Twitter chief Elon Musk on Tuesday disclosed that US Government demanded the suspension of 250k Twitter accounts, including those belonging to journalists and Canadian officials
Washington: Twitter chief Elon Musk on Tuesday disclosed that US Government demanded the suspension of 250k Twitter accounts, including those belonging to journalists and Canadian officials, reported Fox News.
He made the revelation while sharing the latest round of โTwitter Files,โ which were made public by the journalist Matt Taibbi.
โUS govt agency demanded suspension of 250k accounts, including journalists & Canadian officials!โ tweeted Musk.
The new release of internal Twitter correspondence details the relationship between the social media company and government agencies.
Taibbi revealed the US governmentโs mounting and endless pressure on Twitter to work hand-in-hand with Congress to hunt for Russian meddling on the platform, reported Fox News.
The Global Engagement Center โ described by Taibbi as โa fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Departmentโ โ went public by releasing a report to media with a list of โsuspect accountsโ which it said were โRussian personas and proxies.โ
However, Twitterโs subsequent task force to hunt Russian influence on the platform showed โno coordinatedโ effort and mostly โlone-wolfโ accounts with low ad spends, reported Fox News.
These accounts were described based on criteria like โโDescribing the coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,โ โblaming โresearch conducted at the Wuhan institute,โ and โattributing the appearance of the virus to the CIAโ,โ according to Taibbi.
The GEC report included a list of accounts that followed โtwo or moreโ Chinese diplomatic accounts and was 250,000 names long.
Under U.S. government pressure, Twitter went on to suspend nearly 250,000 accounts, including accounts tied to journalists, some questioning the pandemicโs origins, and accounts that followed โtwo or moreโ Chinese diplomatic accounts, reported Fox News.
Notably, an earlier batch of the โTwitter Filesโ showed former President Donald Trump was de-platformed after pressure from the social media companyโs employees.
Off lately, there have been many changes on Twitter after Musk became the CEO of the microblogging site. Recently, he announced a change in the User Interface of the platformโs โBookmarksโ feature.
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Musk hinted that the upcoming changes would make it โEasy to create folders to bookmark tweets into various categoriesโ.
Musk had earlier announced โSignificant backend server architecture changesโ on the platform.
The multi-billionaire announced earlier on that the new Twitter Policy will not only follow science but also question science, reasonably.
โNew Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science,โ Musk tweeted.
Musk stated, โAnyone who says that criticizing them is doubting science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist,โ in a follow-up tweet to his initial policy statement.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by HW News staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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