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The Facebook Files
Confirmed

FBI Agent Elvis Chan Testifies on Regular Meetings With Facebook

Elvis Chan, an FBI agent in the San Francisco field office, was deposed under oath in Missouri v. Biden about the bureau's contacts with social media companies. He testified that the FBI met regularly with Facebook and other platforms ahead of the 2020 election, and that it warned them about possible state-sponsored 'hack-and-dump' operations like the 2016 DNC hack.

Nov 29, 2022
Whose side it served: Democrats

Generic hack-and-leak warnings primed platforms to treat the Hunter Biden laptop story with suspicion weeks before the 2020 election.

What the record shows

Chan's deposition was taken on Nov. 29, 2022, by Zoom from the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco. He testified that the FBI's meetings with platforms ran on 'roughly a quarterly cadence' and grew more frequent ahead of elections, including 2020, and that in 2020 the FBI 'regularly met with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Reddit and LinkedIn.' For the 2022 midterms, he said the meetings went from quarterly to monthly to weekly in the final week. Contemporary accounts of the transcript report that he said the hack-and-dump warnings drew on the 2016 DNC/DCCC hack rather than specific intelligence, that Hunter Biden was not discussed with Twitter, and that the FBI answered a Facebook question on the topic with 'no comment.' The Fifth Circuit later wrote that the FBI 'tipped the platforms off' to hack-and-dump operations and that its flagging led to posts being taken down about 50% of the time.

In their words

“we regularly met with Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, Reddit and LinkedIn”— Elvis Chan, FBI San Francisco field office (deposition) · source
“led to posts being taken down 50% of the time”— U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, describing FBI flagging · source
The other side

Chan described the meetings as sharing threat indicators such as IP addresses and domains 'with no strings attached,' and the FBI says it cannot direct companies to act. The Supreme Court later found the plaintiffs had not tied their own content restrictions to any specific government action.

Sources

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