Twitter Files: Hindu nationalists were targeted by American think tank to be censored
A US think tank’s “disinformation lab” sent at least 40,000 Twitter accounts to Twitter in 2021, accusing them of “engaging in inauthentic behaviour in support of Hindu nationalism,” according to American journalist Matt Taibbi, who is releasing the “Twitter Files” in collaboration with Twitter founder Elon Musk.
Twitter looked up the 40,000 names and discovered that they were “actual people,” primarily Americans who had never been to India and who were not Hindu.
Indian Twitter users are outraged by the revelation, especially since the accounts were sent by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, an organisation that works to expose fake news and human rights violations.
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the US Department of Defense are just two of the organisations that support the Atlantic Council. The Global Engagement Center was established by the US government in 2011 to expose and combat foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies or security of the US and its allies.
According to Taibbi, the DFRLab was a “secret contractor” working for the Global Engagement Center.
The Twitter Files are many internal documents that Musk’s team has now acquired and which disclose decisions and discussions that took place at Twitter prior to Musk. On December 2, Taibbi began disseminating the Twitter files.
The first half of the narrative detailed how US political parties had allegedly pressured Twitter to delete accounts and how the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop was being suppressed by Twitter.
