This past Friday night, the FBI finally issued a response to the newest wave of information coming from “The Twitter Files” which expressly showed that law enforcement officials at the federal level were quite regularly calling for Twitter to take action against content it had flagged as a problem.
Matt Taibbi, the journalist bringing the information from Musk public, stated that between January 2020 and November 2022, Yoel Roth, then-Twitter Senior Director of Trust & Safety, had spokes to the FBI in well over 150 separate emails.
Taibbi highlighted a large number of emails between officials at Twitter and federal law enforcement agencies in which agents called for the flagging of numerous election-adjacent tweets from a number of small accounts to be censored by Twitter.
“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities,” the FBI stated in a release. “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.”
The report from Taibbi revealed that the social media-focused task force from the FBI, which is known as FTIF, consists of a group of 80 agents that expressly focus on any threats involving “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 went on.
Taibbi highlighted that the most recent release of documents uncovered over the course of the investigation highlighted that the DHS and FBI were “regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”
As the then-director and associate general counsel for Twitter’s global policy legal team, Stacia Cardille spokes via email to then-Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker claiming that she was taking part in regular meetings with FBI, DOJ, DHS, and ODNI regarding possible election threats.
Numerous other internal company correspondence highlighted that employees were actively processing a long list of tweets that had been flagged as “possible violative content” by agents of the FBI.
Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Greg Steube (R-FL) issued responses to the news by indicating that the Republican-majority Congress that was on its way in would look into these findings that have been unearthed due to the release of “The Twitter Files.”
“@FBI has a lot to answer for after the latest drop of #TwitterFiles6,” stated Gaetz in a tweet. “@Jim_Jordan, @RepMikeJohnson, @RepAndyBiggsAZ, @RepDanBishop, and I will be asking the questions. Clear your calendar.”
“80 @FBI agents were colluding with Twitter to police content and moderate Americans’ speech?” stated Steube via social media. “Sounds like Communist China to me. Investigations are coming!”