Facebook Censors This Newsletter On FBI Advice
Meta kill switch bans links to Marco Rubio dossier
Within minutes of my publishing the Trump campaign’s vetting dossier of Sen. Marco Rubio, Facebook banned links not just to the article but to every other article from this newsletter, notifying thousands of people that their links had violated its terms of service.
I can now report that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, did this following a notification from the FBI. The Bureau notified Meta that my story contained hacked materials that were part of a foreign influence operation. Meta could have learned this by simply reading my article, in which I was fully transparent about the Iranian provenance of the Rubio dossier. But they didn’t. Instead they chose censorship and fealty to the national security state.
Provided an opportunity to comment, neither the FBI nor Meta responded to my queries.
The censorship is stunning. Meta implemented a blanket ban of all links to this newsletter across its host of social media platforms, including not just Facebook but Instagram and Threads as well. The ban on links to my article about the Rubio dossier remains, but after about a day, the ban on links to other stories from this newsletter was lifted.
It appears that Meta has developed a sort of panic button it hits when the FBI notifies it of a foreign influence operation, blanket banning content without any human review. Meta is a private company. But the FBI is a federal government agency that has no business secretly encouraging censorship, especially not in the name of national security.
This process has crystallized without public input or debate. A rare acknowledgement of the FBI’s pressure on social media companies appears in a Justice Department Inspector General report published in July. Per the report, in response to the 2016 presidential election, the Justice Department established a strategy to combat “malign foreign influence.”
Under the strategy, the report says, “the Department maintains strategic partnerships with social media providers.” The Inspector General reviewed this practice and concluded that the FBI’s slapdash process to warn social media companies was so informal and chaotic that it risked posing a threat to First Amendment-protected speech.
Per the Inspector General report:
“The lack of a comprehensive, Department-level strategy to coordinate information sharing with social media companies regarding foreign malign influence stands in contrast to other priority threat areas covered by DOJ’s mission. Additionally, the lack of policy (discussed previously) and strategy creates a potential risk because social media companies provide a forum for speech, which is subject to protection under the First Amendment from infringement by the government.”
The Inspector General report makes specific reference to hack-and-leak cases where inside information (not necessarily even government information) is hacked and then released, noting that sharing such hacked information results in an FBI counterintelligence investigation. Per the report:
“...Counterintelligence Division officials explained that malign influence can be broad and include covert activity, such as espionage, attempts to influence voter opinions or confidence, or technical interference (hacking).
However, if stolen nonpublic information is leaked to the public, the Counterintelligence Division will investigate the possibility of an influence operation.”
The FBI has already paid a visit to me at my home in Madison, Wisconsin when I published the JD Vance dossier in October, as I’ve written about. Other major media organizations including The New York Times were contacted by the FBI to urge them not to publish the Vance dossier, colleagues at these outlets tell me. But with the sole exception of Reuters, none of these outlets have been transparent about the FBI contact — which coincides with their uniform decision not to publish obviously newsworthy material.
The standard for publication used to be whether the document is in the public interest. Now media outlets ask whether the document is in the national interest, as defined by the national security state.
The threat to the First Amendment here seems clear, but the hyper partisan debate underlying these issues has made rational discussion impossible. When Meta decided to block access to the New York Post article about the Hunter Biden laptop, Republicans in Congress roundly condemned the move and investigated the FBI’s involvement. The incident was referenced in a Supreme Court case examining the legality of the U.S. government’s coordination with social media companies. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, this summer apologized for the incident and other similar ones. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to Congress in August, going as far as using the word “censor.”
But when I was suspended from X (Twitter) for publishing the Vance Dossier, conservatives said almost nothing. Self-described “free speech absolutist” (and Trump mini-me) Elon Musk heartily defended my suspension. Meanwhile, liberals insist government coordination with social media companies is all some kind of right-wing fever dream. Certainly many claims are overblown, but to say there’s nothing there whatsoever is just silly.
The Chinese government has its own kill switch that it has used to shut down Internet service to entire regions in the event of social unrest. More recently, Beijing-owned TikTok offered to develop a kill switch so the U.S. government could shut down the app if it determined there was a national security threat. Though the Biden administration declined to go there, the Meta case suggests that social media companies have already developed a kill switch in consultation with the FBI.
Is this the kind of country we want to live in?
All of this under a Democratic administration that keeps warning us about the coming fascism. All of them are the same.
Gotta keep the community "safe".
It's wonderful irony though that their censorship policies have now been turned against the people who originally pushed them and are now (ostensibly) benefiting Trump.