Federal agents have been maintaining a direct line of communication with two major social media platforms to directly request the censorship of any posts they don’t like, despite overwhelming backlash against prior government attempts to control the flow of social media.
The New York Post reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still actively using the portal with Facebook and Instagram – both of which are owned by the same parent company, Meta – which allows any user with a “.gov” email address to directly request that specific social media posts be censored by the platform’s administrators.
The existence of the portal was revealed in newly-leaked federal documents obtained by The Intercept, which further detailed the ways in which the Biden Administration is still actively pursuing greater control over social media content.
The White House previously faced widespread condemnation after its attempt back in April to create a “Disinformation Governance Board” within the DHS, for the purpose of directly coordinating with the Big Tech platforms to censor even more content that politically disagrees with Biden’s agenda. After overwhelming backlash from the Right and the Left, which often compared the proposed board to the Orwellian government depicted in “1984,” the board was dissolved and its would-be chairwoman, Nina Jankowicz, was fired.
The initial proposal of the Disinformation Board came just days after Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the world’s wealthiest man, announced his intentions to buy the microblogging platform Twitter and completely overhaul its censorship policies, which overwhelmingly target conservatives, in favor of a more Free Speech-oriented approach. Despite outrage from the Left and many Twitter insiders, Musk ultimately completed his $44 billion purchase of the company last week, and has already begun firing top executives.