A new group of “Twitter Files” reports released Friday afternoon reveals the close contact that federal law enforcement officials and Twitter employees had in efforts to censor content.
Journalist Matt Taibbi began by announcing that between January 2020 and November 2022, then-Twitter Senior Director of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth had exchanged over 150 emails with the FBI.
“A surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts,” Taibbi said. “The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
“Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content,” he continued.
Taibbi noted that the newest documents discovered throughout the course of the investigation showed that the FBI and DHS were “regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”
Below are just a few of the examples that Taibbi showcased of the FBI reaching out for action to be taken on specific tweets.
In addition, Stacia Cardille, then-director and associate general counsel for Twitter’s global policy legal team, emailed then-Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker saying that she was having regular meetings with the FBI, DOJ, DHS, and ODNI about election threats.
Some internal company emails revealed that employees were processing a list of tweets that the FBI had highlighted as “possible violative content”
The FBI also shared certain DHS bulletins with Twitter, many of which were related to U.S. elections and others of which were related to the 2016 Russian interference story.
Taibbi said that the volume of tweets that the FBI had flagged was so great that Twitter employees congratulated each other in nonpublic company communications for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them.
Taibbi also revealed that there were multiple channels where the government was able to submit information to Twitter about content and revealed that state governments would also flag content, including the state of California, which demanded to know why action had not been taken on one tweet from former President Donald Trump.
Taibbi concluded by saying that “what most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs,” adding, “the lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
He added that the Twitter Files would continue to be published on his page, the pages of other journalists attached to releasing the files, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, and that they would be expanding to new locations soon.
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