The Department of Homeland Security is not only hiding the purported legal basis for its authority to police misinformation, disinformation and malinformation – the latter sometimes jeered as “true but inconvenient” – but also any explanation for invoking an unexpected Freedom of Information Act exemption to hide them.
That ongoing blowback, which ranges from the left-leaning ACLU to Republican lawmakers, is causing headaches for both agencies doling out misinformation grants and the academic institutions and researchers using them to study and shape messaging on elections, COVID-19, Hunter Biden and the environment among other subjects.