It is very well known by now that FBI agents worked within social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram through direct portals connecting the government to the backdoors of the networks. The Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) continue to operate in partnership with various tech systems and platforms to monitor content.
During a deposition this week the FBI admitted to giving instructions to tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft to block URLs without a basis in legality. Essentially the ideology of the FBI and DHS determines the targets of the content removal, blockage and/or censoring.
To repeat, these are not FBI and DHS instructions based on defined criminal activity, these are government instructions based on disagreements over ‘information’ as espoused by the content provider.
Information the government agrees with is safe; however, information the U.S. government doesn’t agree with is targeted. Obviously, a person of reasonable intelligence can see the problem with allowing law enforcement to determine which information is valid and which information is invalid.
(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 … Fox News Digital also learned that, according to Chan’s testimony, the FBI regularly sends social media companies lists of internet URLs and social media accounts that should be taken down because they are “disinformation” from “malign foreign influence operations.” The FBI then inquires whether the platforms have taken down the content. On many occasions, the platforms take down the accounts flagged by the FBI.
“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.” (read more)
[DISCLAIMER: CTH has a heightened awareness on this issue because I received a congressional subpoena based entirely on a Tweet that was discovered to have been attributed to an account set up by a Twitter employee to create CTH as a target. What we discovered was that Twitter employees have the ability to manipulate the platform to create real world outcomes. A variation on “swatting” by Twitter. As a result, knowing that FBI and DHS officials target user accounts based on content, and knowing that Twitter employees have the ability to create content with false attribution to targeted user accounts, it’s worth an even larger pause when considering the relationship. /SD]