An FBI agent’s testimony in a freedom of speech case confirms that the bureau ran an operation during the 2020 election that requested social media companies remove content as disinformation, suggesting the government’s requests succeeded about half of the time and were conducted with a “headquarter stamp of approval.”
Elvis Chan, the FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Cyber Branch in San Francisco, told lawyers for the Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general in a lawsuit over social media censorship that he supervised a “command post” in his home city that helped the nationwide disinformation censorship operation function in fall 2020.
Asked how frequently his unit succeeded in getting posts blocked, Chan testified: “I would not say it was 100 percent success rate. If I had to characterize it, I would say it was like a 50 percent success rate. But that’s just from my recollection.”
