From the Washington Free Beacon: On Oct. 7, 2020, a Twitter account by the name of “nodrog danarb” issued a warning about the coming election.
“All conservatives vote in person,” the account tweeted, tagging the official Twitter account of the Washington Office of the Secretary of State. “Don’t trust the mail.”
Such posts were a dime a dozen in the lead-up to the 2020 election, as concerns about the COVID pandemic fueled an unprecedented spike in mail-in voting. This tweet, though, caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), whose remit includes election infrastructure.
The agency had received an email from the Washington secretary of state’s communications director, Kylee Zabel, flagging the post as “potential misinformation.” CISA had solicited such communication, and within 20 minutes, the agency had forwarded the complaint to Twitter. By 8 a.m. the next day, Twitter had taken the tweet down.
The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of the many examples of government jawboning discussed in a new report on CISA by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
The report reveals that CISA was holding meetings with social media companies about alleged misinformation—both foreign and domestic—as far back as 2018.
The Free Beacon explains that CISA was actually created during the first Trump administration, but the report indicates that at least some working within the agency may have had a mission of their own. The Free Beacon writes:
The law establishing CISA, which protects critical infrastructure, including election systems, from cyber and physical threats, passed the House and the Senate unanimously and was signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018. But mission creep set in almost as soon as the agency was founded.
The censorship was also taking place during the 2020 election season. The report explains that during that year, CISA instructed state election officials to notify them of ‘false or misleading posts’ the agency could forward those reports to social media companies and have the content removed.
Another alarming excerpt reads:
A 2023 report by the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government found that CISA had “facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries.” Amid a First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration, the agency outsourced its switchboarding efforts to a CISA-funded nonprofit, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), in order to mitigate legal risk. It also scrubbed its website of references to “malinformation”—a term the agency defined as information that is “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
That concept was responsible for some of the most overt overreach of the Biden era. In one particularly extreme case, the elections office in Loudoun County, Virginia, flagged an unedited video of a county official “because it was posted as part of a larger campaign to discredit the word of” that official. The report—which EI-ISAC forwarded to Twitter—noted that the poster was “connected to Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
READ MORE from the Washington Free Beacon.
How a Government Agency You’ve Never Heard of Censored Everyday Americans @aaronsibarium @FreeBeacon https://t.co/oPfCrGSM9i
— Matthew Continetti (@continetti) September 30, 2025
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