Part Six of the Twitter Files was released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Twitter Dec. 16, revealing just how closely the platform worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to censor Americans prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted.
As PJ Media’s Chris Queen reported, most FBI emails to the platform “consisted of requests for Twitter to review and take action on” election content that supposedly qualified as “misinformation.” However, the FBI seems distinctly unrepentant about its “master-canine” relationship with Twitter, where it would “pre-flag” content for moderation.
In response to the damning revelations, an FBI spokesperson gave the following exculpatory statement to Fox News Digital:
”The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”
This seems ridiculously insufficient to address the serious, potentially Constitution-violating actions revealed in the Twitter Files. According to Taibbi, Twitter and the FBI planned to have weekly meetings and coordinated to quash accounts whose humorous posts the government disliked. That’s hardly routine procedure.
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In fact, Taibbi called the FBI statement “disingenuous on multiple fronts” in a Dec. 17 tweet and noted that “flagging the silly jokes of ordinary Americans with low follower counts” has nothing to do with crime, only with “domestic intelligence and opinion control.”
This FBI response is disingenuous on multiple fronts. None of this expains flagging the silly jokes of ordinary Americans with low follower counts. Also, they are clearly not doing this in service of investigating crime. This is about domestic intelligence and opinion control.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 17, 2022
Taibbi later tweeted in an irritated response to a critic, “[E]arlier this year I interviewed an FBI agent literally pulled off a child exploitation detail to chase misdemeanor J6 cases. Here the point is agents flagging social media instead of real work.”
But apparently, the FBI considers censorship of Americans’ free speech to be vitally important work.
