For more than a month now, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has been releasing the “Twitter Files,” each of them a series of tweets by independent journalists like Matt Tabby and Bari Weiss. Based on internal documents of the company, the files investigate. What was going on behind the scenes at the social media platform, especially in its Trust and Safety department, which is in charge of content moderation. The findings are revelation (bit.ly/3CqGpSN,
Until Musk took office, matters such as which tweets were removed and which users were banned were largely decided by US security and intelligence agencies, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). were. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump narrowly lost, the agencies asked for the suspension of a staggering 250,000 user accounts. Reasons cited ranged from misinformation from accounts secretly sponsored by the governments of countries such as China, Russia and Iran. Sometimes no apparent reason was even given; Twitter was bluntly told to close the account.
In most cases, Twitter complied without much internal debate. Its oft-repeated request seemed to be that its officials were being overwhelmed by the number of demands coming in from various agencies, so could they all be routed through one organization, the FBI?
Several journalists and media outlets were also targeted. In the most infamous case, under instructions from the FBI, Twitter suspended the account of new york postIt is one of the largest selling newspapers of the country after Post broke a story about the computer that Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, had lost. Computer data appears to suggest Hunter misused his father’s name and position to make millions of dollars from Chinese and Ukrainian energy firms.
The news would almost certainly have hurt Biden Sr.’s electoral prospects. The FBI told Twitter that it was Russian disinformation intended to help Trump win a second term. The platform removed all references to the story from its feed. Today many people believe that of post The report was accurate. Musk has accused Twitter of “interfering with elections”.
Thousands of tweets were deleted and users were suspended for suggesting that the COVID pandemic may have started because of a leak at the Chinese government’s virus research lab in Wuhan. The forum also tried to suppress information that the US government’s National Institutes of Health had given a grant to the Wuhan laboratory for gain-of-function research, or the study of how to create the deadly virus.
The interesting thing in all this is that it seems that the FBI and other agencies are working to remove the then President of the country, Donald Trump, from power. After all, the Hunter Biden story, if it had been widely disseminated, would have helped him. Regarding Covid, Trump has been boasting since day one that it was a lab leak in Wuhan, and insisted on referring to it as the “Chinese virus” on every platform, which got banned by Twitter. And certainly no love was lost for Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease bureaucrat who led the country’s pandemic response, and who also approved US grants to the Wuhan Institute.
Trump won the 2016 presidential election because of a number of factors, but a major one was because he positioned himself as an outsider to the cozy Washington network of career politicians, entangled bureaucrats, shady intelligence agencies, big business, lobbyists and power brokers. posted as a person. , Trump promised to “drain the swamp”. Now it seems that the swamp controlled the flow of information to the public through social media by ensuring that it cannot be drained.
Twitter files show that requests to Twitter for the agency to ban user accounts increased sharply in the weeks before the 2020 election. And in the four years leading up to Musk’s acquisition, more than a dozen senior FBI agents, analysts and lawyers joined Twitter’s top ranks.
The company was fertile ground for those whose behavior showed they were out to get Trump. Until Musk took over and fired 70% of employees, Twitter employees were left-liberal and anti-Trump. According to data from the US Federal Election Commission, 99% of all political contributions made by Twitter employees in 2021 went to the Democratic Party. To put it mildly, it’s a sharp slant.
However, Twitter, with nearly 450 million monthly active users, may be only the tip of the iceberg. After all, other platforms such as Facebook (2.85 billion users) and Instagram (over two billion) have far greater reaches. Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook was approached by the FBI to suppress the Hunter Biden story, and the platform complied. We are only learning about Twitter’s collusion with US intelligence agencies because a billionaire with a devil-may-care attitude bought the company. The full extent of information filtering by agencies through Big Tech will probably never be known.
It’s extremely difficult to feel much sympathy for Trump, who was often erratic, with erratic behavior that showed signs of megalomania. And since his defeat in 2020, it seems all these symptoms have gotten worse. Still, America’s entrenched power over the global public discourse cannot fail to be disturbing. Musk has promised to release “The Fauci Files” soon.
Sandipan Deb is the former editor of financial express, and founder-editor of open And Swarajya Magazines.
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