(NewsNation) — The ninth installment of the “Twitter Files” document dumps contains information alleging that the FBI and the CIA were involved in content moderation on the social media service.
The documents, which were released in a series of tweets on Christmas Eve, are part of Twitter owner Elon Musk’s effort to document how the company was run before he took over.
NewsNation reporter Tom Dempsey said the latest tweets were part of an effort to illustrated a coordination between Twitter and government agencies including the FBI.
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi, author of the tweets, said, “The files show the FBI acting as a doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship encompassing agencies across the federal government from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
Taibbi claims that Twitter kept in contact with so many agencies, including the Department of Defense and the FBI, that it lost track. He also describes alleged meetings of Twitter executives with FBI personnel and other agencies where they would discuss foreign matters and moderation requests from state governments and local police.
He goes on to write that as the 2020 election got closer, the FBI and other agencies connected to those meetings flooded Twitter with requests about alleged problem accounts posting misinformation. Taibbi wrote it boils down to Twitter execs being pressed to find information about Russian misinformation campaigns but being unable to find evidence of key assertions.
This release follows others which allege everything from suppression of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop to suppression of former President Donald Trump’s tweets. There is no independent attribution of many of the claims.