(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Federal Bureau of Investigation openly admitted that it plays a controversial role in censorship in Big Tech.
In a recent statement, the FBI admitted that the bureau “routinely” communicates with social media companies to notify them of censorship opportunities, National File reported.
“[The FBI] routinely notifies U.S. private sector entities, including social media providers, of potential threat information, so that they can decide how to better defend against threats” the statement read.
They also “provided companies with foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors.”
The FBI claimed that it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received,” but recent comments from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicate that may not be the case.
In an interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook rolled out algorithms censoring the spread of posts related to the breaking Hunter Biden laptop story after the FBI sent out an advisory.
“The background here is the FBI I think basically came to some folks on our team [and] were like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. 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 similar to that, so just be vigilant,’” Zuckerberg explained to Rogan.
Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that the FBI reached out to Facebook to put them on notice that the Hunter Biden’s laptop story was similar to the previous Russian Propaganda and to be on high alert #joerogan #MarkZuckerberg #JRE pic.twitter.com/ojZHhK3isa
— Giuseppe Mercadante (@itsmercadante) August 25, 2022
House Republicans have requested that Zuckerburg further explain what he said about the censorship of the story in front of Congress.