The FBI repeatedly grilled Twitter execs about censorship on the social media platform in the summer of 2020 — insisting that the company provide more information about removing “state propaganda” from the site, according to the latest Twitter Files release.
The agency’s Foreign Influence Task Force — which deals with cyber threats — interrogated Twitter on its reporting about official state media actors’ use of the site, according to emails unearthed by independent journalist Matt Taibbi in what he dubbed the “Twitter Files Supplemental” Sunday night.
San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan pressured former Twitter trust and safety chief Yoel Roth in July 2020 for more information about how they prevented bad actors from using the platform, according to screengrabs of email correspondence posted by Taibbi.
Chan was not satisfied with Twitter’s indication that it “had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform,” the emails show.
Roth, in return, commented on the persistence of the agency, stating that he was “perplexed” by the probing inquiry.
“I’m frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau,” he said in an email to his team.
Roth added that he was not “particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the [Intelligence Community]) demanding written answers.”
In another email, Roth said he felt the FBI’s line of questioning was flawed since Twitter had clearly acknowledged that “official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter.”
The FBI said its requests to the social media platform were a normal procedure for the agency.
“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities,” the agency told Taibbi.
On Friday, Taibbi said the FBI and Twitter’s relationship had a “master-canine quality” and that the two parties were in “constant and pervasive” contact. The FBI treated the social media giant like a “subsidiary,” he added, and constantly flagged numerous Twitter accounts for purportedly harmful “misinformation” beginning in January 2020.
