Four years ago this month, the FBI worked with Facebook and Twitter to suppress a New York Post article detailing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 US presidential election.
Today, on the eve of another contentious election, what U.S. District Judge Terry Doty called “the most massive attack on free speech in American history” could be repeated in the United States. .
The FBI knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was real in November 2019, but had repeatedly warned social media platforms about an impending “hack and leak operation” ahead of the 2020 election.
The FBI’s false flag was the pretext for Facebook and Twitter to suppress a New York Post article in October 2020, saying it was likely “Russian disinformation.” At the same time, the FBI’s Special Committee on Foreign Influences issued a warning against other “domestic disinformation,” without distinguishing between foreign and foreign intelligence. American user-generated content.
In July of this year, the FBI announced that after a court injunctive stay, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a lawsuit challenging the Biden administration’s collusion with Big Tech due to the plaintiff’s lack of standing. We have resumed coordination with the platform.
In other words, not much has changed.
In response to a two-year investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI has declassified a summary of standard operating procedures for engaging social media platforms to counter negative foreign influence.
Before engaging with a platform regarding specific content, FBI agents must have “specific, credible and clear facts” showing that the reported social media activity “is attributable” to a foreign actor rather than a U.S. person. It is to be specified.
FBI officials are also required to make clear that platforms are not expected to act or change policies in response to information shared.
That all sounds good, but there is no real oversight or transparency in these processes. Additionally, FBI officials have strongly denied that First Amendment-protected speech has been the subject of the Foreign Influence Task Force’s activities, insisting that the agency already follows such practices. There is.
According to court documents, Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan denied that the FBI “urged social media platforms to change their policies regarding hacked content.” Nevertheless, Chan acknowledged that the bureau had repeatedly asked whether the platform had made any changes regarding the “hacked” material.
FBI officials also told the inspector general that the FBI does not “monitor social media content” or “investigate specific rhetoric related to negative foreign influence being spread online.” Ta. The head of the Special Committee on Foreign Influences even claimed that the FBI was acting on “information about the activities of specific foreign actors” rather than what Americans say.
However, the FBI often acted contrary to these assurances. In fact, two years after the Biden laptop crackdown scandal, the FBI once again censored Americans in the name of combating foreign influence.
The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee revealed that after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine’s security services sent the FBI a list of social media accounts suspected of spreading Russian disinformation. The FBI forwarded those lists to Facebook, Instagram, Google, and YouTube, resulting in some of the content being removed.
Although the FBI claimed it was targeting only foreign actors, the list included posts from verified American users who expressed their views on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Surprisingly, some of the lists included posts by journalists criticizing Russian aggression, including @usaporusski, Russia’s official Instagram handle for the US State Department.
Similar to the department’s 2020 charges of so-called “domestic disinformation,” there were no adequate safeguards in place to prevent protected First Amendment speech from being caught in the crossfire. .
Apparently, the FBI learned nothing from its past mistakes in 2020.
To add insult to injury, the FBI continues to retain some of its core personnel responsible for facilitating censorship of the American public in 2020 and 2022.
For example, Mr. Chan, who served as the “key liaison” between the Special Committee on Foreign Influences and social media companies and helped orchestrate collusion between government agencies and Big Tech, remains employed by the agency. It seems so. The New York Post reports that Chan lied under oath about his knowledge of the Hunter Biden laptop investigation and ignored a Congressional subpoena to testify last year.
Declassified standard operating procedures ring hollow given the FBI’s blatant misrepresentation of its actions and avoidance of responsibility.
It simply repeats the process FBI officials claimed they followed in colluding with Big Tech platforms to censor Americans.
With just over a week until the 2024 presidential election, collusion between the FBI and Big Tech remains a clear and present danger.
