Internal documents at Twitter show just how much the FBI has worked to censor information. This comes from another round of the Twitter Files from journalist Matt Taibbi.
Last week a federal judge ruled that U.S. government agencies cannot reach out to social media companies in order to censor content. The Justice Department appealed this ruling but the judge denied the appeal so for now, this is supposed to be law. The documents released by Taibbi show how much the FBI has been able to censor content at Twitter.
In one email exchange, FBI Agent Elvis Chan provides a list of accounts he says could be foreign actors and asks Twitter to let him know what actions they plan to take. When Twitter fails to remove the accounts, he follows up and Twitter apologizes and does what the government agent requests, taking down the accounts. Later it turns out that Twitter cannot verify that the accounts are foreign actors but it hardly matters. They censor them anyway.
Here the FBI has not had to prove in a court of law that these people have committed any wrongdoing, nor do they have to go through any official channels. It is a simple ask-and-receive exchange inside of public platforms.
This is not supposed to happen after the recent court ruling. Key words: supposed to.
