FBI Resumes Flagging Foreign Disinformation to Social Media Giants

The FBI and other agencies quietly resumed coordinating with the major social media companies earlier this year to fight what government officials warned was a coming onslaught of foreign disinformation and influence operations leading up to the presidential election in November. In at least two instances in recent weeks, the companies have taken action to remove malign content, according to the Biden administration and company officials.

Contacts between FBI investigators and the companies — including Facebook, X and YouTube — ground to a halt last year as a legal challenge that accused the Biden administration of censorship wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In June, the Supreme Court rejected the challenge, one of the first to wrestle with how far the government could go to combat misinformation and disinformation online. It left unanswered what limits, if any, the First Amendment could impose on the government’s ability to communicate with the technology companies.

The communication between government agencies and the platforms has resumed as Russia and Iran have stepped up efforts to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. Intelligence gathered and shared by the government has previously flagged covert influence campaigns before they could take off on social media.

The FBI’s communications with the platforms resumed behind the scenes in February, according to the officials and a report by the Department of Justice in July, and they have already thwarted two campaigns spreading information from Russia’s propaganda apparatus.

Last month, X voluntarily closed 968 accounts that the Department of Justice linked to Russia’s Federal Security Service and RT, the state television network. On Thursday, Meta disclosed that a tip from the FBI had led to the removal of a broad web of inauthentic pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram disparaging Ukraine, Poland and the European Union.

“ We’ve thus far received some limited information,” David Agranovich, Meta’s director of global threat disruption, said when asked about the bureau’s role, “and we’ll continue keeping an eye out for any additional sharing that might come down in the future.”

That kind of coordination was once routine under President Donald Trump, and included monthly meetings between government investigators and company officials, often at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

When President Joe Biden came to office, however, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana went to court, saying such coordination was part of a sweeping government conspiracy to stifle critical conservative voices online.

After a lower court judge ruled in July 2023 that the accusations at the heart of the case reflected “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the Biden administration suspended virtually all contact with the social media platforms as the appeals process unfolded.

In February, the Department of Justice rewrote its standard operating procedures to clarify when its officials could communicate with social media companies, even before the Supreme Court’s decision, according to the department’s official response to an inspector general report. It posted an outline of the guidelines without fanfare on the FBI’s website Aug. 1.

The new procedures emphasize that the bureau’s agents cannot exert any pressure on the platforms, leaving it to the companies to decide what to do with information about malign foreign influence operations online. The goal was to deflect the core accusation of the legal challenge: that the government had effectively coerced the platforms to act with threats of retaliation.

“While our adversaries try to hide their hand, we show our work because we recognize that transparency about how we conduct this work is as important as the work itself — including how we do so while protecting First Amendment rights,” Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in Chicago on Aug. 2.

FBI agents must now preface any communication with the companies with “a standardized caveat” assuring them that “the FBI does not request or expect the receiving company to take any particular action based on the shared information,” according to an internal department letter responding to an inspector general report in July.

They must also have “specific, credible and articulable facts that provide high confidence for assessing that the information at issue relates to activity attributable to a foreign government, foreign nonstate actor or their proxy.”

Officials and researchers have warned that foreign adversaries are stepping up efforts to influence the U.S. political process.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned in July that Russia, Iran and China hoped to “undermine democratic institutions, foment discord and/or change public opinion.”

Last week, Microsoft disclosed an effort by Iran to hack a presidential campaign in June, an operation Trump said had been directed at his. “Never a nice thing to do!” he declared, adding that the operation had obtained only “publicly available information.”

Whether the hack has any influence on the race remains unclear, but Microsoft reported that Iran was determined “to amplify existing divisive issues with the U.S., like racial tensions, economic disparities and gender-related issues.”

It is also unclear whether cooperation between the government and Big Tech will be as robust as it was in 2020. The question of government intervention online remains politically fraught.

The Supreme Court challenge, investigations by Republicans in Congress and parallel lawsuits filed by conservative legal organizations have had a chilling effect on the informal network of research organizations and universities that worked with the government and platforms to track disinformation campaigns around the 2020 presidential election. The legal costs alone have discouraged some of them from continuing.

The major platforms, too, have shifted their priorities and reduced staff members overseeing disinformation. Elon Musk, the owner of X, has repeatedly vowed to create a platform free of any restrictions on speech. However, X removed the accounts identified by investigators as inauthentic this month. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

While the FBI has the principal responsibility for countering foreign intelligence operations, other agencies are also working with the platforms.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the part of the Department of Homeland Security that is responsible for protecting the nation’s voting processes, said in a statement that it would share any threats with private companies, including social media platforms.

“This election cycle, if we assess that engagement with social media companies is critical to ensure the security of election infrastructure,” the statement said, “CISA would do so.”

One challenge for government officials trying to combat foreign disinformation is that Russia, Iran and other states often rely on what the Director of National Intelligence report called “witting and unwitting Americans.”

“These foreign actors seek to take advantage of these Americans to spread messaging through their channels and engagements,” the report said. Such content would be protected by the First Amendment.

Jenin Younes, a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, an organization that represents individual plaintiffs in the court challenge against the Biden administration, said the lawsuit had succeeded in prompting reforms. With the new guidelines, she said, the Department of Justice had “implicitly acknowledged that government entities were unlawfully coercing and pressuring social media companies to censor protected speech.”

“This should have been the government’s approach all along,” she added, “but better late than never.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .