The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and other federal agencies are restarting their communications about “disinformation” with social media companies as the November election approaches. This is according to Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who noted it was a big reversal from the Biden administration’s pause on all such relationships due to a Supreme Court legal challenge on First Amendment grounds.
Warner joined Dave DeWalt, founder of cybersecurity venture capital firm NightDragon, for a discussion at the RSA Conference this Monday to discuss the present state of America’s cyber- and national security risks and what can be done to secure our “digital infrastructure.”
Warner told the press at the event that federal agencies had restarted their talks as the Supreme Court began to hear arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case. Eric Schmitt, the Attorney General of the state of Missouri at the time, filed the suit in July 2023 alleging that the Biden administration violated First Amendment rights by engaging in relationships with tech companies that led to the suppression right-of-center voices online. Central allegations to the case involved claims that CISA had told platforms to remove content related to the COVID-19 vaccine and the 2020 election.
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The Supreme Court has yet to make a decision on whether federal agencies can have dialogue with social media firms about disinformation. When preliminary reports seemed to indicate that SOCUTS was going to err on the side of the administration, such communications began to pick up from where they left off.
Related: Google Launches “Prebunking” Initiative to Counter Misinformation in Elections
“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 NextGov.com. Warner said the Biden administration should play an active role in denouncing foreign countries that meddle in American elections, citing the alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 election as an example. Warner described the White House as “too timid” to engage with social media companies over the last six months.
Warner also suggested AI could be used to manipulate elections. “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 said, saying it could be categorized as a “whole other vector of attack.”
As Valuetainment covered in November, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in his capacity as the chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, intensified the pressure on the Biden administration when he and his team released a 100-page report exposing in great detail the network through which the federal government suppressed conservative voices ahead of the 2020 election. Jordan followed that up with a second report confirming the Biden White House had directly told YouTube to suppress “disinformation” about COVID-19 and the vaccine.
As was discovered in March, the federal government has gone so far as to demand the IP addresses and identities of users that watched specific videos on YouTube.
Then, a March report from the Media Research Center (MRC) found that Google interfered in US elections 41 times since 2008, with an executive from the tech giant having been caught undercover admitting they were trying to “prevent the next Trump situation in 2020.” Watch this video below to learn more about MRC’s special report:
Shane Devine is a writer covering politics and business for VT and a regular guest on The Unusual Suspects. Follow Shane’s work here.
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