40 Years of Information Defence. Undone in 400 Days.

The list is public. Have you seen it?

https://getfactfirst.substack.com/p/who-is-here-to-help-know-what-is

“Something broke in our information defences since the Trump Administration took power. And it wasn’t the tech.

You can still Google a claim. Pull a CSIS threat report. Cross-reference a story against a news database and run a question through AI several times, probing deeper with each pass, until something useful surfaces.

The information is still there but who the hell has time for all that checking?

So many of the people whose job it was to keep us safe from information attacks are gone. Most of the time, we never even knew they were there.

Quiet, hard-working people who turned raw intelligence into usable warnings. Or teams who converted research into policy. Offices that held power accountable to evidence and shared what they found with the public.

In just over 400 days of Trump’s second term, those people have been fired, defunded, or disbanded. The Trump Administration calls it dismantling the censorship bureaucracy (more on that coming).”

“The Global Engagement Center has been shuttered. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was disbanded. CISA’s election security teams have been placed on leave. The ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center has been gutted. Then there is all of USAID’s media support programs that were shut down. The National Science Foundation’s disinformation research grants have been all cancelled and then of course, the platforms, including Meta’s third-party fact-checking program and X’s trust and safety teams were already gutted before any of this started.

One by one, the institutions built to detect and defend against information threats have been taken apart.”