On Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi discussed the newest Twitter Files and pointed to one email exchange where Twitter “immediately” suspended accounts flagged by the FBI without investigation on Twitter’s part that Twitter later couldn’t point to solid proof to back the FBI’s allegations.
Taibbi said, “In one shot, you can see the FBI asks to remove three accounts, that gets forwarded to Twitter, Twitter immediately suspends them, the accounts. But more importantly, when there’s a glitch, and the accounts remain up, the FBI immediately writes back and says, what’s the deal? We just wrote to you, why is it still up? So, that shows the nature of the relationship basically that it’s not really a collaboration. It’s much more like somebody reporting to an authority.”
He added, “[W]hat happens in these instances in the ones that I was showing, they’re just forwarding names of accounts that they say are associated with foreign threat actors. It’s very vague. And Twitter is taking them down before they even investigate. In this case, they later determined that they couldn’t find anything connecting them to any bad actors. In fact, one of them was from Canada. And so, that’s the problem. If it’s not connected with a crime, they’re just asking to take accounts down because they don’t like the profile of them.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett