The Propaganda FilesIn February 2025 DHS placed CISA staff who worked on mis-, dis- and malinformation and election security on administrative leave while it reviewed the agency's election mission. Further cuts to election security funding and plans to shrink the workforce followed.
On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order barring federal employees from facilitating unconstitutional restrictions on speech and directing the Attorney General to investigate the previous four years of federal activity. Several related actions followed in 2025-2026, along with criticism that the administration pressured media itself.
The State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC), created in 2016 to counter foreign propaganda, gave the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) $100,000 between 2018 and 2021, according to a State Department spokesperson. Congress let the GEC's authority lapse on Dec. 23, 2024, and in 2025 the Trump administration closed its successor office and took further action against what it called censorship.
Nina Jankowicz sued Fox News for defamation over its coverage of her and the Disinformation Governance Board. Chief Judge Colm F. Connolly dismissed the suit on July 22, 2024, and the Third Circuit affirmed on Sept. 12, 2025.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that neither the states nor the individual users had Article III standing to seek a preliminary injunction, reversing the Fifth Circuit. The Court did not decide whether the government's contacts violated the First Amendment.
In June 2024, Platformer reported that the Stanford Internet Observatory was being wound down after leadership departures and costly lawsuits and congressional probes tied to the EIP and Virality Project. Stanford disputed that SIO was being dismantled but confirmed it would not continue election research.
Judge Terry A. Doughty (W.D. La.) issued a preliminary injunction on July 4, 2023 barring numerous federal agencies and officials, including CISA, from urging platforms to suppress protected speech. He found plaintiffs likely to succeed on claims that CISA 'significantly encouraged' platforms to suppress speech; these were preliminary findings, not a final judgment.
In 2023 the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released two interim staff reports accusing CISA and university partners of facilitating censorship. The underlying documents are real; the reports' characterizations are contested.
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas disclosed the Disinformation Governance Board at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing on April 27, 2022, with Nina Jankowicz as its executive director. After heavy criticism the board was paused on May 18, 2022, and Mayorkas terminated it on August 24, 2022, after a Homeland Security Advisory Council subcommittee said it was not needed.
CISA's Cybersecurity Advisory Committee formed a subcommittee on 'Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation' that convened in December 2021 and issued recommendations in June and September 2022. House Republicans said its records showed concern about public scrutiny; a member of the subcommittee says it was purely advisory and never flagged content.
Speaking at WIRED's RE:WIRED conference in November 2021, CISA Director Jen Easterly described public resilience to misinformation as part of CISA's infrastructure mission. Critics later cited the remark as evidence of mission creep into speech.
Court records show White House digital director Rob Flaherty pressed Facebook and Twitter in 2021 over COVID-19 vaccine content in sharply worded emails. On July 16, 2021 President Biden said of platforms like Facebook, 'They're killing people,' then softened the remark on July 19.
The Stanford-led Virality Project applied the EIP model to COVID-19 vaccine content in 2021, using the same Jira ticketing system and briefing platforms and government agencies. Emails released in the 'Twitter Files' show it described some true content as reportable; Stanford says it never asked platforms to remove side-effect content.
From 2018 until mid-2022, CISA's mis-, dis- and malinformation (MDM) team forwarded reports of alleged election misinformation from state and local election officials to social media platforms. The practice is admitted by CISA and described by the courts; whether it amounted to coercion or 'significant encouragement' is disputed.
Critics of the Disinformation Governance Board pointed to statements its director, Nina Jankowicz, made in 2017-2021 about the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Steele dossier. The statements themselves are on the record; whether they amounted to spreading disinformation is disputed, and Jankowicz said they were taken out of context.
The EIP was a 2020 coalition of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, Graphika and the Atlantic Council's DFRLab that tracked election misinformation and shared tickets with platforms. Its links to CISA are documented; whether it functioned as a government censorship proxy is disputed.
