Who's that sliding into your Twitter DMs? Is it the federal government? Well, according to Elon Musk, who took over the social media platform last year, government bureaucrats were routinely taking a close look at users' content.
Thanks to the Twitter Files, a collaboration between Elon Musk and independent journalists, as well as the Facebook Files, my own investigative project for Reason, we now know that social media companies constantly faced pressure to censor speech—and that pressure was coming from the government. The State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and even the White House all targeted legitimate online speech. Federal law enforcement agents flagged tweets and posts for deletion under the guise of protecting national security.
