At the end of April, the Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress that his agency was in the process of starting a “Disinformation Governance Board” to take on disinformation and misinformation in the lead up to the midterm elections. The timing of this announcement on the heels of the brouhaha over Elon Musk’s purchase and privatization of social media giant Twitter may be coincidental, but is nonetheless revealing.

While Musk is being painted as some kind of white supremacist troll with bad intentions, his actual statements reflect a soberingly neutral approach for the moderation of the site. In several tweets Musk honed in on instances where users were censored discriminately over topics of controversy that even former CEO Jack Dorsey admits were not correct in hindsight. If Musk has any intent, it is to engender more speech and not to curate it, which is quite the opposite of how the site previously operated and that is what his critics are upset about.

Twitter previously did nothing to tamp down stories and discussion about Russian kompromat and collusion during the Trump Administration, and nor should they have. However, we now know there was very little substance to this narrative, as Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of “Russian Interference” instead found a concerning amount of dirty dealing and complicity between intelligence agency bureaucrats, media members, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. If that doesn’t count as spreading disinformation, then what did?

Apparently, what did was any information or discourse surrounding the dubious business dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine and China and the influence this may have had over his father while he ran for office in 2020. Twitter very infamously chose to suppress conversation on their site linking to the information shared by the New York Post, going as far as to outright ban the storied paper’s account, the very thing Jack Dorsey regrets doing.

There is very little regret over the censorship of this news story from media members and former intelligence agency pundits who dismissed the whole affair as “Russian disinformation.” Among them is the person being tapped to lead the DGB. Nina Jankowicz is a policy wonk formerly of the Wilson Center (itself partially funded by Facebook), who doggedly appeared on cable news advocating for the suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop story, despite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Times sheepishly admitting the “laptop from hell” was very real, nearly two years after the fact.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has had to awkwardly announce that a probe into Hunter Biden’s finances is underway, with Attorney General Merrick Garland refusing to empower a special counsel to handle the case despite the clear conflict of interest present to anyone with eyeballs.

If the whole point of this so-called disinformation board is to safeguard our elections from it, one can only be skeptical of the intentions and events that have inspired its creation. The board’s boosters may defend it by claiming it will protect our elections from undue influence, it likely will end up directly influencing them itself. While this board may not have true legislative or law enforcement powers, tech companies will surely point toward its declarations when determining what can be said and who can say it, a nefarious synergy between government and private companies typically reserved for the villains of history.

The Whitehouse has trotted out press secretary Jen Psaki to gaslight the nation further by asserting that the DGB was actually started during the Trump Administration, which doesn’t do anything to undermine criticism for Biden realizing it during his. While Psaki can disingenuously assert, she doesn’t know anyone who would oppose the efforts of the DGB to curtail disinformation, one person who previously did, was Jankowicz herself.

In a Zoom interview from 2020, Jankowicz criticized the Trump administration for lashing out at publishers and platforms and labeling them “fake news.” Jankowicz claimed that the Federal Government should not be able to declare what is and isn’t true, concluding by saying, “I would never want to see our executive branch have that sort of power.” But now she has that power, and delights in having it.

All that we as citizens of this country and users of the Internet can do is “speak truth to power” like we were championed to in the Trump years, until those currently in power decide to remove us from the conversation.