Matt Taibbi: Twitter Files part 6 - the FBI connection

There is no end to Twitter drama, past or present. Today, Matt Taibbi has published part six of the Twitter Files, this one focused on the site’s close connection with the FBI. As he frames it with his headline, Twitter was acting as a subsidiary of the FBI.

That’s about one email a week which seems like a lot.

Here’s the sort of thing he’s talking about. The FBI just sends Twitter a list of accounts that “may potentially” violate TOS.

Here’s the joke.

Not funny but also kind of an old joke. How much are we paying to the FBI to flag jokey tweets by people with a handful of followers? That particular account didn’t get suspended and as Taibbi points out, people on both sides of the aisle were making the same joke.

Again, a lot of these accounts are people with very few followers and low engagement. So the first question is why is anyone bothering and the second is should the FBI really be handing over lists of people for Twitter to ban? Granted they’re not ordering Twitter to do anything specific but that’s partly because they don’t need to. What would happen if Twitter just said no?

Overall, various government agencies seem pretty cozy with Twitter.

Again, how many FBI man-hours were spent on this stuff?

All the while, the government is pressing for more integration.

But it wasn’t just the FBI.

And that’s it for this installment. Taibbi says there’s more coming from Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger soon on different topics.

Like every other one of these Twitter Files reports, how people feel about it seems to depend on where they were already standing. Is this a nothingburger or proof the FBI is defacto banning accounts?

My own take is that nothing described here sounds illegal but a lot of it seems like a complete waste of time. Also the collegial behavior between Twitter and the FBI makes it awfully close to a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. What you have here is government controlling speech albeit not directly and not by demanding specific outcomes. Still it’s clear what the FBI expects and Twitter seems to understand that and to generally go along with it.

This was one of the possibilities that was raised a few weeks ago about the Hunter Biden story after the FBI explicitly warned Twitter that there might be some disinformation involving Hunter Biden prior to the election. The government/FBI didn’t technically shut down the NY Post story, Twitter did. But it sure looks like the FBI set the conditions up such that Twitter would be eager to do what the FBI couldn’t.

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