Published 19 December 2022 at 10.44
Foreign. According to new documents released by journalist Matt Taibbi and Twitter owner Elon Musk, the FBI has pressured Twitter to control political content on the platform. According to the FBI, it was about countering election influence from a foreign power.
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Twitter's former security chief says he was surprised when the FBI questioned the company about threats from foreign election influence on the microblog.
Copies of internal communications released Sunday show that in July 2020, FBI agent Elvis Chan told Twitter's former head of trust and security, Yoel Roth, that he would expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force and that the intelligence community wanted “clarification ” from the company.
The FBI subsequently sent a list of detailed questions and wanted Twitter to explain why it had said during a previous briefing to US security and intelligence agencies that it had not observed much activity from official propaganda actors on its platform.
At the end of the letter, the FBI attached references to several articles about Russian and Chinese “propaganda campaigns” on social media.
Roth shared the questionnaire with other Twitter influencers and said he was “openly surprised” by the requests, which ” seemed more like something we would get from a congressional committee than from the FBI,” according to screenshots posted by Taibbi.
The former security chief added that he did not feel “particularly comfortable” with the FBI demanding written responses to this way.
According to the released files, Roth wrote that the basic premise of the questions “seems flawed” and that the intelligence and security agencies had “fundamentally misunderstood” Twitter's stance on disinformation.
“We have been clear that official government propaganda is definitely on Twitter,” Roth wrote, saying he would contact Chan as soon as possible by phone.
The call came as US authorities, think tanks and media companies warned of alleged foreign interference in the ongoing US presidential campaign and disinformation related to The Covid-19 pandemic.
Musk, who completed his purchase of Twitter in October, promised more transparency at the company and fired some of its top executives.
The files previously released by Taibbi with Musk's blessing revealed how Twitter employees struggled to rationalize the permanent ban of former US President Donald Trump and how to block news about a particular laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, son of the current US President Joe Biden.