Twitter resisted requests to blacklist accounts from outside groups that receive funding from the federal government, according to internal company documents released Thursday.
The social platform was sent a list of 40,000 accounts alleged to be Hindu nationalists by the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab in June 2021. Twitter reviewed the accounts and found them to be Americans and not fake accounts run by foreign countries, according to internal communications published Thursday by Matt Taibbi, a journalist who has been given access to the documents under the ownership of Elon Musk.
The incident is notable because DFRLab typically receives funding from the Global Engagement Center. This government organization helped fund efforts to fight foreign "disinformation" and "propaganda" but ended up restricting the speech of conservative news websites.
Twitter failed to find evidence that the listed accounts were Hindu nationalists. "I spot-checked a number of these accounts, and virtually all appear to be real people," Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, said in an email to other executives.
GEC associates and Twitter communicated regularly, including transferring information about alleged misinformation on the platform. The social platform received the info but regularly disagreed with the GEC-affiliated groups' analysis of users.
The details echo previous findings in other releases of internal Twitter documents, referred to as the "Twitter Files," in which Twitter executives said they failed to find evidence of Russian interference, as had been alleged, in a social media push to release a January 2018 memo by former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) claiming the FBI had "politically motivated or questionable sources" in the Russiagate hearings.
Twitter also received pressure from the office of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to take down accounts that promoted what they called "QAnon"-esque ideas. The company declined on multiple occasions.
The GEC provided more than $100,000 in 2022 to the Global Disinformation Index, a group that compiled a "dynamic exclusion list" of conservative websites that it alleges are the most prominent misinformation peddlers.
Previous versions of the "Twitter Files" address efforts by both former President Donald Trump's administration and President Joe Biden's administration to quell COVID-19 misinformation, including communications with Twitter. They also detailed communications between the FBI and Twitter regarding foreign threats, the company's handling of Hunter Biden's laptop, and the decision to remove Trump from the platform.
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Vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson was given access to the files in January. He released his first edition in January, claiming that then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb pressured Twitter to censor.