When Mark Zuckerberg dropped the bomb on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the FBI had contacted social media companies to effectively warn them about a “Russian misinformation” that was the Hunter Biden laptop story, many people became rightly angry.
Fresh off the Mar-a-Lago raid, the FBI was already looking like the enforcement arm of the Democrat Party, but this reveal showed that they were also the Democrat’s propaganda arm to boot. Moreover, the FBI attempted to come to its own defense by saying it regularly warns social media companies of potential misinformation, but it only made them look worse.
If they’re consistently reaching out to social media companies to influence them into suppressing various stories, then what else are they doing with these companies? How often are they doing it? What stories have been suppressed in the past thanks to a clearly weaponized FBI?
These are answers we all clearly want, and it’s answers Republicans are looking to get. According to Fox News, Republicans are demanding Facebook hand over any communications its company has had with the FBI:
In a letter to Zuckerberg sent Monday, the senators said the CEO’s recent revelation that the FBI told Facebook employees to be on “high alert” for Russian propaganda before the 2020 election raised new questions after a whistleblower previously alleged that the FBI worked to downplay stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“The American people deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden,” said the letter, obtained and published by the New York Post. “If so, Congress and the American people require clarity with respect to the extent the FBI communicated with Facebook during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden-related information.”
Facebook notes that the senators want records specifically dated between July 1, 2020, to that same date in 2021. Moreover, Grassley wants the names of both Facebook and government employees involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
It’s hard to buy the story that the FBI didn’t know it was the laptop story, in particular, that was making the rounds. The idea that they just had some clue that some nebulous bad info was coming down the line seems strange. Either way, the FBI is clearly practicing censorship efforts. They know their influence will cause social media companies to fall in line.
Moreover, it’s odd that the “intelligence community” was willing and ready to allow all sorts of bad information to circulate to the media when it came to Donald Trump’s alleged connections with Russia. In fact, the FBI seems to have known about the Democrat Party/Hillary Clinton origins of the Steele Dossier much earlier than many thought.
It’s clear that the FBI is more than willing to hide and manipulate information for the benefit of the Democrat Party, so their painting the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian misinformation despite knowing it very well wasn’t is very believable.
As Nick Arama wrote, the FBI agent responsible for handling the Hunter Biden laptop case, Timothy Thibault, recently lost his job over his extreme bias corrupting the investigation. Clearly, there was a willingness to intentionally mishandle the case, and it would behoove Republicans to uncover what the FBI has been saying to social media companies, and not just about this story in particular.