(Headline USA) The Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a video posted in 2021 that encouraged Americans to report their family members for spreading “COVID disinformation” online, according to the Daily Caller.
The video, titled “Countering Disinformation: Cybersecurity 101,” was posted by DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in June 2021.
“Since 2020, there has been a lot of false and inaccurate information about COVID-19,” the video stated.
It went on to depict a cartoon version of a social-media feed from the perspective of a made-up character named Susan.
“Consider this post from Susan’s feed: It’s from her Uncle Steve, who claims everybody knows COVID is no worse than the flu,” the video said.
In the fictional scenario, Susan’s uncle was accused of using a “fake news story” to back his claims about COVID. Susan then used the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, which the video described as a “trustworthy” and “fact-based” source “due to large government funding,” to fact-check her uncle’s claims.
The video concluded with Susan reporting her uncle’s statement on social media as disinformation.
“You can’t win every argument online, but you can protect yourself from disinformation. You can stop it from spreading, too,” the video stated.
The video was reportedly taken down between April 9 and May 9 of this year, right before a federal lawsuit accusing the Biden administration of censorship and free-speech violations went before a federal appeals court.
DHS’s efforts to erase its own censorship will only hurt its case as the lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, makes its way before the Supreme Court next year, said Mike Benz, online executive director of the Foundation for Freedom.
“DHS now has no defense to a Supreme Court injunction prohibiting them from future domestic censorship activity,” he said. “If DHS is deleting evidence of its past behavior today, it should have no problem with a court order today barring such activity in the future.”
Much of the information promoted by the CDC as factual during the height of the pandemic has since been discredited, with the government itself acknowledging that it had made several missteps in pushing disinformation onto the public.
