The following article is a supplement to the MRC Report: The Biden Administration Waged War on Free Speech with 57 Censorship Initiatives.
Initiative #32: The FBI – Big Tech Partnership
Type of Censorship: Direct Action
Agencies Involved:
- Department of Justice
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Summary:
Separately from the weekly Big Tech “industry working groups” it participated in (see Case #31), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) held regular “bilateral meetings” with Big Tech platforms to coordinate censorship efforts.
Among the platforms that participated in these meetings were Google/YouTube, Facebook (now Meta), Microsoft/LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter (now X), Yahoo!/Verizon and the Wikimedia Foundation. For a considerable time, the meetings were hosted by Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, who led the FBI’s efforts to cover-up the Biden laptop scandal (see Initiative #31).
While Twitter (now X) employees were censoring so-called election “disinformation” on behalf of Chan and the FBI, the FBI paid the company over $3.4 million for its services. Nevertheless, when the FBI was later sued for ordering the censorship, it insisted that Twitter was a private company acting independently (see Initiative #39).
Key Individuals:
- Elvis Chan, FBI Supervisory Special Agent
- Merrick Garland, Attorney General
- Christopher Wray, FBI Director
