(Republicaninformer.com)- According to recently made public emails, former Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth was “frankly perplexed” by some of the demands the FBI made of the platform.
As a follow-up to his Friday “Twitter Files” article, veteran journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted correspondence between Roth and San Francisco FBI Agent Elvis Chan.
Taibbi said that Roth was uncomfortable with the Bureau’s (and consequently, the IC’s) demand for written responses. Given that numerous agencies are prohibited from conducting domestic operations, the idea of the FBI serving as a conduit for the intelligence community is intriguing.
Emails from Chan to Roth from July 2020 with inquiries from the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) regarding state propaganda on the platform were made public by Taibbi. According to Taibbi, the FITF sent Roth clarification requests regarding his findings after he claimed that he “had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors” on Twitter.
According to Taibbi, Chan reportedly informed Roth that “there was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company.” Chan was referring to the U.S. Intelligence Community. A bibliography of sources, including open research and a Wall Street Journal article, was included in the FTIF.
When Roth gave his team the questionnaire, he said, “I’m honestly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.”
According to Taibbi, Roth also said, “I’m not particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension, the IC) demanding written answers,” and he reportedly asked colleagues how to “best navigate” the predicament.
Between January 2020 and November 2022, the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth exchanged over 150 emails, Taibbi tweeted on Friday, illustrating how the FBI and other intelligence agencies flagged content for Twitter to act on.
In his Friday “Twitter Files” article, Taibbi noted that “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive as if it were a subsidiary.”
Roth previously supported enhancing “visibility filtering” in private messages to “reduce exposure” to “misinformation,” according to a “Twitter Files” article by Bari Weiss of The Free Press.
A week or so before the 2020 election and again afterward, Roth pushed for the suppression of then-President Donald Trump’s Tweets, according to Taibbi.
