Aleksei – stock.adobe.com
They just can’t help themselves: The FBI is once again dipping its toes back into social-media meddling.
In response to a Department of Justice report on “information sharing” about “foreign malign influence threats to U.S. elections” released in July, Associate Deputy Attorney General George. D. Turner issued a memo stating that the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential FMI threats involving the companies’ platforms.”
The info-sharing quarterly meetings began “after the 2018 midterm election and ended in mid-2023,” according to the DOJ’s report. Now the DOJ wants to start them up again, just in time for the 2024 election.
Brace yourself: The FBI is going to work with social-media companies to squash information it doesn’t like. And maybe try, once again, to tilt the election away from Donald Trump.
How do we know? Because it’s done it before.
In 2022, Twitter File releases and other evidence showed the FBI was heavily involved in content moderation at social-media companies between 2020 and 2022, flagging accounts that the agency decided could be engaged in “foreign influence” and even bullying Twitter when the company did not respond the way the FBI wanted.
Accounts and sites that purportedly posted “anti-Ukraine narratives” were treated with suspicion, including those that shared information about Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma.
As independent journalist Matt Taibbi pointed out: “Intel about the shady origin of these accounts might be true. But so might at least some of the information in them — about neo-Nazis, rights abuses in Donbas, even about our own government. Should we block such material?”
It’s worth noting that many of the government’s accusations of “foreign influence” couldn’t be substantiated by Twitter.
The Democrats’ obsession with “disinformation” reached a head during Russiagate, which was used as an excuse to treat anyone posting right-wing material as possible foreign meddlers.
An arguably even bigger crime was the government’s prepping platforms like Twitter and Facebook to dismiss the 2020 election-eve reports by The Post on Hunter Biden’s laptop, suggesting it was “foreign disinfo.”
(And it wasn’t just the FBI: Remember the 51 Spies Who Lie? Many had CIA links.)
By censoring our scoop, government officials and their social-media partners were attempting to directly tilt the election by hiding information from the voters.
It’s abusive and anti-American: The cost of free speech, after all, is tolerating speech we disagree with; government officials have absolutely no business pressuring companies (especially ones they have leverage over) to publish or censor information.
Given its record, it’s hard not to suspect that the FBI will now use its power over social-media companies to clamp down on speech that could help Donald Trump or hurt Democrats.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter (now called X) and vows to keep it open to free speech, may resist such efforts, but left-leaning outfits — Facebook, Google, etc. — are sure to play along.
Keep that in mind the next time they squelch a Post story claiming it’s merely “foreign disinfo.”