In the latest installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” it was revealed that even the far-left activists in charge of censorship at Twitter were concerned by the demands that the FBI was making of them as it demanded further censorship of conservatives.
As reported by the Daily Caller, journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted out a thread titled “Twitter Files Supplemental,” which followed six prior entries in the series revealing internal communications that displayed the full extent of coordinated censorship at the company. This thread included correspondence between San Francisco-based FBI agent Elvis Chan and Yoel Roth, the former “Head of Trust and Safety” for Twitter who recently left the position out of protest of Elon Musk’s pro-Free Speech stance.
Chan, on behalf of the FBI, demanded in July of 2020 that Twitter submit written answers as to why Twitter had, at the time, determined that they had “not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.” Chan said that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) had held “quite a bit of discussion within the USIC (United States Intelligence Community) to get clarifications from your company.”
In response, Roth sent the correspondence to other executives at Twitter, adding that he personally was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.”
“I’m not particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC) demanding written answers,” Roth added, asking his colleagues to determine how to “best navigate” the FBI’s demands. Roth’s reluctance indicates that even he believed the FBI was going too far in its demands, despite the fact that Roth himself is a radical, far-left activist who would later go on to advocate for censoring President Donald Trump on numerous occasions.
A relationship between Twitter and the FBI had been established by the sixth entry in the “Twitter Files” series, posted by Taibbi on Friday, revealing numerous channels of communication between the bureau and the private company with requests to censor certain accounts and topics. Taibbi, with the endorsement of Twitter owner Elon Musk, described the revelations as proof that Twitter was essentially an “FBI Subsidiary.”