2020 ELECTION: FBI Tried Pressuring Twitter to Censor Right Wing News Site
With Elon Musk now sifting through Twitter’s dirty laundry, there are a number of disturbing new facts about the social media megalith surfacing.
For instance, news that that FBI had attempted to pressure the site to censor a popular right-wing news site around the time of the 2020 election.
The FBI’s “National Election Command Post” (NECP) sent an email asking its San Francisco field office to pressure Twitter to censor the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a conservative news channel made popular by streaming Trump campaign rallies, two days before the 2022 midterm elections.
Advertisement - story continues belowIn the email, dated November 6, 2022, the NECP gave its San Francisco field office a list of 25 accounts “being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election,” a list which included RSBN.
The NECP asked the field office to coordinate with Twitter to “determine whether the accounts identified below have violated Twitter’s terms of service and may be subject to any actions deemed appropriate by Twitter.”
The news was just the latest in a long line of wild revelations.
The emails came to light in another installment of the Twitter files. Elon Musk’s Twitter once again disclosed documents to a journalist, in this case Matt Taibbi, which shed light on the inner workings of censorship at the social media platform.
Advertisement - story continues belowTaibbi dubbed this installment: “TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.”
“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” wrote Taibbi. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
Musk has promised the world a more transparent and freer Twitter under his command, but the transition has not been terribly smooth thus far.
