Twitter and FBI were in ‘constant and pervasive’ contact with agents sending lists of users to be suspended – including actor Billy Baldwin and satire accounts, new leak suggests
A new trove of internal communications from Twitter suggests that the FBI maintained persistent contact with company employees in recent years, frequently proposing user bans, including for actor Billy Baldwin and what appear to be satire accounts.
‘Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,’ argued journalist Matt Taibbi, who shared the documents in a Twitter thread on Friday afternoon.
‘Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth,’ claimed Taibbi.
‘But 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 added.
New documents suggest the FBI asked Twitter, without success, to ban actor Billy Baldwin, seen above last month with Chyna Phillips
In one exchange from November 6, 2022, FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Elvis Chan forwarded Twitter staff a lengthy list of accounts for review.
Chan wrote that the FBI believed the accounts were ‘disseminating false information about the time, place or manner of the upcoming elections.’
The list included Baldwin, who was not suspended after Twitter’s review, as well as what appear to be several satire accounts.
That email exchange took place after Elon Musk took control of Twitter in late October.
The FBI’s San Francisco field office and Roth did not immediately respond to requests for comment from DailyMail.com.
Developing story, more to follow.
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