Darren Lyn
19 December 2022•Update: 19 December 2022
HOUSTON, United States
The FBI repeatedly grilled Twitter executives in the summer of 2020 for not reporting enough “state propaganda” on the site, insisting that the company provide more information about safety enforcement, according to the latest Twitter Files release.
"In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats," Matt Taibbi, who writes for the online publishing platform Substack, said on Twitter in his "supplemental" thread.
The thread came on the heels of his Friday revelations that Twitter employees had near-constant communication with the FBI from 2020 to 2022.
"The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th 'DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,' that 'you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform,'" his thread continued, which detailed continued conflict between Twitter and the FBI.
While Taibbi noted "one would think that would be good news," he said the FBI "seemed to feel otherwise."
"Chan underscored this: 'There was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company,' he wrote, referring to the United States Intelligence Community," the journalist continued. "The task force demanded to know how Twitter came to its unpopular conclusion. Oddly, it included a bibliography of public sources - including a Wall Street Journal article - attesting to the prevalence of foreign threats, as if to show Twitter they got it wrong."
Taibbi went on to say that Roth was not “comfortable” with the FBI demanding written answers.
"Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was ‘frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau,’" added Taibbi, who explained the FBI said that its requests to the social media platform were a normal procedure for the agency.
The bureau subsequently responded to Taibbi's report: “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities."
Taibbi concluded his thread by announcing there were more revelations to come regarding the pre-Elon Musk Twitter through his ongoing "Twitter Files" reports.
