Elon Musk, CEO of the US social media platform Twitter, broke the news on the 27th that “every” US social media company has strictly censored its content under the leadership of the US government. In addition, the U.S. government sometimes issues explicit instructions to these companies. For example, Google often removes specified links in accordance with its requirements.
Musk tweeted that all social media platforms cooperate with the U.S. government to review content, and that they all remove relevant content under the explicit direction of U.S. federal agencies.
According to a Fox News report on the 28th, documents released by Musk, after acquiring Twitter, showed that Twitter cooperated with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information about the US election, the situation in Ukraine, and the new coronavirus. Information about virus infection.
Musk’s tweet on the 27th was an acknowledgment and supplement to reporter Matt Taibi’s previous series of revelations. With Musk’s approval, Taibi released internal Twitter communications that confirmed regular meetings between Twitter executives and members of the FBI and CIA. During the meeting, the agencies provided the platform with a list of “hundreds of problematic accounts” and asked it to suspend them ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Taibi also said that not only Twitter, but that the U.S. government is in touch with “almost every major technology company,” including Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, and Reddit. Taibi alleges that CIA agents almost always sit in on the companies’ meetings with the FBI’s foreign influence task force. He explained that while the task force was set up to combat foreign interference in U.S. elections, it made a large number of moderation requests for domestic content in the United States.
Coincidentally, the U.S. independent investigative website “The Intercept” recently disclosed that a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Defense had intervened in public opinion in the Middle East by manipulating topics and deceptive propaganda on Twitter, and continued to promote narratives that benefited the U.S. and its allies.