FBI Held 'Weekly Meetings' With Big Tech Ahead of 2020 Election, 'Sent Lists of URLs and Accounts' to be Censored

🚨BREAKING: In our deposition of FBI agent Elvis Chan on Tuesday, we found that the FBI plays a big role in working with social media companies to censor speech - from weekly meetings with social media companies ahead of the 2020 election to asks for account takedowns.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

Chan, the FBI's FITF, and senior CISA officials had meetings with social media companies in the lead-up to the 2020 election, in which Chan personally told the social media companies that there could potentially be a Russian “hack and leak” operation shortly before the election.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the 2020 election.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

Chan stated that the FBI regularly sent social media companies lists of URLs and social media accounts that should be taken down because they were disinformation from “malign foreign influence operations.” The FBI then inquired whether the platforms have taken down the content.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

On many occasions, the platforms took down the accounts flagged by the FBI.

— Eric Schmitt (@Eric_Schmitt) December 2, 2022

On Tuesday, lawyers from the offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. That suit accuses high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies "under the guise of combating misinformation" to achieve greater censorship.

Chan, who serves in the FBI’s San Francisco bureau, was questioned under oath by court order about his alleged "critical role" in "coordinating with social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech on their platforms."

During the deposition, Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general's office.

Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly heading into the presidential election between former President Donald Trump and now President Biden. According to a source, Chan testified that in those multiple, separate meetings, the FBI warned the social media companies that there could be potentially Russian "hack and dump" or "hack and leak" operations.

In their complaint, the GOP AGs noted an Aug. 26 podcast episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that "the FBI basically came to us" and told Facebook to be "on high alert" relating to "a lot of Russian propaganda." Zuckerberg added that the FBI said "there’s about to be some kind of dump… that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant."

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan that Facebook algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for 7 days based on a general request from the FBI to restrict election misinformation. pic.twitter.com/llTA7IqGa1

— Minds💡 (@minds) August 25, 2022

[...] "Since filing our lawsuit, we've uncovered troves of discovery that show a massive 'censorship enterprise,'" Attorney General Eric Schmitt told Fox News Digital. "Now, we're deposing top government officials, and we're one of the first to get a look under the hood — the information we've uncovered through those depositions has been shocking to say the least. It's clear from Tuesday's deposition that the FBI has an extremely close role in working to censor freedom of speech."

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.” pic.twitter.com/mnv0YZI4af

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party: pic.twitter.com/4uzkHnQ65E

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

https://t.co/j4EeXEAw6F can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”: pic.twitter.com/w1wBMlG33U

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

Truly incredible -- former Twitter executive @yoyoel, who just got caught fabricating a fake justification for censoring a media outlet, says the decision to ban Trump after Jan 6 was impelled by the "trauma" he and other "content moderators" experienced online that fateful day pic.twitter.com/JSE7tpXtGz

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) December 3, 2022