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Employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation regularly contacted workers at Twitter to notify them of accounts that "may" constitute violations of the company's terms of service, new Twitter Files released Friday reveal.Substack writer and journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted several internal emails between Twitter workers and FBI employees as part of the sixth installment of the Twitter Files. "Hello Twitter contacts, FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter's Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy," one email FBI employee wrote in an email on Nov. 10, 2022.The email would go on to list several Twitter accounts that might violate the social media company's terms of service.ELON MUSK CLASHES WITH 'TWITTER FILES' JOURNO BARI WEISS AFTER SHE CRITICIZES JOURNALIST SUSPENSIONS The seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is seen outside of its headquarters in Washington, DC on August 15, 2022. - Threats against the FBI and law enforcement agencies have increased following the search and seizure of top secret documents from former US president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate where he resides.  (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)In response, a Twitter employee said that three of the

from the do-I-sense-some-worry? dept Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It’s how it always goes. Remember Parler? They promised that they would moderate “based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States” (a nonsensical statement for a variety of reasons, including that the FCC does not regulate websites). Then, as soon as people started abusing that on the site, they suddenly came out with, um, new rules, including no “posting pictures of your fecal matter.” Or how about Gettr? Founded by a former Trump spokesperson, and funded by a sketchy Chinese billionaire, it promised to be a “free speech” haven. Then it had to ban a bunch of white nationalists for, you know, doing white nationalist shit. Then, suddenly, it started banning anyone who mentioned that the sketchy billionaire funder might actually be a Chinese spy. And then there’s Truth Social. It’s also supposed to be all about free speech, right? That’s what its pitch man, Donald Trump, keeps insisting. Except, an actual study that compared its content moderation to other sites found that Truth Social’s moderation was far more aggressive and arbitrary than any other site. Among the forbidden

BERLIN (AP) — A German official who won a defamation case against Twitter this week dedicated his legal victory to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert targeted by the microblogging site’s new owner, Elon Musk.A Frankfurt regional court ruled Wednesday that Twitter has to remove false or defamatory tweets about Michael Blume, who is the southwest German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg’s commissioner against antisemitism. Crucially, the court made clear that the order applies not only to identical posts but also to any that are substantially similar.Blume told The Associated Press on Thursday that he wanted to dedicate the successful outcome of his case to Fauci, to send a signal that Twitter “can’t simply let people be trolled and stalked for years.”“When even Elon Musk himself lets trolls loose on a scientist, then that’s disturbing,” he said. “I believe that’s just wrong.”Musk recently called for Fauci, a leading figure in the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to be prosecuted. His tweet was warmly applauded by users opposed to the U.S. pandemic response, with some posting images of Fauci wearing prison garb or in a coffin.Blume had taken Twitter to court in Germany after users of the platform

Just a day after jet tracker Jack Sweeney made the jump to Mastodon post-Twitter ban, Mastodon’s official Twitter account has been suspended. Mastodon, a fast-growing decentralized social network that aims to recreate Twitter’s best parts while nixing its mammoth-sized issues, has increasingly been touted as the go-to alternative to Twitter. Since taking over Twitter in a $44 billion deal, Elon Musk has managed to embroil the social media giant in a series of controversial firings, bans, and reinstatements. Notably, the free-speech champion suspended Ye from Twitter after the rapper tweeted out an image of a swastika intertwined with a Star of David, while also bring back a burgeoning legion of neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and bigots including Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene back on the app. Trending As celebrities and every day users wave Twitter goodbye amid the drastic changes, Musk (whose reported affinity for booting accounts who annoy him is now a regular theme) has suspended competitor Mastodon’s Twitter account. The move is in marked contrast to Musk’s stance as a “free speech absolutist” who has frequently tweeted like-minded catchphrases like “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” and “Transparency is the key to trust,” yet doesn’t share those same beliefs when it

“Twitter”, Elon Musk wrote on December 10th, on the website he owns and runs, “is both a social-media company and a crime scene”. Mr Musk’s crime scene is described in the “Twitter Files”, a set of screenshots of the social-media company’s internal communications. They were taken mostly from Slack, a workplace messaging app, and given to three freelance journalists by Twitter’s current staff, at Mr Musk’s direction. They relate to moderation decisions taken by Twitter before Mr Musk bought the company. The “Files” have been published in a hard-to-follow stream of at least 225 tweets over the past two weeks, the most recent set emerging on December 12th.To understand what is important about the Files, it helps to be clear about what they are not. They are not a systematic examination of Twitter’s content-moderation choices. This has not stopped Mr Musk, and the journalists to whom he has given access, claiming that the files offer damning evidence of Twitter’s institutional bias against Republicans, driven by a staff who wanted to censor ideas and people who made them uncomfortable.Perhaps the most important thing the Files do is demolish the notion that a centrally controlled entity can write down a set of

Mr. Musk says real-time posting of people’s locations violates doxing policies; he previously said he wouldn’t suspend the @ElonJet accountUpdated Dec. 14, 2022 8:56 pm ETTwitter Inc. said it will suspend accounts dedicated to sharing someone’s live location, after one account in particular had gained traction for tracking the private jet of Elon Musk, the social-media giant’s new owner. A message Wednesday morning on the @ElonJet account, operated by Jack Sweeney, a student at the University of Central Florida, said the account was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules. The account had about 500,000 followers.

Dec. 13, 2022Updated: Dec. 13, 2022 5:20 p.m. Twitter Headquarters, 1355 Market Street in San Francisco., on Thursday, November 17, 2022. The company has reportedly stopped paying rent on all of its office space.Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle Twitter has stopped paying rent on all of its office space, including its San Francisco headquarters, as the company seeks to renegotiate leases, the New York Times reported. The nonpayment is one of the efforts by owner Elon Musk to cut more costs, which have included laying off cafeteria workers and, according to the Times, potentially not paying severance to former employees, which could open up Twitter to more legal action. Ex-workers are already suing and seeking arbitration over the company’s mass layoffs last month. Continued nonpayment of rent raises the possibility that Twitter could be evicted from offices. Twitter’s headquarters at 1355 Market St. has been at the center of Musk’s takeover drama, with 998 local employees resigning or being laid off, according to state filings. Roughly 5,000 workers have left the company since Oct. 30. San Francisco officials are also investigating allegations that Twitter illegally converted office space into bedrooms. Last week, a building inspector found two beds on the eighth

Jack Dorsey has responded to Elon Musk’s purported exposé known as “The Twitter Files,” and he’s done so in an essay that’s mercifully not written as a Twitter thread. In it, the social network’s co-founder and former CEO says that he believes the company has nothing to hide, contrary to how the files have been presented. He also says he wishes the information had been “released Wikileaks-style,” and asks that the internet not go after Twitter employees for perceived slights. Of course, his article also promotes his own social networking protocol and Bitcoin.Dorsey’s response comes after Elon Musk has spent over a week promoting five selective document releases known as the Twitter Files, which show internal documents, Slack logs, and emails around things like Twitter’s removal of Donald Trump following the January 6th riots, moderation “blacklists,” and how the site dealt with news about Hunter Biden’s laptop. The threads, and Musk’s promotion of them, have largely taken on a conspiratorial tone, painting the old Twitter leadership and employees as being in cahoots with the government to silence Twitter users. Dorsey clearly doesn’t agree, saying his his post that “mistakes were made” at Twitter, but that he believes the company had

New York CNN  —  A series of internal Twitter documents shared on the social media platform Monday offer a glimpse into internal debates among some of the company’s employees ahead of its decision to ban then-President Donald Trump following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The documents — shared by journalist Bari Weiss as the latest installment of the so-called Twitter Files — appear to show that there was at least some debate among various employees about whether Trump’s final tweets violated the social network’s policies prohibiting inciting violence. But they stop short of showing that Twitter ignored its own rules in implementing the ban. Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, cheered and promoted the release of the internal company documents on Monday and attempted to paint the former Twitter leadership’s decision as politically motivated. In a tweet, he suggested that the former president “didn’t violate the rules” and that the decision was made at the behest of “activist employees.” The comments come after Musk made the controversial decision last month to reverse the platform’s ban of Trump following a poll of his Twitter followers, after initially saying he would consult a panel of experts on the decision.

Elon Musk’s Twitter has dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the advisory group of around 100 independent civil, human rights and other organizations that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.The council had been scheduled to meet with Twitter representatives Monday night. But Twitter informed the group via email that it was disbanding it shortly before the meeting was to take place, according to multiple members. The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation. The email said Twitter was “reevaluating how best to bring external insights” and the council is “not the best structure to do this.”“Our work to make Twitter a safe, informative place will be moving faster and more aggressively than ever before and we will continue to welcome your ideas going forward about how to achieve this goal,” said the email, which was signed “Twitter.”The volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how Twitter could better combat hate, harassment and other harms but didn’t have any decision-making authority and didn’t review specific content disputes. Shortly after buying