FBI And DHS Directors Mislead Congress About Censorship
Over the last year, mainstream news reporters have dismissed every new revelation of government censorship. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) officials who primed social media executives to censor the Hunter Biden laptop were simply on guard for Russian disinformation, they said. White House officials who demanded that Facebook censor accurate information about Covid-19 vaccine side effects were simply trying to save lives, journalists argued. And the sweeping effort by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demand, alongside academic institutes, social media censorship of Covid and election information was, a “public-private partnership” to “counter misinformation,” many reporters insisted. White House officials also demanded that social media companies censor accurate information about the side effects of the Covid vaccine. Facebook complied, fearing retaliation from the White House, even though executives knew that doing so would increase, not decrease, “vaccine hesitancy.”
Yet, emails obtained through discovery in the Missouri v. Biden case revealed how officials from the federal government threatened, berated, and pressured social media companies. In light of this evidence, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld an injunction in the Missouri v. Biden case, ruling that some government agencies had coerced platforms into censoring protected speech. And the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals viewed the sweeping public-private effort overseen by DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to censor disfavored views on vaccines and elections to be in violation of the First Amendment. The court demanded that CISA, along with the FBI, CDC, and the White House, refrain from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to censor users.
After this sequence of events, Senator Rand Paul interrogated DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray. After Sen. Paul asked if DHS had held meetings with social media companies to discuss content moderation, Mayorkas answered, “We, along with other federal agencies, have met with social media companies in a public-private partnership to speak of the threats to the homeland, so that those companies are alert to them.”
When Sen. Paul asked Wray if the FBI was “still meeting with social media companies,” Wray responded, “We’re having some interaction with social media companies. But, all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the [Fifth Circuit Appeals] court’s ruling.”
“We do not meet with social media companies for the purpose of instructing them to take down content,” Wray stated. “What we have done in the past, Ranking Member Paul, as I shared with you previously, is we, along with other federal agencies, have met with social media companies in a public-private partnership to speak of the threats to the homeland so that those companies are alert to them,” said Mayorkas. “We do not instruct them.”
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