According to an explosive report from Miranda Devine in the New York Post, sources within the Justice Department have confirmed that Facebook has been spying on the private messages and data of American users and reporting anyone expressing anti-government sentiments or questioning the 2020 election to the FBI.
Over the past 19 months, if Facebook red-flagged a message, they were transmitted in redacted form to the FBI’s domestic terrorism operation unit in Washington.
According to one of the sources, this was done without a subpoena, “outside the legal process and without probable cause.”
The messages were then “farmed out” to FBI field offices nationwide. These field offices would then request subpoenas from the US Attorney’s office in their district to obtain the unredacted messages.
However, according to Devine’s sources, when the users were investigated by the FBI field offices, often using covert surveillance, “nothing criminal or violent turned up.”
The source described the operation as “a waste of our time.”
And, big surprise here, every single person Facebook red-flagged to the FBI were “conservative right-wing individuals.”
According to Devine, Facebook has denied the allegations.
Erica Sackin, a spokeswoman for parent company Meta, initially responded to Devine’s report saying the claim was “false,” explaining that the interactions Facebook had with the FBI were to “protect people from harm.”
About an hour later, Sackin sent a follow-up “updated statement” in which, instead of calling the claims “false,” she called them “wrong.” Sackin said the “suggestion” that Facebook is monitoring “private messages for anti-government language” or questions about “past elections” and submitting them to the FBI “is plainly inaccurate and there is zero evidence to support it.”
Meanwhile, the FBI refused to confirm or deny the claims in Devine’s report, saying that the bureau “maintains relationships” with private US companies “to help them protect their platforms and customers from abuse by foreign malign influence actors.”
Devine posits that the FBI may be using a “confidential human source” within Facebook to do its dirty work, thereby giving Facebook “plausible deniability.”
Read Devine’s report HERE.
