by Laurel Duggan

The vast majority of Americans support criminal prosecution for Twitter employees who worked with the U.S. government to suppress tweets in a possible violation of the First Amendment, a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll found.

Elon Musk’s ongoing Twitter Files have revealed that the platform engaged in widespread censorship in partnership with the FBI, which pressured the company to share private information with the agency outside of normal legal avenues and to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story implicating President Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business dealings. Among respondents, 74% believed the Twitter employees who worked with the FBI to censor users should be criminally prosecuted, and only 26% thought they shouldn’t, according to the poll.

Former FBI employees had their own private Slack channel at Twitter, and the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million for its employees fulfilling its requests, according to internal Twitter documents published by author Michael Shellenberger. The FBI and Twitter worked together closely in the run-up to the 2020 election, and the FBI promised “no impediments to information sharing” between the two groups in a September 2020 meeting between social media executives and intelligence community members.

Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

28. Baker wasn't the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter. Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy.

5:42 PM ∙ Dec 19, 2022

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Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD

29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.

5:44 PM ∙ Dec 19, 2022

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Most respondents believed that Twitter had been shadow-banning users (64%), that the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story was based on bias (61%), that Twitter officials worked with the government to censor dissenting COVID-19 opinions (69%) and that Twitter employees violated the First Amendment by censoring users at the behest of the federal government (69%), the poll found.

The poll surveyed 1,851 respondents from December 14-15.

Twitter did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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