FTC’S TWIT JOB
Musk ‘squeezed’
The Federal Trade Commission has sent more than a dozen letters to Twitter since Elon Musk took over as CEO, demanding a broad array of internal communications — including the names of all reporters who got access to the so-called “Twitter Files,” House Republicans revealed Tuesday.
The FTC demands were revealed in a report by the GOP-led Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which accused the agency of waging “an aggressive campaign to harass” the social-media giant and making requests that “have no basis in the FTC’s statutory mission and appear to be the result of partisan pressure to target Twitter and silence Musk.”
One request, according to the report, sought “[e]very single internal communication ‘relating to Elon Musk,’ by any Twitter personnel — including communications sent or received by Musk — not limited by subject matter, since the day Musk bought the company.”
At the center of the report is a Dec. 13 letter in which the FTC demanded that the company identify “all journalists and other members of the media to whom [Musk has] granted any type of access to the Company’s internal communications, resources, internal documents and/or files.”
After Musk took over the firm, he allowed select journalists to view internal communications, later reported on in a series dubbed the “Twitter Files.”
‘Attacking’ speech
The reports revealed dozens of FBI and government employees actively sought to censor users for their viewpoints, including for obvious jokes and criticism of Democrats.
The FTC letter namechecked journalists involved in producing the “Twitter Files” reports, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and Abigail Shrier — and asked if Twitter conducted background checks on them and whether they were able to access users’ direct messages.
“There is no reason the FTC needs to know every journalist with whom Twitter was engaging,” the committee’s report said. “Even more troubling than the burden on the company, the FTC’s demand represents a government inquiry into First Amendment-protected activity.”
“While the FTC’s inquiry would be inappropriate in any setting, it is especially inappropriate in the context of journalists disclosing how social-media companies helped the government to censor online speech.”