The FBI serves "as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government," according to the ninth installment of the "Twitter Files" released over the weekend.
Among these agencies included are "the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA," according to journalist Matt Taibbi, who released the latest files.
He also pointed out that the FBI did not refute the previous claims, which basically asserted that the agency moderates Twitter. The bureau releasing a statement in the past few days saying that "the men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. ... It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency."
Taibbi wrote: "The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors — from local cops to media to state governments," emphasizing that "Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track."
"A chief end result," Taibbi noted, "was that thousands of official 'reports' flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI's San Francisco field office."
Taibbi added that "despite its official remit being 'Foreign Influence,' the FITF and the SF FBI office became conduit for mountains of domestic moderation requests."
The journalist stated, "It seemed to strike no one as strange that a 'Foreign Influence' task force was forwarding thousands of mostly domestic reports, along with the DHS, about the fringiest material."