Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, shared a sixth installment of files on Friday night about the censorship practiced on that platform. This time, the businessman referred to a thread by journalist and writer Matt Taibbi, which exposed the social network’s ties to the FBI.
“Twitter’s contact with the FBI has been constant and widespread, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi said in one of his posts, specifying that “from January 2020 to November 2022, more than 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and the former Head of Twitter ran Confidence and Safety, Yoel Roth.”
The journalist stated that “a surprising number” of these “mails” were FBI requests for the platform to “take action against false election information, including joke tweets on accounts with few followers.” Taibbi claimed federal intelligence and other law enforcement agencies are stepping in, “including the Department of Homeland Security, which has been working with security firms and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate its content.”
On November 10 of this year, the FBI’s San Francisco office sent an email to its “Twitter contacts” urging them to take action against several accounts that “possibly constitute violations of this social network’s terms of service.” ‘ reveals one of the posts. In response, employees at the company set out to “look for reasons to ban” four profiles, including one whose tweets were “almost entirely jokes.”
“Another internal letter from January 2021 reveals that Twitter executives edited an FBI list of tweets with ‘potentially infringing content,'” says the journalist, mentioning several other instances of correspondence between police intelligence and the social network. On one such occasion, Twitter responded with a list of accounts it had retaliated against, including that of actor Billy Baldwin.
“The state governments also determined the content,” Taibbi reported. As an example, supported by screenshots, he pointed to a case where Twitter executives, after receiving an alert from California officials “via the ‘partner support portal,’ debated whether to respond to a Trump tweet should”.
“The bottom line: what most people think of as ‘deep state’ is actually a convoluted collaboration between government agencies, private contractors and (sometimes government-funded) NGOs. The boundaries become so blurred that they don’t make sense,” said the journalist.
Following those revelations, Taibbi noted in a separate post that “rather than pursuing child sexual predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents, many of them, analyzing and tagging social media posts en masse.” “Not as part of a criminal investigation, but as a permanent surveillance operation with an end in itself. People should not agree to that,” he concluded.