CISA layoffs do foreign disinformation peddlers a massive favor

The Trump administration has made a big mistake in eliminating teams working on combating foreign disinformation campaigns, Dr. Lance Hunter tells Cybernews in an interview.

At the beginning of February, staff at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who are focused on disinformation and influence operations, were placed on leave, sparking concerns about the future of American efforts to counter digital threats under the new administration.

For good measure, Pam Bondi, the new Attorney General, also dissolved an FBI task force formed in response to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections that worked to sniff out efforts by Russia, China, or Iran to manipulate US voters.

These moves aren’t surprising as they originate from within an administration that has consistently claimed that even merely pointing out potential disinformation is censorship in disguise.

But most disinformation experts say that the very fact that the US is now dismantling the CISA and FBI teams working on foreign threats must seem extremely welcoming to countries where disinformation campaigns aimed at America are born.

One such expert is Dr. Lance Hunter, a professor of International Relations and faculty member within the Master of Arts in Intelligence and Security Studies Program at Augusta University in Georgia.

Last week, even more CISA employees, some described by Politico sources as “like Einstein talented,” were fired. These are the people that combat hacking threats against the US.

Alarmist rhetoric across the media might be a bit much. However, Dr. Hunter, who examines how emerging digital tools influence political stability, security, and the spread of disinformation in his daily work, told Cybernews he thought that US adversaries are certainly seeing a green light to go ahead “and have a good time.”

“It’s not censorship”

The current administration officials, including the new Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, say that CISA has gone “far off mission,” must eat less, so to speak, and lay off people left and right. You disagree, right?

I do. We're living in a very polarized time in the United States politically. One of the things that's happened over the last few years is there would be disinformation, let's say, starting out from another country – Russia, China, Iran – that's targeting the US for political purposes.

In some cases, domestic political actors – just citizens of a certain political persuasion, or a political party, politicians – would pick up this disinformation, and it would start to be part of our political narratives here in the US. The disinformation got embedded into our domestic political conversations.

CISA identified some of this as disinformation but then got pulled into some of the political conversations. Some from the right didn't like the idea of calling some content disinformation.

As an example, Russia and Iran had a number of disinformation campaigns going during the 2022 midterm elections, talking of alleged hacking of voter databases and trying to delegitimize the process.

CISA is not an enforcement agency at all. It’s just a partnership agency helping social media companies identify but not remove content.

All that wasn’t true, but some domestic political groups in the US picked up that information and ran with it. So when CISA identified it as disinformation, they got upset. That’s why CISA is being targeted.

Let's maybe try to dissect this for a bit. I’m not trying to say that conservatives are more gullible or that they want disinformation to spread but they have been claiming for some time now that any kind of government work in general to combat disinformation is just censorship. Is it?

No. Because what's CISA doing? CISA wasn’t removing the information itself – they were simply identifying the disinformation and sending this analysis to social media companies so they would know it's disinformation.

Then it was up to the social media companies what to do with it. In that way, CISA is not an enforcement agency at all. It’s just a partnership agency helping social media companies identify but not remove content.

To me, that's not censorship. That’s just stating: “Here's this information. It's really up to you what you want to do with it.” Identifying a piece of disinformation is not censorship because the government wasn't taking it down itself.

Great opportunities

So how should one call refusing to let the agencies work on combating disinformation? Is this censorship on fact-checking? We have seen on X that these “Community notes” don’t really work, and now Meta, probably pressured by the government, is following suit.

A lot of technology companies in the US are very dependent on the federal government for grants and things like this, because they have a lot of operations outside of just social media that have to do with developing AI. So they really need the federal government to be cooperative with them.

They're rolling back kind of their disinformation identification efforts because they realize that the Trump administration and the supporters aren't in support of that. Meta, for instance, wants to make sure it's in the good graces of the Trump administration.

There's a notion from the right that all these campaigns just target the left, which is not the case necessarily. Rolling back all of these disinformation efforts could be bad for either party because, ultimately, the intent behind the disinformation is to increase division, increase polarization, and weaken the country internally.

If you have less federal government resources directed at identifying that disinformation, you're going to be much more vulnerable to those types of disinformation campaigns.

So what happens now? Do you think there's a plan or is it just the hands-off approach and the government is just going to see what happens? To Russia or Iran, it might be seem that they’re going to enjoy this, no?

I think you're right. The administration's statements have argued that they want to focus more on protecting critical infrastructure from cyber threats and moving away from disinformation.

Russia, Iran, and then also China, but maybe to a lesser extent – they're going to realize that the US is going to be more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns because they're going to be identified and taken down less often.

Disinformation now has a greater opportunity to spread. It's kind of a green light probably in the minds of the Russians and the Chinese that, okay, yeah, we have a great opportunity here.

Solution, where art thou?

Might there be a way for responsible federal employees to still fight disinformation, even though the Trump administration won’t, as long as, let’s say, the Russians know which buttons to push and praise him just enough?

Well, there are other agencies within the federal government that do have some ability to identify disinformation. Now, to what extent they're going to be limited going forward? That's a big question.

There are some other departments within the FBI that can do this as well. And the CIA has some ability, as well as the US Army Cyber Command, even though they focus more on cyber attacks. They also have some opportunities in the office of Director of National Intelligence.

But to what extent will these agencies be encouraged or allowed to look for and combat disinformation? Part of the solution may have to come outside of the federal government, and it'll be really up to social media companies to police the content to some extent.

We're going to see a lot of variations across platforms. Some platforms will have very little content moderation and very little identification of disinformation, others will work harder.

France, for example, has traditionally invested a lot into digital literacy campaigns and courses, starting from a very young age. Kids are learning to separate fact from fiction, so to speak. How is America doing in increasing digital literacy among its population?

That's one area we're lacking a lot here in the US. It looks very different from one state to another because we have a very decentralized educational system. Actually, our Department of Education may be disbanded soon.

The blue liberal states invest more in education and educational infrastructure. You can see a little bit less of that in the red states.