> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
(a) The Biden/Harris administration was not one that I would consider Progressive, and I really have no interest in defending them broadly speaking
(b) I am quite aware of the actions and events described in the article you link, and do not approve of them. Even so, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not these actions constituted violations of the first amendment, at least legally if not in spirit. This is quite unlike the current administration's blatant violations which include:
(c) Jailing and attempting to deport people for political speech, attempting to revoke funding from universities that allow certain protests (freedom of assembly), defunding PBS and NPR on the basis of political viewpoints expressed, suing many other news outlets for unflattering coverage and threatening to revoke licenses via FCC. The list goes on. Also, Twitter is now owned by an honorary member of the Trump cabinet, and if you don't think he's putting his finger on the scale, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
https://unherd.com/2026/04/how-censorship-seized-america/?ed...
(a) The Biden/Harris administration was not one that I would consider Progressive, and I really have no interest in defending them broadly speaking
(b) I am quite aware of the actions and events described in the article you link, and do not approve of them. Even so, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not these actions constituted violations of the first amendment, at least legally if not in spirit. This is quite unlike the current administration's blatant violations which include:
(c) Jailing and attempting to deport people for political speech, attempting to revoke funding from universities that allow certain protests (freedom of assembly), defunding PBS and NPR on the basis of political viewpoints expressed, suing many other news outlets for unflattering coverage and threatening to revoke licenses via FCC. The list goes on. Also, Twitter is now owned by an honorary member of the Trump cabinet, and if you don't think he's putting his finger on the scale, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.