THE BIG LIST: 10 Ways The White House, FBI Pushed Big Tech To Censor You

(NRSC News) – One of the biggest and most important battles this generation of Americans currently faces is the protection of free speech from power hungry progressives who are desperately attempting to use any and every tool available to them to silence those who oppose their takeover of the government and society as a whole.

This is seen very clearly in the pressure that was applied to social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and others by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies within the federal government to suppress the New York Post story involving the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, just days before the election. Then, of course, there is the “suggestion” made by these same entities to also censor information related to posts about COVID that did not line up with the official leftist narrative.

All of this was sort of already known to the general public, but Elon Musk’s release of the “Twitter Files,” along with open testimony from an FBI agent has allowed Americans to get a glimpse of just how bad these things have gotten over the course of the last several years.

“We’ve entered into this period of American history where the range of permissible thought and speech has so narrowed that if you depart from it at all you are, you’re labeled, you are censored, and you are silenced,” retired Democrat Sen. Robert Torricelli stated during an interview with Just the News earlier this month. “It’s incredibly dangerous.”

“And the odd thing about it is the very institutions which have been the safeguard of American free thought and speech — American universities, think tanks, the media — are the worst offenders,” he continued.

The FBI has attempted to defend itself by stating that it did not explicitly order these social media companies to censor the content on their platforms, saying they just made suggestions for posts that they believed violated the platform’s terms of service. If you questioned their censorship activities, the bureau said you were a conspiracy theorist.

“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” it went on to say.

In order to help folks better understand just how bad things have gotten, Just the News created a list of 10 ways the FBI and the White House pushed social media companies to censor those with opposing views.

The FBI established a command center located in the city of San Francisco during the fall of 2020 that forwarded censorship requests from the bureau headquarters to various social media platforms.

“FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan testified in a free speech lawsuit brought by Louisiana and Missouri that the FBI set up an elaborate system that involved field agents, prosecutors and the bureau’s headquarters to monitor and flag content. Requests to censor content that were approved by headquarters were then sent to the command center he ran in San Francisco and forwarded to Big Tech,” Nick Givas wrote for the outlet.

“By the time it’s reached us, there’s already been what I will characterize as an FBI headquarter stamp of approval,” he went on to state during his testimony.

The bureau experienced frequent success with social media companies when forwarding censorship requests, which included content posted by Americans.

Chan then testified that social media firms were often very compliant when these requests were made, in some cases completely taking down posts.

“I would not say it was 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,” he remarked.

Givas then reported, “Twitter messages released by Musk show some of the targeted content was posted by Americans, including one example of an Indiana GOP politician targeted for raising election integrity concerns.”

Agencies within the federal government teamed up with contractors to make sure that certain pieces of content were policed and censored, creating a degree of separation.

“After Elon Musk granted access to Twitter’s emails and a trove of other data to certain members of the media, Matt Taibbi reported earlier this month that in addition to the FBI seeking takedowns of select posts, the DHS was also working with security contractors to make sure select content was deemed misinformation,” Givas noted.

The DHS also teamed up with a couple of different political think tanks, which included one known as the Election Integrity Partnership, along with executives from Big Tech companies with regularity in order to go over what they believed should be considered “misinformation.”

Officials from Homeland Security participated in weekly meetings with high-level executives at Twitter as the 2020 election drew near.

DHS was involved in a group of government agencies who kept in regular contact with high-level executives working for Twitter during the final weeks before the controversial 2020 election. The meetings soon became routine and included the FBI. One of the internal communications from Twitter revealed a “weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI” to chat about election security matters.

Homeland Security was aware that Twitter was having second thoughts about censorship concerning the Hunter Biden laptop story.

“Following revelations from a New York Post article in October 2020 about then-candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter – and his laptop revealing the extent of his Ukrainian business dealings, along with other potential criminal activity – Twitter took action and blocked access to the story. They later restored it, and then worked to suppress it again,” Givas declared in the report.

“Taibbi’s review of the third release of Twitter’s internal files disclosed that Twitter’s chief of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, was having communications describing his regular meetings with senior U.S. intelligence officials,” he continued. “A screenshot from one of the communications from a ‘yoelr,’ thought to be Roth, showed him criticizing the handling of the Hunter Biden article and taking issue with how it affected Twitter’s public image.”

“We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said the opposite), then said we unblocked it… and now we’re in a messy situation where our policy is in shambles, comms is angry, reporter think we’re idiots, and we’re refactoring an exceedingly complex policy 18 days out from the election,” it stated. “In short, FML.”

The screenshot in question also revealed the message was sent as part of a weekly meeting concerning the topic of election security between Roth and FBI, DHS, and DNI.

Memos from a whistleblower show that DHS downplayed plans for a “Governance Board” designed to help battle “misinformation.”

“Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) made public some whistleblower documents from inside DHS late last month, showing the agency had ‘internal plans for the Disinformation Governance Board, including a potential partnership with Twitter and a public-facing ‘Rumor Control Program,'” Givas explained in the article.

“The new documents also reveal that the Disinformation Governance Board plans to partner with Big Tech were far more extensive than DHS or the White House has admitted,” Hawley’s official website says. “Internal emails detail how DHS officials planned to meet with Meta’s Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher in February 2022, the same official who was in charge of security during Facebook’s suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election. The Disinformation Governance Board also planned to establish an ‘analytic exchange’ with ‘industry partners’ in Big Tech.”

The FBI Paid Twitter a whopping $3.4 million for disinformation monitoring.

“Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public,” Musk posted in a tweet last week. The message also included a Twitter thread from reporter Michael Shellenberger which disclosed just how much money was received.

Shellenberger shared an image of an email from February 2021 that was sent to Jim Baker who was serving as Twitter’s deputy general counsel at the time. It’s important to note that Baker also worked as the general counsel for the FBI before taking his position with Twitter.

The sender’s name was blocked, but the message said, “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” the unidentified sender informed Baker. The money apparently came as a “reimbursement for the time spent processing requests from the FBI.”

Federal agencies worked together to put on a campaign that would discredit stories concerning the foreign business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Shellenberger then released a set of memos that revealed how the FBI, along with the U.S. intelligence community, teamed up in order to discredit “factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.”

“In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published,” the journalist wrote.

“First, it’s important to understand that Hunter Biden earned ‘tens of millions’ of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China’s government, for which Hunter offered no real work. Here’s an overview by investigative journalist @peterschweizer” he added.

“And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” Shellenberger posted on Twitter, citing a sworn declaration by Roth that was given back in December 2020.

“Federal agencies also impacted Americans’ debate over the COVID-19 pandemic, at times censoring factually accurate posts at odds with the government’s preferred narrative,” the report revealed.

Givas wrote, “Twitter altered the COVID conversation by censoring information that was true but not in line with U.S. government policy, discrediting public health experts who disagreed and suppressing contrarian users, according to a release of documents Monday ‘[B]oth the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes,’ journalist David Zweig said in the release of the 10th tranche of Twitter Files.”

When Biden took over for former President Donald Trump, the focus at the White House shifted to “anti-vaxxer accounts” during their meetings with Twitter. Biden’s administration set their sights specifically on Alex Berenson, a reporter who was critical of the vaccine and the official narratives being pushed by the powers-that-be. He was then removed from Twitter, however, new CEO Elon Musk has since restored his account.

“Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information,” Zweig commented in his article.

“What’s next? Congress is investigating how far reaching federally sanctioned censorship has become, including at platforms beyond Twitter,” Givas added.

Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who is set to be the next chairman of the House Judiciary Committee told Just The News he is already planning to lead the charge concerning a wide-ranging investigation into the FBI and DOJ, which will include their potential collusion with other federal government agencies to engage in censoring the free speech of Americans. He then went on to say that these inappropriate interventions with social media companies should be considered meddling in the election.

“This was an information operation and misinformation operation run by big government and Big Tech against we the people,” he asserted. “And they did it before the most important election we have and that is not supposed to happen in this great country. But it did. Again, that’s why we have to expose it so that it never happens again.”

Copyright 2022. NRSCNews.org

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