Ministry of Truth

First action taken by the Ministry of Truth

Musk breaks silence on Biden disinformation board formation after Twitter buyout: 'Discomforting'
Andrew Miller
Thu, April 28, 2022, 11:28 AM

Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared to react negatively on Twitter in response to the Biden administration’s establishment of a "Disinformation Governance Board" to combat online disinformation just days after Musk’s deal to buy Twitter.

"Discomforting," the South African billionaire posted on Twitter in response to a tweet from conservative commentator Steven Crowder comparing the newly established board to Nazi Germany.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified Wednesday that a "Disinformation Governance Board" had recently been created, days after Musk purchased Twitter, to combat online disinformation.

"The goal is to bring the resources of (DHS) together to address this threat," Mayorkas said, adding that the department is focused on the spread of disinformation in minority communities

ELON MUSK CONDEMNS TWITTER CENSORSHIP OF NY POST’S HUNTER LAPTOP STORY: ‘OBVIOUSLY INCREDIBLY INAPPROPRIATE’

The move received immediate criticism from Republicans including from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley who called the board a "disgrace" and accused the board’s executive director Nina Jankowicz, who previously served as a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, of being a "leftist radical."

Jankowicz has been slammed for previously seeming to dismiss the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has been independently verified by multiple news outlets, and once referred to it as a "Trump campaign product."

Representatives for Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox Business.

First meeting of the Federal Disinformation Board...

Incensed By Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover, The Left Won’t Even Pay Lip Service To Free Speech
BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | THE FEDERALIST
APRIL 29, 2022

There was a time not long ago when liberals at least pretended to support free speech. Those days are gone, and never coming back.

If you want to know how insane our disinformation discourse is right now, consider this: on Wednesday, just two days after Elon Musk secured a $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter — triggering apoplectic doomsaying from his critics on the left — news broke that the Department of Homeland Security has created a “Disinformation Governance Board” to combat misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms.

Testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the new entity would address the “threat” of so-called targeted misinformation campaigns among minority communities. Hours later, Politico reported the DHS board would also focus on illegal immigration and Russia, and would be led by Nina Jankowicz, a former disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center and an advisor to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, who also happens to be a Russia collusion truther.

In addition to spreading the false story that former President Donald Trump was put in office as part of a nefarious Kremlin plot, Jankowicz once claimed armed Trump supporters would show up to the polls to intimidate voters. In the runup to the 2020 election, she spread the false narrative that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian influence operation.

Indeed, the choice of Jankowicz to head a DHS office targeting election misinformation ahead of the midterms tells you everything you need to know about what the Biden administration means when it uses terms like “misinformation,” and sets up a board at DHS to “combat” it. The point of the board is to suppress any information or news that runs counter to the administration’s political aims and policy agenda. Understood in this light, the new DHS board amounts to a Soviet-style Ministry of Truth, a propaganda operation designed to quash speech and hide information from voters ahead of national elections — the exact opposite of its stated purpose.

News of this Disinformation Governance Board should snap the entire Musk-Twitter saga into focus. The unintentionally hilarious freak-outs from corporate media and left-wing blue checks about the end of democracy if Musk takes control of Twitter are not, according to the left’s point of view, overreactions.

For them, the purpose of Twitter is not to facilitate free speech or the salutary exchange of ideas or even robust debate. They care as much about all that as, say, Mayorkas and Jankowicz care about disinformation ahead of the midterms. Nor do they care all that much about hateful speech or targeted harassment on Twitter. So long as the targets of hate and harassment are on the right, it’s fine by them.

When they decry Musk’s takeover and lament that it will threaten democracy, what they mean is that they fear losing control over the platform, which, although smaller than some other social media companies, is a remarkably powerful tool for controlling narratives, shaping political discourse, and influencing news coverage. For them, “free speech” means speech they allow, that falls within boundaries they themselves have set and can change as needed. None of the people who now claim Musk’s ownership of Twitter is a huge problem saw any problem at all with Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election — a major case of actual misinformation that arguably affected the outcome of the election.

You cannot get them to admit this, though, in part because they will not admit it to themselves. Epistemic closure on the left makes it impossible for someone like The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, for example, to understand the Musk takeover of Twitter as a potential victory for authentic free speech. For Serwer, the entire debate about free speech on Twitter is a canard, “a disingenuous attempt to frame what is ultimately a political conflict over Twitter’s usage as a neutral question about civil liberties, but the outcome conservatives are hoping for is one in which conservative speech on the platform is favored and liberal speech disfavored.”

That pretty much sums up what the left is telling itself about all this. Allowing conservatives to speak their minds on Twitter about, say, transgenderism or abortion or critical race theory, can’t possibly be considered “free speech.” To them, it’s just “hateful conduct” conservatives engage in as part of a power dynamic, which in turn warrants censorship.

Same goes for raising concerns about last-minute changes to voting rules ahead of the 2020 election, or questions about the origins of Covid-19 and the efficacy of the vaccines. None of it counts as free speech, according to the left. Mention any of that, and you’re liable to get locked out of your Twitter account. (Believe me, I know whereof I speak.)

For the left, this isn’t only right and just, it’s necessary to “protect democracy.” Consider the recent remarks from former President Barack Obama — the living, breathing avatar for this mode of thinking. During a speech at Stanford University, Obama said censoring speech online is necessary to thwart disinformation that could hoodwink people into believing falsehoods or losing trust in their leaders, and of course we can’t have that. “Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” he said.

It never occurs to Obama, or to his rapt audience at Stanford, that our leaders richly deserved to be distrusted, as do the mainstream media and our political institutions. The important thing, for Obama and those with his mindset, is not that these people and institutions prove themselves actually trustworthy, only that they be seen as such. If that means a little more online censorship, then so be it.

It was not always so. There was a time not long ago Obama himself at least made it sound like he thought free speech was important. Speaking at the United Nations in 2012 just weeks after the terrorist attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi that killed Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador in Libya, along with three other Americans, Obama mounted a spirited defense of free speech. (Set aside, for the moment, that he did so under the false pretense that the Benghazi attack came about as a result of spontaneous protests of an anti-Muslim video, and not, as everyone at the time knew, a coordinated assault by Islamic militants affiliated with Al Qaeda.)

The reason the United States protects free speech, Obama said, is “because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities,” and because, “given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression, it is more speech.”

Efforts to suppress free speech, he went on, are doomed to fail because “in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete.”

What a difference a decade makes.

"...the Department of Homeland Security has created a 'Disinformation Governance Board' to combat misinformation..."


They can start by shutting down the mainstream media

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA -

https://babylonbee.com/news/disinformation-board-detects-high-levels-of-disinformation-coming-from-mysterious-white-building-in-washington-dc

This is laughable and all but it seriously needs to be nipped in the bud ..and no waiting till the midterms and blathered over for 6 months

This is the DHS enforcing this bullshit .. It just stomps all over the 1st amendment .. It's bad enough getting banned from social media for whatever shit they don't like, but there's no telling WTF DHS is gonna do about what they deem as "hate speech, disinformation, etc.." .. It's not a joke to the left.. They're really doing this

Here's Your Disinformation:
Now Psaki Is Claiming That TRUMP Started Biden’s Thought Police Board
BY ROBERT SPENCER APR 30, 2022 5:26 PM ET

Psaki [claimed] that the Board was “again, a continuation of the work of the former president, so for anyone who’s critical of it, I don’t – I didn’t hear them being critical of the work under the former president…
 
Is this some of that disinformation the Biden administration is talking about? Jen Psaki on Friday twice claimed that the Biden administration’s Orwellian and ominous new Disinformation Governance Board isn’t really new at all, and in fact, was started not by Old Joe or his DHS hatchet man, Alejandro Mayorkas, but by one Donald J. Trump. Psaki delivered this whopper with a clear tone of What are all you racist, redneck, MAGA-hat wearing yahoos getting all upset about? This was all your guy’s idea. She offered no evidence, and there doesn’t seem to be any for her to have offered.

Psaki said this under question from Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich, who noted that both Mayorkas and Psaki had expressed some unfamiliarity with the bizarre fascist who will be heading up the Ministry of Truth, Nina Jankowicz. Heinrich asked Psaki, “How was she hired if you and the White House are not familiar with her and Mayorkas is not familiar with her statements? What’s the process for, um, putting her into a position like this, and who’s in charge of hiring her?” Indeed — although it’s clear that Jankowicz, who bills herself on her website as “an internationally-recognized expert on disinformation,” is an enthusiastic proponent of government censorship who has been preparing for this job for her entire professional life.

She then launched into a potted history of Jankowicz’s career:

Well, let me give you a sense of who she is. She’s an expert on online disinformation. She was formerly in the Wilson Center as disinforma– she was formerly a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center. She’s testified before Congress, as well as the United Kingdom and European Parliament, advised a Ukrainian foreign minister, particularly relevant in this moment, under the auspices of a Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and overseeing Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. Any hiring decisions are up to the Department of Homeland Security, but this is a person with extensive qualifications. What I will tell you about the, um, Board and what the Board is doing, this is a continuation of work that began at the Department of Homeland Security in 2020 under former President Trump.

Heinrich followed up with a question about Jankowicz’s video in which she tells people not to vote for those who supposedly spread “disinformation,” and Psaki responded by claiming again that the Board was “again, a continuation of the work of the former president, so for anyone who’s critical of it, I don’t – I didn’t hear them being critical of the work under the former president, which is just interesting to note contextually.” She went on to explain that the Board would fight “misinformation spread by human smugglers,” which she said was work begun in the Trump administration, and added semi-coherently: “This is also work, um, that is helping to, uh, address unauthorized terrorism, other threats, and see how disinformation and misinformation is being pushed to lead, uh, to increase those.”

Now wait a minute. Politico revealed the existence of the Board on Wednesday, it said that the Department of Homeland Security was “standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board.” The “standing up” locution is strange, but “new” is a fairly unambiguous word. If the Board is new, it’s not a continuation of a Trump administration initiative. Mayorkas confirmed this on Thursday, saying: “We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security.” He didn’t say anything about continuing work begun during the Trump administration, either.

Also, it’s a matter of simple common sense. Imagine if the Trump administration really had established some entity that was meant to combat “disinformation.” Amid all the Left’s hysterical propaganda about Trump being a “fascist” who was bent on destroying “our democracy,” do you really think that we would only be hearing fifteen months after Trump left office that he had established a board to police speech? The news would have been shouted from every rooftop. Chris Cuomo and Brian Stelter and Rachel Maddow would have spent weeks warning us about this threat to “our democracy,” while the New York Times and Washington Post would have run feature after feature about how authoritarian rulers always claim that speech that opposes their agenda is “disinformation.”

Search the net for “Disinformation Governance Board,” and all you’ll find are stories about this new Board that Biden’s handlers have just created. If there is any truth in Psaki’s claims, and there is no indication that there is, the Trump-era entity went by another name and was so far from being a Ministry of Truth or a Thought Police that not even the Leftist media, always avid for anything they could hang around Trump’s neck, made anything of it. It strains credulity well beyond the breaking point. Ms. Psaki, you have been found guilty of disinformation. Please report to Ms. Jankowicz for reeducation.

‘There Is No Ministry of Truth,’ Minister of Truth Confirms
Nina Jankowicz(@wiczipedia/Twitter)
By NATE HOCHMAN | NationalReview
May 2, 2022 12:05 PM



If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that Babylon Bee-style parodies often turn out to be prophetic. Yesterday, I jokingly wrote in a Twitter thread:




Turns out my joke was only slightly more extreme than a real Politico headline published around the same time: “Mayorkas cites misinformation about Homeland Security’s disinformation board.” (Or alternatively, as my friend Aaron Sibarium tweeted, “There is no Ministry of Truth,” Minister of Truth confirms). Politico reports:

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Sunday defended the department’s new disinformation board amid pushback from conservatives who say the effort is Orwellian.

“It works to ensure that the way in which we address threats, the connectivity between threats and acts of violence are addressed without infringing on free speech — protecting civil rights and civil liberties, the right of privacy,” Mayorkas told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

Mayorkas in another interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” reiterated that the board will work on ways to address disinformation “in a way that does not infringe on free speech, does not infringe on civil liberties.”

“See? Nothing to worry about!” assures the man who’s overseeing the formation of a “Disinformation Governance Board,” whose newly appointed leader labeled the now-confirmed New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop “a Russian influence op.” “Trust us, we won’t be weaponizing this against Americans — our approach to policing disinformation will be ‘politically neutral,’” insists the employee of an administration that has routinely labeled inconvenient but factual news reports as “disinformation,” and is openly working with social-media platforms to censor content it deems as such. “Your civil liberties are safe with us,” says the White House who threatened to sic the feds on parents who protested at schoolboard meetings.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, etc. The problem with unaccountable government bureaucrats defining “disinformation” is that their definition inevitably encompasses true information that just happens to run contrary to their ideological priors. And if policing false or misleading claims is now the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, why shouldn’t the next Republican president use the new “disinformation” bureaucracy to go after the allegations of widespread voter suppression that will inevitably follow his or her victory? After all, disinformation about the sanctity of our electoral process is an existential threat to democracy . . . right?



. . . right?

Trump Shreds Biden’s ‘Ministry Of Truth’ As A ‘Horrible Idea’

Twenty attorneys general demand Mayorkas disband disinformation board, threaten lawsuit
By Bethany Blankley
Updated: May 6, 2022 - 3:16pm

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares led the coalition of attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.

They expressed alarm after learning of the board after Mayorkas announced its creation in his testimony before the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.

“No statutory authority exists to support your creation of a board of government censors,” the attorneys general wrote. “Although Congress has considered a variety of measures to address the perceived dangers of ‘disinformation’ in the United States, none has passed.” …

Having a federal board slap a “federal-government label of ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’ on speech that government bureaucrats, operating behind closed doors, decree to be improper” is “an unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment on every citizen’s right to express his or her opinions, engage in political debate, and disagree with the government,” they wrote.

“Instead, while the people’s elected representatives continue to debate this issue, you have arrogated to yourself the power to address it without congressional authorization, despite the far-reaching effects of the Disinformation Governance Board on Americans and our political process,” they add.

Having a federal board slap a “federal-government label of ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’ on speech that government bureaucrats, operating behind closed doors, decree to be improper” is “an unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment on every citizen’s right to express his or her opinions, engage in political debate, and disagree with the government,” they wrote.

“Your censorship will not drown out misinformation; it will suppress the lawful speech of well-meaning but unpopular speakers, and it will turn bad actors into martyrs with far more influence than if you simply allowed ‘more speech’ to combat their alleged misinformation,” they warned.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who signed the letter, said, “I will not allow the Biden Administration to continue to erode our democracy by silencing millions of people in defiance of our Constitution and First Amendment freedoms, and deny every American the right to be heard. You cannot simply label as ‘disinformation’ all speech you disagree with or find politically damaging to your cause and expect the American people to tolerate the government telling them what they can think or say.”

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, who also signed the letter, said, “President Biden is attempting to confuse and distort legitimate criticism and the perspective of American citizens. This authoritarian maneuver could be straight out of the novel 1984 and should frighten Americans of all political persuasions."

The AGs also expressed alarm over the board’s new director, Nina Jankowicz, pointing to erroneous claims she’s made while labeling others as “ dis-informers” and “information launderers.”

Jankowicz previously claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “the product of a foreign disinformation campaign,” which was later proven to be false. She asserted that the coronavirus lab leak in China was “invented because it was ‘politically convenient for Trump,’” even though the U.S. intelligence community “now assesses that this theory may very well be correct,” they write. She also “even praised Christopher Steele, the discredited author of the infamous false ‘dossier’ about President Trump, and one of the most notable peddlers of disinformation in recent memory,” they add.

“It would be amusing that a self-proclaimed expert in disinformation like Ms. Jankowicz has proven to be so bad at identifying it, except that you have placed her in charge of doing so on behalf of the United States government,” they argue.

Miyares also it’s extremely troubling that Jankowicz described parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, as “‘disinformers’ engaged in ‘disinformation for profit’” simply because they don’t want their children taught Critical Race Theory.

DHS published a fact sheet about the board, calling it an internal working group with a stated purpose of “protecting free speech and other fundamental rights when addressing disinformation that threatens the security of the United States.”

DHS said it’s focused on “disinformation that threatens the security of the American people, including disinformation spread by foreign states such as Russia, China, and Iran, or other adversaries such as transnational criminal organizations and human smuggling organizations. Such malicious actors often spread disinformation to exploit vulnerable individuals and the American public, including during national emergencies.”

It also states the working group will be coordinating with “other federal agencies and a diverse range of external stakeholders.”

A bipartisan Homeland Security Advisory Council co-chaired by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and former DHS Secretary under the George W. Bush administration, Michael Chertoff, will also offer recommendations according to the fact sheet.

Biden’s Disinformation Board Co-Chair Worked for George Soros
By Pamela Geller - on May 8, 2022

The man who told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes that “the happiest days of his life:” was collaborating with the Nazis is running a shadow government here in the United States.

Thrown out of Hungary and Poland, Soros is now being driven out of Turkey, but he continues his quest for the destruction of America and individual freedom. Here in America, the party of treason has canonized him and allowed him to anoint our destroyers.

Biden’s Disinformation Board Co-Chair Formerly Worked for George Soros:

By: Truth Press, May 7, 2022:

A top Biden administration official in the Department of Homeland Security’s new Disinformation Governance Board has strong connections to controversial anti-American billionaire George Soros.

Disinformation Governance Board leader Jennifer Daskal has three connections to the controversial Soros, according to the Media Research Center. Soros is known for backing left-wing causes in the United States and Europe.

Before being chosen to serve in the Disinformation Governance Board — dubbed by critics as the Biden administration’s “Ministry of Truth” — the Homeland Security Deputy General Counsel (Cyber and Technology) had served as an Open Society Institute fellow, according to the report.

SOROS SHOULD BE TAKEN OUT AND SHOT

Biden's Disinformation Board Head Suggests Verified Twitter Users Should Be Able to 'Edit' Other Users' Tweets
By Bradley | https://ijr.com
May 12, 2022 at 3:28pm

The head of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Disinformation Governance Board is suggesting that users with a blue checkmark on Twitter should be able to “add context” to other users’ tweets.

In a video clip of a zoom call, shared by The Post Millennial, Nina Jankowicz said that “there are a lot of people who shouldn’t be verified, who aren’t legit” and are not “trustworthy.”

Jankowicz shared a vision of a feature where “verified people can essentially start to ‘edit’ Twitter [in] the same sort of way that Wikipedia is so they can add context to certain tweets.”

“If President Trump were still on Twitter and tweeted a claim about voter fraud, someone could add context from one of the 60 lawsuits that went through the court or something that an election official in one of the states said…so that people have a fuller picture rather than just an individual claim on a tweet,” she added as an example.

Watch the video below:



It was not clear how old the video is.

During an appearance on CNN last month, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described the board as a “small working group.”

He explained, “It works to ensure that the way in which we address threats, the connectivity between threats and acts of violence, are addressed without infringing on free speech. Protecting civil rights and civil liberties, the right of privacy.”

He clarified, “The board does not have any operational authority or capability.”

However, the choice of Jankowicz to lead the panel has been criticized.

She has been accused of spreading disinformation in the past.

Conservatives have also expressed dismay at resurfaced TikTok videos from Jankowicz.

In one video, Jankowicz sings about disinformation to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” from “Mary Poppins.”

“Information laundering is really quite ferocious. It’s when a huckster takes some lies and makes them sound precocious,” the video starts off. “By saying them in Congress or a mainstream outlet. So disinformation’s origins are slightly less atrocious.”



Jankowicz continued, “It’s how you hide a little, hide a little lie.”

“When Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine. Or when TikTok influencers say COVID can’t cause pain. They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note and not support their lies with our wallet, voice or vote,” she added.

Mayorkas previously defended Jankowicz, calling her “eminently qualified” and “a renowned expert in the field of disinformation.”

DHS is pausing its newly created disinformation board
By Sean Lyngaas and Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Updated 12:07 PM ET, Wed May 18, 2022

(CNN)The Department of Homeland Security is pausing its newly created disinformation board amid fierce criticism and confusion over the effort, according to a source familiar with the decision.

Earlier this month, DHS announced an interagency team, dubbed the "Disinformation Governance Board," to coordinate department activities related to disinformation aimed at the US population and infrastructure. Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert with experience working on Ukraine and Russia issues, was tapped to helm the board.

Jankowicz's appointment quickly drew condemnation from GOP lawmakers and right-wing media, who pointed to her past tweets and statements regarding Hunter Biden's laptop and Christopher Steele, the author of the so-called Steele Dossier.

At the time, DHS and the White House defended the new initiative, and backed Jankowicz to lead it.
The Washington Post first reported on the suspension of the disinformation board. CNN has reached out to DHS for comment.

Jankowicz has focused on disinformation and Eastern Europe for years and advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on the subject in 2016 and 2017, according to her website. She is fluent in Russian, and her book "How to Lose the Information War" examines how five Western governments have dealt with Russian disinformation.

Despite her expertise, critics argue she holds biases on certain issues. For instance, in a TikTok video posted prior to her appointment to lead the board, Jankowicz singled out Rudy Giuliani and TikTok influencers to a Mary Poppins jingle.

DHS previously said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas asked department officials to enhance the public's trust in the group. The board is an internal working group and doesn't have operational authority, instead serving in a more advisory role. It's intended to gather best practices and support counter-disinformation activities, not monitor Americans, according to DHS.

The concept of the board dates to last year. At the time, Homeland Security officials began discussing a group to provide guidance on policies and privacy protection questions, given that agencies within the department were already collecting information for purposes related to their missions, said John Cohen, the former acting head of the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, in an interview with CNN earlier this month.

One of the questions the working group could help with, officials thought, was whether agencies could share information with one another that they had obtained through their own authorities, Cohen said.
Mayorkas acknowledged that some of the criticism of the board was brought on by the department's own rollout.

"We probably could have done a better job of communicating what it does and does not do," he said earlier this month in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash.

The "Disinformation Governance Board" focuses first on disinformation surrounding human migration into the US and potential disinformation threats from Russia aimed at US critical infrastructure, DHS said in a news release announcing the board.

Russian disinformation campaigns against Americans have gone on for years, including during election cycles. US officials are always watching for new signs of Kremlin-backed efforts to sow divisions, particularly in light of Russia's war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, US challenges in dealing with migrants trying to enter the US are exacerbated by smugglers who "make a profit by spreading false information that endangers lives," DHS said in its news release.

Heh: