Mar 21, 2024
3 mins read
3 mins read

Elon Musk Reveals FBI’s Twitter Portal Designed to Auto-Delete Communications, Suggesting Potential FOIA Violations
Elon Musk highlights in an interview the existence of an FBI portal on Twitter designed to auto-delete communications after two weeks, suggesting efforts to obscure government involvement in speech censorship and potential violations of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This revelation, coupled with the extensive government requests for account suspensions, including those from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, raises significant concerns about transparency and the scope of government oversight on social media platforms.

By yourNEWS Media Staff

Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), revealed in a conversation with Texas Lindsey that the FBI operated a special portal on Twitter designed to automatically erase all communications after two weeks. Musk suggested this function was likely implemented to conceal the agency’s questionable requests, effectively making it impossible for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) inquiries to uncover these communications after the deletion period.

According to Musk, this issue was not confined to a single government agency; multiple sectors including the State Department, the FBI, and Homeland Security were involved. He pointed out that the automatic deletion of such communications could be in violation of FOIA, given that it systematically removes potentially discoverable records.

Elon Musk: And this is coming from multiple parts of the government, from the State Department, the FBI, Homeland Security, from really many parts of the government. It wasn’t just one arm of the government. There was this FBI portal that auto-deleted all communications after two weeks. So we actually don’t know what was said there. In fact, this strike me as a FOIA violation, freedom of Information act violation, because you shouldn’t be able to delete, orderly delete things after two weeks.

There’s a little known agency in the State Department called the Global Engagement Center, which most people have never heard of, but they might have been the single worst offender because they demanded the suspension of, at one point, over 250,000 accounts, which I think all Twitter largely complied with. But the suspension demands were so broad that they accidentally demanded a suspension of a journalist on CNN and an elected Canadian politician. It was just an incredibly broad sweep.

 

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