From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, leaked documents, and even open admissions have implicated the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s FBI intends to resume meetings with social media companies on content decisions, a month after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid to stop such coordination as infringing on free speech.

National Review reports that U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s July 2024 report on the DOJ’s “Efforts to Coordinate Information Sharing About Foreign Malign Influence Threats to U.S. Elections” contains a memo stating that the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential FMI [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”

Horowitz’s report “make[s] two recommendations to ensure that DOJ takes a public and strategic approach to sharing information with social media companies in a manner that protects First Amendment rights to combat foreign malign influence directed at U.S. elections,” ostensibly to build trust with the general public.

The first is to “[d]evelop an approach for informing the public about the procedures the Department has put into place to transmit foreign malign influence threat information to social media companies that is protective of First Amendment rights.” The second is to “[d]evelop and implement a comprehensive strategy to ensure that the Department of Justice’s approach to information sharing with social media companies to combat foreign malign influence directed at U.S. elections can adapt to address the evolving threat landscape.”

For years, conservatives and other dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy have criticized the world’s largest online information and communications platforms, including Google, Facebook, and (until ownership changed hands in late 2022) Twitter, for using their vast influence to slant the news, sources, ideas, and arguments their users see and share through their services. One of their chief rationales for doing so was to prevent “misinformation” from influencing elections, which critics denounce as merely a pretext to sway elections in their favor.

The most dangerous aspect to the issue is the extent to which the government actively encourages private companies to censor disfavored speech, something in which emails, public statements, congressional investigation, leaked documents, and even open admissions have implicated the Biden administration.

Starting under the Trump administration and continuing into the Biden White House, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) have factored heavily into these activities, working with Stanford University and other entities to establish the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), through which requests to censor “thousands” of conservative posts could be laundered so as to keep the government’s fingerprints off censorship decisions.

The news of the FBI resuming meetings with Big Tech follows the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in June’s Murthy v. Missouri, which concerned whether the federal government “asking” platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to delete objectionable content constitutes government censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Rather than answer that question, the Court’s majority decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett ruled that the plaintiffs – the states of Louisiana and Missouri as well as social media users themselves – lacked standing to bring the case.

The court’s three most conservative justices, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented, writing that “[w]hen the White House pressured Facebook to amend some of the policies related to speech in which [one plaintiff] engaged, those amendments necessarily impacted some of Facebook’s censorship decisions. Nothing more is needed.”

Polls currently indicate a close race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, in which many speculate that manipulating what information is allowed to spread on social media could shift a potentially decisive number of votes in states where the gap between the candidates is small enough.