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I feel like if I make the slightest wrong move I'll scare them or accidentally hurt them. It just feels like a lot of pressure being around something so vulnerable even you aren't their caregiver.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies quietly resumed coordinating with the major social media companies earlier this year to fight what government officials warned was a coming onslaught of foreign disinformation and influence operations leading up to the presidential election in November. In at least two instances in recent weeks, the companies have taken action to remove malign content, according to the Biden administration and company officials.

Contacts between F. B. I. investigators and the companies — including Facebook, X and YouTube — ground to a halt last year as a legal challenge that accused the Biden administration of censorship wound its way to the U. S. Supreme Court.

When President Biden came to office, however, the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana went to court, saying such coordination was part of a sweeping government conspiracy to stifle critical conservative voices online.

After a lower court judge ruled in July 2023 that the accusations at the heart of the case reflected “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” the Biden administration suspended virtually all contact with the social media platforms as the appeals process unfolded.

In February, the Department of Justice rewrote its standard operating procedures to clarify when its officials could communicate with social media companies, even before the Supreme Court’s decision, according to the department’s official response to an inspector general report. It posted an outline of the guidelines without fanfare on the F. B. I.’s website on Aug. 1.

The new procedures emphasize that the bureau’s agents cannot exert any pressure on the platforms, leaving it to the companies to decide what to do with information about malign foreign influence operations online. The goal was to deflect the core accusation of the legal challenge: that the government had effectively coerced the platforms to act with threats of retaliation.