Twitter was asked to suspend 250k accounts linked to Wuhan labs, Russian by US government

New Delhi, Jan 04: Twitter boss, Elon Musk said that the US government demanded that 250k Twitter accounts be suspended, including those belonging to journalists and Canadian officials.

While sharing the latest round of Twitter Files, which were made public by journalist Matt Taibbi.

"US govt agency demanded suspension of 250k accounts, including journalists & Canadian officials!" Musk said in a tweet. Taibbi revealed that the US government's mounting and endless pressure on Twitter to work hand in hand with the Congress to hunt for Russian meddling on Twitter, Fox News also said.

Under the pressure of the US government, Twitter went on to suspend nearly 250,000 accounts, including those tied to journalists, some questioning the pandemic's origins and accounts that followed two or more Chinese diplomatic accounts.

Taibbi went on to describe The Global Engagement Centre as a fledging analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department. He went public by releasing a report to the media with a list of suspect accounts, which it said were Russian personas and proxies.

Fox News reported that Twitter's subsequent task force to hunt Russian influence on the platform showed no coordinated effort and mostly lone-wolf accounts with low ad spends.

An earlier batch of Twitter Files showed that former president Donald Trump was de-platformed after pressure from Twitter's employees.

After Musk took over Twitter, there have been many changes in the platform. Recently he announced a change in the user interface of the Bookmark's feature.

He hinted that the changes would make it easy to create folders to bookmark tweets in various categories. He had earlier announced significant backend server architecture changes on the platform.

Musk had said that the new Twitter policy will not only follow science, but also question science reasonably.

"New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science," Musk said in a tweet.

Anyone who says that criticising them is doubting science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist, Musk said in tweet.