Congress launches probe into FBI social media surveillance
The House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government is looking into whether the FBI has continued to violate the First Amendment with social media surveillance.
In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray Tuesday, Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) revealed testimony by a whistleblower that the FBI uses “software tools where [the FBI can] search open-source databases about content indicative of criminal conduct.” The whistleblower, an analyst who worked for the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), said the FITF employs these tools to monitor foreign and American social media users.
If the FITF finds evidence of “content indicative of criminal conduct,” it passes information about the post and its user to the social media companies for removal. When the whistleblower was asked for details about the scope of this surveillance, FBI lawyers warned the analyst not to answer.
“Therefore, we write to obtain additional information in order to understand whether the FBI has or could use this software tool to censor or infringe upon lawful speech, particularly Americans’ political speech,” Jordan wrote in the letter obtained by the New York Post.
He noted the FITF’s previous work, which included interference in the 2020 presidential election. The task force worked with social media companies in 2020 to censor a New York Post story exposing the Biden family’s corruption. Studies have since revealed that censorship of the article cost Trump 17% of the vote in swing states.
Trump vowed to fire every bureaucrat involved in censorship
In 2022, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed to crack down on government censorship immediately upon taking office.
“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” Trump said.
“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”
