A federal judge in Louisiana set off a political firestorm with a Fourth of July injunction that bans numerous federal government agencies and officials from communicating and meeting with social media companies. The move was praised by conservatives, who have warned that the feds have become too cozy with Big Tech executives.
After Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction, State Department officials reportedly canceled a weekly meeting with Facebook, according to an employee at the tech giant who told The Washington Post that meetings with the feds had been “canceled pending further guidance.” Those meetings between the federal government and tech companies have become commonplace since former President Donald Trump’s re-election bid in 2020. Here’s how federal government officials got in bed with social media companies before, during, and after the COVID pandemic and the tumultuous 2020 presidential election.
Hunter Biden Emails
The partnership between federal government agencies and social media companies ramped up during the last few weeks of the 2020 presidential election as federal government officials communicated often about what they deemed “Russian disinformation” surrounding a certain candidate’s troublesome son.
The supposed Russian disinformation op was about Hunter Biden, and it was making waves on social media before Twitter stopped its circulation and Facebook censored the story. Years later, through the Twitter Files and revelations from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the public found out about the FBI’s communication with Twitter and Facebook in the days before the bombshell New York Post story.
In Part 7 of the Twitter Files, journalist Michael Shellenberger, who was given inside access to Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover, reported that the day before the New York Post published the Hunter Biden email story, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chen sent 10 documents to Twitter’s then-head of site integrity Yoel Roth. Hours after the Biden laptop story went up, Twitter censored the piece, stopping it from being shared on the site. A few months later, Roth gave a sworn declaration admitting he had regular meetings with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Director of National Intelligence, where the federal agencies warned of a “hack-and-leak” operation involving Hunter Biden.
The FBI also met with Facebook in the weeks leading up to the New York Post story. Zuckerberg told podcast host Joe Rogan, “The FBI … basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was, we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
In response, Facebook stifled the distribution of the Hunter Biden story “so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise,” according to Zuckerberg.
13. They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The FBI basically came to us [and] was like, ‘Hey… you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016 election. There's about to be some kind of dump similar to that.'" pic.twitter.com/yPGP8nYgCq
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) December 19, 2022
2020 Election
The federal government’s meetings with tech companies weren’t only about the Hunter Biden story. According to independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who was also given inside access to Twitter, internal Slack communications between Twitter executives showed that the social media company was meeting with federal government agents to discuss election-related posts and stories as well.
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After the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Roth complained that there weren’t “generic enough” calendar descriptions to conceal apparent meetings with FBI officials. During another conversation, Policy Director Nick Pickles asked if Twitter should say it detects “misinfo … through partnerships with outside experts,” before adding, “not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts.”
Another screenshot of internal communications showed that the FBI sent Twitter reports about tweets related to mail-in-ballots, which were heavily scrutinized by Trump and his supporters before and after the 2020 election. “The FBI-flagged tweet then got circulated in the enforcement Slack,” Taibbi reported. “Twitter cited Politifact to say the first story was ‘proven to be false,’ then noted the second was already deemed ‘no vio on numerous occasions.’”
Twitter responded to the FBI’s concern by applying a “learn how voting is safe” label to one of the tweets.
COVID
In another Twitter Files entry, Free Press writer David Zweig reported that “The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.” According to Zweig, both the Trump and Biden administrations “directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.”
During the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration was concerned with “misinformation” surrounding “panic buying” and held meetings attended by Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others, according to Zweig.
When President Joe Biden took over in January of 2021, one of his administration’s first meeting requests with Twitter was concerning COVID and “anti-vaxxer” accounts, most notably that of Alex Berenson, who was banned by Twitter after regularly raising concerns about the COVID vaccines. Berenson sued Twitter over the ban and eventually settled with the social media company. During the legal battle, Twitter was forced to release internal communications that showed how the White House met with the Big Tech company and pressured Twitter to kick Berenson off the platform.
10. Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson.
https://t.co/CHt0s7ZqfQ pic.twitter.com/dFgRmyRB3z
— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
These are just a few of the reported examples of the federal government having a direct line into social media companies where they influence decisions on censorship. That relationship between the feds and companies like Twitter and Facebook has been largely restricted thanks to Doughty’s injunction following a lawsuit from the attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, who alleged that the federal government and social media companies were colluding to censor “disfavored” speech in violation of the First Amendment.
The injunction is not the final ruling in the case, and the Biden administration has appealed the order blocking its communication with social media companies, but the judge made the reasoning for his injunction clear, writing, “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”