An FBI agent who coordinated with Facebook to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story is advising the Biden administration in its push to suppress information on social media, according to leaked documents published by The Intercept.
“We need a media infrastructure that is held accountable,” she said during a March meeting attended by Twitter executives and executives from JP Morgan Chase, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. She also said subversive content on social media could weaken public support for the U.S. government.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made plans to pressure private social media companies to censor information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine,” according to leaked documents obtained by The Intercept. Facebook and Instagram also have a formal process for government officials to ask them to suppress certain information.
The DHS was created to combat terrorism, and it justified its involvement in online censorship with the claim that threats can be “exacerbated by misinformation and disinformation spread online,” according to The Intercept.
Disinformation and misinformation aren’t always precisely defined by the federal government; this creates an opening for the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech and what they can censor.
Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for several days after the outlet broke a story Oct. 15, 2020 about emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop regarding a meeting between then-Vice President Joe Biden and a Ukrainian gas executive; the platform also blocked users from sharing links to the article.
The FBI, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
