WASHINGTON, D.C., October 29, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – While this week’s grilling of social media giants on Capitol Hill offered little in the way of bringing about policy changes to better protect free speech on the internet, it did unearth one potentially alarming revelation: that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) allegedly suggests that social media suppress “misinformation.”
The ongoing debate over free speech online took on new urgency this month when Facebook and Twitter attempted to clamp down on the spread of a New York Post report about emails that appear to detail how the family of former Vice President and current Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden made millions of dollars by selling meetings with the vice president around the world.
The uproar spurred Senate Republicans to call Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to Congress for questioning, during which Zuckerberg indicated that Facebook was acting on the advice of the FBI.
“One of the threats that the FBI has alerted our company and the public to was the possibility of a hack and leak operation in the days or weeks leading up to this election,” Zuckerberg said, American Greatness reported. “So you had both public testimony from the FBI and in private meetings alerts that were given — at least to our company, I assume the others as well – that suggested we be on high alert and sensitivity that if a trove of documents appeared, that we should view that with suspicion that it might be part of a foreign manipulation attempt.”
Zuckerberg added that the FBI had not specifically mentioned the Biden laptop story, but “alerted us to be on heightened alert around a hack and leak operation around the release of a trove of information.” While Facebook’s initial statement cited the need to “fact-check” alleged “misinformation,” Twitter had claimed that the Post’s publication of emails and phone numbers violated their Hacked Materials Policy; the Post denied that the emails had been obtained via hacking, and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the laptop is not related to foreign disinformation operations.
So far, the FBI says only that it has “nothing to add at this time to the October 19th public statement by the Director of National Intelligence about the available actionable intelligence,” and that the Bureau “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation of persons or entities under investigation.”
Still, the possibility that someone within the FBI, which has reportedly been in possession of the laptop since last year, encouraged social media to suppress coverage of it is deeply alarming to supporters of President Donald Trump, who have been suspicious of politicization within the bureau for years.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh speculated Wednesday that the FBI has been sitting on Hunter’s laptop all this time so they can “hold it over (the) heads” of a potential Biden administration.
“It doesn’t matter who the president is. They want the access,” Limbaugh said. “They want to be able to tell him the hot spots around the country, around the world. Power. P-O-W-E-R. It’s what they want. If they’ve got the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden laptop, and it’s got evidence of all this criminal activity on it, do you realize how much power they have over the Bidens if Biden gets elected?”