The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on Tuesday said it had no plans to censor information about bank runs on social media.
“We have not, would not, and will not,” Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the FDIC, told The Epoch Times.
The statement comes after members of Congress inquired during a Monday briefing with representatives from the FDIC, Treasury Department, and Federal Reserve whether there are programs in place “to censor information on social media that could lead to a run on the banks,” Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who attended the meeting wrote in a tweet.
During the meeting, Massie says that a Democrat senator “asked if we had a ‘good program to censor this stuff at social media, to censor information so there wouldn’t be a run on the banks.'”
The member of Congress has since been identified as Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.
“The problem is he didn’t say he wanted to censor false information or foreign information, he kind of left it open-ended. And I mean, that’s chilling to me,” Massie added.
A spokesperson for Sen. Kelly later confirmed to the Daily Caller that the congressman had indeed made the comment.
“The unsupported claim made by this blog post you referenced is false,” the spokesperson said. “On the briefing, Senator Kelly asked about *foreign adversaries* potentially trying to take advantage of this situation by spreading misinformation.”
Ostensibly, the blog post the spokesperson refers to is a report from Public, a substack cofounded by Michael Shellenberger, one of the authors of the Twitter Files, who, on Thursday, gave his testimony to a House Select Committee hearing regarding the federal government’s role in working with social media companies to weaponize censorship.
Commenting on Monday night’s call, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said that Kelly asked “whether the call hosts (at Treasury, FDIC, etc) were interacting with [social media] platforms and on the lookout for foreign influence that might promote bank runs.”
On Sunday, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., tweeted that during a “briefing” held by President Joe Biden’s Under Secretary of the Treasury, Nellie Liang, “regarding the SVB BAILOUT … a member asked if … they were reaching out to Facebook and Twitter to monitor misinformation and ‘bad actors.'”
“And this administration AGAIN just committed the federal government to interfere with free speech. Unacceptable!” Boebert added.
On Sunday, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and FDIC announced they would make funding available to ensure all Silicon Valley Bank deposits, “both insured and uninsured, will be paid in full,” according to ABC.
The FDIC relies on banks paying an insurance premium to insure depositors, and is backed by the U.S. Treasury Department, which is ultimately responsible for providing financial support to the FDIC, if needed. The Treasury Department manages the country’s finances and collects taxes.
Biden on Monday stressed that “no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. I’m going to repeat that — no losses will be borne by the taxpayers. Instead the money will come from the fees that banks pay into the Deposit Insurance Fund.”
But following the president’s comment, former FDIC chair Sheila Bair told Fox News on Monday that Silicon Valley Bank did indeed receive a “bailout.”
“Well, it is a bailout — different people define ‘bailouts’ in different ways,” she stated. “We have a set of rules, we give a lot of support to banks; deposit insurance is one of the things we let banks have — they pay a premium for it, it’s capped at $250,000. If we change those rules for a couple of banks and then give them more coverage than anybody else gets, or they were entitled to under the law, I think that’s a bailout.”
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