Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Ever since he took control of Twitter in October 2022, the microblogging platform has remained in news for a variety of reasons, the latest one is: its new owner, Elon Musk, “Chief Twit”, has said a US Government agency ordered the suspension of 250,000 Twitter accounts, including those of journalists.
According to media reports, Musk, on Tuesday, disclosed the US Government demanded the suspension of 250,000 Twitter accounts, including those of journalists and Canadian officials.
He revealed this while sharing the latest round of “Twitter Files”, which were made public by a journalist, Matt Taibbi.
The new release of internal Twitter correspondence details the relationship between the social media company and government agencies, the media reported.
Taibbi revealed the US Government’s mounting and endless pressure on Twitter to work hand-in-hand with Congress to hunt for Russian meddling on the platform, reported Fox News.
The Global Engagement Center (GEC)—which Taibbi described as “a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department” –went public by releasing a report to the media with a list of “suspect accounts” it said were “Russian personas and proxies.”
However, Fox News reported that Twitter’s subsequent task force to hunt Russian influence on the platform showed “no coordinated” effort and mostly “lone-wolf” accounts with low ad spending.
These accounts were said to be based on criteria like “describing the coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,” blaming “research conducted at the Wuhan Institute (of Virology),” and “attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,” Taibbi said.
The GEC report included a list of accounts that followed “two or more” Chinese diplomatic accounts and was 250,000 names long.
Under the US Government’s pressure, Twitter suspended these accounts, some questioning the pandemic’s origins, and the accounts that followed “two or more” Chinese diplomatic accounts.
An earlier batch of the “Twitter Files” showed former US President Donald Trump was de-platformed after pressure from the microblogging platform’s employees.
Since Musk became the CEO, Twitter has undergone many changes. Recently, he announced a change in the User Interface of the platform’s “Bookmarks” feature.
He hinted the upcoming changes would make it “easy to create folders to bookmark tweets into various categories.”
Earlier, Musk announced “significant backend server architecture changes.” The new Twitter Policy will not only follow science but also question science, reasonably, he said.
“(The) new Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science,” Musk tweeted.
“Anyone who says that criticizing them is doubting science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist,” he added in his initial policy statement.