FBI, Ukraine’s SBU told social media that bona fide accounts were suspicious, US report says

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation or FBI participated in a flawed effort to stop Russian disinformation at the behest of one of Ukraine’s main intelligence agencies, the SBU, that instead ensnared the owners of authentic U.S. social media accounts.

That’s the conclusion of the House Judiciary Committee in a new report obtained earlier by U.S. television channel CNN and released on July 10.

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The committee said the SBU sent the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly “spread Russian disinformation,” and that the FBI then “routinely relayed these lists to the relevant social media platforms, which distributed the information internally to their employees in charge of content moderation and enforcement.”

The report accuses the FBI of not properly vetting social media accounts that the SBU flagged as spreading Russian disinformation. Some of the accounts that the FBI passed on to social media company Meta for review, according to the report, were actually criticizing Russia and its war on Ukraine.

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The committee claims that the FBI and SBU, “flagged for social media companies the authentic accounts of Americans, including a verified U.S. State Department account and those belonging to American journalists” and requested that those accounts be taken down.

The report, drafted in tandem with the House subcommittee on the alleged weaponization of the federal government, draws on information from a subset of subpoenas the committee sent to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, in February as part of its investigation into whether the federal government played a role in censoring speech on social media platforms.

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The FBI declined to comment on this story.

CNN has requested comment from the SBU, Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, the State Department and Meta.

The report reveals that the State Department’s Russian-language Instagram account was flagged for removal after the SBU and FBI provided a list of Instagram accounts they claimed engaged in “distribut(ing) content that promotes war, inaccurately reflects events in Ukraine, justifies Russian war crimes in Ukraine in violation of international law,” among other things.

Meta does not appear to have complied with the request. Indeed, the committee’s report details how one senior Twitter employee pointed out in an email to the FBI that some of the accounts that were included in one list included “even a few accounts of American and Canadian journalists.”

In the emails cited in the committee’s report, the FBI agents do not at any point demand that social media content be taken down. Instead, the FBI agents pass the information on from the SBU and ask the social media platforms to review the accounts and take any action they deem appropriate.

The House panel also alleges that SBU had questionable motives in flagging the accounts, pointing to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to fire the head of SBU in 2022 “on account of Russian infiltration of the SBU.”

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The committee says they interviewed a senior employee on Google’s cybersecurity team who testified that Google was “deluged with various requests” for the removal of content following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“The employee testified that the primary sources of these requests for censorship were the Ukrainian government, other Eastern European governments, the European Union, and the European Commission,” the report states.

The committee plans to use the report and its findings to claim the FBI improperly interfered in free speech.

The panel also alleges that the report’s findings show “misconduct by the FBI that is unconstitutional,” and argues the activity “endangers national security.”

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Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine