This Friday Elon Musk announced that he would deliver "the coup de grace" with the sixth installment of the Twitter Files called "The FBI Subsidiary."
This time all the information was published by journalist Matt Taibbi, who started the thread explaining that it would focus on revealing how the government was collecting, analyzing and even flagging social media content.
In fact, Matt highlighted that the contact between Twitter and the FBI was so constant that the communications company was like a "subsidiary" of sorts.
"Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were more than 150 emails between the FBI and Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth," he reported.
Taibbi explained that there was a "surprisingly high" number of requests from the federal agency for Twitter to take action on election disinformation, including accounts with small followings that made jokes.
"The federal intelligence and law enforcement outreach on Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content," the reporter said.
Taibbi shared that in an email sent by the FBI's deputy special agent in charge, Elvis Chan, the company, which is the largest and most important of its kind, asked Twitter to review an extensive list of accounts on the grounds that they were "violating the terms of service by disseminating false information about the time, place or manner of the upcoming elections.”
The list in turn would have been sent by the FBI's National Election Command Post, which collects and forwards complaints.
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
The journalist said that Twitter later responded by informing him about what actions they took. However, he would have "forgiven" some of the accounts mentioned by the FBI.
"The moral: what most people consider the "deep state" is actually a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless,” concluded Matt Taibbi about this sixth installment of the Twitter Files.
