A United States (US) government department and a government-funded think tank collectively flagged tens of thousands of tweets to Twitter for censorship.
This secret censorship was exposed in the latest batch of “Twitter Files” (internal communications from the previous Twitter regime that reveal numerous examples of clandestine censorship) which was published by journalist Matt Taibbi.
One of the entities that compiled lists of accounts for Twitter to censor was the Global Engagement Center (GEC) — a State Department entity that was established through a President Barack Obama Executive Order in March 2016.
Taibbi said that the GEC flagged 5,500 accounts to Twitter because it believed they were Chinese accounts engaging in “state-backed coordinated manipulation and 499 accounts to Twitter because they had been branded as “foreign disinformation.” Yet many of the accounts on the Chinese list were non-Chinese. Some were Western government accounts and three accounts were those of CNN employees based abroad.
Twitter also deduced that many of the accounts were not Chinese with then-Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth describing the list as “a total crock.”
Hellbound and Down 