Agencies in President Joe Biden’s administration have resumed their perceived disinformation censorship collaboration with social media companies, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner told reporters at a recent security conference, Nextgov/FCW reported.
The administration stopped “misinformation” censorship collaboration with social media platforms after a July Missouri v. Biden ruling to prevent federal agencies from coordinating with social media companies, but recently restarted this work, Warner told reporters, according to Nextgov. He said the cooperation resumed as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, now called Murthy v. Missouri, in March, where multiple justices indicated they supported the Biden administration’s viewpoint that it has the right to work with platforms to combat what it believes is harmful content.
Democrat Senator Mark Warner says there’s a “voluntary agreement about disinformation and misinformation in elections” between “all 20 of the major social media companies” pic.twitter.com/YmIyAuJBrw
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 21, 2024
“There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications with [the companies],” Warner said, according to Nextgoc. He also reportedly called on the Biden administration to take strong action against any foreign countries that try to interfere in the 2024 election.
The agencies include the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to NextGov.
“If the bad guy started to launch AI-driven tools that would threaten election officials in key communities, that clearly falls into the foreign interference category,” he added.
A district court judge issued an injunction in July preventing certain officials in agencies from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to the FBI from communicating with social media platforms to censor speech, characterizing the government conduct exposed by the plaintiffs in the case as arguably “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, expressed concern during March oral arguments about restricting the government’s ability to persuade companies to take action when necessary, such as when terrorists disseminate speech on a platform.
The justices also questioned whether the plaintiffs could prove their platforms censored their speech as a direct result of the government.
Facebook executives believed they were engaged in a “knife fight” with Biden’s White House on COVID-19 censorship, according to a recent House Judiciary Committee report. Biden accused the platform of “killing people” in July 2021 for not censoring so-called COVID-19 misinformation, and unearthed WhatsApp messages between Facebook executives revealed that they were unhappy about the president’s remarks.
Warner, the White House and the FBI did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. CISA declined to comment, but notified the DCNF about an Election Security hearing in the coming weeks with the agency’s Director, Jen Easterly.
