The Federal Trade Commission has sent more than a dozen letters to Twitter since Elon Musk took over as CEO demanding a wide range of internal communications — including the names of any reporters who had access to the so-called “Twitter Files,” House Republicans revealed. Tuesday.
The FTC’s demands were revealed in a report by the GOP-led federal government’s select subcommittee on militarization, which accused the agency of waging “an aggressive campaign to harass” the social media giant and to make claims that “have no basis in the FTC’s statutory mission and appear to be the result of partisan pressure to target Twitter and silence Musk.”
The 112-page report claims the FTC, charged with protecting consumers from anti-competitive, deceptive, or unfair business practices, flooded Twitter with “more than 350 specific requests” in less than three months after Musk acquired the company in the part of a $44 billion hostile takeover. last October.
One request, according to the report, was for “[e]a very unique internal communication “relating to Elon Musk”, by any Twitter staffer – including communications sent or received by Musk – not limited by subject, from the day Musk bought the company.
Another asked for details about the creation of Twitter Blue, Musk’s controversial subscription plan for verified accounts.
At the center of the report is a Dec. 13 letter in which the FTC demanded that the company identify “all reporters and other members of the media to whom [Musk has] granted any type of access to internal communications, Resources, internal documents and/or Company files”.
After Musk took over the company, he allowed some reporters to view internal communications, which were later reported in a series called “Twitter Files.”
Reports revealed that dozens of FBI and government employees were actively seeking to censor users for their views, including for obvious jokes and criticism of Democrats.
The “Twitter Files” also showed that the company was deleting tweets from right-wing commentators and COVID-lockdown advocates by “blacklisting” their accounts, limiting the visibility of their tweets.
The December 13 letter verified the names of several journalists involved in producing the “Twitter Files” reports, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Abigail Shrier – and asked both if Twitter had conducted background checks on them and if they were able to access direct messages from users.
“There’s no reason the FTC needs to know every reporter Twitter has engaged with,” the committee report said. “Even more troubling than the burden on the company, the FTC’s request represents a government investigation into activities protected by the First Amendment. This is a federal government agency requiring a private company to reveal the names of journalists engaged in reporting on matters of public interest, including possible government misconduct.
“While the FTC’s investigation would be inappropriate in any context, it is particularly inappropriate in the context where journalists are disclosing how social media companies helped the government censor online speech.”
The panel report also notes that at least one letter from the FTC pressed Twitter to explain why former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, hired by Twitter in 2020 to be its deputy general counsel, was fired weeks later. Musk’s takeover.
In December, Musk tweeted that Baker had been fired for secretly checking internal documents related to Twitter’s removal of The Post’s bombshell stories about Hunter Biden before giving them to reporters.
In tweets mardiMusk called the FTC’s Twitter investigation a “disgraceful case of weaponizing a government agency for political purposes and suppressing the truth!”
He added that the agency’s interest in the company’s communications with reporters amounted to “a serious attack on the Constitution by a federal agency.”
