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Matt Taibbi released the sixth installment of the Twitter Files over the weekend, exposing the company as, essentially, a cutout for the US intelligence community.
From FOX News:
Substack writer Matt Taibbi added a “supplemental” thread on Sunday to his latest “Twitter Files” drop on FBI connections with the social media site.
After revealing on Friday in the sixth iteration of the “Twitter Files” that Twitter employees had near constant communication with FBI agents from 2020 to 2022, Taibbi detailed an additional conflict between the federal agency and the social media company when the FBI appeared displeased with Twitter’s responses.
“In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats,” Taibbi tweeted.
He continued, “The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th ‘DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,’ that ‘you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.’”
Although Taibbi noted that “one would think” that report from Twitter would be “good news,” FBI agents appeared to “feel otherwise.” He emphasized that Chan remarked that discussions within the United States Intelligence Community pushed for “clarifications” withing Twitter on its propaganda monitoring, often using mainstream media articles as sources.
“The task force demanded to know how Twitter came to its unpopular conclusion. Oddly, it included a bibliography of public sources – including a Wall Street Journal article – attesting to the prevalence of foreign threats, as if to show Twitter they got it wrong,” Taibbi explained. “Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was ‘frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.’”
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