Twitter files reveal how FBI nudged firm to censor conservatives who alleged ... trends now

Federal authorities nudged Twitter's content moderation leader Yoel Roth to suppress the First Amendment rights of conservative commentators who pushed the idea of fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

The latest Twitter leaks from journalist Matt Taibbi also show the tech giant's staffers openly discussed banning former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee over a joke.

Taibbi tweeted a screengrab of a message between Twitter executives following a report from the FBI highlighting tweets from former Tippecanoe County, Indiana, official and Republican, John Basham. 

Basham alleged between two and 25 percent of ballots by mail were being rejected due to 'errors.'

He later tweeted: 'An unexpected number of registered Republicans are returning ballots,' while alleging the vote by mail had been a Democratic Party plan to gain an advantage in the election. 

Rather than remove the tweet, Roth opts to place a 'Learn how voting is safe and secure' label on the message. 

Roth, who quit his role at Twitter last month following Musk's takeover, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com on Saturday. 

Basham responded to the leak on Twitter saying: 'The Twitter files show that the FBI violated my First Amendment right by getting Twitter to take action against my tweets!

'The federal government has no right to determine what I may print or what I may say.' 

Musk defended the FBI in a tweet that read: 'With rare exception, the FBI seems to want to do the right thing.'

He did concede that under Twitter's former leaders the company 'operated as s Democratic Party activist machine.'

In another case, when former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee joked: 'Stood in the rain for hour to early vote today. When I got home I filled my stack of mail-in-ballots and then voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me! #Trump2020.'

On Slack, one Twitter staffer said: 'Putting this tweet on everyone's radar. This appears to be a joke but other people might believe it. Can I get your weigh in this?'

Roth says in the conversation: 'It's a joke' but also says that Huckabee is 'literally admitting in a tweet to a crime.' 

He went on: 'Yeah. I could see us taking action under 'misleading claims that cause confusion about the established laws, regulations, procedures, and methods of a civic process' but it's not one that we could really label in a useful way, so it's removal (of a stupid and ill-advised joke) or nothing.'

Roth added: 'I'm maybe inclined not to remove without a report from voting authorities given it's been a while since he tweeted it and virtually all of the replies I'm seeing are critical/counterspeech.'

While another staffer said: 'The thrust of the joke seems to be that mail-in ballots are for the fraudulent votes, so I could see an argument for our mail-in voting label, but absent confusion I'd also be inclined to leave the joke alone.'

Taibbi said that on October 8th, 2020, Twitter executives created a Slack chatroom devoted to high-profile moderation actions related to the election, which was then a month away.

He describes this group as a 'a smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs' that included Roth and Vijaya Gadde, Twitter's former head of legal, policy, and trust.

Taibbi claimed the group operated as 'a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.'

Screenshots show the group debating what to do about Trump's frequent attacks on absentee voting procedures in the lead-up to the election.

The latest thread also covered the months and weeks leading up to then-President Donald Trump's ban from Twitter following the Capitol riot, shedding light on the increasingly frenzied internal efforts within the social media site to

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