The FBI and fellow “thought police” operators determined that social media postings, not only about neo-Nazis, or Joe Biden’s 2014 role in the coup in Ukraine, or Hunter Biden’s suspicious “job” at Ukraine’s Burisma oil company, but even about the BRICS grouping, had to be suppressed, if not censored. (https://taibbi.substack.com/p/twitter-files-thread-the-spies-who )
This is the latest finding from the Twitter emails being released by Elon Musk, exposing the muscle that FBI and friends applied to social media companies. In Twitter Files #8, released on Dec. 24, Matt Taibbi states: “The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” The Pentagon, CIA and other U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies became increasingly “more aggressive” with takedown requests. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force would channel the “takedown requests” to Twitter, as collected from “OGA"—meaning “Other Government Organizations.”
Sometimes massive batches of a thousand accounts were lined up for “digital execution,” with very little description of the problem requiring the execution. The FBI/OGA operation also streamlined the process, as the volume of requests expanded, by dedicating special personnel to “back-engineer” the takedown requests. They would begin with the structure of Twitter’s policies and then cast the offending tweets in the language and terms of the policy—reducing, ahead of time, any role Twitter might have in the process. Taibbi writes that Twitter execs acknowledged this as “odd,” but even then the company often struggled to justify the proposed censorship. Of some note, Taibbi credits John Kiriakou for “recognizing the formatting” of the CIA in some of the directives given to Twitter.
