The most recent installment of Elon Musk's Twitter Files reveals that as part of its massive push to encourage social media companies to censor content, the FBI sent CIA intelligence assessments to Twitter site monitors.
The most recent issue of the independent journalist Matt Taibbi's Twitter Files series showed that the CIA and Other Government Agency (OGA) personnel regularly attended meetings between federal authorities and social media platforms.
The files reveal the FBI serving as the doorman to a massive operation of social media monitoring and control, encompassing agencies throughout the federal government, Mr. Taibbi said in a long Twitter thread on Christmas Eve.
He said that thousands of official reports from all around the world flooded Twitter thanks to the FITF and the FBI's San Francisco field office.
For a FITF Meeting with Twitter in August 2020, Elvis Chan, the FBI associate special agent in charge of the San Francisco cyber section, sent out one invitation. Two participants who are listed as OGA officials are among the dozens of FBI workers and Twitter executives on the list.
Mr. Chan further emphasized OGA briefings on the Russia Status in several emails from 2020 that included a sneak peek of the agendas for meetings between the FITF and Twitter.
The phrase OGA, or Other Government Organization, may be used as a euphemism for the CIA, according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors. One of them giggles, They think it's mysterious, but it's simply conspicuous.
In later exchanges, Twitter executives and FBI personnel used more blunt language to discuss the CIA.
In July 2020, Twitter lawyer Stacia Cardille wrote to James Baker, a former FBI lawyer who is now a Twitter employee, that she expected the CIA to attend an Info Ops conference.
I invited the FBI, and I believe the CIA will attend too, she commented.
According to later documents, the FBI regularly flooded Twitter with intelligence notifications to warn users about foreign interference on social media networks.
Additionally, those reports were made available to Twitter, Yahoo, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, and Wikimedia.
According to Mr. Taibbi, John Kiriakou, a former CIA official, claims to be able to recognize the structure of these reports. The original CIA office and all the duplicated offices were what was cut off above the tear line, says Kiriakou, adding, Looks right on to me.
Officials alerted platforms about Russian attempts to denigrate French President Emmanuel Macron's campaign before the runoff election in France in a report dated April 2022.
Another article included an outline of Ukraine's Nazi' Propaganda' that circulated online in February of this year.
Other reports included lists of publications, tweets, and YouTube videos that the government thought to be pushing anti-Ukraine narratives.
There were lists of particular testimony that the papers, in certain circumstances, claimed represented the American enemy camps.
According to Mr. Taibbi, many people wonder if Internet portals get instructions from intelligence agencies on the filtering of news articles about foreign events. It seems that Twitter did, sometimes through FITF/FBI.
More details concerning the FBI's close collaboration with Twitter to censor speech have been revealed in the most recent release of Twitter Files.
According to an internal email, the FBI warned Twitter workers about concerns over certain messages related to the 2020 presidential election.
These messages were regularly flagged using a back-channel reporting tool called Teleporter, which scheduled talks between agency agents and Twitter workers to abruptly end.
In response to user requests, the FBI/FITF reportedly supplied names of hundreds of problem accounts to Twitter as the 2020 election got closer, according to Mr. Taibbi's most recent story.
In an email exchange with Mr. Baker dated November 2020, Ms. Cardille claimed that the FBI had workers in the Baltimore field office and at HQ who are running keyword searches of violations.
Mr. Baker said It seems surprising that they are searching for violations of our rules.
Other private emails show Twitter employees trying to back up the FBI's assertion that certain accounts were used to influence from outside.
After reviewing the accounts requested by the FBI, one Twitter employee pledged to brainstorm and see if we could go any further and attempt to unearth a stronger link, but he later claimed that he was unable to identify connections to Russia after doing so.
The most recent incident also follows revelations of the platform's left-leaning bias that led to the suppression of conservative viewpoints, the decision to permanently ban the then-President Trump from the platform in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the suppression of news reports about Hunter Biden's laptop computer just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
The findings have ignited debate on Capitol Hill and triggered a House Republican probe into the FBI's alleged abuse of government power and participation in restricting conservative internet freedom.
Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who will shortly take over as chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the FBI maintained this connection with Twitter away from any particularised necessity for a specific probe, but as a permanent and constant surveillance operation.
It is obvious from published Twitter records and publicly available material that the FBI worked extensively with Twitter to urge the limitation of certain content on Twitter's platform, he said in a letter delivered on Friday to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray. These findings regrettably serve to corroborate the FBI's wrongdoing and its hostility against the First Amendment.
