By Ben Weingarten

August 12, 2024

America’s speech police are reassembling to once again influence our elections. At the same time the security state is creating potential pretexts for renewed censorship by issuing warnings of cyberattacks that could “hinder public access to election information,” they are also reprising old claims of coming Russian election interference on behalf of Donald Trump.

The little-noticed development comes in a report from the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) on the DOJ’s efforts to “Coordinate Information Sharing About Foreign Malign Influence Threats to U.S. Elections” — a euphemism for the chief law enforcement agency’s prior censorship activities.

During the 2020 election, as revealed in litigation, congressional oversight, and reporting, national security and law enforcement agencies used the threat of foreign misinformation and disinformation on social media to U.S. elections as a pretext to surveil and suppress domestic news and opinions deemed derogatory to our ruling regime.

An alphabet soup of agencies coerced, cajoled, and colluded directly and via cutouts with social media companies to get those companies to squash all manner of wrongthink on election integrity and outcomes at mass scale.

While the OIG explicitly omitted the “FBI’s information sharing with social media companies with respect to domestic actors” from its report, the DOJ’s response to the office’s recommendations will likely have substantial bearing on Americans’ speech.

That response, appended to the report, comes in the form of a DOJ memo revealing that the law enforcement agency has now codified its protocols for reporting purported “foreign malign influence” information with social media companies, and is redoubling its efforts to do so in the run-up to the 2024 election.

In fact, the FBI has been implementing new Standard Operating Procedures since February.

Under those procedures, the FBI is required to identify “specific, credible, and articulable facts that provide high confidence for assessing that the information at issue relates to activity attributable to a foreign government, foreign non-state actor, or their proxy engaged in an FMI [foreign malign influence] operation.”

The Bureau is also required to include a disclaimer — akin to one authorities often included in censorship requests from 2020 — explaining it “does not request or expect” recipients to take any specific action based on shared information.

A related summary of the procedures posted on the FBI website notes that communications to social media platforms must make clear that the FBI “does not investigate solely based on First Amendment-protected activity.” [Emphasis mine]

On top of implementing these procedures, the memo adds that the FBI will be resuming regular meetings with social media companies regarding foreign malign influence threats; that FBI field offices will be engaging in outreach efforts to foster relationships with social media companies in their jurisdictions, in coordination with the FBI’s “Foreign Influence Task Force” — a key cog in censorship activities in 2020; and that senior DOJ officials will be making the rounds with relevant stakeholders to discuss their information sharing strategy.

The Justice Department assures us that its extensive interaction with Big Tech companies is of a completely passive nature, solely concerning clear-cut foreign influence operations, and will strictly protect our right to free speech.

(more…)