by Madeleine Hubbard
The latest installment of the “Twitter Files” revealed that the FBI acted “as a doorman” for the social media giant to other government agencies, including the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.
“Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote as he released the ninth batch of internal Twitter files on Saturday evening. “Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying.”
4.The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022
“The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government — from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The Twitter Files, a series of revelations given by the platform’s new owner Elon Musk to reporters, have shown that the FBI regularly communicated with Twitter employees about content the agency deemed questionable while paying the social media platform for legal requests.
The FBI called the revelations “misinformation” and the work of “conspiracy theorists,” and Taibbi, who has published several installments of the Twitter Files, responded by publishing emails showing how multiple government agencies had extensive communications with then-Twitter executives.
Internal emails also show that one of Twitter’s executives worked at the CIA.
“The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi said. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.”
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Madeleine Hubbard joined Just the News as a fast file reporter after working as an editor at Breitbart News. Hubbard previously served as the special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo “Twitter” by greenwish _. Background Photo “U.S. State Department” by AgnosticPreachersKid. CC BY-SA 3.0.
