Twitter Executive Met with FBI Weekly around 2020 Election, Documents Show
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Twitter’s former head of safety Yoel Roth was seemingly meeting with the FBI on a weekly basis around the 2020 election, according to the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” from journalist Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi shared a screenshot of Slack messages from after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, in which Roth jokingly says a time block on his calendar is “DEFINITELY not a meeting with the FBI I SWEAR.”
11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners. pic.twitter.com/kgC4eGykcO
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
Roth also cites a “weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI” in a separate set of messages and a “report from the FBI concerning 2 tweets” in another. The tweets apparently related to false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI): pic.twitter.com/s5IiUjQqIY
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
The documents also show an unnamed employee asking policy director Nick Pickles if Twitter should say the company detects “misinfo” through “ML, human review, and **partnerships with outside experts?*”
“I know that’s been a slippery process . . . not sure if you want our public explanation to hang on that,” the employee says.
Pickles asks if they can “just say ‘partnerships,'” adding “e.g. not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts.”
The new documents reveal the internal discussions around Twitter’s decision to ban former president Donald Trump from the platform after the Capitol riot.
One message said, “we currently analyze tweets and consider them at a tweet-by-tweet basis which does not appropriately take into account the context surrounding.”
It continued, “you can use the yelling fire into a crowded theater example — context matters and the narrative that trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly last 4+ years must be taken into account.”
Taibbi writes that the new files, which are set to be released in three parts each day until Sunday, will reveal “the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.”
He adds that the documents show that in 2020 Twitter was “deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement, long before J6. The ban will come after other avenues are exhausted.”
45. On December 10th, as Trump was in the middle of firing off 25 tweets saying things like, “A coup is taking place in front of our eyes,” Twitter executives announced a new “L3 deamplification” tool. This step meant a warning label now could also come with deamplification: pic.twitter.com/MP4F7cvguw
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022
Taibbi’s Friday posts say journalists Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss will post additional documents on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
Weiss posted the second installment of the Twitter Files on Thursday, revealing Twitter had shadowbanned a number of conservative figures, including conservative commentator Don Bongino, who was placed on a “search blacklist” and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, who was given a “Do Not Amplify” label.
