According to a report from the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worked alongside a Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor Americans.
The Ukrainian intelligence agency is believed to have been compromised by Russian actors.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) desired to fight alleged Russian influence on social media platforms, drawing upon the assistance of the FBI.
“The SBU enlisted the FBI in support of this effort, transmitting to the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly ‘spread Russian disinformation,'” the report explains.
“The FBI, in turn, 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 report continued.
Some of the censored posts included those from “authentic” American accounts,” including “a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists.”
“Based on open-source information, it appears that the FBI’s cooperation with the SBU remains ongoing,” the report notes, adding that the FBI’s misconduct is “unconstitutional.”
Reporting from The Daily Wire:
Months before Zelensky’s attempted crackdown on Russian agents within his intelligence team, an FBI agent sent an email to Meta in March 2022, specifying accounts that the SBU wanted the social media giant to censor, according to the report. ... [Special agent Aleksandr Kobzanets] also attached two spreadsheets to his email, containing thousands of accounts and posts suspected of “spread[ing] Russian disinformation.” Most of the posts and accounts belonged to people living in Russia and Belarus, but accounts belonging to Americans were interspersed throughout the spreadsheets. Some of the American accounts included in the spreadsheet belonged to “a photographer working with a studio in New York; a manager of a moving company in South Carolina; a musician and vocalist based in Minnesota; a professor at a university in California; and a children’s book author living in Washington state,” the report said.
