OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, who is now CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social, said the FBI’s heavy involvement on social media is not limited to Twitter.
The former California Republican’s comments to The Epoch Times came earlier this week, ahead of Friday’s stunning revelation in the latest Twitter Files dump by journalist Matt Taibbi that the bureau has been heavily involved in getting users banned and content censored since the 2016 presidential election.
The Epoch Times noted further:
The Twitter Files, a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, confirmed what many Conservatives have alleged for years. Namely, Twitter was shadow-banning accounts that didn’t fit a specific ideology and suspending accounts that bucked the chosen political narrative, Nunes claimed.
But, the most concerning revelation in the Twitter Files, according to Nunes, is that the DOJ and the FBI had informants—whether paid or volunteers—that put forward a specific directive to Twitter, and that is likely happening on other social media platforms.
“The coordination that the Department of Justice and the FBI clearly had with Twitter? I don’t think it stops there,” Nunes said.
“It seems like they were either running informants, or had paid informants, or had volunteers, where they were actively sending information on behalf of the government on who to look into, or who to ban, and that sort of thing. The bigger issue is, Twitter is one thing, but what about Facebook? What about Instagram?”
“What [do] we really need from Elon Musk and Twitter at this point? Just release all the files. Don’t just have selective journalists look at it. Release all the files so everyone can begin to evaluate them. You never know what you’re going to find [with more people looking at the files],” Nunes added.
“There’s a strange cat-and-mouse game where [Musk] is sitting on what seems to be a treasure trove of really damaging information to not only the fake news media but also to probably many areas within the United States government,” he said.
“[Musk] has hinted that he has information on [Dr. Anthony] Fauci. So, we’re all just kinda sitting back and watching this cat-and-mouse game play out, where you’ve got one of the world’s oligarchs [who] has decided to say, ‘Look, if [Jeff] Bezos can buy the Washington Post, I can buy Twitter.’ And in the process of that, Elon Musk is saying things that, quite frankly, make him sound slightly center Right,” the former Intelligence Committee chairman added.
Nunes’ observations came just days before a Friday Twitter Files dump by journalist Matt Taibbi, revealing the extent the FBI was involved in censoring content and users on the platform since at least 2016.
“The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi began his latest thread on Friday evening.
“Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth… a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts,” he wrote.
Taibbi went on to highlight a social media task force established by the FBI after the 2016 presidential election, in which as many as “80 agents” were assigned to allegedly monitor foreign interference.
“Do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? ‘You have to prove to me that inside the f—ing government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,’ says one former intelligence officer,” Taibbi noted.
He also shared an email that was sent to “Twitter contacts” from an FBI official who listed several user accounts that “may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service.”
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts: pic.twitter.com/LjgB6fxENo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
“Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his ‘civic misinformation’ of Nov. 8,” Taibbi tweeted.
