State Department Colluded With Social Media to Censor Content, Twitter Files Show

From [HERE] The latest release of the “Twitter Files” includes evidence that the U.S. Department of State worked closely with social media platforms, despite denials by government officials.

Independent journalist Paul D. Thacker published the documents today in The Disinformation Chronicle. Thacker’s previous “Twitter Files” installments revealed evidence of collusion between the federal government, social media platforms and private actors to censor content.

According to Thacker, the newly released documents add to existing evidence that the Biden administration worked closely with platforms like Twitter to censor content and influence social media content moderation policies.

“These emails [call] into sharp question claims by Democrats and their allies in the media that Twitter did not collude with federal agencies and was free from Biden administration pressure to make its own censorship decisions,” Thacker wrote.

According to the new “Twitter Files,” the Indian government pressured Twitter to censor accounts in 2021, including accounts critical of India’s COVID-19 policies.

This led Twitter to hire Albright Stonebridge, a lobbying firm “closely aligned with the Biden administration” — and previously funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — to pressure the State Department for assistance.

“Around this same timeframe, emails show that the State Department was pressuring Twitter to censor accounts they didn’t like,” Thacker wrote.

Thacker told The Defender the Indian government “was going after Twitter for not suspending accounts critical of the government, and there were threats that Twitter employees in the country would be arrested.”

The State Department then began “working closely with Twitter to deal with the company’s problems in India,” Twitter’s third-largest market, at the same time that it “was leaning on Twitter to censor certain accounts and topics,” Thacker said.

The new “Twitter Files” release is the latest in a series of installments, based on internal company records, that suggest “close coordination between U.S. government officials and social media companies to censor viewpoints and accounts — often those that opposed Biden administration policies,” Thacker wrote. [MORE]