In a recent interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Twitter CEO Elon Musk revealed just how much access the government had to Twitter ultimately leading to the question “Would that include people’s DM’s?”
After Musk acquired Twitter and brought it back from the brink of bankruptcy, he has started to uncover the full extent that government agencies had within Twitter. He has revealed that the FBI had been working with Big Tech in order to control certain information by either censoring things that they didn’t want discussed or outright suppressing damaging stories from spreading.
“The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind. I was not aware of that,” Musk stated in the interview.
Carlson asked “Would that include people’s DMs?” These are direct messages between users with the expectation of privacy.
Musk without hesitation confirmed, “Yes.”
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee has launched an investigation into Twitter and Big Tech in order to find out how much the government colluded with these companies. This investigation led to the compilation of the “Twitter Files” and how the weaponization of the federal government can be used against its citizens.
Journalist Matt Taibbi was granted access by the committee to report to the public what was uncovered.
“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to…use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control,” Taibbi Explained. “Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
“We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same,” he said.
After his report became public, this independent journalist visited by an IRS agent with incredibly suspicious timing, who claimed his tax returns for 2018 and 2021 were rejected. This occurred during his testimony before Congress.
After hearing of this, Musk tweeted “That’s very odd,” and we will hear more tomorrow in Carlson’s two part interview with Musk on how deep the government actually went to spy on its citizens.