A new report from the House Judiciary Committee indicates that an effort against “Russian disinformation” on social media platforms, spearheaded by the FBI and Ukrainian intelligence officials, resulted in the censorship of Americans’ accounts. In one case, the FBI and Ukrainian intelligence effort flagged an account run by the U.S. State Department for censorship, but it was ultimately not taken down.
The report was obtained by CNN and is based on subpoenas from the subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the investigations of which have already exposed key details about the government’s online censorship machine.
A sign at Twitter headquarters is shown in San Francisco, Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
It corroborates a report in May of this year from journalist Lee Fang, who confirmed the FBI’s collaboration with Ukraine on social media censorship in an interview with llia Vitiuk, head of Ukraine’s Department of Cyber Information Security.
Via CNN:
The committee says SBU sent the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly “spread Russian disinformation,” and that the FBI then “routinely relayed these lists to the relevant social media platforms, which distributed the information internally to their employees in charge of content moderation and enforcement.”
The committee claims that the FBI and SBU, “flagged for social media companies the authentic accounts of Americans, including a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists” as well as requested that those accounts be taken down.
The report reveals that the State Department’s Russian-language Instagram account, @usaporusski, was flagged for removal after the SBU and FBI provided a list of Instagram accounts they claimed engaged in “distribut[ing] content that promotes war, inaccurately reflects events in Ukraine, justifies Russian war crimes in Ukraine in violation of international law,” among other things. @usaporusski is the official, verified, Russian-language account of the US State Department.
The report notes that Facebook (now known as Meta) did not comply with that particular SBU-FBI request, and that one Twitter employee noted that the reported accounts included “even a few accounts of American and Canadian journalists.”
This confirms the reporting of Grayzone reporter Aaron Maté, who appears to have obtained the same communications between Twitter and the FBI via the Twitter Files.
According to Maté’s reporting, of the 163 accounts named by the SBU, 34 were suspended and 20 no longer exist. The remainder are still active.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.