Noem: No anti-disinformation, misinformation action under her as DHS secretary – CyberScoop
Department of Homeland Security secretary nominee Kristi Noem committed to senators Friday that if confirmed she would keep the department out of efforts to combat disinformation and misinformation, and pledged to make the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller, more nimble.”
The South Dakota governor’s remarks signal that the incoming Trump administration will act on an issue that has galvanized many conservatives who maintained that their free speech was being curtailed on social media — in areas like election security and COVID-19 — at the behest of federal agencies.
“CISA’s gotten far off-mission,” Noem said in testimony before the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “They’re using their resources in ways that [were] never intended. The misinformation and disinformation that they have stuck their toe into and meddled with should be refocused back onto what their job is.
“CISA needs to be much more effective — smaller, more nimble — to fulfill their mission, which is to hunt and to help harden our nation’s critical infrastructure,” she said.
DHS has already wound down a number of initiatives to combat dis- and mis-information, disbanding a Disinformation Governance Board and backing away from efforts to flag false election-related claims. Officials have repeatedly countered allegations that they were policing free speech, saying critics mischaracterized their work as such. The Supreme Court this year rejected a bid from conservative governors to limit those efforts by government agencies.
In his first term, Trump himself took issue with DHS’s election security fact checks, ultimately firing then-CISA director Chris Krebs over it.
GOP senators like Chairman Rand Paul of Kentucky, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin solicited comments from Noem on the topic, with Noem saying she would never authorize anything like the Disinformation Governance Board and saying that materials CISA put out on COVID-19 were “shocking.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg complained last week that the Biden administration pressured his company to take down posts about COVID-19, some of which Zuckerberg said were true. Since Trump’s election, Meta has moved toward X’s model of community notes and away from outside fact checkers as a way to counter disinformation. Biden commented that it was “really shameful” for billionaire social media owners to wash their hands of fact-checking.
Paul has zeroed in on the topic as a focus of his committee leadership, saying he will do what he can to limit CISA authorities or even eliminate the agency.
“DHS has spent its time and resources creating [a] partisan disinformation board, spying on Americans through invasive surveillance technologies,” he said in opening remarks. “The mission drift is dangerous. Every dollar spent monitoring law-abiding citizens is a dollar not spent securing the homeland.”
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