UK Edition
The FBI routinely asked Twitter executives to silence satirical and joke accounts on the pretext of fighting disinformation and election interference, it has been claimed following the latest alleged leak of the social media company's internal communications.
Matt Taibbi, one of a handful of reporters to whom Elon Musk appears to have been granted access to Twitter's corporate records and emails, posted a series of screenshots of emails that he said showed "constant and pervasive" contacts between Twitter and the FBI, "as if it were a subsidiary" of the Federal agency.
He did not say how he obtained access to the files.
Mr Musk announced the latest publication with a Tweet reading "KABOOM" followed by five emojis of explosions.
The most recent claims revolve around an alleged more than 150 emails between the FBI and Yoel Roth, a former Twitter Trust and Safety chief.
Mr Taibbi claimed those emails included specific requests to review and potentially ban individual accounts, and that an 80-agent FBI social media task force called the FTIF regularly handed Twitter lists of accounts to review for possible violations of Twitter's terms of service, citing screen shots of several such emails.
Many accounts 'clearly posting jokes'
In one email sent in November this year, the National Election Command Post, an FBI operation tasked with combating disinformation designed to interfere with elections, asked the FBI's San Francisco field office to coordinate with Twitter on reviewing 25 accounts for terms of service violations.
The same email asked Twitter to preserve user data for possible future investigations and "voluntarily provide" location data.
Mr Taibbi claimed many of the accounts were clearly posting jokes or satire rather than malicious misinformation.
The tranche is the sixth publication of so-called "Twitter files" since Mr Musk took over the social media giant in October.
Mr Musk, the billionaire behind Tesla and SpaceX, earlier this month began teasing the publication of information he called “the Twitter Files,” as part of a series of recent tweets claiming to defend free speech and accusing the company’s former management, and advertisers such as Apple, of opposing it.
Mr Musk appears to have granted three reporters: Mr Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger - access to large portions of internal Twitter communications and documents.