(LifeSiteNews) – Newly released emails show that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) flagged Twitter accounts for violating the platform’s terms of service and asked the platform to take action on them. The emails from Friday’s set of “Twitter Files” were released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
In the files were 150 emails exchanged between Elvis Chan, an FBI official from the agency’s San Francisco field office, and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety. The dump includes other emails from the FBI to Twitter employees in which the agency flagged accounts for the platform.
An internal FBI email dated November 5, 2022, for instance, lists a series of accounts that “may warrant additional action” because they were being used to “spread misinformation about the upcoming election.” Chan passed the email to Twitter, writing, “Let us know if you decide to take any actions against these accounts based on our tipper to you … Also let us know if we need to issue a preservation letter as we intend to serve legal process for these accounts.”
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
19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his “Twitter folks”: pic.twitter.com/eXaZnC3I7y
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Twitter responded by suspending seven of the accounts, temporarily suspending another, and nine had tweets bounce back for “civic misinformation policy violations,” the Post Millennial reported. Among the suspended accounts were one belonging to Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a conservative news channel that frequently hosted live streams of Trump rallies.
The FBI also flagged jokes that were left leaning, Taibbi noted. One post the FBI flagged read, “I’m a ballot counter in my state. If you’re not wearing a mask, I’m not counting your vote.” Another from the same account read, “For every negative comment on this post, I’m adding another vote for the Democrats.” The account, @ClairFosterPHD, responded to Taibbi’s request for comment, saying, “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds.”
Another email dated November 10 reads, “Hello Twitter contacts, FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.” Four accounts were listed in the email for allegedly violating Twitter’s terms of service.
Three of the four were suspended, a Twitter employee informed the FBI. The same employee asked a coworker to review the fourth account, almost all of whose posts were jokes, for “possible civic misinformation.”
The emails also reveal that Twitter participated in monthly meetings with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
A letter from Twitter attorney Stacia Cardille dated from September this year to former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, who had previously worked as general counsel for the FBI, states that the meetings were soon to become weekly and that the FBI was “adamant” it would share classified information with the platform.
The emails also note that the FBI sent Cardille a “packet” in March 2021 highlighting the dangers of Russian and Iranian misinformation, and a “heightened Domestic Violence Extremist Threat.” According to Taibbi, the “packet” consisted of a set of “DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and ‘private sector partners.’”
Commenting on the FBI’s contact with Twitter, Taibbi wrote, “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.”
Taibbi noted that the FBI has had increased focus in social media since the 2016 election, with the agency’s social media task force increased to 80 agents, and that the DHS collaborated with security contractors and think tanks to put “pressure on Twitter to moderate content.” However, Taibbi stated that he could not determine if the FBI of its own initiative monitored tweets, or if the agency had “farmed out” the work.
Taibbi also noted that the FBI was not the only entity flagging tweets. According to Taibbi, state governments and organizations partnered with the DHS flagged tweets.
“The takeaway: what most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state funded) NGOs,” Taibbi observed. “The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
The FBI, in response to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, stated, “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. 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.”
The outlet noted that it received the same statement in response to a request for comment when covering the agency’s warning of a “disinformation operation” before the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Since the start of December, new Twitter owner Elon Musk has been giving what he calls the “Twitter Files,” a trove of documentation on the previous management’s choices to remove or limit disfavored content and accounts, to various journalists for dissemination.
Revelations so far shed light on the platform’s efforts to suppress the 2020 story about presidential son Hunter Biden’s laptop, the shadow-banning of conservative personalities, the removal of former President Donald Trump, and the quashing of dissenting voices on COVID-19 policy, among other issues.
A new set of “Twitter Files” released Monday revealed that the FBI contacted Twitter hours after the New York Post contacted Hunter Biden in regard to his laptop.