WASHINGTON — House Republicans are demanding more information from the FBI about its use of “software tools” to seek out election-related speech on social media after a bureau analyst mentioned their use during a recent deposition — before being barred from saying any more by FBI lawyers.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told FBI Director Christopher Wray Tuesday to hand over the information as President-elect Donald Trump’s looming return to office creates uncertainty for Wray’s future employment.
“In a transcribed interview… on October 23, 2024, an FBI Criminal Investigative Division Analyst previously assigned to the [Foreign Influence Task Force] disclosed that the FITF uses ‘software tools where [the FBI can] search open-source databases about content indicative of criminal conduct’,” Jordan wrote to Wray in a letter obtained by The Post.
Although the material was described as “open-source,” the search tools are suspected to have been developed in-house.
It’s unclear what social media sites are included in the search or how the information is compiled.
“According to the analyst’s testimony, the FBI uses this tool to monitor social media posts by users, regardless of whether the users are American citizens or foreign actors, to search for ‘content indicative of criminal conduct,’” Jordan wrote.
“The analyst further testified that the FBI shares its findings, such as the specific ‘user name and the content’ of the posts, with social media companies to censor such content accordingly.”
Jordan wrote that “[a]lthough the analyst testified that the FBI uses this tool to pursue ‘criminal conduct,’ when questioned about the nature of the software tool and the scope of the FBI’s use of it, agency counsel repeatedly prevented the analyst from fully answering the Committee’s questions.
“Therefore, we write to obtain additional information in order to understand whether the FBI has or could use this software tool to censor or infringe upon lawful speech, particularly Americans’ political speech.”
Jordan, who also chairs the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, has for years investigated and criticized the FBI’s role in a broader executive branch effort to curb alleged misinformation and disinformation online.
Weeks ahead of the 2020 election, Facebook and Twitter suppressed The Post’s reporting on files from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that linked his father, then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, to business relationships in Ukraine and China — with social media employees noting that the FBI had warned the companies about a looming “hack and dump” foreign operation involving the Biden family.
The files in fact were from a laptop that a Delaware computer repairman gave to the FBI in December 2019, but the bureau did not publicly confirm the authenticity of the device until long after that election.
Other executive-branch actors have also been involved in policing social media.
In 2021, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the Biden administration was “flagging” alleged COVID-19 misinformation to Facebook for removal.
The Intercept reported in 2022 that content flagged by the Department of Homeland Security through a special Facebook portal for review and removal included “parody accounts or accounts with virtually no followers or influence.”
Trump made opposing online censorship a major issue in the presidential campaign — after he was banned from most mainstream social media websites after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in which his supporters stormed the Capitol to disrupt the electoral vote count.
“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” Trump said in a December 2022 policy statement.
“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
