FBI Coordination With Big Tech Censorship Ahead of 2020 Election Revealed in Agent Deposition, Missouri AG Says
Officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security frequently met with major social media companies ahead of the 2020 election and pointed out users and pieces of content for removal, according to information from a deposition of a senior FBI agent revealed by a state Attorney General.
“We found that the FBI plays a big role in working with social media companies to censor speech—from weekly meetings with social media companies ahead of the 2020 election to asks for account takedowns,” said Missouri Attorney General
Eric Schmitt in a Dec. 2
series of tweets, three days after deposing Special Agent Elvis Chan, who is in charge of cyber affairs at the FBI San Francisco Field Office.
Chan has given major social media companies warnings that have led them to censor information about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, shortly before the election that put Biden in office, according to a lawsuit against the Biden administration led by Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General
Jeff Landry.
Chan testified that he and officials from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were meeting social media officials on a quarterly, then monthly, and finally, weekly basis as the election approached, Schmitt said in his tweets.
“Chan stated that the FBI regularly sent social media companies lists of URLs and social media accounts that should be taken down because they were disinformation from ‘malign foreign influence operations,’” Schmitt said, adding that “on many occasions, the platforms took down the accounts flagged by the FBI.”
“Chan personally told the social media companies that there could potentially be a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation shortly before the election,” Schmitt said.
Chan also referred to the operation as a “hack and dump,” an unnamed source in Schmitt’s office told Fox News.
After flagging some links and accounts “the FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content,” Schmitt said in the tweets.
There’s also evidence that the companies felt compelled to act on the takedown requests because they were coming from the FBI.
“If the FBI… if they come to us and tell us we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously,” said Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, formerly known as
Facebook, during an August interview with podcast host Joe Rogan.
The FBI told Facebook ahead of the election to be “on high alert” regarding something “similar” to “Russian propaganda” ahead of the 2016 election, Zuckerberg said.
“There’s about to be some kind of dump… that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant,” he recounted the FBI message as saying.
