FBI Pressured Twitter to Share User Data outside Search-Warrant Process, Records Reveal
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The FBI repeatedly pressured Twitter to grant agents access to user data in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, according to documents revealed as part of the seventh installment of the “Twitter Files” exposé.
In January 2020, former Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth resisted the bureau’s efforts to coerce the platform into providing data outside of the normal search-warrant process, according to an analysis of internal documents conducted by journalist Michael Shellenberger. New Twitter CEO Elon Musk enlisted Shellenberger, and independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, to dissect and report on the records.
Roth was intimately involved in the old management’s content-moderation regime, which Musk has accused of disproportionately censoring right-wing political thought. For example, Roth led the team responsible for suppressing the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell.
However, records reveal that Roth resist FBI intrusion into Twitter’s operations.
In December 2019, a supervisory special agent of the FBI’s national security cyber wing working out of the bureau’s San Francisco field office asked Roth if the company would revise its terms of service to permit a vendor contracted with the bureau to access the Twitter data feed. Agent Elvis Chan extended an invite to Roth to discuss the matter in person with his “colleagues.”
Weeks later, Roth wrote a suggested response to a colleague rejecting Chan’s offer and taking a firm stance to protect user privacy.
“As a rule we’re not able to directly discuss data licensing relationships with third parties (such as the customers of our data customers), both due to confidentiality reasons and limited information on our end about the business decisions that may have led one of our customers to decline to provide services to the government,” he said.
Roth the referred to Twitter’s “long-standing policy prohibiting the use of our data products and APIs for surveillance and intelligence-gathering purposes, which we would not deviate from.”
Twitter would continue to be a partner to the government to combat shared threats, Roth assured, “but the best path for NSA, or any part of government, to request information about Twitter users or their content is in accordance with valid legal process.”
In early January 2020, Twitter’s then director of policy and philanthropy, Carlos Monje Jr., urged caution in response to the FBI’s insistence about gathering user data.
“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff),” he wrote to Roth.
The sixth installment of the “Twitter Files,” synthesized by Taibbi, broke the news that the FBI had frequently communicated with Roth’s team before Elon Musk bought the company. Between January 2020 and November 2022, over 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and Roth, Taibbi uncovered.
Throughout 2020, the FBI asked Twitter to search for evidence of foreign influence, specifically accounts linked to Russian entities. On September 24, 2020, Twitter updated the FBI that it had removed 345 “largely inactive” accounts “linked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts” that “had little reach & low follower accounts.”
Flash forward to summer 2020, the FBI was still nagging Twitter for proof of foreign meddling, such as in a tweet from Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), according to an email Shellenberger reviewed.
“While much of this violates our terms of service, we haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context),” Roth emailed back to the FBI.
Over the next few months into fall 2020, the FBI intensified its focus on foreign interference, expecting an influx of propaganda ahead of the 2020 election. On August 11, 2020, Chan sent information to Roth relating to the Russian hacking organization, APT28, through the FBI’s secure, one-way communications channel, Teleporter, Shellenberger noted. The documents were sent hours before the Post published its first bombshell report on the Hunter Biden laptop.
Twitter’s public pretense for the blackout of the Hunter Biden story was that it violated the company’s “hacked materials” policy. Democratic figures, including Joe Biden, maintained that the report was Russian misinformation, until its contents and claims were proven accurate.
At a recent conference on democracy in the digital age, after he resigned from Twitter following Musk’s takeover, Roth said the FBI trained him in Russian hacking threats before the Hunter Biden laptop breakthrough.
“It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells” when the story surfaced, Roth said.
