The FBI publicly admitted a controversial role it may play in “cancel culture” and censorship seen across Big Tech.
The FBI released statements on Friday where they explained the bureau “routinely” communicates with social media companies to discuss censorship.
The bureau said it “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” and it “has provided companies with foreign threat indicators to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors.”
While the FBI claims it “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received,” comments made by Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggest otherwise.
Speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast last week, Zuckerberg revealed Facebook purposefully rolled out an algorithm to censor the spread of social media posts related to Hunter Biden and his laptop story after the FBI sent the company 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.
WATCH:
House Republicans have called on Mark Zuckerberg to further clarify what the FBI told him and his company about the Hunter Biden story in front of Congress.
“This isn’t just insane, it’s election interference. The Oversight Committee must immediately invite Mark Zuckerberg to testify — under oath — about the FBI’s attempts to circumvent the First Amendment. The American people deserve answers and accountability,” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) commented on Twitter.
