Since Elon Musk started releasing the hidden files of communication between previous Twitter management and the federal agencies, the deep involvement of the FBI in Twitter’s censorship of conservatives has become public knowledge.
Republicans are now promising to probe the FBI’s role in the whole affair once they take back the House in the first week of January next year.
On Sunday (December 18), Republican congressman Mike Turner – who is expected to be the incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee – told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News that Republicans may use their subpoena power to expose the extent to which the FBI was involved in dictating the tech on censorship and manipulation of political commentary on Twitter. Speaking of the issue, Congressman Turner said:
“Now, it is my understanding from our contacts that we have had with the FBI that there are secret files that the FBI has of these contacts that they were having with social media and with mainstream media.”
He told Maria Bartiromo that the FBI has been resistant so far in granting Republicans’ requests to access those files.
“They have been resistant to this point, and we certainly intend to pursue subpoena power to expose the extent to which the FBI has been doing this.”
Congressman Turner also mentioned possible defunding of the federal agency to prevent “average Americans being impacted by FBI actions.”
Meanwhile, the extent to which the FBI was involved in getting Twitter to censor free speech from anti-establishment voices continues to be exposed via Twitter’s release of communication files. On Monday (December 19), new Twitter files showed that the FBI actually paid millions of dollars to Twitter to make it do what the agency was directing it.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported on an email from February 2021 by Twitter’s Safety, Content, & Law Enforcement (SCALE) team revealing the amount of money – which is $3.4 million – they received from the FBI since 2019 for processing the agency’s requests. One of those requests was suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 while Joe Biden was on the campaign trail.
Miranda Devine, a journalist at New York Post and Daily Telegraph, commented on the revelation saying that FBI used taxpayers’ money to censor Americans on Twitter.
Just a day earlier, New York Post had reported that the FBI repeatedly bullied Twitter executives in 2020 over keeping the agency updated on the platform’s handling of “state propaganda.” In the words of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, the FBI and Twitter’s relationship had a “master-canine quality,” and the two were in “constant and pervasive” contact.