The latest development in the reveal of the Twitter files, where the FBI allegedly constantly contacted the social media giant, sparks significant fears and concerns among online users.
Matt Taibbi, a writer on Substack, dropped his latest batch of the files on Friday that allegedly detailed the federal agency's ties with the tech giant. He said that the files reveal more daily about how the American government collects, analyzes, and flags users' social media content.
Twitter Files Part 6
He added that Twitter's contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive and claimed that the federal agency treated the social media company as a subsidiary. Taibbi said that between January 2020 and November 2022, the two parties shared more than 150 emails, particularly Twitter's Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
A surprisingly high number of those conversations were requests from the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts. The Substack writer highlighted the FBI's social media task force established after the 2016 presidential election to monitor foreign interference prominently featured in the Twitter files, as per Fox News.
Taibbi asked whether agencies such as the FBI and DHS did in-house flagging work or hired third parties to do the job. He demanded proof that it was allowed to conduct any massive data or AI search within the government itself.
Later, he shared an email sent to "Twitter contacts" from an FBI official that listed several Twitter accounts that the agency said "may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service."
According to the Washington Examiner, the federal agency also sent Twitter several lists of accounts that "may warrant additional action due to the accounts being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election." Following that specific message, the social media company responded with a list of the actions involved.
Flagging Problematic Accounts
Taibbi claimed that, more often than not, the lists of tweets that the federal agency sent to Twitter to review involved joke-level content and had a low engagement. Furthermore, it was not only the FBI that wanted to flag content and included the DHS and several state governments.
These agencies notified Twitter of content they thought was problematic, and some communication was done through the Partner Support Portal. It is an outlet constructed by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization with the DHS.
The Substack writer concluded that what many people thought of as the "deep state" was just a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and NGOs. He added that sometimes, the lines became so blurred as to become meaningless.
Among the individual Twitter accounts that the FBI wanted the social media giant to act on was that of Billy Baldwin, the brother of actors Alec and Stephen Baldwin. They also included what appeared to be several satire accounts and the right-wing news and commentary outlet Right Side Broadcasting Network, the Daily Mail reported.
