FBI & Big Tech had ‘Weekly Meetings’ B-4 2020 Election about ‘Accounts’ to be Censored
By Chris Menahan | Information Liberation
The FBI held “weekly meetings” with social media giants ahead of the 2020 election and sent in “lists of URLs and accounts” for them to take down in the name of fighting “foreign influence operations,” an FBI agent revealed [last week] while under oath.
🚨BREAKING: In our deposition of FBI agent Elvis Chan on Tuesday, 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.
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022
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.” The FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content.
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022
Eric Schmitt@Eric_Schmitt
Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the 2020 election.
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.” The FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content.
— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022
Eric Schmitt@Eric_Schmitt
On many occasions, the platforms took down the accounts flagged by the FBI.
This is what real “election interference” looks like.
From Fox News:
On Tuesday, lawyers from the offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. That suit accuses high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies “under the guise of combating misinformation” to achieve greater censorship.
Chan, who serves in the FBI’s San Francisco bureau, was questioned under oath by court order about his alleged “critical role” in “coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms.”
During the deposition, Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general’s office.
Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the presidential election between former President Donald Trump and now President Biden. According to a source, Chan testified that in those multiple, separate meetings, the FBI warned the social media companies that there could be potentially Russian “hack and dump” or “hack and leak” operations.
In their complaint, the GOP AGs noted an Aug. 26 podcast episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that “the FBI basically came to us” and told Facebook to be “on high alert” relating to “a lot of Russian propaganda.” Zuckerberg added that the FBI said “there’s about to be some kind of dump… that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant.”
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1
— Minds💡 (@minds) August 25, 2022
[…] “Since filing our lawsuit, we’ve uncovered troves of discovery that show a massive ‘censorship enterprise,'” Attorney General Eric Schmitt told Fox News Digital. “Now, we’re deposing top government officials, and we’re one of the first to get a look under the hood — the information we’ve uncovered through those depositions has been shocking to say the least. It’s clear from Tuesday’s deposition that the FBI has an extremely close role in working to censor freedom of speech.”
Elon Musk released internal documents from Twitter last week showing the “Biden team” sent in requests for URLs to be taken down ahead of the election.
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022
Matt Taibbi@mtaibbi
9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party.
As we saw with Zuckerberg’s comments on Rogan, the FBI’s “warnings” were a way to pressure Big Tech to censor content the regime viewed negatively.
https://t.co/j4EeXEAw6F can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”: pic.twitter.com/w1wBMlG33U
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022
Truly incredible — former Twitter executive @yoyoel, who just got caught fabricating a fake justification for censoring a media outlet, says the decision to ban Trump after Jan 6 was impelled by the “trauma” he and other “content moderators” experienced online that fateful day pic.twitter.com/JSE7tpXtGz
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 3, 2022
The FBI not only directed the censorship of the internet ahead of the 2020 election but also manufactured a fake terror plot in the swing state of Michigan to hype the phony threat of “right-wing extremism.”
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(TLB) published this article as written by Chris Menahan and posted on InformationLiberation with our appreciation for this report
Header featured image (edited) credit: Trump/NBC News screen shot
Emphasis added by (TLB) editors
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