If you had any doubts whatsoever about a judge’s order to have the government stop talking to social media platforms, this story should answer the last of your questions. (The Justice Department is fighting the order.) It’s now being reported that the FBI has, over the past year, been working with the SBU – the Ukrainian Security Service, similar to America’s FBI – to shut down the spread of supposed “Russian disinformation.” The method of choice is, as you would guess, to shut down the social media accounts of people or groups critical of the Ukrainian government or the war in Ukraine. And they’ve shut down quite a few of them, including those of American journalists reporting on events in the region. There are several obvious problems with this, including the fact that the SBU is notoriously corrupt and is known to have been infiltrated by the Russians. (Just The News)

The FBI pressured social media companies to crack down on the spread of so-called “Russian disinformation” on behalf of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), according to a report from the House weaponization panel, but evidence suggests that the Russians had infiltrated the group and used the censorship pipeline to suppress anti-Putin and pro-Ukrainian materials.

“Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) sought to identify and impair suspected Russian influence operations on social media,” reads the report. “The SBU enlisted the FBI in support of this effort, transmitting to the FBI lists of social media accounts that allegedly ‘spread Russian disinformation.’ The FBI, in turn, 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 tendrils of the Censorship Industrial Complex truly spread all across the globe. And while many of the targeted accounts were those of people in Europe, America was not immune from its reach. One of the accounts that was suspended was a verified U.S. State Department account. Several others belonged to American journalists and social media influencers.

The real irony here is that the FBI was so uncritical in its evaluation of the information coming from the SBU that it was simply passing along the lists of accounts to be suspended to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms. Most of the time the accounts were censored without question.

If the FBI had expressed any interest in what was actually going on, they would have realized that Zelensky had actually fired the former head of the SBU in July of last year. He did so because the Service had been so thoroughly infiltrated by Russians and Russian sympathizers. The end result was a mish-mosh of Ukrainian accounts that were “too critical” of Russia and American accounts that criticized America’s support for the war being taken offline.

No matter which side the users came down it, the end result was the same. It was censorship by the government, plain and simple. That sort of thing may be allowed in Ukraine (Zelensky has famously closed down media outlets critical of his administration and locked up his political rivals), but it is blatantly unconstitutional in America. And the FBI is obviously one of the worst offenders. When they aren’t working with social media companies to silence unapproved political speech, they’re conducting armed raids of the homes of pastors and those with pro-life views while ignoring the firebombing of crisis pregnancy centers.

I will be saying this until I’m blue in the face. The GOP desperately needs to retake the White House next year and the next Republican President – no matter who it is – MUST have the intestinal fortitude to immediately fire Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and probably the majority of the regional Bureau chiefs of the FBI, starting with the one in Washington. We can only hope that there are enough good, independent FBI agents out there who believe in one form of justice for all to replace them. The current situation is nothing short of obscene and it’s no wonder that American faith in so many of our institutions like the FBI is crashing.