Frustration grows as federal agency struggles to combat election lies spread by Americans

The federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s elections systems has retreated from some of the key work it did to counter false and viral information about voting in the 2020 election, including dismissing or ignoring multiple internal and external policy proposals to combat disinformation, numerous sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The federal agency tasked with protecting the nation’s elections systems has retreated from some of the key work it did to counter false and viral information about voting in the 2020 election, including dismissing or ignoring multiple internal and external policy proposals to combat disinformation, numerous sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, or CISA, is charged with protecting election infrastructure from physical and cyberattacks, a task that has grown in importance since Russian intelligence agents conducted a wide-ranging effort to influence the 2016 election. While CISA has actively called out foreign disinformation efforts this year, it has been less active in swatting down domestic election disinformation, according to interviews with election officials, a review of public records and sources in the federal government. Agency officials no longer pass along to social media platforms viral online falsehoods flagged by election officials from both parties, as they did in 2020, following a lawsuit from Republican attorneys general that accused the agency of censorship. A webpage that CISA aggressively maintained to debunk viral election rumors in 2020 has been sparsely updated. Some internal proposals to support election officials’ efforts to combat disinformation have made little headway. And one of the agency’s top experts on election-related disinformation has been marginalized and not fully utilized by the agency, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. CISA Director Jen Easterly has emphasized in public remarks that it is not the agency’s job to police speech on social media platforms.