Elon Musk Shows How Twitter Served as the FBI’s Lapdog By Chris Queen
Part six of the Twitter Files dropped on Friday afternoon, and, in this installment, Matt Taibbi revealed how closely the Twitter folks worked with the FBI and other agencies to silence “election misinformation.”
Taibbi reported that the relationship between the FBI and Twitter was cozy, even chummy. In fact, Taibbi suggested that the social media giant operated as if it were a “subsidiary” of the FBI.
“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
Taibbi noted that, while some of the emails were anodyne and humdrum, most of them consisted of requests for Twitter to review and take action on information relating to what the FBI deemed “misinformation” relating to elections. And the FBI’s involvement in rooting out “misinformation” led to bureaucracy on a massive scale.
“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,” Taibbi tweeted, also pointing out that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) got involved alongside the FBI.
It’s no surprise that the federal government surveils citizens all the time, but Taibbi wrote that “The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”
Taibbi compared the relationship between the FBI and Twitter to that of a dog and its owner, showing an email where the agency dictated to Twitter that it needed to look at some accounts:
Some of the accounts that the FBI took issue with were low-follower accounts, and many of the offending tweets were jokes. And what’s particularly fascinating is that the FBI went after accounts that shared “election misinformation” from both the left and the right.
One user in particular made some interesting observations about what Twitter was doing on the bidding of the FBI.
But wait, there’s more. Explaining how tight the relationship between Twitter and the FBI was, Taibbi showed an email from Twitter executive Stacia Cardille to General Counsel Jim Baker talking about her “soon to be weekly” meetings with the FBI.
In the email, Cardille related that she “explicitly asked if there were ‘impediments’ to the sharing of classified information ‘with industry.’ The answer? ‘FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.’”
Another email detailed the actions that Twitter took on the FBI’s orders regarding several tweets, many of which repeated the same joke and had low engagement. The FBI also repeatedly sent “products” to Twitter, and those “products” consisted of “DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and ‘private sector partners.’”
Taibbi also pointed out that the 2016 Russian collusion narrative served as an incubator for government censorship.
The FBI sent so many requests to Twitter that employees discussed on Slack how “monumental” the task of going through all the agency’s requests was.
Taibbi concluded 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. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
After his threat, Taibbi mentioned a quote from an FBI agent:
Taibbi also teased that there’s still more to come. What’s next?
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