TWITTER FILES:The Dis­gust­ing CIA Effort to Con­trol Social Media

The lat­est install­ment of The Twit­ter Files details how the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency (CIA) tar­get­ed Amer­i­cans’ free speech, in vio­la­tion of its restric­tion against domes­tic oper­a­tions.
The CIA is pro­hib­it­ed from spy­ing on or oth­er­wise secre­tive­ly tar­get­ing Amer­i­cans domes­ti­cal­ly, but that did not stop the agency from try­ing to co-opt Twit­ter and oth­er Big Tech plat­forms, pres­sur­ing them into spe­cif­ic cen­sor­ship activ­i­ties, inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist Michael Shel­len­berg­er report­ed.  In a thread on X (for­mer­ly Twit­ter), Shel­len­berg­er explained that indi­vid­u­als con­nect­ed to the U.S. Intel­li­gence Com­mu­ni­ty (IC), includ­ing the CIA, tried to “take over Twitter’s con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem” and “to de-plat­form, de-mon­e­tize, and excom­mu­ni­cate from the Inter­net entire­ly” any­one whom the IC claimed to be a threat.
One senior intel­li­gence ana­lyst told The Twit­ter Files jour­nal­ists how this could hap­pen: “There are deep cov­er peo­ple who are known to be CIA and who go to DARPA [Defen …