Twitter files showed that the FBI was in regular contact with Twitter. The FBI flagged parody accounts and jokes about election day. This was an entirely normal response from the FBI.
A spokesperson for the FBI stated that “The FBI regularly engages in dialogue with private sector entities to provide specific information to identified foreign malign influences actors’ subversive undeclared, covert or criminal activities.” “After being notified by the FBI, private sector entities can decide what action to take for their customers and their platforms.”
Sorry guys, it’s not suppression of speech, that was pushed by a government agency.
Matt Taibbi pointed to the fact that they were not only flagging speech without criminal intent but were also asking for locations of Americans responsible for these accounts, including those for Right Side Broadcasting or actor Billy Baldwin. They want to find those people. Taibbi, Elon Musk, and others questioned the validity of this. But Rep. Ted Lieu (D.Ca) attempted to justify his position and said that he knew this was happening.
It is now revealed that the files from Twitter that were dropped Friday night reveal that things are much deeper than that. With their response, the FBI appeared to be just giving information to Twitter. According to Yoel Roth (a liberal man with issues in charge of Trust and Safety), they demanded written responses from Twitter. Even for Yoel Roth, the liberal guy in charge of Trust and Safety, this was too much. The FBI used Twitter to pretend it was theirs.
7.Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.” pic.twitter.com/SrLrdZLREa
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022
The messages between Yoel Roth and Agent Elvis Chan revealed that the FBI wasn’t the only one pushing for answers to Twitter here. It was also the Intelligence Community that appeared to be using the FBI to facilitate Twitter. Taibbi reported, “there was quite some discussion within the USIC in order to get clarifications from your company.”
These questions were being pushed by who? Is this the CIA? The CIA is not supposed to look into U.S. citizens but foreign countries. They might ask questions about foreign actors but not about U.S. citizens. So there need to be some answers here as to what the involvement of the intelligence community was, what their involvement entailed, and if they were involved in asking for information/investigating U.S. citizens.
Beyond the IC, the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was meant to look into foreign influence. It wasn’t chasing down jokes about the election on Twitter.
12.The FBI responded to Friday’s report by saying it “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.” pic.twitter.com/fkJrLjPKlN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022
They are trying to police speech they don’t consider criminal, rather than go after criminals they should be following.
The Twitter files call for more Congressional oversight of what was happening here.
