FBI Director Kash Patel said Tuesday that his office has been engaged with social media companies behind the scenes to remove supposedly illegal content.
It was an interesting revelation in light of conservatives’ angst-ridden — and fundamentally baseless — allegations in recent years that the government has coerced Big Tech companies into censoring conservatives.
Patel’s remark came during Thursday’s national security hearing before members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It came in response to a question from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., about whether social media companies are cooperating with efforts to remove “illegal content off their sites.” Lankford said that “in the border areas, many of the sites are allowing child trafficking, or they’re allowing basically the hiring of Americans to come be drivers and such, and they know this is being circumvented.”
Patel replied:
We have engaged directly at the top levels of all the private-sector software communities and social media companies, and they have been very helpful. Because they have known — they have been told — that this is a priority for me at the FBI, to work with them. Because they have so much information to share back with us.
Watch the exchange here:
It’s hard to know what, precisely, Lankford was talking about. His office didn’t immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for clarification, and the FBI didn’t immediately respond to MSNBC’s request for comment on the nature of Patel’s relationship with social media companies.
On one hand, Lankford might have raised a legitimate issue. The Texas Tribune, for example, reported late last year that some cartel leaders have been known to use social media sites to recruit Americans to aid human smuggling. But that same report highlights concerns from civil rights activists and lawyers that Texas’ law on human smuggling has “morphed into an unconstitutionally vague statute that gives state police a fishing license to look for undocumented migrants.”
In light of that, it’s worth noting that top Republican officials in Texas have contended on multiple occasions that charity organizations that help migrants at the border could be engaging in illegal trafficking, a claim these groups vehemently deny. And a Human Rights Watch report from last summer revealed how right-wingers in Texas have used laws around trafficking to target people who provide aid — such as transportation to medical appointments — to undocumented people.
Indeed, trafficking is a horrible crime — and legitimate efforts to root it out on social media should be welcomed. The problem is that we’re talking about an FBI director who has vowed to weaponize law enforcement against the MAGA movement’s perceived enemies and hasn’t earned the public’s trust, so the mere idea of him playing a role in policing speech online is a frightening prospect.