Mehul Reuben DasDec 28, 2022 10:15:37 IST
Elon Musk has often claimed that the US Government basically had Twitter in its pockets, and would often pay millions of dollars to suppress some news and posts that would not suit their agenda. With the ongoing Twitter Files Saga, Musk reiterated the claim, causing a ruckus to interrupt.
Commenting on Twitter Files 7, Elon Musk revealed that all social media platforms are in the pockets of the US government and that they suppress information, and take down users and posts at the FBI and CIA’s requests. Image Credit: AFP
Documents released by Elon Musk and his team as Twitter Files, showed that the platform often colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and COVID-19.
This revelation comes to us because of the several reports that journalist Matt Taibbi has published with Musk’s approval. Taibbi claims that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Musk has claimed that apart from Twitter, the FBI and the CIA also engaged with other social media companies like Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, Pinterest etc. In all of these meetings with heads of these platforms, agents from the CIA would sit in to ensure that what is being discussed actually gets carried. Furthermore, Taibbi claims that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which was initially formed to counter election interference by foreign states, would often make a ton of moderation requests on domestic accounts.
Retweeting ‘Part 7’ of the Twitter Files, Musk posted, “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.” Not only Twitter, he continued, “but other social media companies as well.”
Most people don’t appreciate the significance of the point Matt was making:
*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government.
Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 27, 2022
The debate over the controversial ‘The Twitter Files’ saga sparked following Musk’s decision to release the new instalments behind internal company communication which also included the company’s decision to block a media report regarding Hunter Biden’s international business operations.
Twitter Files, for those who are unaware, is a set of reports based on documents that Elon Musk dumped on several independent journalists. These documents show how Twitter suppressed information that would have been damaging to Joe Biden’s election campaign, colluded with the FBI to remove content the agency wanted hidden, assisted the US military’s online influence campaigns, and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple US intelligence agencies.
Although the White House and Joe Biden’s administration has refused to comment on the allegations that Musk and Twitter files have raised, the FBI in a recent statement said that the correspondence between its agents and Twitter staff that Twitter Files is referring to shows nothing more than examples of their longstanding practice of the federal government engaging with the private sector.
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