New Twitter Files claim thousands of moderation requests from US govt

San Francisco: Elon Musk on Sunday revealed the next lot of ‘Twitter Files,’ where independent journalist and author Matt Taibbi claimed that there were thousands of moderation requests from every corner of the US government.

He said that the real story emerging in the Twitter Files is about a “ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy” that’s not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.

“Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the ‘US intelligence community,’ Taibbi posted in a Twitter thread.

Taibbi further said that beginning in March, “We’ll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counter-terrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).”

The earlier Twitter Files claimed that top Twitter executives suppressed and censored former US President Donald Trump in the days before the 2020 election, finally deplatforming him on January 8, 2021 — two days after the storming of the Capitol Hill that left five dead.

According to Taibbi, Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”

The Twitter Files claimed that Twitter executives “were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.”

(IANS)