Twitter Files: Federal Agencies, Partisan Officials Demanded Accounts Be Removed

Leading up to the 2020 general election, Twitter received and obliged requests from federal and state government bodies as well as partisan officials to remove accounts they deemed problematic, a Tuesday installment of the “Twitter Files” exposé series reveals.

Throughout the fall of 2020, increasingly more agencies attempted to interlope in Twitter’s content moderation processes, which already involved the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and others.

For example, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) checked in on September 1 to confirm Twitter was heeding the FBI’s flagging of certain accounts, according to emails obtained and analyzed by independent journalist Matt Taibbi. Twitter assured the committee in a “kudos” email that it would be suspending five accounts “for platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors.”

Previously released internal documents from Twitter exposed that the FBI was in constant contact with the company’s former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth. Between January 2020 and November 2022, over 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and Roth. In many instances, the FBI allegedly demanded that Twitter crack down on election ‘misinformation.’