supremacist extremism.\6\ Antisemitism, 
conspiracy theories, anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and misogynistic content has 
spiked across on-line platforms. Before he was banned from social media 
platforms in mid-2022, violent and deeply misogynistic videos from one 
content creator were viewed 12 billion times on TikTok alone.\7\ 
Violent outcomes often show a toxic mix of ideological hatred. Just 
this week, 8 people lost their lives at a Texas shopping mall at the 
hands of a man with a swastika tattoo who had posted both violent 
misogynistic and neo-Nazi content on-line.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \6\ Weissman, Sara. ``Suspect Identified in Bomb Threats Against 
HBCUs.'' Inside Higher Ed., November 16, 2022. https://
www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/17/fbi-says-most-bomb-threats-
against-hbcus-made-minor.
    \7\ Miller-Idriss, Cynthia. ``How to Counter Andrew Tate's Growing 
Subculture of Violent Toxic Masculinity.'' MSNBC, February 7, 2023. 
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/counter-andrew-tates-
growing-subculture-violent-toxic-masculinity-rcna69411.
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    In October 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under 
President Trump issued a threat assessment report declaring domestic 
violent extremism in general and white supremacist extremists (WSEs) in 
particular the ``most persistent and lethal threat in the 
Homeland.''\8\ The Biden administration issued a similar assessment in 
spring 2021,\9\ followed by the first-ever national strategy to counter 
domestic terrorism, noting the rising threat from white supremacist 
extremism and anti-Government and unlawful militias that threaten 
civilians, elected officials, and democratic institutions.\10\ Much of 
this violence is motivated by disinformation, propaganda, and 
conspiracy theories. According to the Global Terrorism Database, 
terrorist attacks motivated by conspiracy theory extremists were 
responsible for 119 attacks in 2020--a jump from 6 attacks the year 
before--in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, United 
Kingdom and Germany.\11\ Meanwhile, hate crimes in the United States 
are at the highest level in decades,\12\ despite persistent 
underreporting. In sum, the United States and our allies have seen 
rising violent extremism and hate-fueled and political violence fueled 
by antisemitism, conspiracy theories, propaganda, disinformation, and 
other harmful on-line content as a pattern of violence that has been 
escalating for years.
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    \8\ U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ``Homeland Threat 
Assessment.'' October, 2020. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/
publications/2020_10_06_homeland-threat-assessment.pdf
    \9\ Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ``Domestic 
Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021.'' March 1, 2021. 
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/
21_0301_odni_unclass-summary-of-dve-assessment-17_march-final_508.pdf.
    \10\ Executive Office of the President, National Security Council. 
``National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.'' June, 2021. 
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/National-
Strategy-for-Countering-Domestic-Terrorism.pdf.
    \11\ START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and 
Responses to Terrorism). (2022). Global Terrorism Database 1970-2020 
[data file]. https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd,
    \12\ U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 
Criminal Justice Information Services Division. ``Supplemental Hate 
Crime Statistics, 2021''. March, 2023. https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/
webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime.
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            what works to prevent and counter disinformation
    The good news is there is a growing body of evidence about what 
works to equip the public with tools that shore up their capacity to 
intervene in pathways to violent extremism, while protecting their 
right to free speech and reducing the need for security-based 
approaches. We have found that it only takes 7-12 minutes of reading 
one of our intervention guides for its audience to be significantly 
better informed about harmful on-line content and the risks of 
radicalization to violence; to feel more empowered and confident about 
intervening; to build their own capability to intervene; and to know 
where to get more help.* This is the case across our research with 
parents and caregivers, including grandparents, uncles, and cousins; 
with educators and youth mentors; with local governments and small 
businesses, and more. For example, in just 12 minutes of reading one of 
our intervention tools, 85 percent of our participants understood the 
process by which youth become radicalized, and 83 percent felt that 
they knew where to get help if they suspect a young person to be 
engaging in extremist ideas.
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    * Findings from the lab are included in the following works: PERIL 
(Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab) & SPLC (Southern 
Poverty Law Center). ``Empowered to Intervene: An Impact Report on the 
PERIL/SPLC Guide to Youth Radicalization. 2021. https://
www.splcenter.org/peril-assessments-impact#impact-parents; PERIL & 
SPLC. ``Building Networks & Addressing Harm: A Community Guide to 
Online Youth Radicalization, Impact Study.'' November, 2023. https://
www.splcenter.org/peril-assessments-impact#impact-networks; PERIL & 
SPLC. ``Parents & Caregivers Longitudinal Impact Study.''; PERIL & Rosa 
Luxemburg Stiftung. ``Resources to Combat Extremism: Impact Study 
Report.'' 2022.; PERIL & The Lumina Foundation. ``Building Resilient & 
Inclusive Communities of Knowledge.'' July, 2022. https://
perilresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/PERIL-Building-Inclusive-
and-Resilient-Campuses-v15.2-FINAL.pdf.
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    Importantly, across our work, we found that both prior to and after 
reading our parents and caregivers guide, Democrats and Republicans did 
not significantly differ in their knowledge of extremism. Republicans 
scored significantly better (5 percent better) than Democrats did in 
terms of knowledge of extremism after having read the guide, and 
members of both political parties reported being satisfied with the 
guide's contents and equally willing to intervene with a young person 
they suspect is coming into contact with radicalizing content. We have 
also found that education alone doesn't solve our problem of 
disinformation. Our research has shown that higher levels of education 
do not necessarily mean people have the skills to consistently 
recognize harmful manipulation tactics on-line. On the contrary--we 
found that parents with higher levels of education were overconfident 
in their ability to help children distinguish trustworthy and 
untrustworthy news sources. After reading our guide, their confidence 
went down as they realized how tricky on-line disinformation and 
harmful content can be.
    There is also strong emerging evidence that even short 
interventions can have a lasting impact on local communities. We are 
currently studying a group of 1,500 parents and caregivers in 3-month 
intervals for a full year after reading our intervention tool. Three 
months after reading our guide for parents and caregivers, over 11 
percent (135 individuals) of respondents said that after the 
intervention, they either joined or created a group that discusses 
issues of youth radicalization and extremism. Six percent of our 
participants, or about 75 people, told us that within the 3 months 
after reading our guide, they used what they learned to take direct 
action to prevent youth from radicalizing further or being recruited 
through additional on-line manipulation. Overall, 3 months after 
reading our guide, parents and caregiver retained the vast majority of 
the knowledge and skills they had learned. Seventy-five percent of 
participants reported understanding the process by which youth become 
radicalized on-line--a 23 percent increase from the initial survey--and 
70 percent felt prepared to talk with youth about on-line extremism--
only a 5 percent drop from the initial survey. Over a third of 
participants told us they had shared or used the information with their 
biological children, while nearly 13 percent shared it with other young 
people in their family, including grandchildren, nephews and nieces, 
and cousins.
    Taken together, our evidence shows that it is possible to provide 
communities with tools to be safer on-line. Parents, grandparents, 
teachers, coaches, mental health professionals, and others deserve help 
confronting an unprecedented amount of harmful on-line content and 
being more confident and capable to keep their families safe and 
protected from harmful on-line content. All communities need 
information and tangible action steps for how to help their loved ones 
resist manipulative rhetoric, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and 
disinformation they are exposed to on-line and off-line in ways that 
help them make better choices while avoiding censorship, surveillance, 
monitoring, or other security-based approaches.
                   adopting a public health approach
    PERIL advocates for a holistic public-health mode of prevention 
consisting of investments at the primary, secondary, and tertiary 
prevention levels to prevent violent extremism and the components that 
contribute to it, including disinformation and propaganda. Primary 
prevention refers to efforts to address radicalization before it takes 
root, including through broad civic education and media literacy 
focused on helping the public build resilience in ways that do not 
infringe on their right to free speech or free association, and that 
work as an alternative to security-based approaches that surveil, 
monitor, censor, or ban content. Secondary prevention refers to efforts 
to mitigate the impacts of already radicalized people and groups, 
primarily through surveillance, monitoring, arrests, and interruption 
of plots. Tertiary prevention refers to focused deradicalization 
efforts, including through prison deradicalization programs and 
``exit''-type counseling services that help radicalized individuals 
disengage from extremism.
    An effective public health approach to countering disinformation 
builds prevention and intervention across all three of those levels--
with the significant majority of efforts and resources on the primary 
prevention side--and would require four things. First, it must be 
nimble and responsive to communities' needs depending on regional areas 
of concern. Second, it must be holistic and whole-of-community in ways 
that broaden engagement of a wide range of government offices, 
agencies, and organizations beyond the security and law enforcement 
sectors, such as the education, health and human services, and mental 
health sectors. It would include primary prevention efforts through the 
arts, community organizations, faith communities, or other community-
based non-profits. Third, an effective public-health prevention model 
rests on evidence at all levels of intervention. This means moving 
beyond outcome evaluations that describe only outputs, or the numbers 
of people trained, the numbers of downloads of a particular tool, or 
other descriptive metrics that do not actually provide evidence of 
impact. Finally, a holistic public health approach focuses on building 
resilient systems as well as resilient individuals. Resilience to 
propaganda and disinformation is not merely a technical skill, in other 
words: it is also rooted in national and community values and 
commitment to an inclusive democracy that must be reinforced, 
emphasized, and modeled in all aspects of life across the life course. 
The aim is to reduce the fertile ground in which disinformation, 
propaganda, hate, and anti-democratic ideas thrive.
    This is a vision of a public health-style prevention system that 
works to prevent violence and counter harm while simultaneously 
promoting concrete steps toward inclusive equity, respect, coexistence, 
and real and symbolic recognition of difference. Such a prevention 
system gives us the best chance of building community social cohesion, 
reducing violent outcomes, and strengthening our democracies.
                         policy recommendations
    1. Invest in a holistic, community-based, public-health approach to 
        preventing the spread of supremacist ideologies, mis/dis/
        malinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. This 
        includes creating avenues to fund both pilot testing of 
        innovative approaches, followed by national scale-up of what is 
        proven to be effective in primary-level prevention strategies, 
        including digital literacy and civic education that equips 
        educators, parents and caregivers, youth mentors, faith 
        leaders, coaches, mental health counselors, and others with 
        better tools to recognize and ``offramp'' individuals who are 
        persuaded by disinformation from further radicalization to 
        violence. The Federal Government can support the creation of 
        impact-driven networks that bring together government agencies 
        from well beyond the security sector; civil society 
        institutions like schools, mental health professionals, sports 
        leagues and after-school programs; local NGO's and advocacy 
        efforts that enhance community wellness; and others. At the 
        local level, people need to hear and see pathways for their own 
        engagement, to spark their imaginations about ways to act, to 
        be moved to change their behaviors, to know there are resources 
        to support their learning, and to want to know more in ways 
        that make a difference in their families' and communities' 
        well-being.
    2. Incentivize and prioritize rigorous impact assessment and 
        evaluation frameworks to ensure policies and programs are 
        implemented as intended and are effective beyond descriptive 
        metrics. Evaluation frameworks and results funded with public 
        dollars should be made publicly available to ensure 
        transparency and reduce the need for every initiative to 
        reinvent the wheel.
    3. Ensure that prevention initiatives focus on equipping the public 
        with better tools for their own decision making, while not 
        interfering with any individual's freedom of speech, 
        conscience, or association. We cannot repeat the mistakes of 
        historical civil liberties violations or promote censorship as 
        a solution to disinformation.
    4. Continue to work with the tech sector to remove harmful and 
        dangerous content, while understanding that banning and content 
        removal is an after-the-fact solution that does not, on its 
        own, solve the crisis of disinformation and propaganda. 
        Addressing the problem of disinformation must begin with 
        upstream prevention that reduces the production of and 
        receptivity to harmful content to begin with.
    5. Create a central, national, nonpartisan center for prevention to 
        provide Federal, State, and local governments and all local 
        communities with tools, resources, training, capacity-building, 
        and evidence about what works.
                              definitions
    We define disinformation as false, untrue, or incorrect information 
spread to intentionally deceive, manipulate, misinform, and erode an 
individual or group's belief of established facts, often with a 
specific interest or goal. This includes efforts from hostile foreign 
influence operations, profiteers, and international extremist and 
terrorist groups who aim to harm American democracy, U.S. elections, or 
scam unsuspecting Americans for profit. It also includes domestic 
efforts that undermine inclusive democracy, such as antisemitism or 
anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, or compromise the physical health 
and well-being of communities. Disinformation is similar but distinct 
from misinformation, which is the unintentional sharing of false or 
incorrect information or untrue claims spread without the aim to 
deceive, manipulate, or harm. It also differs from malinformation, 
which refers to true claims spread with the intent to deceive, 
manipulate, or harm. Propaganda refers to manipulative persuasive 
techniques that seek to make people believe true or untrue information, 
or values and opinions, sometimes using dis/mis/malinformation, 
persuasive narratives (stories that help audiences imagine themselves 
as heroes, villains, victors, or victims), or rhetoric (emotionally 
stirring language, image, and sounds), which lend manipulative power. 
Extremism is the belief that one group of people is in dire conflict 
with other groups who don't share the same racial or ethnic, gender or 
sexual, religious, or political identity. This ``us'' versus ``them'' 
framework positions the ``other'' as an existential threat and calls 
for total separation, domination, or other forms of violence.
    Notably, terrorist violence from domestic violent extremists does 
not usually link back to specific groups. Instead, it's most often 
perpetrated by individuals who have experienced networked on-line 
radicalization through exposure to propaganda. Groups are still an 
important source of much of the propaganda that circulates in extremist 
scenes and subcultures, including on-line. Finally, it is important to 
note that the spread of on-line propaganda and disinformation is fueled 
by how people spend time on-line. On-line radicalization happens in 
part when people spend time in echo chambers, where extreme content is 
self-reinforcing across platforms. There is also significant 
algorithmic radicalization through recommendation systems that suggest 
content that is related, but more salacious or more extreme than the 
content the viewer just watched. This can lead to ``rabbit holes'' of 
disinformation, conspiracy theories and propaganda consumption that are 
difficult to climb out of.
                               conclusion
    The crisis of domestic violent extremism that is fueled by 
disinformation and propaganda cannot be solved by law enforcement and 
security-based approaches. We must invest in upstream strategies to 
keep communities safe from on-line harms. We seek a world in which 
every community is equipped with the tools they need to reject harmful 
on-line propaganda, conspiracy theories, and manipulative content 
without the need for censorship, surveillance, banning, or security-
based solutions. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to 
your questions.

    Mr. Bishop. Thank you, Dr. Miller-Idriss.
    I now recognize Professor Turley for his 5-minute opening 
statement.

STATEMENT OF JONATHAN TURLEY, SHAPIRO CHAIR FOR PUBLIC INTEREST 
             LAW, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

    Mr. Turley. Thank you, Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member 
Ivey, Members of the subcommittee. It's an honor to be before 
you today and also to participate with my esteemed co-
witnesses.
    This is obviously a question of tremendous importance to 
all of us. We all love our country, and I believe we all love 
free speech, and we have to find a way to talk to each other to 
find a way to deal with our rivaling concerns.
    From my perspective, I've been an advocate for free speech 
my entire life. Some people have even called me an absolutist 
of free speech. There was a time when that was a compliment, 
but I admit that I do resist most efforts to regulate speech.
    What we have seen thus far--and we've only seen a fraction 
of the complex of censorship in the U.S. Government--is a 
censorship system of breathtaking size. We've seen only a 
fraction through the Twitter Files, through some hearings, and 
some litigation.
    From the free speech community, it's like a game of whack-
a-mole. Every time we deal with a disinformation office that 
raises concerns, we find out that there are five others.
    One of the things I have emphasized in my testimony is that 
I think people of good faith can come together to at least say 
that we need to know the full scope of the disinformation 
system we have in the Government. We can debate.
    I really took to heart the Ranking Member's comments about 
finding solutions here. We can look at those solutions. But we 
also need to look at what's the current effort thus far in 
terms of speech regulation, censorship, and blacklisting.
    Many of these grants, many of these programs are straight 
blacklisting programs. They are to identify people, to 
discourage in some cases advertisers from supporting sites. 
This is money coming from the U.S. Government to support these 
types of efforts, and that's deeply problematic.
    Many of these efforts are not just to remove people, but to 
isolate them. The recent disclosures of LinkedIn as engaging in 
censorship is an example of that.
    As an academic, I've seen this. It's an honor to appear 
with one of our esteemed scientific academics who was the 
subject of censorship. But the idea is to isolate people, to 
chill their speech. It's working. It's succeeding.
    Now, the whole point of much of my testimony is to look at 
what the legal standards are, how far the Government can go 
without tripping the wire of the First Amendment, but more 
importantly, to what extent this damages free speech.
    The courts have emphasized over and over again that the 
Government cannot enlist agents to do indirectly what they are 
prohibited from doing directly. I believe that is what we're 
seeing today.
    The collateral harm is considerable. People talk about 
speech as harmful. So is censorship. When you censor people 
like my esteemed colleague from Harvard, you are denying a 
public debate about public health issues, issues like, did we 
need to close our schools?
    We're facing a terrible psychological and educational 
crisis that is linked to the shutdowns of the pandemic. We're 
now debating that when we should have been debating this at the 
time.
    Those are costs. Those are costs that come from censorship.
    Now, in my testimony I explore the cases that admittedly 
have a difficult time of when the Government trips this wire 
under the First Amendment. I'd be happy to talk about that 
today.
    I obviously am very critical of CISA's idea that it is 
supposed to be regulating the cognitive infrastructure. That 
Orwellian notion really sends people like me into a tight fetal 
position. The fact is we don't need the Government looking at 
our cognitive anything, whether it's the infrastructure or not.
    Recently, an English court found someone guilty of toxic 
ideology. That is a sort of cognitive infrastructure problem. I 
hope we don't go in that direction.
    MDM is designed to give the maximal space for censorship. 
It is something I hope this committee will turn its back on.
    Many of us welcome a debate that will come when we know the 
full extent of these efforts, but let it be an open and honest 
debate. Let's understand what has been done. Then we can 
debate, as citizens that love this country, the type of 
solutions the Ranking Member spoke of.
    [The prepared statement of Mr. Turley follows:]
                 Prepared Statement of Jonathan Turley
                              May 11, 2023
                            i. introduction
    Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member Ivey, Members of the subcommittee, 
my name is Jonathan Turley, and I am a law professor at George 
Washington University, where I hold the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro 
Chair of Public Interest Law.\1\ It is an honor to appear before you 
today to discuss free speech and Government censorship.
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    \1\ I appear today on my own behalf, and my views do not reflect 
those of my law school or the media organizations that feature my legal 
analysis.
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    For the purposes of background, I come to this subject as someone 
who has written,\2\ litigated,\3\ and testified \4\ in the areas of 
Congressional oversight and the First Amendment for decades. I have 
also represented the U.S. House of Representatives in litigation.\5\ My 
testimony today obviously reflects that past work and I hope to offer a 
fair understanding of the governing Constitutional provisions, case 
law, and standards that bear on this question.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \2\ In addition to a blog with a focus on First Amendment issues 
(www.jonathanturley.org), I have written on First Amendment issues as 
an academic for decades. See, e.g., Jonathan Turley, THE INDISPENSABLE 
RIGHT: FREE SPEECH IN THE AGE OF RAGE (forthcoming 2024); Jonathan 
Turley, The Unfinished Masterpiece: Speech Compulsion and the Evolving 
Jurisprudence of Religious Speech 82 MD L. REV. (forthcoming 2023); 
Jonathan Turley, Rage Rhetoric and the Revival of American Sedition, 65 
William & Mary Law Review (forthcoming 2023), Jonathan Turley, The 
Right to Rage in American Political Discourse, GEO. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 
(forthcoming 2023); Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of 
Free Speech in the United States, 45 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 571 
(2022); Jonathan Turley, The Loadstone Rock: The Role of Harm in The 
Criminalization of Plural Unions, 64 EMORY L.J. 1905 (2015); Jonathan 
Turley, Registering Publicus: The Supreme Court and Right to Anonymity, 
2002 SUP. CT. REV. 57-83.
    \3\ See, e.g., Eugene Volokh, The Sisters Wives Case and the 
Criminal Prosecution of Polygamy, WASH. POST, Aug. 28, 2015 (discussing 
challenge on religious, speech, and associational rights); Jonathan 
Turley, Thanks to the Sisters Wives Litigation, We have One Less 
Morality Law, WASH. POST, Dec. 12, 2013.
    \4\ See, e.g., ``Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal 
Government,'' U.S. House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee, 
Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, 
February 9, 2023 (Statement of Jonathan Turley); Examining the 
``Metastasizing'' Domestic Terrorism Threat After the Buffalo Attack: 
Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 117th Cong. (2022) 
(Statement of Jonathan Turley); Secrecy Orders and Prosecuting Leaks: 
Potential Legislative Responses to Deter Prosecutorial Abuse of Power: 
Hearing Before H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 117th Cong. (2021) (Statement 
of Jonathan Turley); Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism 
in the Media: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Commc'n & Tech. of the H. 
Comm. on Energy & Com., 117th Cong. (2021) (Statement of Jonathan 
Turley); The Right of The People Peacefully to Assemble: Protecting 
Speech By Stopping Anarchist Violence: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on 
the Const. of the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 116th Cong. (2020) 
(Statement of Jonathan Turley); Respect for Law Enforcement and the 
Rule of Law: Hearing Before the Commission on Law Enforcement and the 
Administration of Justice, (2020) (Statement of Jonathan Turley); The 
Media and The Publication of Classified Information: Hearing Before the 
H. Select Comm. on Intelligence, 109th Cong. (2006) (Statement of 
Jonathan Turley).
    \5\ See U.S. House of Representatives v. Burwell, 185 F. Supp. 3d 
165 (D.D.C. 2016), https://casetext.com/case/us-house-of-
representatives-v-capacity-1.
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    As I recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee, the 
growing evidence of censorship and blacklisting efforts by the 
Government raises serious and troubling questions over our protection 
of free speech.\6\ There are legitimate disagreements on how Congress 
should address the role of the Government in such censorship. The first 
step, however, is to fully understand the role played in prior years 
and to address the deep-seated doubts of many Americans concerning the 
actions of the Government to stifle or sanction speech.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \6\ Some of today's testimony is material included from that 
earlier hearing. ``Hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal 
Government,'' U.S. House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee, 
Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, 
February 9, 2023 (Statement of Jonathan Turley).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Twitter Files and other recent disclosures raise serious 
questions of whether the United States Government is now a partner in 
what may be the largest censorship system in our history. That 
involvement cuts across the Executive branch, with confirmed 
coordination with agencies ranging from the Homeland Security to the 
State Department to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Even 
based on our limited knowledge, the size of this censorship system is 
breathtaking, and we only know of a fraction of its operations through 
the Twitter Files, Congressional hearings, and pending litigation. Most 
of the information has come from the Twitter Files after the purchase 
of the company by Elon Musk. Notably, Twitter has 450 million active 
users \7\ but it is still only ranked 15th in the number of users, 
after companies such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and 
Pinterest.\8\ The assumption is that the Government censorship program 
dovetailed with these other companies, which continue to refuse to 
share past communications or work with the Government. Assuming these 
efforts extended to the larger platforms, we have a Government-
supported censorship system that is unparalleled in history.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \7\ Twitter Revenue and User Statistics, BUSINESS OF APPS, Jan. 31, 
2023, https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/.
    \8\ Most Popular Social Networks, STATISTA, https://
www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-
number-of-users/.
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    We now have undeniable evidence of a comprehensive system of 
censorship that stretches across the government, academia, and 
corporate realms. Through disinformation offices, grants, and other 
means, an array of Federal agencies has been active ``stakeholders'' in 
this system. This includes Homeland Security, State Department, the 
FBI, and other Federal agencies actively seeking the censorship of 
citizens and groups.
    The partners in this effort extend across social media platforms. 
The goal is not just to remove dissenting views, but also to isolate 
those citizens who voice them. We recently learned that this effort 
extended even to companies like LinkedIn.\9\ New emails uncovered in 
the Missouri v. Biden litigation reportedly show that the Biden 
administration's censorship efforts extended to Facebook to censor 
private communications on its WhatsApp messaging service.\10\ The 
effort to limit access, even to professional sites like LinkedIn, 
creates a chilling effect on those who would challenge majoritarian or 
official views. It was the same chilling effect experienced by 
scientists who tried to voice alternative views on vaccines, school 
closures, masks, or the COVID origins. The success of this partnership 
may surpass anything achieved by direct state-run systems in countries 
like Russia or China.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \9\ Jonathan Turley, ``Connect to Opportunity'': State Department 
Pushed LinkedIn to Censor ``Disinformation,'' Res Ipsa Blog 
(www.jonathanturley.org), Apr. 12, 2023, https://jonathanturley.org/
2023/04/12/connect-to-opportunity-new-evidence-shows-state-department-
pushing-linkenin-to-censor-disinformation/.
    \10\ Jonathan Turley, New Documents Expose Government Censorship 
Efforts at Facebook and WhatsApp, Res Ipsa Blog 
(www.jonathanturley.org), March 26, 2023, https://jonathanturley.org/
2023/03/26/new-documents-expose-government-censorship-efforts-at-
facebook-and-whatsapp/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The recent disclosures involving the Cybersecurity and 
Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is chillingly familiar. It is 
part of an ever-expanding complex of Government programs and grants 
directed toward the censorship or blacklisting of citizens and groups. 
In just a matter of weeks, the size of this complex has come into 
greater focus and has confirmed the fears held by many of us over the 
use of private actors to do indirectly what the Government is 
prohibited from doing directly. I have called it ``censorship by 
surrogate'' and CISA appears to be the latest agency to enlist private 
proxy actors.
    The focus of this hearing is particularly welcomed, as it reminds 
us that the cost of censorship is not just the loss of the right to 
free expression. Those costs can include the impact of reducing needed 
public debate and scrutiny in areas like public health. For years, 
Government and corporate figures worked to silence scientists and 
researchers who opposed Government policies on mask efficacy, universal 
vaccinations, school closures, and even the origin of COVID-19. Leading 
experts Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin 
Kulldorff (Harvard University) as well as a host of others, faced 
overwhelming attacks for questioning policies or views that later 
proved questionable or downright wrong. Those doctors were the co-
authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a more 
focused COVID response that targeted the most vulnerable populations, 
rather than wide-spread lockdowns and mandates.
    Dr. Kulldorff was censored in March 2021 when he tweeted ``Thinking 
that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as 
thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older 
high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural 
infection do not need it. Nor children.'' Every aspect of that tweet 
was worthy of scientific and public debate. However, with the support 
of political, academic, and media figures, such views were suppressed 
at the very moment in which they could have made the most difference. 
For example, if we had a true and open debate, we might have followed 
other countries in keeping schools open for young children. Agencies 
and the media now recognize that these objections had merit. We are now 
experiencing an educational and mental health crisis associated with a 
lockdown that might have been avoided or reduced (as in other 
countries). Millions died as Government agencies enlisted companies to 
silence dissenting viewpoints on best practices and approaches. We do 
not know how many of those deaths or costs might have been avoided 
because this debate was delayed until after the pandemic had largely 
subsided.
    The purpose of my testimony today is to address the legal question 
of when Government support for censorship systems becomes a violation 
of the First Amendment and, more broadly, when it convenes free speech 
principles. To that end, I hope to briefly explore what we know, what 
we do not know, and why we must know much more about the Government's 
efforts to combat speech deemed misinformation, disinformation, and 
malinformation (MDM).
    Regardless of how one comes out on the Constitutional ramifications 
of the Government's role in the censorship system, there should be no 
serious debate over the dangers that Government-supported censorship 
presents to our democracy. The United States Government may be 
outsourcing censorship, but the impact is still inimical to the free 
speech values that define this country. This should not be a matter 
that divides our political parties. Free speech is the core article of 
faith of all citizens in our Constitutional system. It should transcend 
politics and, despite our deepening divisions, unite us all in a common 
cause to protect what Justice Louis Brandeis once called ``the 
indispensable right.''\11\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \11\ Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 375-76 (1927) (Brandeis, 
J., concurring).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  ii. mdm and censorship by surrogate
    It is a common refrain among many supporters of corporate 
censorship that the barring, suspension, or shadow banning of 
individuals on social media is not a free speech problem. The reason is 
that the First Amendment applies to the Government, not private 
parties. As a threshold matter, it is important to stress that free 
speech values are neither synonymous with, nor contained exclusively 
within, the First Amendment. The First Amendment addressed the most 
prevalent danger of the time in the form of direct Government 
regulation and censorship of free speech and the free press. Yet, free 
speech in society is impacted by both public and private conduct. 
Indeed, the massive censorship system employed by social media 
companies presents the greatest loss of free speech in our history. 
These companies, not the Government, now control access to the 
``marketplace of ideas.'' That is also a free speech threat that needs 
to be taken seriously by Congress. While the Washington Post has shown 
that the Russian trolling operations had virtually zero impact on our 
elections,\12\ the corporate censorship of companies like Twitter and 
Facebook clearly had an impact by suppressing certain stories and 
viewpoints in our public discourse. It was the response to alleged 
disinformation, not the disinformation itself, that manipulated the 
debate and issues for voters.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \12\ Tim Starks, Russian Trolls on Twitter Had Little Influence on 
2016 Election, WASH. POST, Jan. 9, 2023, https://
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/09/russian-trolls-twitter-had-
little-influence-2016-voters/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The First Amendment addresses actions by the Government, but there 
are certainly actions taken by these agencies to censor the views of 
citizens. While one can debate whether social media executives became 
effective Government agents, public employees are Government agents. 
Their actions must not seek to abridge the freedom of speech. It is 
possible that a systemic Government program supporting a privately-run 
censorship system is sufficient to justify injunctive relief based on 
the actions of dozens of Federal employees to target and seek the 
suspension of citizens due to their viewpoints. However, this program 
can also run afoul of the First Amendment if the corporate counterparts 
in the system are considered effective Government agents themselves. 
The most common example occurs under the Fourth Amendment where the 
Government is sometimes viewed as acting through private security 
guards or snitches performing tasks at its request.
    The same agency relationship can occur under the First Amendment, 
particularly on social media. The ``marketplace of ideas'' is now 
largely digital. The question is whether the private bodies engaging in 
censorship are truly acting independently of the Government. There is 
now ample reason to question that separation. Social media companies 
operate under statutory conditions and agency review. That relationship 
can allow or encourage private parties to act as willing or coerced 
agents in the denial of free speech. Notably, in 1946, the Court dealt 
with a town run by a private corporation in Marsh v. Alabama.\13\ It 
was that corporation, rather than a Government unit, that prevented 
citizens from distributing religious literature on a sidewalk. However, 
the Court still found that the First Amendment was violated because the 
corporation was acting as a governing body. The Court held that, while 
the denial of free speech rights ``took place, [in a location] held by 
others than the public, [it] is not sufficient to justify the State's 
permitting a corporation to govern a community of citizens so as to 
restrict their fundamental liberties.''\14\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \13\ Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946).
    \14\ Id. at 509.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Congress has created a curious status for social media companies in 
granting immunity protections in Section 230. That status and immunity 
have been repeatedly threatened by Members of Congress unless social 
media companies expanded censorship programs in a variety of different 
areas. The demands for censorship have been reinforced by letters 
threatening Congressional action. Many of those threats have centered 
around removing Section 230 immunity, pursuing antitrust measures, or 
other vague regulatory responses. Many of these threats have focused on 
conservative sites or speakers. The language of the Section itself is 
problematic in giving these companies immunity ``to restrict access to 
or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be 
obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or 
otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is 
constitutionally protected.''\15\ As Columbia Law professor Phil 
Hamburger has noted, the statute appears to permit what is made 
impermissible under the First Amendment:\16\ ``Congress makes explicit 
that it is immunizing companies from liability for speech restrictions 
that would be unconstitutional if lawmakers themselves imposed 
them.''\17\ As Hamburger notes, that does not mean that the statute is 
unconstitutional, particularly given the judicial rule favoring narrow 
constructions to avoid unconstitutional meanings.\18\ However, there is 
another lingering issue raised by the use of this power to carry out 
the clear preference on ``content moderation'' of one party.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \15\ 47 U.S.C.  230(c).
    \16\ Philip Hamburger, The Constitution Can Crack Section 230, WALL 
STREET JOURNAL (Jan. 30, 2021).
    \17\ Congress makes explicit that it is immunizing companies from 
liability for speech restrictions that would be unconstitutional if 
lawmakers themselves imposed them.
    \18\ Id. See, e.g., Republican Party of Hawaii v. Mink, 474 U.S. 
1301, 1302 (1985) (narrowly interpreting the recall provisions of the 
Honolulu City Charter).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The Court has recognized that private actors can be treated as 
agents of the Government under a variety of theories. Courts have found 
such agency exists when the Government exercises ``coercive power'' or 
``provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that 
the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the state.''\19\ The 
Court has also held that the actions of a private party can be ``fairly 
treated as that of the state itself'' where there exists a ``close 
nexus between the state and the challenged action'' that a private 
action ``may be fairly treated as that of the state itself.''\20\ I 
will return to the case law below, but first it is useful to consider 
what is currently known about the Government-corporate coordination 
revealed by the Twitter Files.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \19\ Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 1004 (1982).
    \20\ Jackson v. Metro. Edison Co., 419 U.S. 345, 351 (1974).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I will not lay out the full array of communications revealed by 
Twitter and recent litigation, but some are worth noting as 
illustrative of a systemic and close coordination between the company 
and Federal officials, including dozens reportedly working within the 
FBI. The level of back-channel communications at one point became so 
overwhelming that a Twitter executive complained that the FBI was 
``probing & pushing everywhere.'' Another official referred to managing 
the Government censorship referrals as a ``monumental undertaking.'' At 
the same time, dozens of ex-FBI employees were hired, including former 
FBI General Counsel James Baker. There were so many FBI employees that 
they set up a private Slack channel and a crib sheet to allow them to 
translate FBI terms into Twitter terms more easily. The Twitter Files 
have led groups from the right to the left of our political spectrum to 
raise alarms over a censorship system maintained by a joint Government-
corporate effort.\21\ Journalist Matt Taibbi was enlisted by Elon Musk 
to present some of these files and reduced his findings to a simple 
header: ``Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \21\ Compare Yes, You Should be Worried About the Relationship with 
Twitter, THE FIRE, Dec. 23, 2022, https://www.thefire.org/news/yes-you-
should-be-worried-about-fbis-relationship-twitter with Branco Marcetic, 
Why the Twitter Files Are In Fact a Big Deal, JACOBIN, Dec. 29, 2022, 
https://jacobin.com/2022/12/twitter-files-censorship-content-
moderation-intelligence-agencies-surveillance.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As discussed today, these disclosures show that FBI is not alone 
among the Federal agencies in systemically targeting posters for 
censorship. Indeed, emails reveal FBI figures, like San Francisco 
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan, asking Twitter executives 
to ``invite an OGA'' (or ``Other Government Organization'') to an 
upcoming meeting. A week later, Stacia Cardille, a senior Twitter legal 
executive, indicated the OGA was the CIA, an agency under strict limits 
regarding domestic activities. Much of this work apparently was done 
through the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which 
operated secretly to censor citizens. Cardille referenced her ``monthly 
(soon to be weekly) 90-minute meeting with FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI [Office 
of the Director of National Intelligence], and industry peers on 
election threats.'' She detailed long lists of tasks sent to Twitter by 
Government officials. The censorship efforts reportedly included 
``regular meetings'' with intelligence officials. This included an 
effort to warn Twitter about a ``hack-and-leak operation'' by state 
actors targeting the 2020 Presidential election. That occurred just 
before the New York Post story on Hunter Biden's laptop was published 
and then blocked by Twitter. It was also blocked by other social media 
platforms like Facebook.\22\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \22\ Mark Zuckerberg has also stated that the FBI clearly warned 
about the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation. David Molloy, 
Zuckerberg Tells Rogan that FBI Warning Prompted Biden Laptop Story 
Censorship, BBC, August 26, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-
canada-62688532.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The files also show the staggering size of Government searches and 
demands. The FBI reportedly did key word searches to flag large numbers 
of postings for possible referral to Twitter. On November 3, 2020, 
Cardille told Baker that ``[t]he FBI has ``some folks in the Baltimore 
field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for 
violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the 
last 5 days.'' Baker responded that it was ``odd that they are 
searching for violations of our policies.'' But it was not odd at all. 
Twitter had integrated both current and former FBI officials into its 
network and the FBI was using the company's broadly-defined terms of 
service to target a wide array of postings and posters for suspensions 
and deletions.
    At one point, the coordination became so tight that, in July 2020, 
Chan offered to grant temporary top-secret clearance to Twitter 
executives to allow for easier communications and incorporation into 
the Government network.\23\ This close working relationship also 
allowed the Government use of accounts covertly, reportedly with the 
knowledge of Twitter. One 2017 email sent by an official from United 
States Central Command (CENTCOM) requested that Twitter ``whitelist'' 
Arabic-language Twitter accounts that the Government was using to 
``amplify certain messages.'' The Government also asked that these 
accounts be granted the ``verified'' blue checkmark.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \23\ Gadde and Roth both testified that they do not know if anyone 
took up this offer for clearances.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The range of available evidence on Government coordination with 
censorship extends beyond the Twitter Files and involves other 
agencies. For example, recent litigation brought by various States over 
social media censorship revealed a back-channel exchange between 
defendant Carol Crawford, the CDC's Chief of digital media and a 
Twitter executive.\24\ The timing of the request for the meeting was 
made on March 18, 2021. Twitter senior manager for public policy Todd 
O'Boyle asked Crawford to help identify tweets to be censored and 
emphasized that the company was ``looking forward to setting up regular 
chats.'' However, Crawford said that the timing that week was 
``tricky.'' Notably, that week, Dorsey and other CEOs were to appear at 
a House hearing to discuss ``misinformation'' on social media and their 
``content moderation'' policies. I had just testified on private 
censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship 
by surrogate.\25\ Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked at the March 25, 
2021, hearing about my warning of a ``little brother problem, a problem 
which private entities do for the Government which it cannot legally do 
for itself.''\26\ Dorsey insisted that there was no such censorship 
office or program.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \24\ The lawsuit addresses how experts, including Drs. Jayanta 
Bhattacharya (Stanford University) and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard 
University), have faced censorship on these platforms.
    \25\ Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media: 
Hearing Before the Subcomm. on Commc'n & Tech. of the H. Comm. on 
Energy & Com., 117th Cong. (2021) (Statement of Jonathan Turley, 
Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law, The George Washington 
University Law School).
    \26\ Misinformation and Disinformation on Online Platforms: Hearing 
Before the Subcomm. on Commc'n & Tech. and Subcomm. on Consumer 
Protection of the H. Comm. on Energy & Com., 117th Cong. (2021).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The pressure to censor COVID-related views was also coming from the 
White House, as they targeted Alex Berenson, a former New York Times 
reporter, who had contested agency positions on vaccines and underlying 
research. Rather than push information to counter Berenson's views, the 
White House wanted him banned. Berenson was eventually suspended.
    These files show not just a massive censorship system but a 
coordination and integration of the Government to a degree that few 
imagined before the release of the Twitter Files. Congressional 
hearings have only deepened the alarm for many in the free speech 
community. At one hearing, former Twitter executive Anika Collier 
Navaroli testified on what she called the ``nuanced'' standard used by 
her and her staff on censorship, including the elimination of ``dog 
whistles'' and ``coded'' messaging. She then said that they balanced 
free speech against safety and explained that they sought a different 
approach:

``Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech 
for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we 
protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we 
willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely?''

    The statement was similar to the statement of the former CEO Parag 
Agrawal. After taking over as CEO, Agrawal pledged to regulate content 
as ``reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public 
conversation.'' Agrawal said the company would ``focus less on thinking 
about free speech'' because ``speech is easy on the internet. Most 
people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can 
be heard.''
    The sweeping standards revealed at these hearings were defended by 
Members as necessary to avoid ``insurrections'' and other social harms. 
What is particularly distressing is to hear Members repeatedly 
defending censorship by citing Oliver Wendell Holmes' famous statement 
on ``shouting fire in a crowded theater.'' This mantra has been grossly 
misused as a justification for censorship. From statements on the 
pandemic to climate change, anti-free speech advocates are claiming 
that opponents are screaming ``fire'' and causing panic. The line comes 
from Schenck v. United States, a case that discarded the free speech 
rights of citizens opposing the draft. Charles Schenck and Elizabeth 
Baer were leading socialists in Philadelphia who opposed the draft in 
World War I. Fliers were distributed that encouraged men to ``assert 
your rights'' and stand up for their right to refuse such conscription 
as a form of involuntary servitude. Writing for the Court, Justice 
Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed the free speech interests in protecting 
the war and the draft. He then wrote the most regrettable and 
misunderstood judicial soundbites in history: ``the character of every 
act depends on the circumstances in which it is done . . . The most 
stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely 
shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.'' ``Shouting fire in a 
crowded theater'' quickly became a mantra for every effort to curtail 
free speech.
    Holmes sought to narrow his clear and present danger test in his 
dissent in Abrams v. United States. He warned that ``we should be 
eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions 
that we loath and believe to be frought (sic) with death, unless they 
so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and 
pressing purposes of the law that at an immediate check is required to 
save the country.'' Holmes' reframing of his view would foreshadow the 
standard in Brandenburg v. Ohio, where the Supreme Court ruled that 
even calling for violence is protected under the First Amendment unless 
there is a threat of ``imminent lawless action and is likely to incite 
or produce such action.'' However, Members are still channeling the 
standard from Schenck, which is a curious choice for most Democrats in 
using a standard used against socialists and anti-war protesters.
    Even more unnerving is the fact that Navaroli's standard and those 
referencing terms like ``delegitimization'' makes the Schenck standard 
look like the model of clarity. Essentially, they add that you also 
have to consider the theater, movie, and audience to decide what speech 
to allow. What could be treated as crying ``Fire!'' by any given person 
or in any given circumstances would change according to their 
``nuanced'' judgment.
           iii. cisa within the government-corporate alliance
    The role of CISA in this complex of Government-corporate programs 
only recently came into closer scrutiny. The Department of Homeland 
Security was previously the focus of public controversy with the 
disclosure of the creation of Department's Disinformation Governance 
Board and the appointment of Nina Jankowicz, its head.
    Jankowicz was a long advocate for censorship in the name of 
combating disinformation. At the time, White House press secretary Jen 
Psaki described the board as intended ``to prevent disinformation and 
misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of 
communities.''\27\ While the Department ultimately yielded to the 
public outcry over the board and disbanded it, the public was never 
told of a wide array other offices doing much of the same work in 
targeting citizens and groups for possible censorship.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \27\ Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki, April 29, 2022, 
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/04/28/
press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-april-28-2022/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    In January 2017, the Homeland Security declared that election 
infrastructure would be treated as ``critical infrastructure.'' CISA 
took a lead in supporting election infrastructure integrity and 
countering election misinformation. In 2018, CISA and its Countering 
Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) reportedly assumed a greater role 
in monitoring and counteracting foreign interference in U.S. elections. 
In 2020, this work appears to have expanded further to pursue 
allegations of ``switch boarding'' by domestic actors, or individuals 
thought to be acting as conduits for information undermining elections 
or critical infrastructure. Much about this work remains unclear and I 
am no expert on CISA or its operational profile. However, the expanding 
mandate of CISA follows a strikingly familiar pattern.
    The Twitter Files references CISA participation in these 
coordination meetings.
    Given a mandate to help protect election integrity, CISA plunged 
into the monitoring and targeting of those accused of disinformation. 
Infrastructure was interpreted to include speech. As its director, Jen 
Easterly, declared ``the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive 
infrastructure'' and thus included ``building that resilience to 
misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly 
important.''\28\ She pledged to continue that work with the private 
sector including social media companies on that effort. We do not need 
the Government in the business of building our ``cognitive 
infrastructure.'' Like content moderation, the use of this euphemism 
does not disguise the Government's effort to direct and control what 
citizens may read or say on public platforms.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \28\ Maggie Miller, Cyber Agency Beefing Up Disinformation, 
Misinformation Team, THE HILL, Nov. 10, 2022, https://thehill.com/
policy/cybersecurity/580990-cyber-agency-beefing-up-disinformation-
misinformation-team/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Over the years, the range of information deemed harmful has 
expanded to the point that even true information is now viewed as 
harmful for the purposes of censorship. Some of the recent disclosures 
from Twitter highlighted the work of Stanford's Virality Project which 
insisted ``true stories . . . could fuel hesitancy'' over taking the 
vaccine or other measures.\29\ It is reminiscent of the sedition 
prosecutions under the Crown before the American revolution where truth 
was no defense. Even true statements could be viewed as seditious and 
criminal. Once the Government gets into the business of speech 
regulation, the appetite for censorship becomes insatiable as 
viewpoints are deemed harmful, even if true. CISA shows the same broad 
range of suspect speech:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \29\ Jonathan Turley, True Stories . . . Could Fuel Hesitancy'': 
Stanford Project Worked to Censor Even True Stories on Social Media, 
Res Ipsa Blog (www.jonathanturley.org), March 19, 2023, at https://
jonathanturley.org/2023/03/19/true-stories-could-fuel-hesitancy-
stanford-project-worked-to-censor-even-true-stories-on-social-media/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the 
        intention of causing harm.
   Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or 
        manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
   Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to 
        mislead, harm, or manipulate. An example of malinformation is 
        editing a video to remove important context to harm or 
        mislead.''\30\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \30\ Foreign Influence Operations and Disinformation, https://
www.cisa.gov/topics/election-security/foreign-influence-operations-and-
disinformation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    MDM regulations offer the Government the maximal space for 
censorship based on how information may be received or used. The 
inclusion of true material used to ``manipulate'' others is 
particularly chilling as a rationale for speech controls.
    According to the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), ``tickets'' 
flag material for investigation that can be ``one piece of content, an 
idea or narrative, or hundreds of URLs pulled in a data dump.''\31\ 
These tickets reportedly include those suspected of 
``delegitimization,'' which includes speech that undermines or spread 
distrust in the political or electoral system. The ill-defined 
character of these categories is by design. It allows for highly 
selective or biased ``ticketing'' of speech. The concern is that 
conservative writers or sites subjected to the greatest targeting or 
ticketing. This pattern was evident in other recent disclosures from 
private bodies working with U.S. agencies. For example, we recently 
learned that the U.S. State Department funding for the National 
Endowment for Democracy (NED) included support for the Global 
Disinformation Index (GDI).\32\ The British group sought to discourage 
advertisers from supporting sites deemed dangerous due to 
disinformation. Companies were warned by GDI about ``risky'' sites that 
pose ``reputational and brand risk'' and asked them to avoid 
``financially supporting disinformation on-line.'' All ten of the 
``riskiest'' sites identified by the GDI are popular with 
conservatives, libertarians, and independents, including Reason, a site 
featuring legal analysis of conservative law professors. Liberal sites 
like HuffPost were ranked as the most trustworthy. The categories were 
as ill-defined as those used by CISA. RealClearPolitics was blacklisted 
due to what GDI considers ``biased and sensational language.'' The New 
York Post was blacklisted because ``content sampled from the Post 
frequently displayed bias, sensationalism, and clickbait, which carries 
the risk of misleading the site's reader.'' After the biased 
blacklisting was revealed, NED announced that it would withdraw funding 
for the organization. However, as with the Disinformation Board, the 
Disinformation Index was just one of a myriad of groups being funded or 
fed information from Federal agencies. These controversies have created 
a type of ``Whack-a-mole'' challenge for the free speech community. 
Every time one censorship partnership is identified and neutralized, 
another one pops up.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \31\ ELECTION INTEGRITY PARTNERSHIP, THE LONG FUSE MISINFORMATION 
AND THE 2020 ELECTION 9 (2021), https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/
druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-Report.pdf.
    \32\ Jonathan Turley, Scoring Speech: How the Biden Administration 
has been Quietly Shaping Public Discourse, Res Ipsa Blog 
(www.jonathanturley.org), Feb. 20, 2023, https://jonathanturley.org/
2023/02/20/scoring-speech-how-the-biden-administration-has-been-quietly 
shaping-speech/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    EIP embodies this complex of groups working with agencies. It 
describes itself as an organization that ``was formed between four of 
the Nation's leading institutions focused on understanding 
misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the 
Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington's Center 
for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council's Digital 
Forensic Research Lab.'' The EIP has referred to CISA as one of its 
``stakeholders'' and CISA has used the partnership to censor 
individuals or groups identified by the agency. We still do not the 
full extent of the coordination between CISA and other agencies with 
private and academic groups in carrying out censorship efforts. 
However, the available evidence raises legitimate questions over an 
agency relationship for the purposes of the First Amendment.
   iv. outsourcing censorship: the need for greater transparency and 
                             accountability
    In recent years, a massive censorship complex has been established 
with Government, academic, and corporate components. Millions of posts 
and comments are now being filtered through this system in arguably the 
most sophisticated censorship system in history. This partnership was 
facilitated by the demands of the First Amendment, which bars the 
Government from directly engaging in forms of prior restraint and 
censorship. If ``necessity is the mother of invention,'' the censorship 
complex shows how inventive motivated people can be in circumventing 
the Constitution. It has been an unprecedented challenge for the free 
speech community. The First Amendment was designed to deal with the 
classic threat to free speech of a Government-directed system of 
censorship. However, the traditional model of a ministry of information 
is now almost quaint in comparison to the current system. It is 
possible to have an effective state media by consent rather than 
coercion. There is no question that the work of these academic and 
private groups limits free speech. Calling opposing views 
disinformation, malinformation, or misinformation does not sanitize the 
censorship. It is still censorship being conducted through a screen of 
academic and corporate entities. It may also contravene the First 
Amendment.
    The Government can violate the Constitution through public 
employees or private actors. As I testified recently before the 
Judiciary Committee, this agency relationship can be established 
through consent or coercion. Indeed, the line can be difficult to 
discern in many cases. There is an argument that this is a violation of 
the First Amendment.
    Where the earlier debate over the status of these companies under 
Section 230 remained mired in speculation, the recent disclosures of 
Government involvement in the Twitter censorship program presents a 
more compelling and concrete case for arguing agency theories. These 
emails refer to multiple agencies with dozens of employees actively 
coordinating the blacklisting and blocking of citizens due to their 
public statements.
    There is no question that the United States Government is actively 
involved in a massive censorship system. The only question is whether 
it is in violation of the First Amendment.
    Once again, the Twitter Files show direct action from Federal 
employees to censor viewpoints and individual speakers on social media. 
The Government conduct is direct and clear. That may alone be 
sufficient to satisfy courts that a program or policy abridges free 
speech under the First Amendment. Even if a company like Twitter 
declined occasionally, the Federal Government was actively seeking to 
silence citizens. Any declinations only show that that effort was not 
always successful.
    In addition to that direct action, the Government may also be 
responsible for the actions of third parties who are partnering with 
the Government on censorship. The Government has long attempted to use 
private parties to evade direct limits imposed by the Constitution. 
Indeed, this tactic has been part of some of the worst chapters in our 
history. For example, in Lombard v. Louisiana,\33\ the Supreme Court 
dealt with the denial of a restaurant to serve three Black students and 
one white student at a lunch counter in New Orleans reserved for white 
people. The Court acknowledged that there was no State statute or city 
ordinance requiring racial segregation in restaurants. However, both 
the Mayor and the Superintendent of Police had made public statements 
that ``sit-in demonstrations'' would not be permitted. The Court held 
that the Government cannot do indirectly what it cannot do directly. In 
other words, it ``cannot achieve the same result by an official command 
which has at least as much coercive effect as an ordinance.''\34\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \33\ 373 U.S. 267 (1963).
    \34\ Id. at 273.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As the Court saidg in Blum v. Yaretsky (where state action was not 
found), ``a state normally can be held responsible for a private 
decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such 
significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must 
in law be deemed to be that of the state.''\35\ Past cases (often 
dealing with state action under the Fourteenth Amendment) have produced 
different tests for establishing an agency relationship, including (1) 
public function; (2) joint action; (3) Governmental compulsion or 
coercion; and (4) Governmental nexus.\36\ Courts have noted that these 
cases ``overlap'' in critical respects.\37\ I will not go into each of 
these tests but they show the highly contextual analysis performed by 
courts in finding private conduct taken at the behest or direction of 
the Government. The Twitter Files show a multilayered incorporation of 
Government information, access, and personnel in the censorship 
program. One question is ``whether the state has so far insinuated 
itself into a position of interdependence with [the private entity] 
that it must be recognized as a joint participant in the challenged 
activity.''\38\ Nevertheless, the Supreme Court noted in Blum that 
``[m]ere approval of or acquiescence in the initiatives of a private 
party is not sufficient to justify holding the state responsible for 
those initiatives.''\39\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \35\ Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 1004-05 (1982).
    \36\ Pasadena Republican Club v. W. Justice Ctr., 985 F.3d 1161, 
1167 (9th Cir. 2021); Kirtley v. Rainey, 326 F.3d 1088, 1092 (9th Cir. 
2003). Some courts reduce this to three tests.
    \37\ Rogalinski v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 
142721 (August 9, 2022).
    \38\ Gorenc v. Salt River Project Agr. Imp. & Power Dist., 869 F.2d 
503, 507 (9th Cir. 1989).
    \39\ Blum, 457 U.S. at 1004-05.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Courts have previously rejected claims of agency by private parties 
over social media.\40\ However, these cases often cited that lack of 
evidence of coordination and occurred before the release of the Twitter 
Files. For example, in Rogalinski v. Meta Platforms, Inc.,\41\ the 
court rejected a claim that Meta Platforms, Inc. violated the First 
Amendment when it censored posts about COVID-19. However, the claim was 
based entirely on a statement by the White House Press Secretary and 
``all of the alleged censorship against Rogalinski occurred before any 
Government statement.'' It noted that there was no evidence that there 
was any input of the Government to challenge the assertion that Meta's 
message was ``entirely its own.''\42\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \40\ O'Handley v. Padilla, 579 F. Supp.3d 1163 1192-93 (N.D. Cal. 
2022).
    \41\ 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 142721 (August 9, 2022).
    \42\ Id.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    There is an interesting comparison to the decision of the United 
States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Paige v. Coyner where 
the Court dealt with the termination of an employee after a county 
official called her employer to complain about comments made in a 
public hearing.\43\ The court recognized that ``[t]his so-called state-
actor requirement becomes particularly complicated in cases such as the 
present one where a private party is involved in inflicting the alleged 
injury on the plaintiff.''\44\ However, in reversing the lower court, 
it still found state action due to the fact that a Government official 
made the call to the employer, which prompted the termination.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \43\ Paige v. Coyner, 614 F.3d 273, 276 (6th Cir. 2010).
    \44\ Id.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Likewise, in Dossett v. First State Bank, the United States Court 
of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that the termination of a bank 
employee was the result of state action after school board members 
contacted her employer about comments made at a public-school board 
meeting.\45\ The Eighth Circuit ruled that the district court erred by 
instructing a jury that it had to find that the school board members 
had ``actual authority'' to make these calls. In this free speech case, 
the court held that you could have state action under the color of law 
when the ``school official who was purporting to act in the performance 
of official duties but was acting outside what a reasonable person 
would believe the school official was authorized to do.''\46\ In this 
case, Federal officials are clearly acting in their official capacity. 
Indeed, that official capacity is part of the concern raised by the 
Twitter Files: the assignment of dozens of Federal employees to support 
a massive censorship system.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \45\ 399 F.3d 940 (8th Cir. 2005).
    \46\ Id. at 948.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Courts have also ruled that there is state action where Government 
officials use their positions to intimidate or pressure private parties 
to limit free speech. In National Rifle Association v. Vullo, the 
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that a free 
speech claim could be made on the basis of a state official's 
pressuring companies not to do business with the NRA.\47\ The Second 
Circuit held ``although Government officials are free to advocate for 
(or against) certain viewpoints, they may not encourage suppression of 
protected speech in a manner that `can reasonably be interpreted as 
intimating that some form of punishment or adverse regulatory action 
will follow the failure to accede to the official's request.' ''\48\ It 
is also important to note that pressure is not required to establish an 
agency relationship under three of the prior tests. It can be based on 
consent rather than coercion.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \47\ National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo, 49 F.4th 700, 
715 (2d Cir. 2022).
    \48\ Id. (quoting Hammerhead Enters., Inc. v. Brezenoff, 707 F.2d 
33, 39 (2d Cir. 1983)).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    We have seen how censorship efforts began with claims of foreign 
interference and gradually expanded into general efforts to target harm 
or ``delegitimizing'' speech. The Twitter Files show FBI officials 
warning Twitter executives that their platform was being targeted by 
foreign powers, including a warning that an executive cited as a basis 
for blocking postings related to the Hunter Biden laptop. At the same 
time, various Members of Congress have warned social media companies 
that they could face legislative action if they did not continue to 
censor social media. Indeed, after Twitter began to reinstate free 
speech protections and dismantle its censorship program, Rep. Schiff 
(joined by Reps. Andre Carson (D-Ind.), Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) and Sen. 
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)) sent a letter to Facebook, warning it not 
to relax its censorship efforts. The letter reminded Facebook that some 
lawmakers are watching the company ``as part of our on-going oversight 
efforts''--and suggested they may be forced to exercise that oversight 
into any move by Facebook to ``alter or rollback certain misinformation 
policies.'' This is only the latest such warning. In prior hearings, 
social media executives were repeatedly told that a failure to remove 
viewpoints were considered ``disinformation.'' For example, in a 
November 2020 Senate hearing, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized 
for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. But Sen. Richard 
Blumenthal, D-Conn., warned that he and his Senate colleagues would not 
tolerate any ``backsliding or retrenching'' by ``failing to take action 
against dangerous disinformation.''\49\ Senators' demands increased 
censorship in areas ranging from the pandemic to elections to climate 
change.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \49\ Misinformation and Disinformation on Online Platforms: Hearing 
Before the Subcomm. on Commc'n & Tech. and Subcomm. on Consumer 
Protection of the H. Comm. on Energy & Com., 117th Cong. (2021).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    These warnings do not necessarily mean that a court would find that 
executives were carrying out Government priorities. An investigation is 
needed to fully understand the coordination and the communications 
between the Government and these companies. In Brentwood Academy v. 
Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Assn.,\50\ the Supreme Court noted 
that State action decisions involving such private actors are highly 
case-specific:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \50\ 531 U.S. 288 (2001).

``What is fairly attributable is a matter of normative judgment, and 
the criteria lack rigid simplicity. From the range of circumstances 
that could point toward the state behind an individual face, no one 
fact can function as a necessary condition across the board for finding 
state action; nor is any set of circumstances absolutely sufficient, 
for there may be some countervailing reason against attributing 
activity to the government . . . 
``Our cases have identified a host of facts that can bear on the 
fairness of such an attribution. We have, for example, held that a 
challenged activity may be state action when it results from the 
state's exercise of `coercive power,' . . . when the state provides 
`significant encouragement, either overt or covert,' . . . or when a 
private actor operates as a `willful participant in joint activity with 
the state or its agents,' . . . We have treated a nominally private 
entity as a State actor when it is controlled by an `agency of the 
state,' . . . when it has been delegated a public function by the 
state, . . . when it is `entwined with governmental policies,' or when 
government is `entwined in [its] management or control.' ''\51\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \51\ Id. at 296.

    Obviously, many of these elements appear present. However, the 
Twitter Files also show executives occasionally declining to ban 
posters targeted by the Government. It also shows such pressure coming 
from the Legislative branch. For example, the Twitter Files reveal that 
Twitter refused to carry out censorship requests from at least one 
Member targeting a columnist and critic. Twitter declined and one of 
its employees simply wrote, ``no, this isn't feasible/we don't do 
this.''\52\ There were also requests from Republicans to Twitter for 
action against posters, including allegedly one from the Trump White 
House to take down content.\53\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \52\ Jonathan Turley, ``We Don't Do This'': Twitter Censors 
Rejected Adam Schiff's Censorship Request, THE HILL, Jan. 5, 2023, 
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3800380-we-dont-do-this-even-
twitters-censors-rejected-adam-schiffs-censorship-request/.
    \53\ This included the Trump White House allegedly asking to take 
down derogatory tweets from the wife of John Legend after the former 
President attacked the couple. Moreover, some Trump officials supported 
efforts to combat foreign interference and false information on social 
media. It has been reported that Twitter has a ``database'' of 
Republican demands. Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebaeny, Twitter Kept 
Entire ``Database'' of Republican Requests to Censor Posts, ROLLING 
STONE, Feb. 8, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
news/elon-trump-twitter-files-collusion-biden-censorship-1234675969/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    We simply do not know the extent of what companies like Twitter 
``did do,'' nor for whom. We do not know how demands were declined when 
flagged by the CISA, FBI, or other agencies. The report from Twitter 
reviewers selected by Elon Musk suggests that most requests coming from 
the Executive branch were granted. That is one of the areas that could 
be illuminated by this select subcommittee. The investigation may be 
able to supply the first comprehensive record of the Government efforts 
to use these companies to censor speech. It can pull back the curtain 
on America's censorship system so that both Congress and the public can 
judge the conduct of our Government.
    Whether the surrogate censorship conducted by social media 
companies is a form of Government action may be addressed by the courts 
in the coming years. However, certain facts are well-established and 
warrant Congressional action. First, while these companies and 
Government officials prefer to call it ``content moderation,'' these 
companies have carried out the largest censorship system in history, 
effectively governing the speech of billions of people. The American 
Civil Liberties Union, for example, maintains that censorship applies 
to both Government and private actions. It is defined as ``the 
suppression of words, images, or ideas that are `offensive,' [and] 
happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal 
political or moral values on others.''\54\ Adopting Orwellian 
alternative terminology does not alter the fact that these companies 
are engaging in the systemic censoring of viewpoints on social media.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \54\ American Civil Liberties Union, What is Censorship?, https://
www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Second, the Government admits that it has supported this massive 
censorship system. Even if the censorship is not deemed Government 
action for the purposes of the First Amendment, it is now clear that 
the Government has actively supported and assisted in the censorship of 
citizens. Objecting that the conduct of Government officials may not 
qualify under the First Amendment does not answer the question of 
whether members believe that the Government should be working for the 
censorship of opposing or dissenting viewpoints. During the McCarthy 
period, the Government pushed blacklists for suspected communists and 
the term ``fellow travelers'' was rightfully denounced regardless of 
whether it qualified as a violation of the First Amendment. Even before 
Joe McCarthy launched his un-American activities hearings, the Justice 
Department created an effective blacklist of organizations called 
``Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations'' (AGLOSO) that 
was then widely distributed to the media and the public. It became the 
foundation for individual blacklists.\55\ The maintenance of the list 
fell to the FBI. Ultimately, blacklisting became the norm with both 
Legislative and Executive officials tagging artists, writers, and 
others. As Professor Geoffrey Stone observed, ``Government at all 
levels hunted down `disloyal' individuals and denounced them. Anyone so 
stigmatized became a liability to his friends and an outcast to 
society.''\56\ At the time, those who raised the same free speech 
objections were also attacked as ``fellow travelers'' or ``apologists'' 
for communists. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. It was an 
affront to free speech values that have long been at the core of our 
country. It is not enough to say that the Government is merely seeking 
the censorship of posters like any other user. There are many things 
that are more menacing when done by the Government rather than 
individuals. Moreover, the Government is seeking to silence certain 
speakers in our collective name and using tax dollars to do so. The FBI 
and other agencies have massive powers and resources to amplify 
censorship efforts. The question is whether Congress and its individual 
members support censorship whether carried out by corporate or 
Government officials on social media platforms.\57\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \55\ Robert Justin Goldstein, Prelude to McCarthyism, PROLOGUE 
MAGAZINE, Fall 2006, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/
2006/fall/agloso.html. Courts pushed back on the listing to require 
some due process for those listed.
    \56\ Geoffrey R. Stone, Free Speech in the Age of McCarthy: A 
Cautionary Tale, 93 CALIF. L. REV. 1387, 1400 (2005).
    \57\ The distinction between these companies from other corporate 
entities like the NFL or Starbucks is important. There is no question 
that businesses can limit speech on their premises and by their own 
employees. However, these companies constitute the most popular 
communication platforms in the country. They are closer to AT&T than 
Starbucks in offering a system of communication.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Third, the Government is engaged in targeting users under the 
ambiguous mandates of combating disinformation or misinformation. These 
are not areas traditionally addressed by public affairs offices to 
correct false or misleading statements made about an agency's work. The 
courts have repeatedly said that agencies are allowed to speak in their 
voices without viewpoint neutrality.\58\ As the Second Circuit stated, 
``[w]hen it acts as a speaker, the Government is entitled to favor 
certain views over others.''\59\ This was an effort to secretly silence 
others. Courts have emphasized that ``[i]t is well-established that 
First Amendment rights may be violated by the chilling effect of 
governmental action that falls short of a direct prohibition against 
speech.''\60\ These public employees were deployed to monitor and 
target user spreading ``disinformation'' on a variety of subjects, from 
election fraud to Government corruption. The Twitter Files show how 
this mandate led to an array of abuses, from targeting jokes to barring 
opposing scientific views.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \58\ Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, 555 U.S. 460, 467-68 (2009); 
Johanns v. Livestock Mktg. Ass'n, 544 U.S. 550, 553 (2005).
    \59\ Wandering Dago, Inc. v. Destito, 879 F.3d 20, 34 (2d Cir. 
2018).
    \60\ Zieper v. Metzinger, 474 F.3d 60, 65 (2d Cir. 2007).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    These facts already warrant bipartisan action from Congress. Free 
speech advocates have long opposed disinformation mandates as an excuse 
or invitation for public or private censorship. I admittedly subscribe 
to the view that the solution to bad speech is better speech, not 
speech regulation.\61\ Justice Brandeis embraced the view of the 
Framers that free speech was its own protection against false 
statements: ``If there be time to discover through discussion the 
falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of 
education, the remedy to be applied is more speech not enforced 
silence.''\62\ We have already seen how disinformation was used to 
silence dissenting views of subjects like mask efficacy and COVID 
policies like school closures that are now being recognized as 
legitimate.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \61\ See generally Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline 
of Free Speech in the United States, 45 HARV. J.L. & PUB. POL'Y 571 
(2022).
    \62\ Whitney, 274 U.S. at 375, 377.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    We have also seen how claims of Russian trolling operations may 
have been overblown in their size or their impact. Indeed, even some 
Twitter officials ultimately concluded that the FBI was pushing 
exaggerated claims of foreign influence on social media.\63\ The 
Twitter Files refer to sharp messages from the FBI when Twitter failed 
to find evidence supporting the widely-reported foreign trolling 
operations. One Twitter official referred to finding ``no links to 
Russia.'' This was not for want of trying. Spurred on by the FBI, 
another official promised ``I can brainstorm with [redacted] and see if 
we can dig even deeper and try to find a stronger connection.'' The 
pressure from the FBI led Roth to tell his colleagues that he was ``not 
comfortable'' with the agenda of the FBI and said that it reminded him 
of something ``more like something we'd get from a Congressional 
committee than the Bureau.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \63\ In his testimony, Roth stated that they found substantial 
Russian interference impacting the election. Protecting Speech from 
Government Interference and Social Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter's Role 
in Suppressing the Biden Laptop Story: Hearing Before the H. Comm. on 
Oversight & Accountability, 118th Cong. (2023) (Statement of Yael Roth, 
former head of trust and safety, Twitter). That claim stands in 
conflict with other studies and reports, but it can also be addressed 
as part of the investigation into these communications.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The danger of censorship is not solely a concern of one party. To 
his great credit, Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Cal.) in October 2020, said that 
he was appalled by the censorship and was alarmed by the apparent 
``violation of the 1st Amendment principles.''\64\ Congress can bar the 
use of Federal funds for such disinformation offices. Such legislation 
can require detailed reporting on agency efforts to ban or block public 
comments or speech by citizens. Even James Baker told the House 
Oversight Committee that there may be a need to pass legislation to 
limit the role of Government officials in their dealings with social 
media companies.\65\ Legislation can protect the legitimate role of 
agencies in responding and disproving statements made out its own 
programs or policies. It is censorship, not disinformation, that has 
damaged our Nation in recent years. Free speech like sunshine can be 
its own disinfectant. In Terminiello v. City of Chicago, the Supreme 
Court declared that:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \64\ Democratic Rep. Ro Khana Expressed Concerns Over Twitter's 
Censorship of Hunter Biden Laptop, FOX NEWS, Dec. 2, 2022, https://
www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-rep-ro-khanna-expressed-concerns-
twitters-censorship-hunter-biden-laptop-story.
    \65\ Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social 
Media Bias, Part 1: Twitter's Role in Suppressing the Biden Laptop 
Story: Hearing Before the H. Comm. on Oversight & Accountability, 118th 
Cong. (2023) (Statement of James Baker, former general counsel, FBI.)

``The right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas . . . is 
. . . one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from 
totalitarian regimes . . . [A] function of free speech under our system 
of Government is to invite dispute. Speech is often provocative and 
challenging. [F]reedom of speech, though not absolute, is nevertheless 
protected against censorship.''\66\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \66\ Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 4 (1949) 
(citations omitted).

    Disinformation does cause divisions, but the solution is not to 
embrace Government-corporate censorship. The Government effort to 
reduce speech does not solve the problem of disinformation. It does not 
change minds but simply silences voices in national debates.
                             v. conclusion
    There is obviously a deep division in Congress over censorship, 
with many Members supporting the efforts to blacklist and remove 
certain citizens or groups from social media platforms. That is a 
debate that many of us in the free speech community welcome. However, 
let it be an honest and open debate. The first step in securing such a 
debate is to support transparency on the full extent of these efforts 
by Federal agencies.
    The second step is to allow these questions to be discussed without 
attacking journalists and witnesses who come to Congress to share their 
own concerns over the threat to both free press and free speech values. 
Calling reporters ``so-called journalists'' or others ``Putin lovers'' 
represent a return to the rhetoric used against free speech advocates 
during the Red Scare.\67\ We are better than that as a country and our 
Constitution demands more from this body. If Members want to defend 
censorship, then do so with the full record before the public on the 
scope and standards of this Government effort.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \67\ Jonathan Turley, Is the Red Scare Turning Blue?, Res Ipsa Blog 
(www.jonathanturley.org), Feb. 12, 2023, https://jonathanturley.org/
2023/02/12/is-the-red-scare-going-blue-democrats-accuse-government-
critics-of-being-putin-lovers-and-supporting-insurrectionists/.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    The public understands the threat to free speech and strongly 
supports an investigation into the FBI's role in censoring social 
media. Despite the push for censorship by some politicians and pundits, 
most Americans still want free-speech protections. It is in our DNA. 
This country was founded on deep commitments to free speech and limited 
Government--and that Constitutional tradition is no conspiracy theory. 
Polls show that 73 percent of Americans believe that these companies 
censored material for political purposes.\68\ Another poll showed that 
63 percent want an investigation into FBI censorship allegations.\69\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \68\ Sean Burch, Nearly 75 percent of Americans Believe Twitter, 
Facebook Censor Posts Based on Viewpoints, Pew Finds, THE WRAP, Aug. 
19, 2020, https://www.thewrap.com/nearly-75-percent-twitter-facebook-
censor/.
    \69\ 63% Want FBI's Social Media Activity Investigated, RASMUSSEN 
REPORTS, Dec. 26, 2022, https://www.rasmussenreports.com/
public_content/politics/partner_surveys/
twittergate_63_want_fbi_s_social_media_activity_investigated.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Adlai Stevenson famously warned of this danger: ``Public confidence 
in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in 
democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in 
everything we fight . . . for.'' Senator Stevenson's words should 
resonate on both sides of our political divide and that we might, even 
now, find a common ground and common purpose. The loss of faith in our 
Government creates political instabilities and vulnerabilities in our 
system. Moreover, regardless of party affiliation, we should all want 
answers to come of these questions. We can differ on our conclusions, 
but the first step for Congress is to force greater transparency on 
controversies involving bias to censorship. One of the greatest values 
of oversight is to allow greater public understanding of the facts 
behind Government actions. Greater transparency is the only course that 
can help resolve the doubts that many have over the motivations and 
actions of their Government. I remain an optimist that it is still 
possible to have a civil and constructive discussion of these issues. 
Regardless of our political affiliations and differences, everyone in 
this room is here because of a deep love and commitment to this 
country. It was what brought us from vastly different backgrounds and 
areas in our country. We share a single article of faith in our 
Constitution and the values that it represents. We are witnessing a 
crisis of faith today that must be healed for the good of our entire 
Nation. The first step toward that healing is an open and civil 
discussion of the concerns that the public has with our Government. We 
can debate what measures are warranted in light of any censorship 
conducted with Government assistance. However, we first need to get a 
full and complete understanding of the relationship between Federal 
agencies and these companies in the removal or suspension of 
individuals from social media. At a minimum, that should be a position 
that both parties can support in the full disclosure of past Government 
conduct and communications with these companies.
    Once again, thank you for the honor of appearing before you to 
discuss these important issues, and I would be happy to answer any 
questions from the committee.

    Mr. Bishop. Thank you, Professor Turley.
    Members will be recognized by order of seniority for their 
5 minutes of questioning. An additional round of questioning 
may be called after all Members have been recognized.
    I now recognize myself for 5 minutes of questioning.
    Mr. Weingarten, you laid out in your testimony, your 
written testimony, that CISA--and that's the reason I think 
this subcommittee, as the oversight committee, needs to look at 
this also, it's an issue of supreme importance--that CISA had a 
central role in creating this what I refer to as the censorship 
laundering enterprise.
    You mentioned that it convened meetings with social media 
companies and others and other law enforcement agencies. They 
switchboarded, meaning that a request to censor would come in 
from other sources. They'd pass them on. They would brief state 
officials on sort-of what's acceptable thought and not, 
coordinate with public and private-sector partners to, ``build 
resilience.'' I'll maybe get a chance to ask Dr. Miller-Idriss 
about that topic.
    I wonder if you'd elaborate on this one aspect, this 
coordination with private-sector partners. Professor Turley 
made reference to it. It's an article you made reference to, 
the Siegel Tablet mag article. He refers to it as the NGO Borg. 
That is to say, all these acronymed entities.
    Talk about that, if you would, a little bit.
    Mr. Weingarten. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Briefly, switchboarding, that concept of receiving 
purported misinformation or disinformation and then passing it 
on to a platform and the platform responding and saying 
escalated and, yes, under XYZ policy we have actioned, we have 
taken action on this tweet.
    It seems to me that CISA understood that when it ran up 
against domestic speech, even though it appears domestic speech 
was captured in its switchboarding efforts, it recognized that 
the proper way to do this, in the term that this hearing has 
used of laundering it, could be better done through outsourcing 
those efforts, but in close coordination with the Government.
    So you mentioned before EIP, the Election Integrity 
Partnership. This is a consortium of four outside 
nongovernmental groups. It includes the Stanford Internet 
Observatory, University of Washington's CIP, the Atlantic 
Council's DFRLab, as well as a company called Graphika. Many of 
these organizations have links and ties to Government 
officials.
    Essentially what CISA did, in conjunction with EIP and, 
according to EIP officials, with some interns who were both 
working at CISA while at the same time members of SIO, the 
Stanford Internet Observatory, was create a platform to pass 
along purported mis-, dis-, and malinformation for this 
platform to, as shown in that graphic before, collect and 
surveil tweets, to then for this platform to pressure social 
media companies to change their terms of service, and then flag 
for them specific instances of content they believed ran up 
against those flags, and consequently have led to, as shown, 22 
million tweets and retweets and such to be labeled 
misinformation.
    Mr. Bishop. That phenomenon appears to be--it sort-of goes 
underground, the Government censoring effort. There are a lot 
of other indications that it's kind-of being--the tracks are 
being covered. Maybe we'll get a chance to talk about that some 
more.
    Dr. Kulldorff, you're an epidemiologist of 30 years' 
experience, two decades at Harvard. You are, to me, the epitome 
of a public health expert. So you made some views, expressed 
some views on COVID issues, and then you were censored. CISA 
may have played a role in that.
    CISA, one of the connections, this Election Integrity 
Project or whatever it's called, Partnership, became the 
Virality Project, which then censored COVID information. So not 
only were you censored by YouTube and Twitter and the like, 
there was a Government hand in this kind of censorship.
    Thank you for your role in the attorney generals of 
Louisiana and Missouri's litigation that is, frankly, to be 
thanked for the exposure of a lot of it.
    How does that make you feel, that the Government was 
responsible for censoring your views?
    Mr. Kulldorff. I think it's stunning. If you had mentioned 
this 3 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you, that scientists 
would be censored in this country.
    Mr. Bishop. Dr. Miller-Idriss, you have said--one thing I 
appreciated in your testimony, you said that we should protect 
people's First Amendment rights as you go about this. How do 
you propose to do that?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Thank you for the question.
    I would say by not telling them what to think, by not 
censoring them, by not telling people what they should be 
thinking, but just helping them make better choices about 
recognizing some of the tricky content that, for example, their 
kids encounter on-line.
    Mr. Bishop. Well, but there's a recognition, the Supreme 
Court has recognized that there's a First Amendment right of 
access to information as well as the right to speak.
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Yes.
    Mr. Bishop. One of your proposals in your policy 
recommendation list is that you continue to work with the tech 
sector to remove harmful and dangerous content.
    If it's content that the First Amendment allows, how could 
you possibly justify removing it under the--as a Government 
agency?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Well, I would say, as a Government 
employee or agency or anyone would want to remove criminal 
content, content that is incitement to violence, criminal 
content, something that is inciting someone, that is live-
streaming the murder of people in a Walmart, for example. 
That's what I'm talking about when I talk about harmful 
content.
    Mr. Bishop. OK. My 5 minutes have expired, unfortunately. I 
hope we'll be able to have a second round.
    I now recognize Ranking Member Ivey for 5 minutes for 
questions he may have.
    Mr. Ivey. I'm pretty sure we'll have a second round, 
whether we like it or not.
    Professor Turley, let me come back to you. I thought I 
pulled up your testimony here. But it goes to the question I 
raised when I was making my opening statement, which was that 
you'd raised the issue--I'm sorry. It's page 18 of your 
testimony.
    ``Disinformation does cause divisions, but the solution is 
not to embrace Government-corporate censorship.''
    So what would be the types of solutions we're looking at? 
Just off Dr. Miller-Idriss' statement.
    For example, a new phenomenon apparently is people. I guess 
when I was a kid they would pull the fire alarm. Now they're 
making calls and saying that there's an active shooter at 
elementary school X. Because of the networking that everything 
has now, that gets picked up by the police and the EMT and 
frightened parents, news media, even though it's false.
    So one example--I mean, there's multiple others. We could 
talk about the recruitment videos and the like. You might have 
gradations of those. But, I mean, what would be your take on 
how we should be addressing these kinds of issues?
    Mr. Turley. Thank you very much for that question.
    I actually think there is a lot of common ground there in 
terms of what we can do positively to deal with disinformation.
    Disinformation is a real thing. It is a thing that people 
go on the internet. It seems to be a license for people, and in 
an age of rage that license can be truly horrific when you look 
at how people transform themselves on the internet.
    What I would stress is that the Government should not be in 
the business of censorship. That's a bright line that the 
Government can live with. Instead, it should focus on producing 
better information and to have offices that can counter--
because, remember, the courts have accepted that--the Supreme 
Court has said the Government doesn't have to be neutral on 
information. When it speaks, it's allowed to take a side. It's 
allowed to say what it believes is true.
    Mr. Ivey. Well, but let's follow up on that.
    So I, as Government official, learn that there's no active 
shooter at that elementary school and I call YouTube, Twitter, 
whoever, and say, hey, look, that's false information, you're 
scaring parents to death, can you take that down?
    Mr. Turley. Well, first of all, that example you gave may 
indeed be a crime under State law, to make false claims of that 
kind with the purpose of triggering panic.
    But, more importantly, one of the things that can be done 
is that the social media companies and the Government can 
immediately flag information they believe is untrue and speak 
in their own voice.
    What I think we need to develop--and I think there's a lot 
of room there to develop it--is to try to create better 
guardrails that keep the U.S. Government on this side of 
censorship. That includes the use of agencies. The use of 
private companies, in my view, do trigger the First Amendment. 
I think that the Government has actually violated the First 
Amendment.
    Mr. Ivey. Since I'm running out of time, there was 
something else I wanted to raise. I'll have to come back to you 
all in the next round.
    You did mention Nina Jankowicz in your statement, who I had 
a chance to meet during a deposition in the Judiciary 
Committee. I've started following her and what happened with 
respect to her. She was the person, as you may recall, who was 
appointed to head that board. As it turned out, she was 
essentially forced out of the position before it was even 
formed.
    I'll offer a couple of articles here that can be put into 
the record. But there's an individual named Jack Posobiec, I 
guess his name is, who put out arguably false information about 
her that got picked up by Chairman Jordan and others. Actually, 
I think Ms. Taylor Greene had some comments with respect to it. 
We can put them in the record. I think Mr. Gaetz did as well.
    That sort-of escalated into her getting death threats. She 
had to hire a security company. She was 8 months pregnant.
    Ms. Greene. Parliamentary question, Mr. Chairman.
    Mr. Ivey. I didn't say that you----
    Mr. Bishop. What is that?
    Ms. Greene. He mentioned my name and accused me of saying 
false information about Nina Jankowicz.
    Mr. Bishop. The committee will be at ease.
    Mr. Ivey. Can we pause the clock?
    Mr. Bishop. Yes. Please do. In fact, put 20 seconds back on 
the clock, please. The committee will suspend.
    [Pause.]
    Mr. Bishop. Members are reminded not to engage in 
personalities.
    The gentleman is recognized.
    Mr. Ivey. Thank you.
    But Members of Congress made comments about her that took 
on a life of their own, that became viral on the internet, led 
to the death threats that she got--and still gets, actually, 
even though she's been out of the position for about a year, at 
least. I think she's filing a lawsuit against FOX for 
propagating these stories as well.
    But she was clearly a victim of, in my view, 
misinformation, disinformation. From her perspective, it was 
very ironic, because that's what she was actually brought into 
the Government to try and address.
    So I'll come back to it later. But thank you, Professor 
Turley, for your comments.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the gentlelady, Ms. Greene of Georgia, for 
her 5 minutes.
    Ms. Greene. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
    Thank you, witnesses, for coming before our committee 
today.
    I am one of those that believe our First Amendment is one 
of the greatest rights that we have. I also am so grateful to 
be an American, always believing that freedom of speech was 
something that we possessed until the past few years, where 
myself and many other Americans--Dr. Kulldorff--we found 
ourselves--I, like you, had my Twitter account permanently 
banned for posting my speech, opinions, and thoughts on Twitter 
about COVID-19.
    I'm not a doctor or an expert like you are. You certainly 
are an expert in the field on it. It's a shame that you had 
your speech censored.
    But it's appalling to me that CISA, which is taxpayer-
funded by the American people, the same American people that 
are given the right to the freedom of speech, that are given 
this great freedom by our Founders, had their speech censored.
    That combination between the Homeland Security and CISA, 
working with private companies, big tech companies and others, 
to silence Americans is a grave assault on all of these 
Americans' First Amendment rights.
    So I'd like to ask each of you, Mr. Weingarten, do you 
believe in the First Amendment?
    Mr. Weingarten. Wholeheartedly.
    Ms. Greene. Dr. Kulldorff.
    Mr. Kulldorff. I do.
    Ms. Greene. Dr. Miller-Idriss.
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Absolutely.
    Ms. Greene. Mr. Turley.
    Mr. Turley. I do.
    Ms. Greene. Great. Well, it seems that we all share the 
same belief.
    I would like to ask, since we're talking about truth and 
information, given that CISA engaged in this with the 
Department of Homeland, who is the author of truth? I'll ask 
each of you again. Who's in charge of truth?
    Mr. Weingarten.
    Mr. Weingarten. Well, I believe, as citizens, we're all 
entitled to evaluate facts and opinions and decide for 
ourselves.
    Ms. Greene. Dr. Kulldorff.
    Mr. Kulldorff. Nobody is in charge. It's a collective 
responsibility.
    Ms. Greene. Dr. Miller-Idriss.
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. I agree. There's no truth with a capital 
``T''. I think we all need to be equipped with the tools to 
evaluate evidence and make decisions.
    Ms. Greene. Mr. Turley.
    Mr. Turley. I agree with all those comments.
    Ms. Greene. Great. This is very overwhelmingly fantastic.
    But I'd like to ask a question, Dr. Miller-Idriss, if I 
may.
    You're an expert on so-called right-wing extremism, 
including on-line radicalization by right-wing extremist 
groups. You've written several books on right-wing extremism, 
including ``Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right.'' 
You're a member of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC 
Tracking Hate and Extremism Advisory Committee.
    I couldn't find any of your work studying left extremism or 
antifa or BLM. I mean, we all know antifa and BLM riots are 
responsible for $2 billion of damage across American cities in 
2020, and antifa literally took over Portland and declared 
their own autonomous zone.
    So I'm just wondering, how do you consider your 
organization, PERIL, a good source of informing people on what 
they should believe and not believe when you do no study 
whatsoever into left extremism?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Thank you for the question.
    I'm an expert on the far right because I spent the first 20 
years of my career working in Germany in the post-Holocaust, 
post-unification surge of far-right extremism. I know you have 
a hearing on Tuesday on far-left extremism.
    Ms. Greene. Yes. But, Dr. Miller-Idriss, just to let you 
know, this is America. We're not Nazi Germany.
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Yes, absolutely right. But that's how 
when I pivoted here, the first time I was asked to testify was 
about that evidence that I had learned from what Germany had 
been doing, and then that became relevant here for policy 
makers.
    But we don't--first of all, just to respond to your query 
about what we teach people, we don't teach people anything. We 
are just looking at helping them understand what the tactics of 
manipulation are on-line so they can make better decisions.
    We have experts who do work on environmental extremism. We 
have experts who work on Islamist forms of extremism. But 
because, both under the Trump administration and the Biden 
administration, the emphasis has been right now on the 
greatest, most lethal threat, which has been determined to be 
far right, meaning white supremacist extremism and unlawful 
militias----
    Ms. Greene. Well, Dr. Miller-Idriss, just real quick, I'm 
out of time. But would you consider Trump supporters 
extremists?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. We are worried about violent extremism. 
So that to the extent--not about what people believe, but to 
the extent that they are moving toward violence.
    Ms. Greene. Trump supporters specifically?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. If they're calling for violence. It 
doesn't matter to me who they support.
    Ms. Greene. I haven't seen any--by the way, there's a great 
rally in Iowa this weekend if you want to study people on the 
right and what they believe. You'll find secure borders, 
freedom of speech.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentlewoman's time----
    Ms. Greene. No crime.
    Thank you. I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentlewoman's time has expired.
    I recognize Mrs. Ramirez for her 5 minutes of questioning.
    Mrs. Ramirez. Thank you, Chairman and Ranking Member Ivey.
    I have a couple of comments for Dr. Miller-Idriss. But I 
want to come back real quick before that to something I heard a 
couple of my colleagues mention. This question is for Dr. 
Kulldorff.
    I heard that it was referred that you too have been 
censored by CISA and sharing that concern that both of you are 
censored. Could you give me examples of how CISA has censored 
you?
    Mr. Kulldorff. I was censored by Twitter, by YouTube, by 
LinkedIn, Facebook, and Reddit. They don't tell who is behind 
it. So sometimes they don't say anything. Whatever I said just 
disappears. Sometimes one gets a note saying something of the 
style of, ``It goes against our standards.'' But they never 
tell--they never told me, the person being censored, who was 
behind it.
    Mrs. Ramirez. So, Doctor, just for the record here, just I 
think on the record here, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure 
Security Agency, you have no evidence that they censored you. 
You were told by Twitter and other social media outlets that 
you were not allowed to continue posting these things, but CISA 
itself there's no evidence was censoring you, correct? Yes or 
no?
    Mr. Kulldorff. They never disclosed who sort-of was behind 
it or what was behind it.
    Mrs. Ramirez. OK. Well, thank you. I just wanted to make 
sure that that was on the record, that CISA itself had not 
censored you. There's no evidence of that.
    So I want to come back, Dr. Miller-Idriss, to the work that 
you've been doing, your work on disinformation and the role of 
hate in community violence.
    Look, it could not be happening at a more urgent time. We 
talk about the border here. We talk about children, families, 
people seeking asylum. There's all sorts of things that are 
said about them.
    Just a few days since--just a few days ago someone 
senselessly drove their car into a group of migrants outside of 
a shelter in Brownsville, the same border that my mother 
crossed pregnant with me. A witness of the horrible scene heard 
the attacker make anti-immigrant remarks after he initially 
tried to run away after plowing his car into people, killing 
several and injuring more.
    There isn't always a written manifesto to directly point to 
when it comes to extreme hate, but we know there's a troubling 
connection between spreading hateful ideas and extreme violence 
that destabilizes entire communities, and the cost for this 
could be human lives.
    In your testimony you shared that pace, scope, and scale of 
violent extremism have probably increased and are escalating 
rapidly due to propaganda, conspiracy theories, and 
disinformation. Is that correct?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Yes.
    Mrs. Ramirez. What kind of impact does spreading propaganda 
and disinformation have on vulnerable communities, such as 
immigrants and asylum seekers?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. The impact on vulnerable communities, of 
course, is to terrorize them. So we saw that in Buffalo. We've 
seen that in Pittsburgh. We've seen that in record-breaking 
anti-Semitism and attacks on the LGBTQ community. With every 
vulnerable community, essentially, we're seeing spikes, surges, 
or record-breaking hate. Hate crimes are higher than they've 
been in well over a decade.
    So the impact is on families that are torn apart, 
communities that are torn apart, but also people who are afraid 
to go to synagogue, to go to church, to go to their school 
board meetings in some cases, that they're going to be met with 
violent protesters.
    Mrs. Ramirez. Thank you.
    There's an extremely disturbing rise in people who commit 
extreme violence that cite the great replacement theory, which, 
to be absolutely clear, is a white supremacist conspiracy 
theory that alleges that white people are being replaced by 
Black and Brown people, including immigrants.
    In your opinion, what are the most effective strategies for 
countering conspiracy theories like the great replacement 
theory that promote deadly violence and are frequently a source 
of inspiration for people who commit horrific violence in our 
communities?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Well, what we have found is that 
people--nobody likes to find out that they're being 
manipulated. People do not like to find out that they're being 
manipulated or that they're at risk of manipulation.
    I think it is extremely difficult to counter propaganda and 
conspiracy theories once they circulate. You get into 
challenges to freedom of speech. You get into censorship 
issues. You also get into ineffective strategies, as we've 
seen.
    But what does work is to prevent people from believing it 
in the first place. We have excellent evidence that that can be 
done by teaching them how manipulative tactics work and letting 
them make up their own minds.
    Mrs. Ramirez. Dr. Miller-Idriss, I really appreciate all of 
your work.
    Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentlelady yields back.
    I now recognize Mr. Ezell for his 5 minutes of questioning.
    Mr. Ezell. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    CISA has an important mission in safeguarding cyber 
networks and protecting the physical infrastructure that our 
society depends on. The agency has enjoyed broad bipartisan 
support since Congress established CISA in 2018 because it 
plays a key role in protecting the homeland. It is my goal that 
this continues with its original intent.
    Mr. Weingarten, what concerns do you have about CISA's 
ability to fulfill its core responsibilities?
    Mr. Weingarten. Well, I would say there's a huge 
opportunity cost to devoting resources supposed to be intended 
toward foreign threat actors toward domestic ones, and on the 
basis of interpreting speech to be a threat to a virtually 
limitlessly-defined critical infrastructure, up to and 
including our brands.
    So the first thing would be it's a huge shift in resources. 
To the extent it's trampling on our rights directly or by 
proxy, that directly undermines its mission.
    Mr. Ezell. Thank you.
    Documents obtained in a lawsuit show Brian Scully, a deputy 
of CISA's Countering Foreign Influence Task Force, 
communicating regularly with external organizations. At one 
point Mr. Scully even offers up a CISA-run web page as a 
resource to help with one partner's ``pre-bunking'' efforts.
    In other words, CISA was generating content and then 
pushing it through external parties to shape their censorship 
efforts.
    Can you walk us through some of the key players involved in 
discussions like these and how they work together to create a 
censorship operation, Mr. Weingarten?
    Mr. Weingarten. So, as you noted, Mr. Scully is one senior 
official who I believe is the chief of the MDM team now. It is 
worth noting that that foreign task force became the MDM team, 
going from foreign to domestic and foreign actors under its 
purview.
    Beyond that, Matt Masterson, I believe, was a top election 
official within CISA. He ultimately would end up, I believe, 
becoming a--it may be a nonresident fellow at the Stanford 
Internet Observatory. There's sort-of a revolving door here.
    Worth noting, Christopher Krebs, as well, former director 
of CISA, he ended up starting a consultancy with the head of 
SIO, Alex Stamos.
    We can go through several other individuals on the outside, 
as well. So non-CISA officials but officials--or, rather, 
principals who were coordinated by CISA, worked with CISA, 
ended up on CISA's advisory committees and such. Those would 
include Kate Starbird at the University of Washington's CIP, as 
well. Renee DiResta within SIO, I believe, was a research 
director there. She has direct ties to CISA advisory 
committees, as well.
    So there's a slew of people, and it's sort-of a revolving 
door, and it starts to blur the line between public and 
private.
    Mr. Ezell. Thank you.
    Professor Turley, this censorship laundering enterprise 
basically gives Government officials and their private-sector 
partners the power to control public discourse.
    What is the danger of the Government focusing on some of 
these subjective terms like misinformation and malinformation?
    Mr. Turley. Well, the danger is significant. You have terms 
like malinformation that starts out by saying the information 
may be true, but we're going to target that information because 
it's being used to manipulate others.
    Statements like that are really quite chilling for all of 
us that value free speech. The question is, should the 
Government be in that business?
    But it is in that business. I mean, in terms of the two 
legal issues that we look at, these are Government agents who 
are acting.
    So we don't even have to get into the question of whether 
there's an agency relationship with private companies. There 
are Government officials who are taking these acts and actively 
participating in what is the largest censorship system in the 
history of this country.
    Then, second, you have private actors who are being used by 
what I call censorship by surrogate. Both of those raise 
Constitutional questions.
    But putting all that aside, one of the things I emphasize 
in my testimony is people constantly have this mantra: It's not 
a First Amendment problem, so it's not a free speech problem.
    That's not true. The First Amendment is designed to deal 
with one problem of free speech. It was the traditional, the 
most looming problem at the time. It is not synonymous or 
exclusive with the term free speech.
    What the U.S. Government is doing now is a serious threat 
to free speech.
    Mr. Ezell. Thank you, Mr. Turley.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentleman yields back.
    The Chair now recognizes Ms. Clarke for her 5 minutes of 
questioning.
    Ms. Clarke. Good afternoon.
    First, let me thank our panel of witnesses for joining us 
today and thank Chairman Bishop, Ranking Member Ivey for 
calling this hearing.
    The Department's role in addressing mis-, dis-, and 
malinformation is certainly a worthy topic of discussion for 
this subcommittee.
    Unfortunately, many of my colleagues are politicizing a 
serious issue today, and I'd like to set the record straight.
    The rapid spread of mis-, dis-, and malinformation is a 
threat to our security and to the institutions at the 
foundation of our democracy.
    Both the Department of Homeland Security's Office of 
Inspector General and the Homeland Security Advisory Council 
have determined disinformation to be a threat to national 
security and to the successful execution of DHS's mission, from 
disaster response, to border security, to election security.
    Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to insert into the 
record reports on disinformation from the DHS Office of the 
Inspector General* and the Homeland Security Advisory 
Council**.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    * The information has been retained in committee files and is also 
available at https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2022-
08/OIG-22-58-Aug22.pdf.
    ** The information has been retained in committee files and is also 
available at https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-08/
22_0824_ope_hsac-disinformation-subcommittee-final-report-08242022.pdf.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mr. Bishop. Without objection, so ordered.
    Ms. Clarke. Thank you.
    As the former Chair of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity 
and Infrastructure Protection, I'm acutely aware of the threat 
mis-, 
dis-, and malinformation poses to the election security and 
other critical infrastructure.
    In 2020, DHS had to provide guidance to telecommunications 
firms to prevent attacks on 5G cell towers linked to a COVID 
conspiracy theory.
    In the wake of the election-related disinformation 
campaigns aimed to undermine public confidence in election 
outcomes, CISA established Rumor Control to serve as a trusted 
source of election information.
    Suffice it to say, the threat posed by disinformation is 
real and we have to take it seriously.
    Dr. Miller-Idriss, I thank you for your testimony today and 
for your leadership in developing mechanisms to combat 
disinformation.
    Would it surprise you to learn that the intelligence 
community has referenced misinformation or disinformation as a 
threat to national security in every Worldwide Threat 
Assessment except one since 2016?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. No, that does not surprise me.
    Ms. Clarke. Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to insert 
into the record the Worldwide Threat Assessments from 2016, 
2018, and 2023.***
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    *** The information has been retained in committee files and is 
also available at https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/
SASC_Unclassified_2016_ATA_SFR_FINAL.pdf, https://www.dni.gov/files/
documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/2018-ATA---Unclassified-SSCI.pdf and 
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2023-
Unclassified-Report.pdf respectively.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mr. Bishop. Without objection, so ordered.
    Ms. Clarke. Thank you, sir.
    I am concerned that my colleagues are attempting to make a 
real discussion about combating disinformation so politically 
toxic that no one will touch it. What kind of threat does that 
pose to our national security?
    Well, I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentlelady yields back.
    I now recognize Mr. Strong for his 5 minutes of 
questioning.
    Mr. Strong. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I'd like to remember those that are defending America's 
Southern Border, as we're a matter of hours from not an 
insurgent, but an all-out invasion of tens of thousands of 
illegal migrants, to name a few, from Mexico, Guatemala, 
Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Russia, and China 
too.
    While fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, marijuana continue to pour 
into America, the Secretary of Homeland Security continues to 
testify and spew on every network that he has operational 
control of the Southern Border.
    As this administration struggles to admit that their 
policies created the Southern Border debacle that will soon 
unfold before the world's eyes, the fact is President Donald 
Trump's policies worked and America was protected.
    Thank you again for being here with us today.
    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or 
CISA, was originally formed under the Trump administration to 
reduce and eliminate threats to U.S. critical physical and 
cyber infrastructure. It's hard to believe the agency has 
gotten so far away from its original mission.
    This shouldn't come as a surprise if you recall CISA 
director Jen Easterly's view on CISA's mission, which Chairman 
Bishop just reminded us of.
    In August 2021, she said, ``One could argue we are in the 
business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical 
infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure.''
    The director of CISA, whose mission is to protect and 
secure our country's sensitive infrastructure, is more worried 
about policing America's thoughts than cyber attacks coming 
from China and Russia.
    Much of the public information regarding CISA's censorship 
activities is only known because of the Missouri v. Biden 
lawsuit and the release of internal communications from Twitter 
after it came under new ownership.
    One such revelation includes that there is a formalized 
process--a formalized process--for Government officials to 
directly flag content on Facebook and Instagram and request its 
removal or suppression.
    I have an image that I would like to put on the screen.
    [Slide.]
    Mr. Bishop. So ordered.
    [The information follows:]
    
    

    Mr. Strong. This is the landing page for Meta's content 
request system, which is still active as of this morning, you 
must have a Government or law enforcement email to use. Yet 
CISA officials maintain that they, ``don't flag anything to 
social media organizations at all. We don't do any 
censorship.''
    Mr. Weingarten, can you share some additional examples of 
actions that DHS and CISA specifically have taken to keep their 
actions hidden from America's people?
    Mr. Weingarten. Thank you, Congressman.
    Mr. Strong. Yes, sir.
    Mr. Weingarten. Several instances of this.
    First, there's been stonewalling of Congressional inquiries 
into CISA's efforts, and subsequently the House Judiciary 
Weaponization Subcommittee has subpoenaed Director Easterly in 
connection with the subject that we're talking about today.
    Beyond that, there's been scrubbing of not only documents 
but also websites, which illustrates the fact that CISA was 
intently focused and may well still be intently focused and 
certainly its partners are intently focused on domestic speech.
    In fact, it's almost comical. If you go to a site, I 
believe the URL was cisa.gov/mdm, it now takes you to a foreign 
mis-, dis-, and malinformation site. There's no sign of 
domestic activity that it's pursuing related to it.
    So I'd say scrubbing, stonewalling are the two biggest 
instances that we've seen thus far.
    Mr. Strong. Thank you.
    There have been several examples of DHS trying to expand 
its censorship activities, only to back down when the public 
found out, such as last year's effort to create a 
Disinformation Governance Board.
    Mr. Weingarten, do these actions suggest about where DHS 
would like to go in the disinformation space in the future?
    Mr. Weingarten. I think by the words of the DHS Secretary, 
absolutely. But if they are not able to carry it on, their 
partners actually in the private-sector side were encouraging 
the creation, I believe, of something like a Center for Mis- 
and Disinformation Excellence within the Government, and that 
seems to be what the DGB was intended to be.
    But we have other ministries of countering mis-, dis-, and 
malinformation, even if there isn't some oversight body layered 
onto it.
    Mr. Strong. Thank you.
    I thank each of you for being here today.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. Thank you. The gentleman yields back.
    I now recognize the gentleman from Arizona, Mr. Crane, for 
his 5 minutes.
    Mr. Crane. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Thank you guys for being here.
    I'd like to take a second to push back on one of my 
colleague's comments that he made a second ago to a friend of 
mine who's not in the room to defend herself.
    Mr. Ivey actually said, ``I guess Ms. Lake is still saying 
that the election was stolen from her even though it's clear, 
according to the officials in the State, that this was not the 
case.''
    Now, I find it funny when people in this town use that 
defense ``according to the officials.'' Right. Like the 
American people believe the officials. They don't. A recent Pew 
study showed that only 20 percent of the American people 
believe the elected officials.
    It's also funny, too, because we all know that election 
fraud couldn't take place in this country, could it? Right? 
This is America. That couldn't take place here.
    Mr. Ivey. Will the gentleman yield for a request?
    Mr. Crane. Just recently we're finding out that this 
President, this Commander-in-Chief, has used his position and 
influence for years to funnel millions of dollars to his 
family. That's something I also thought I'd never see in this 
town.
    Mr. Ivey. Will the gentleman yield?
    Mr. Crane. No, I will not. No, I will not.
    Mr. Ivey. I mean, you did invoke my name.
    Mr. Crane. Well, I actually quoted you. So I will not.
    All right. Though I don't agree with Mr. Ivey's comments, 
I'm glad that he's allowed to say them, because I do support 
the First Amendment. I support his First Amendment. I support 
everybody in this room's First Amendment.
    You know what? You know what's important about supporting 
the First Amendment? It's most important when you disagree with 
people. That's really the only time it's important, because 
when we don't agree--everybody supports the First Amendment 
when you agree with somebody.
    It's interesting, because I was listening to the panel up 
here and we went down the line and everybody here said that 
they support the First Amendment.
    Yet, when we were going back and researching some of Dr. 
Miller-Idriss' comments, MSNBC, 7/17 of 2022, on the January 6 
hearings, she says this: ``What we need right now is a massive 
investment in and commitment to countering disinformation at 
all levels. This includes holding tech companies accountable 
for dangerous and harmful information shared on their 
platforms.''
    She goes on to say, ``It requires strategies to prevent 
public and elected officials from sharing disinformation or 
trying to undermine our elections and the peaceful transfer of 
power.
    ``But above all, we need serious and sustained public 
education and campaigns to build population-wide resilience to 
disinformation, understanding of source integrity, and ways to 
distill false claims from true facts.''
    It's interesting, ma'am, because it seems like you only 
support free speech when you agree with it or you wouldn't make 
the statement, ``It requires strategies''--I'm going to zone in 
here on this--``strategies to prevent public and elected 
officials from sharing disinformation.''
    I've gone through some of your tweets, ma'am. Whether we're 
talking about COVID vaccines or far-right extreme groups, 
there's a lot of things that you and I would disagree on. As a 
matter of fact, there's a lot of things that people sitting on 
your left and right would disagree on.
    But you think that we should stop them from being able, 
according to your own quote, according to your own words, that 
we should stop them from being able to say that.
    That's a problem, ma'am, because, I'll tell you again, the 
most important time to support somebody's free speech isn't 
when you agree with them. It's when you disagree with them.
    Ma'am, I hope that you and others that think like you are 
not successful, because I fought really hard to make sure that 
my kids, and hopefully some day my grandkids, don't live under 
communism or socialism or some other tyrannical dictatorship.
    Thank you. I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentleman yields back.
    Mr. Thanedar is recognized for his 5 minutes of 
questioning.
    Mr. Thanedar. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
    I want to thank all the witnesses to be here and for your 
testimony.
    I have a question for Dr. Miller-Idriss, if I may.
    As we have heard here today, the disinformation that 
spreads on-line can have dangerous real-world consequences. 
Disinformation has been used to incite violence, including the 
January 6 insurrection and crime targeted at ethnic minorities. 
This disinformation undermines trust in journalism and science 
and drowns out marginalized voices.
    Dr. Miller-Idriss, based on your research and expertise, 
what have you found are the best strategies for combating 
pervasive disinformation campaigns?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Thank you for the question.
    What we find in the evidence is that the best way to work 
to combat disinformation, if you will, is to prevent people 
from making the choices that would lead to the spread of that 
to begin with.
    So we focus on teaching people about manipulative tactics, 
regardless of the content, and also about recognizing sort-of 
warning signs in their loved ones, regardless of the ideology.
    So, for example, one of the things we hear from our focus 
groups is that young people have been saying in classrooms 
things like there is no political solution. That comes from the 
left. That comes from the right. It is a call to violence to 
say there's no more political solution, we have to move to 
violence.
    So if an adult hears that, they know that a child is 
exposed to something on-line that is potentially opening up 
rabbit holes of further harm and disinformation. So that's what 
we work on.
    Mr. Thanedar. Thank you.
    Now, despite my Republican colleagues' misplaced fixation 
on the defunct Disinformation Governance Board and their own 
disinformation on the board's intended role, the Department of 
Homeland Security has a significant and valid role to play in 
combating the dangerous disinformation that compromises our 
security.
    There are plenty of examples of disinformation occurring 
that has a homeland security nexus, including that tied to 
domestic terrorism, election security, migration, and disaster 
responses.
    Now, to what extent should DHS and other Governmental 
agencies be identifying and addressing harmful content that may 
threaten homeland security?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Thank you for the question.
    I think that what we hear anyway in our lab is that 
American communities are desperate. They are worried. They're 
worried about what they're seeing, what their loved ones are 
seeing, and they're afraid.
    So I think that the Government has an obligation to help 
local communities with better ways to recognize and reject 
harmful content.
    I think that that includes a national security frame, but 
not exclusively a national security frame. That has to also be 
something that is education, that is health and human services, 
that is about what local communities need.
    That needs to include some expertise in where to draw the 
line. I would welcome the opportunity to have longer 
conversations about where that line falls, because I think 
that's one of the biggest issues we face.
    Mr. Thanedar. Well, I thank you.
    Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
    Mr. Bishop. The gentleman yields back.
    We'll proceed to a second round of questioning. We are up 
against votes, so we'll try to proceed as quickly as we can. 
We'll see if the witnesses are available to remain if we have 
to have a break for votes. We'll see if you can do that.
    So I at this time recognize--well, let me do this first.
    Without objection, I want to submit for the record the 
graphic shown by Mr. Strong during his 5 minutes, the Facebook 
Content Request screen.
    [The information follows:]
    
    

    Mr. Bishop. Now I recognize myself for 5 minutes of 
questioning.
    So, Dr. Miller-Idriss, I want to sort-of pursue where I 
left off and others have illustrated.
    I think you said, notwithstanding what you wrote, that we 
should continue to work with social media platforms to remove 
harmful and dangerous, I think was your terminology. Then you 
gave some examples, an example of a bomb threat or something 
like that. That's illegal speech, not protected by the First 
Amendment.
    But let me just clarify, because I think the concern is, 
whether or not you're concerned about manipulation and 
propaganda and these sort of things, there may be a subterfuge 
for subtle censorship.
    So let me get at it in this way. Do you believe that 
propaganda from foreign governments should be allowed on social 
media and the Federal Government should--and the Government 
should take no effort to interfere with or facilitate its 
removal?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. I believe that if there is 
disinformation circulating from foreign governments that is 
intended to harm our democracy, that that should be removed, 
that that should be removed.
    Mr. Bishop. Are you a lawyer?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. No.
    Mr. Bishop. OK. So there's a case called Lamont v. 
Postmaster General from 1965, it's old law, in which the U.S. 
Supreme Court held that a United States citizen has a First 
Amendment right to foreign communist propaganda that comes 
through the mails to us.
    Do you think communist propaganda might be harmful?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. I think that--I think I'm flattered that 
you think that my expertise extends that broadly to 
disinformation and propaganda across the spectrum. My expertise 
as a professor of education is about equipping communities with 
tools to reject harmful content.
    Mr. Bishop. Well, and I'm not trying to be unfair. What I'm 
trying to do--I am trying to pin you down a little bit. Because 
there's this notion--and I think Professor Turley's gotten to 
it some--but there's this notion out there that, well, we're 
not against--we want to preserve--I get this all the time--
we're going protect the First Amendment, protect everybody's 
First Amendment rights.
    But what I was just sharing with you is that there's a 
First Amendment right to propaganda, communist propaganda from 
abroad, that's been established as long as I've been alive.
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Yes.
    Mr. Bishop. So is that harmful? Do you include that? I'm 
not trying to repeat the question.
    I am trying to say this. If you're trying to--you say you 
want to teach people what is manipulative and not to be 
manipulated. I have no problem about that. But you also are 
proposing to this committee that there's a massive Government 
investment, Government should invest in you, frankly.
    Well, let me ask you this: You are funded by the Department 
of Homeland Security, right?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Uh-huh.
    Mr. Bishop. Is anybody else here, by the way, funded by the 
Department of Homeland Security?
    [Nonverbal response.]
    Mr. Bishop. You have funding from the National Science 
Foundation? Is that correct?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. I did.
    Mr. Bishop. You did. OK.
    Anybody else?
    [Nonverbal response.]
    Mr. Bishop. The Government--I think what concerns me is you 
seem to think that you are the right arbiter to decide what is 
misinformation, malinformation, which is actually true but 
somehow being misused for harm.
    How do you arrogate that? I mean, that's the wrong term. 
How do you assume that you should be the arbiter?
    With respect, you are on the left. There's a tweet from a 
couple of days ago where you're talking about whiteness and how 
the Irish were not white and then became white. I mean, it 
seems to me to be fairly extreme even by the standards I hear 
from my colleagues on the Democrat.
    Why should you be the arbiter to decide who needs to be 
protected from manipulation or propaganda?
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. I understand the question and your 
concern, and I should not be the arbiter as an individual.
    I run a research lab. When we get asked to equip local 
communities with tools, we do a comprehensive mapping of all 
propaganda. We do interviews, focus groups with people. We 
figure out what that content is. Then we equip, then we create 
the tools, and then we test it, like we did, like I reported on 
here today.
    So I'm never putting my opinion into--I'm a columnist 
separately with an opinion. But I never put my opinion into the 
classroom or into the research tools. That comes from a group 
of people who are hired to work on it with their methodological 
expertise.
    Mr. Bishop. Let me see if I can get the professor in, 
Professor Turley, to deal with this. Because it seems to me 
that the notion that the Government should take, with all 
respect, Dr. Miller-Idriss' view of what is manipulative or 
what is misinformation and then have that sort-of spread out to 
the public to teach them to be prepared is a recipe for 
disaster.
    Can you speak to that, Professor Turley?
    Mr. Turley. Well, it's also tragically familiar. I'm just 
finishing a book on free speech now, and it goes back to 
England before the Revolution. Many of the rationales we use 
today actually came from not only England, but came from the 
Star Chamber. The Star Chamber was used to prosecute sedition. 
They came up with this idea that there's, ``bad tendency 
speech,'' that there's some speech that has a bad tendency.
    That took hold in the United States. Even though many of 
the Framers rejected it, it took hold with some early 
decisions. Holmes is a good example of losing his mind by 
saying, talking about crying fire in a crowd theater, which he 
regretted, and that decision was later rejected by the Supreme 
Court.
    The Government should not be in the disinformation 
business. It should not be trying to shape speech. It's a very 
clear line and one that we have lost.
    Mr. Bishop. One of the problems--and I'll turn it over in 
just a second--but one of the problems seems to me that people 
think--it's a vague concept--they want to preserve the full 
right to speak that the First Amendment or the right to have 
access to information, and yet I'm not sure we know what that 
is. You've got to know what the law is before you know whether 
you're agreeing with it or you're doing something in violation 
of it, with all respect.
    My time has more than expired. I yield to Mr. Ivey for his 
5 minutes of questions.
    You're recognized.
    Mr. Ivey. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    I think it's a complicated area, I mean, just sort-of what 
we're going through, for example, the statement that there's no 
specific truth, which I think sounds fine in the abstract.
    But if you say something like, ``Sir, if someone accused 
you of being a sexual pedophile, how would you respond?'' 
that's a false statement. That's definitely not true. So when 
we say there's no such thing as truth, I do kind of struggle 
with those.
    With the issue with respect to elections, Mr. Crane's gone, 
we had a chance to chat a little bit outside, but just briefly, 
and I'll come back to this point.
    I did want to note that he mentioned public officials 
aren't trusted. But only a public official can certify 
elections. So if there's no public official in Arizona that's 
going to say the election is accepted--usually it's the 
secretary of state--I don't know what they do out there with 
that. But I'm pretty sure they do it just like all the other 50 
States do.
    But, anyway, back to this point. I think really quick on 
that point, a couple public--we talked about Government speech 
and what they do.
    Wear your seat belts. I'm old enough to remember a time 
before we had seat belts, and then there was a pushback about 
putting them in the cars. Then there was pushback, free speech 
pushback, but statements I think were clearly false, that they 
weren't necessary, they didn't save lives. I'm OK with the 
Government doing that.
    Tobacco's another one. I grew up in North Carolina and 
Virginia. Everything--they almost had tobacco-flavored 
pacifiers in North Carolina back in those days because it was 
the way to go. But clearly it was dangerous to our health. I 
don't even know if the tobacco industry's come around to 
acknowledging that. But clearly it's true, it hurts your 
health, and clearly their denials were false.
    Another one's drunk driving. I remember when people have a 
steering wheel in one hand and a beer in the other one and it 
was OK. That had to change over time because it was true that 
driving and drinking were a bad combination.
    So I think it can be tricky if we get too absolute in the 
statements that we're making along these lines.
    I do take Professor Turley's point, although even in those 
circumstances I think there are scenarios where it makes sense 
for the Government to at least be involved.
    Now, we might not say they should be able to take down 
information. But in the damaging scenarios that we talked 
about, for example, or people giving false weather information, 
just things that can really cause dislocations in people's 
lives, I think it should be an option for the Government to 
say, ``No, that's incorrect.''
    We run into scenarios with respect to COVID and others. I 
take that point. I'm not an epidemiologist. But I think we have 
to be careful about sort-of pushing and saying none of them can 
get involved.
    I apologize. We were just talking about we wish we had more 
than 5 minutes. I mean, sort-of the question I had, Mr. 
Weingarten, you raised--well, and Mr. Turley, too, I guess--
sort-of the private entities coming together to have 
communications about what to take down or whatever. I take it 
you view that as you see negative connotations around that.
    I do kind-of wonder if there are some good reasons for them 
to do that. For example, lawsuits in the Government are now 
pushing them in the direction of they are being pushed toward 
managing content. If they don't, they get in trouble for it. 
Matter of fact, they get dragged up here by Congress who beats 
them up about not taking it down.
    We could go back to the TikTok hearing. What was that, last 
month? I don't agree with everything TikTok's doing, but we are 
putting a lot on them and expecting them to manage content and 
essentially publicly punishing them when they don't.
    So there may be a reason to have those conversations. Maybe 
we'll have another hearing where people can come up from DHS 
and from some of these entities. I'm open to that. We could 
talk about it then.
    I did want to finish with this. Nina Jankowicz, I did want 
to not leave that unfinished. There's a couple articles I'd 
like to offer for the record. One is ``'A surreal experience': 
Former Biden `disinfo' chief details harassment.'' That's out 
of Politico. Then the other one is ``Old comments by 
disinformation board director misrepresented on-line.'' That's 
an AP story.
    I'd like to offer those for the record, as well.
    Mr. Bishop. Without objection, so ordered.
    [The information follows:]
     Article Submitted For the Record by Ranking Member Glenn Ivey
`a surreal experience': former biden `disinfo' chief details harassment
By Heidi Przybyla
03/08/2023 04:30 AM EST
    In a Valentine's Day court hearing in Arlington, Virginia, Nina 
Jankowicz finally got to face a man who'd been stalking her for nearly 
a year and secured a restraining order against him.
    Jankowicz, 33, is a researcher and author of two books whose stint 
heading the Biden administration's Disinformation Governance Board 
lasted a few weeks last spring before the board itself was dissolved by 
the administration following an outcry by GOP lawmakers that it was 
going to censor the free speech of conservatives.
    But that was just the beginning, she said, detailing for the first 
time a year of intense public and online harassment spurred, she said, 
by conservative media attacks and emblemized by the self-styled 
citizen-journalist who repeatedly stalked her, doxxing and recording 
her without her consent.
    ``It was a surreal experience to be forced to confront this guy,'' 
Jankowicz told POLITICO in an interview. In one video, she says, the 
man said her newborn should be put in ``baby jail.''
    Now, it looks like Jankowicz will be back in the spotlight. Rep. 
Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) plans to make Jankowicz a star witness before his 
new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, which 
Republicans say will investigate alleged abuses of Federal authority. 
On Monday, Jordan issued a subpoena compelling Jankowicz to sit for a 
deposition and Jankowicz says she will abide by it.
    Jankowicz says her story shows what can happen to any private 
citizen or government official who gets cast as a villain in a far-
right conspiracy plot. ``I didn't intend for my entire career to be lit 
on fire before my eyes by taking this job,'' she said.
    The now-defunct initiative that Jankowicz briefly headed was aimed 
at developing government-wide recommendations to stop the flow of 
disinformation sponsored by China, Russia and violent domestic 
extremists.
    Jankowicz, who managed programs on Russia and Belarus for the 
National Democratic Institute and has advised the Ukrainian government, 
was chosen for her expertise in online disinformation, according to the 
Department of Homeland Security, under which she served.
    Jordan says she has refused several requests to testify 
voluntarily. Jankowicz and her attorney say that's because the 
assumption behind his demand--that she was tasked to police speech--is 
false. In his subpoena letter, Jordan said she is ``uniquely situated'' 
to provide relevant information about the board.
    Jankowicz, who is a new mother, says she plans to file a lawsuit 
against Fox News and launched a crowdsourcing campaign to support her 
legal fees.
    ``Fox News irrevocably changed my life when they force fed lies 
about me to tens of millions of their viewers,'' she says in a video 
accompanying her GoFundMe. ``In addition to the deferral of my dream of 
serving my country, I've lost something irreplaceable: peace with my 
son during his first year in the world,'' she says in the video.
    Fox News did not respond to multiple emails to company 
spokespersons seeking comment.
    On Fox shows including those hosted by Laura Ingraham, Tucker 
Carlson and Sean Hannity, she's been called a ``conspiracy theorist,'' 
a ``useful idiot,'' and ``insane.''
    When she was 8 months pregnant, said Jankowicz, strangers online 
were calling her a Nazi and ugly and said she should die.
    Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) decried her ``history of spreading 
disinformation.''
    Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) repeatedly said the board was akin to 
the ``Communist `Ministry of Truth.' '' Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) even 
said she ``appears to be mentally unstable.'' Rep. Marjorie Taylor 
Greene (R-Ga.) said she felt sorry her child has to ``have that kind of 
mother.''
    For a time, she says, her blood pressure spiked. She wore a hat, 
sunglasses and a mask to prenatal doctor appointments, hired a private 
security consultant to monitor the situation and relied on yoga and 
meditation to calm her nerves. A few weeks before her due date, the 
consultant advised her and her husband to leave the house for safety 
reasons, which they ultimately deemed not practical.
    Republicans objected, from the start, to the premise of the board 
and the idea that the government should play any role in defining 
disinformation, according to a spokesman for Jordan.
    ``The very idea of `disinformation' involves policing speech. 
Period,'' he said.
    A number of GOP lawmakers likened it to an Orwellian plot and took 
aim at Jankowicz for statements she made on social media prior to her 
government appointment--mostly expressing doubt about the origins of 
Hunter Biden's laptop, but also about coronavirus disinformation and 
Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
    Regarding the blowback Jankowicz encountered, the Jordan aide said 
she agreed to serve as the board's public face, and should thus be held 
accountable in public.
    ``She's the top person and a public figure. Any assertion otherwise 
is ridiculous,'' he said. Jordan ``has only ever referred to her or 
wrote to her in her official capacity,'' he said.
    Jankowicz counters that Jordan has ``repeatedly referenced my 
statements as a private citizen.''
Taking credit
    When she stepped down in May, Sen. Josh Hawley, (R-Mo.), took 
credit.
    Hawley was among the loudest critics claiming the board was 
``policing Americans' speech.'' He also called Jankowicz a ``human 
geyser of misinformation,'' citing tweets about Hunter Biden's laptop 
in which she suggested it could be part of a Russian disinformation 
campaign.
    ``Only when a patriotic whistleblower came forward with documents 
did we learn the truth,'' he tweeted about board-related paperwork that 
he says shows the administration's plan for the board was more 
extensive than publicly revealed.
    Jankowicz, however, says the documents--which Hawley and other 
Congressional Republicans have had since last June--contradict many of 
the claims he, Hannity, Carlson, Jordan and numerous other figures made 
in public and on Fox's airwaves about the board's mission.
    ``It's hard for boring truths to outpace inflammatory lies,'' said 
Jankowicz.
    ``They're saying the opposite of what's on paper. Everything is 
disproven by documents they have in their possession. They're just 
assuming nobody is going to read them.''
    A response from DHS to a letter Hawley sent in late April seeking 
answers states the board ``is an internal working group that does not 
have operational capacity.''
    Both Jordan and Hawley have zeroed in on an April 28, 2022 draft 
talking points memo for a meeting with Twitter executives that 
Jankowicz says never came to pass. It proposed Twitter become involved 
in ``analytic exchanges'' with DHS and that the board would serve as a 
``coordinating mechanism'' for outreach to industry, civil society and 
international partners. Hawley's office expressed alarm about plans for 
a similar meeting with Facebook's Meta.
    ``Those are remarkably outward facing activities for a supposedly 
internal working group that lacks operational capacity,'' said the 
Jordan spokesman.
    Yet the ``analytic exchanges,'' says Jankowicz, refer to a pre-
existing DHS initiative titled ``Public-Private Analytic Exchange 
Program'' that spans a number of industries and aims to help government 
analysts working on, for instance, threats to supply chains and 
ransomware.
    Further, the next sentence says the board's initial work would 
center on ``domestic violent extremism'' and ``irregular migration,'' 
and said Twitter should be ``thanked'' for its engagement with an 
existing cybersecurity agency created under President Donald Trump. 
During the 2020 election, it ran a ``Rumor Control'' website that 
sought to ``prebunk'' incorrect claims with factual information, reads 
page 3 of a Sept. 13, 2021 memorandum.
    The materials, spanning between September 2021 to January 2022, 
also stipulate the need for protocols to ``protect privacy, civil 
rights and civil liberties.'' Its mission would be information sharing 
and prescriptive in nature.
    The department ``should not attempt to be an all-purpose arbiter of 
truth in the public arena'' but focus on disinformation ``impacting DHS 
core missions,'' it continues.
    ``It's been extremely frustrating that these documents haven't been 
covered at all,'' said Jankowicz.
    In an email response, Hawley's office said emails he obtained show 
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas misled him about when 
the board first began meeting. The emails Hawley cited as proof pertain 
to preparatory meetings of lower level ``steering group'' aides--not 
the board itself.
    Hawley also seized on an email that a DHS cybersecurity official 
sent Jankowicz and others regarding an opinion piece that ran in the 
Washington Post arguing that tech companies should block a Kremlin 
propaganda symbol.
    Hawley said the information behind the op-ed was funded by a 
``liberal dark money group.''
    In a statement, Hawley spokeswoman Abigail Marone said: 
``Conducting rigorous government oversight and holding Biden 
Administration officials accountable is what Missourians expect Josh to 
do. And it's great news for the American people that Biden's 
Disinformation Board was dissolved because of it.''
    Marone also cited language from the board's charter stating that 
board members would ``ensure that their respective components 
implement, execute and follow board decisions.''
Fox Fixture
    Meanwhile, on Fox News, Jankowicz became such a fixture that, when 
DHS paused the board, Jordan thanked anchor Sean Hannity for ``the work 
you've done in helping get rid of this governance board.''
    During this year and last, she's been featured in more than 250 
broadcast segments on Fox, whose hosts and guests have repeated false 
``assertions of fact'' about her more than 400 times, she alleges. 
Hannity called her ``one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of 
disinformation in the entire country.''
    Convinced the firestorm would not end unless she stepped down, 
Jankowicz said she chose to exit the department. ``It just felt like 
they completely rolled over to Republican lies,'' she said of the Biden 
administration.
    ``What has been shocking is the extent to which it [the harassment] 
has continued,'' said Jankowicz, citing at least two incidents of men 
snapping photos of her and posting them to social media.
    She blames the continued focus of Fox News primetime anchors and 
their guests.
    Jankowicz ``will come after you,'' Jordan said on Hannity's show, 
alleging ``the left'' wants to make people who disagree with them ``not 
allowed to talk.'' He retweeted a (now-deleted) video taken out of 
context claiming she wanted to edit tweets. Numerous Fox segments 
featured a Tik Tok video she'd made more than a year before in which 
she did a parody of a ``Mary Poppins'' song.
    Jankowicz, who has been involved in community theater most of her 
life, said it was ``openly campy'' and one of several educational spots 
on disinformation she did on the platform.
Hunter Biden and the Dossier
    Republicans also criticized statements Jankowicz had made prior to 
taking her position about Hunter Biden's laptop. Jankowicz holds that 
``the [Steele] Dossier was real and the Hunter [Biden] laptop story was 
false,'' Jordan said on Fox last April.
    She did repeatedly express skepticism about the laptop's origins, 
which she says was because it was Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy 
Giuliani, who handed it to authorities. More than 50 former senior 
intelligence officials also called it ``deeply suspicious'' at the 
time, and Jankowicz says there is no record of her declaring the laptop 
itself wasn't real.
    One tweet went viral without the context that it was her live 
tweeting an Oct. 20 Presidential debate in which she paraphrased Biden 
referencing that same letter. Another cited an intelligence report 
concluding that the Kremlin ``used proxies'' to push unsubstantiated 
claims about Biden, which she called ``a clear nod to the alleged 
Hunter laptop.''
    POLITICO itself has not authenticated all the Hunter Biden hard 
drive files cited in media reports, but POLITICO reporter Ben 
Schreckinger confirmed the authenticity of some emails on the drive in 
a 2021 book.
    Jankowicz says she never assessed the veracity of a now-infamous 
dossier compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele that made 
explosive claims linking Trump to the Kremlin. Rather, she praised its 
author in an unrelated matter and debated its origins in a couple of 
tweets. In 2019, a special counsel investigation concluded that it 
could not determine a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump 
campaign.
    She also supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, praised 
efforts to crack down on coronavirus misinformation and expressed 
concern over Elon Musk's plans to buy Twitter.
Personal Toll
    Perhaps ironically, in April 2022 amid the fury, a book Jankowicz 
had in the works was published. Its title: ``How to Be a Woman Online'' 
and survive threats and harassment. It was based on her knowledge of 
how Russian disinformation is often presented through a gendered lens.
    Since then, she says, she's received tens of thousands of harassing 
online posts and hundreds of violent threats. One anonymous poster--who 
called her a ``Tranny Jew'' on April 28--said: ``I can't wait for the 
open violence phase of this war to kick off.''
    As the taunts peaked last spring, she says she pleaded with her 
superiors to allow her to speak to the media to ``defend myself.'' Fox 
shows were showing her picture and talking about her being pregnant so 
she could be easily identified, she said.
    ``It was about my life, it was about threats to my family and it 
was clear the administration was mostly concerned about how to put the 
fire out and not how to protect me,'' she said.
    When she finally was notified that DHS would pause the board, she 
was offered an opportunity to remain in the department but felt she had 
no choice but to leave. ``I said `I'm not going to stay if I can't 
speak to media,' '' she said.
    Jankowicz also questioned the commitment to the project because 
they'd ``abandoned'' it so quickly.
    Further, because she'd ``become toxic,'' Jankowicz said ``It just 
didn't seem worth it.''
    DHS cited instances in which both Mayorkas and White House Press 
Secretary Jen Psaki defended Jankowicz' work. Mayorkas has told the 
Washington Post that the agency ``could have done a better job of 
communicating what it [the board] is and what it isn't.''
    The board's ``purpose was grossly and intentionally 
mischaracterized,'' a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO, 
and Jankowicz ``was subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks 
and physical threats.''
    About 2 weeks later, she gave birth to her first child.
    The attacks kept coming. Jankowicz recalled that it was during a 
middle-of-the-night bottle feeding when her husband informed her that 
Hawley had begun touting the documents he'd obtained from a 
whistleblower and Freedom of Information Act request. Two months after 
her resignation, Jankowicz sent a letter to Hawley and Sen. Chuck 
Grassley, R-Iowa, citing ongoing ``aggressive, sexualized, vulgar and 
threatening messages'' she was receiving online, on the phone and even 
at home.
    Hawley reacted to her plea to ``stop amplifying these lies'' by 
tweeting that Jankowicz should testify under oath. By that time, he had 
been in possession of the board's internal documents for a number of 
weeks, having received them in June, she said.
    Today, Jankowicz continues to juggle diaper changes, pumping breast 
milk and other aspects of life as a new mother with consultations with 
her four sets of attorneys--to address her protective order; to respond 
to Jordan's probe; for a ``frivolous'' lawsuit alleging she is 
censoring someone; and a tax adviser for her GoFundMe.
    When she sues Fox, that will require a fifth lawyer, she says.
                                 ______
                                 
     Article Submitted For the Record by Ranking Member Glenn Ivey
  old comments by disinformation board director misrepresented online
By SOPHIA TULP
Published 6:04 PM EST, May 14, 2022
    CLAIM: Nina Jankowicz, the director of the Department of Homeland 
Security's Disinformation Governance Board, said she wants verified 
Twitter users to be able to edit other users' tweets.
    AP'S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Comments Jankowicz made during a 
January 2021 presentation, more than a year before she was named to 
lead the disinformation board, are being misconstrued. A video of 
Jankowicz's full remarks shows she was explaining an existing program 
offered by Twitter that allows certain users to write notes 
contextualizing claims made in tweets. Jankowicz did not say she 
personally wanted verified users to edit tweets, nor has she said she 
plans to implement something similar through the board.
    THE FACTS: Jankowicz's comments, made more than a year ago during 
an online call hosted by a school librarians' association, are being 
taken out of context to suggest she recently expressed a desire to have 
select Twitter users edit peoples' tweets.
    ``There it is, folks: Nina Jankowicz, head of Biden's so-called 
`Disinformation Governance Board' wants to give blue checks the ability 
to edit others' tweets,'' one Twitter user wrote Friday, sharing a 
minute-long video of Jankowicz speaking during the call.
    ``Biden's `Ministry of Truth' director says she wants `verified 
people' like her to be able to edit people's tweets so they can `add 
context to certain tweets,' '' wrote another user, without mentioning 
the video is not recent.
    The clip was also shared on Facebook and by conservative political 
pundits.
    Assertions that Jankowicz was expressing a personal desire to 
launch a tweet-editing program, especially in her capacity as the 
director of the disinformation board, are misleading.
    The comments were taken from a 90-minute virtual conversation 
hosted by the Georgia Independent School Librarians on Jan. 27, 2021, 
in which Jankowicz discussed the state of disinformation. More than an 
hour into her presentation, another member on the call asked Jankowicz 
about a Twitter program they had heard about.
    ``I heard something about Twitter is now or getting ready to start 
allowing other Twitter users to--help me out here, that's where I sort 
of lost track of `what is it Twitter's letting people do?' '' the 
speaker asked.
    ``I haven't looked into this in a huge way yet because it just came 
out, and I am eligible for it because I am verified,'' Jankowicz 
responded. ``But there are a lot of people who shouldn't be verified, 
who aren't, you know, legit, in my opinion. I mean, they are real 
people, but they're not trustworthy. Anyway, so verified people can 
essentially start to edit Twitter, the same sort of way that Wikipedia 
is, so they can add context to certain tweets. ``
    Jankowicz used air quotations when she said the word ``edit'' and 
also mentioned that such notations would give context ``so that people 
have a fuller picture rather than just an individual claim on a 
tweet.''
    The Twitter pilot program, called Birdwatch, had been announced 3 
days prior, on Jan. 25, 2021. At the time, Twitter described it as ``a 
new community-driven approach to help address misleading information.''
    Twitter stated that the program would allow pilot participants to 
write notes that would add factual context to tweets that contained 
potentially misleading claims. Participants would not be able to change 
the actual tweets. The company said the notes would be reviewed by 
others and visible on a separate site, not on Twitter.
    The clip of Jankowicz being shared online only shows her talking 
about the program features. But her full remarks make clear she was 
explaining the Twitter program in response to a question, not proposing 
her own ideas. Further, she never said she herself wanted to allow 
verified Twitter users to edit people's tweets.
    Later on the call, Jankowicz said, ``I like the idea of adding more 
context to claims and tweets and other content online rather than just 
removing it,'' but she also offered caveats about the program, 
including that verified users aren't always trustworthy, and that the 
social media company was asking volunteers to ``do their work for 
them.''
    ``I'm not sure it's the solution,'' she stated, adding she likely 
wouldn't be participating because of time constraints.
    DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
    The AP works with Twitter to elevate credible news and information 
on the platform. The collaboration is part of AP's robust news 
verification efforts, including work to add context to misleading 
content and reduce the circulation of misinformation online.
    DHS has released few details on how the Disinformation Governance 
Board will function and what powers it will have. The effort has drawn 
criticism since it was announced in late April, with some likening it 
to a dystopic attempt to punish people for certain views. Others have 
expressed concern it could violate freedom of speech.
    DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has said the board would examine 
how the agency currently counters disinformation and make sure it 
``does not infringe on freedom of speech, rights of privacy, civil 
rights and civil liberties,'' the AP reported.

    Mr. Bishop. The gentleman yields back.
    The gentlelady, Ms. Clarke, is recognized.
    Ms. Clarke. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    As I had stated in my conversation with the panel just a 
few minutes ago, that I am concerned that my colleagues are 
attempting to make any discussion about combating 
disinformation so politically toxic that no one will touch it. 
That's a threat. It's a threat to our way of life.
    I'd like to ask you, Dr. Miller-Idriss, what type of threat 
does it pose to our national security? Because this is the 
Homeland Security Committee. A lot of the conversation we've 
had here today really should be in the Judiciary Committee. But 
let's speak specifically about national security.
    Ms. Miller-Idriss. Well, the kinds of propaganda and 
disinformation that we work on, like the great replacement 
conspiracy theory, the false great replacement conspiracy 
theory, motivate terrorist actors. Even when there's not a 
specific conspiracy theory like that or a specific manifesto, 
we see that these toxic on-line cultures motivate shootings, 
like in Highland Park or Uvalde or in Texas this past weekend.
    So I think a lot of what we're seeing here is that we have 
a lot of agreement. Nobody wants censorship, actually, I think. 
None of us want censorship at all. I think if you're not going 
to have censorship and banning, then there has to be something 
at the other end to equip people to recognize and reject.
    What happens in the middle is how you determine what 
actually that disinformation is. I think there's some very 
clear cases. Like, I think most people, I hope, would agree 
that the great replacement conspiracy theory is extremely 
harmful disinformation that has caused terrorist shootings, 
that leads to terrorist acts.
    I hope that we can get some help from the Government for 
the communities that keep coming to us desperate for help, 
because I really feel bad for them, and we're trying to equip 
them with better tools.
    Ms. Clarke. Thank you.
    I find myself sort-of trying to figure out, when I hear my 
colleagues talk about the fact that there's a right to free 
speech, 100 percent, full stop, and then I hear about all the 
States that are banning books right now, there just seems to be 
such a major contradiction. It just blows my mind.
    With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my 
time.
    Mr. Bishop. I thank the gentlelady for yielding back.
    Let's see. I guess we have votes on the floor. So we 
certainly won't proceed to a final or a further round.
    I do thank the witnesses for the valuable testimony. It is 
interesting to me, as I hear all of this, it's something that 
begs digging into further. I think we miss each other in 
terminology going back and forth even to the point just made by 
Dr. Miller-Idriss.
    If someone advocates a, what did you call it, a great 
replacement theory, you look at U.S. v. Brandenburg, that's 
clearly protected First Amendment speech.
    Then the question--I respect Ms. Clarke's inquiry she's 
repeated, and Mr. Ivey's, that there's a question of how to 
combat disinformation. But there's certainly things you can't 
do. The Government can't prohibit that which the Supreme Court 
has said for a long time is clearly protected.
    So it's a confounding area but one that requires--and I 
agree with--I appreciate the Ranking Member's comment that it's 
something that warrants further examination. I hope we'll have 
a chance to do that further in another continuation hearing.
    I thank the witnesses for their valuable testimony and the 
Members for their questions.
    The Members of the subcommittee may have some additional 
questions for the witnesses, and we would ask the witnesses to 
respond to these in writing. Pursuant to Committee Rule VII(D), 
the hearing record will be open for 10 days.
    Without objection, the committee stands adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 3:43 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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