Matt Taibbi dropped Part Six of the “Twitter Files” on Friday afternoon, laying out evidence and details regarding the extensive ties between the FBI and the social media platform. The latest thread begins with Taibbi writing, “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.”
He found that more than 150 emails were exchanged between FBI agents and Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth from January 2020 through November 2022. The messages generally sought action from Twitter regarding “election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”
A spokesperson from the FBI said in response to a media request from Fox News that the agency “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”
The FBI statement then attempted to disingenuously distance the government from actual censorship, claiming that Twitter and other “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.”
Taibbi found that the FBI has deployed as many as 80 agents to work on a “social media task force” after President Donald Trump unexpectedly defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The putative function of those dozens of agents is to “monitor foreign interference.”
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts: pic.twitter.com/LjgB6fxENo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Taibbi posted a copy of an email from an FBI officer to his “Twitter contacts” identifying a list of Twitter accounts that he ominously said, “may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service.” Staffers at Twitter went on to work up reasons for suspending every account the FBI agent identified.
14.Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8: pic.twitter.com/gwiDtPcWZv
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Taibbi shared another email from the FBI “National Election Command Post” just last month to FBI agent Elvis Chan in the San Francisco field office. The message contained a long list of Twitter accounts that “may warrant additional action.”
https://t.co/ZQeb9Ko06p an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”: pic.twitter.com/yILcgjFyev
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Chan forwarded that list to his “Twitter folks” inside the company’s San Francisco headquarters. Twitter responded to Chan with information about what it did to sanction the listed accounts.
Taibbi also revealed exchanges in September 2022 between Stacia Cardille, then a Twitter legal executive, and ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker, then Twitter’s deputy counsel. Cardille was updating Baker on her “soon to be weekly” direct meetings with multiple federal agencies, including the FBI, Homeland Security, DOJ, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Cardille wrote that she was concerned about any “impediments” to sharing classified information “with industry.” She said that in response to her concerns, the “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”
Taibbi noted that the exchange “underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI.”
New Twitter owner Elon Musk fired Baker earlier this month when his involvement in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story was revealed.
