The FBI set up a command post ahead of the 2020 election and set up a nationwide system that conveyed election-related posts to social media platforms so the platforms could take them down, an FBI agent testified in a recent deposition.
The information would be provided by FBI field offices and the bureau’s headquarters about “disinformation,” primarily regarding the time, place, or manner of elections, according to Elvis Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch for FBI’s San Francisco Division. The posts were passed to the FBI San Francisco office’s command post, which was set up days before the election and run through election night.
The posts were then sent to Big Tech companies, Chan, the daytime commander of the post, said.
“From my recollection, we would receive some responses from the social media companies. I remember in some cases they would relay that they had taken down the posts. In other cases, they would say that this did not violate their terms of service,” Chan said. “In some cases when we shared information they would provide a response to us that they had taken them down. I would not say it was a 100 percent success rate. If I had to characterize it, I would say it was like a 50 percent success rate. But that’s just from my recollection.”
The “success rate” was defined by Chan as platforms taking some type of action because a post was determined to violate a platform’s terms of service.
San Francisco FBI officials were charged by top government authorities with serving as the final link in the chain because many of the Big Tech firms are headquartered in the area.
Process
The FBI encouraged people to send in examples of election-related “disinformation or misinformation.” Examples were reviewed by an FBI employee or an FBI contractor. If posts were deemed to fit certain criteria, they would be moved to higher officials and, eventually, the San Francisco office.“By the time it’s reached us, there’s already been what I will characterize as an FBI headquarter stamp of approval,” Chan said.
Chan said a post saying voting by mail is unreliable would be looked at but would probably be dismissed before reaching the social media companies because it was “vague.”
One example of the type of post that was forwarded to the companies was statements that misstated when voters could vote, Chan said.
The FBI used two applications, the encrypted communications app Signal, and Teleporter, an app used for securely transferring files, to communicate with the firms.
“In general, Signal is a self-deleting app. But based on guidance from FBI headquarters, we had to turn that functionality off because we needed to save all of that information. So we did,” Chan recalled, speaking about the 2020 election. “We took screenshots of all of the information on the Signal channel. We burned it to DVDs, and then we have saved it as evidence.”
That process wasn’t done for the 2022 midterms because Signal wasn’t used. The FBI determined there would not be a large amount of information to convey to the Big Tech firms.
Hunter Biden
Chan was identified by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, as an FBI official involved in the censorship of the original story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Hunter Biden is President Joe Biden’s son.The judge said Chan “was identified as the FBI Agent who communicated with Facebook to suppress a story about the Hunter Biden laptop,” adding, “If he did this, the Court ultimately finds there are reasons to believe that he has interfered in other ways, too.”
Chan acknowledged regularly meeting with Big Tech executives and inquiring whether their terms of service covered hacked materials in the months leading up to the election. He said he did not recall whether Hunter Biden was brought up before the New York Post reported on the laptop. Afterward, a Facebook employee asked the FBI to comment on the story, and the FBI declined, Chan recalled.
Scenarios were discussed internally regarding hacked material appearing and companies not acting against it, Chan said. One potential solution was to obtain a warrant to seize the material, thus removing it, he said. Another was to “ask the company to consensually take down the information even if it did not violate their terms of service
‘Implanted False Warnings’
Jenin Younes, a lawyer for some of the plaintiffs in the case, told The Epoch Times that the FBI “implanted false warnings that would give Twitter the basis to progress the story.”The deposition contributed some solid evidence that will help bolster the case for the injunction, she added.
The FBI told news outlets this week: “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. It is not based on the content of any particular message or narrative.”
But Younes said that isn’t true.
“We know that’s not true because then why were they working to ensure that the story was suppressed when there really wasn’t evidence that this was the product of a Russian hack job,” she said. “It seems pretty clear to me that it was a political maneuver.”
