The Twitter Files pulled back the curtain on a massive election interference campaign. Now, the House Judiciary Committee is set to grill FBI Director Christopher Wray and others about how the government colluded with Big Tech to censor Americans’ free speech rights.
Twitter owner Elon Musk shocked the internet when he released secret internal documents to certain reporters who uncovered how the FBI, a plethora of other government agencies and leftist elites colluded with Twitter employees to swing the election for Joe Biden and protect him in his presidency. As MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider described it, “The FBI was conspiring and coercing Big Tech to do what it couldn’t legally on its own. They were censoring speech and silencing their political opposition.”
The Russiagate conspiracy theory is the prime and overwhelmingly repeated example throughout the Twitter Files. Politicians, an astounding number of government agencies, journalists and NGOs tasked Twitter with finding evidence to further their unsubstantiated claim that a massive coordinated Russian influence campaign was working to promote former President Donald Trump and his allies. Nearly all involved began with the debunked conclusion that Russian accounts inevitably existed and that if Twitter could not find them, it was because Twitter was negligent, not that the mass Russian influence campaign did not exist. Yet, Twitter stayed silent. Time and time again, company staff found that most of the accounts accused of being Russian or Russian-linked were in fact Americans — oftentimes conservatives and other freethinkers — exercising free speech.
Over time, censorship requests became the norm, and Twitter, for the most part, did as it was told. Russiagate laid the groundwork for censoring the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” as it too was labeled a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation. Russiagate also set the precedent for detailed networks of monitoring for so-called “problematic” accounts and requests to censor enormous numbers of users who disagreed with the official COVID-19 narrative. This thought-policing culture would later manifest in shadowbanning and the more visible censorship of accounts like: the Libs of TikTok account run by Chaya Raichik, podcast host and political commentator Dan Bongino, independent journalist Alex Berenson and former President Donald Trump.
The damning evidence of what The Twitter Files journalists have coined the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is staggering, but much of it would have remained hidden if Musk and a group of independent journalists had not released The Twitter Files.
MRC Free Speech America offers a summary of the Twitter Files and the information they uncovered to date. “This summary is an indispensable tool for anyone who will be following the House Judiciary Committee interrogation of FBI Director Christopher Wray,” Schneider said. “This serves as a resource and road map for everyone trying to understand particular violations or the larger context of the Twitter Files.”
Contractor and former MRC Free Speech America Staff Writer and Researcher Catherine Salgado contributed to this report.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.