Clare Lopez, former career operations officer with the CIA and head of Lopez Liberty LLC, decried government intelligence agencies using Twitter as a proxy to suppress speech.
It's "unconstitutional," Lopez said on Newsmax on Tuesday while appearing on "American Agenda."
Speaking on the revelations seen in the "Twitter Files," Lopez said, "this is about social media platforms, and it's obviously not just Twitter, it's going to be ... Facebook, Instagram, and others."
Lopez added that the intelligence agencies were using these Big Tech companies as a facade "to disguise the involvement of the United States government in suppression of First Amendment-free speech rights; that is the problem; that is unconstitutional."
Commenting on the mainstream media's coverage of the Twitter Files, journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted that "for the crime of reporting that the U.S. Security State agencies are heavily involved in Big Tech's censorship regime, and for confessing that he found this deeply disturbing, liberals have spent a full week saying that [Matt Taibbi] has mental health problems and needs therapy."
Responding to Greenwald, new Twitter owner Elon Musk pointed out that it's not just Twitter involved in state-sponsored censorship but all of Big Tech.
"Most people don't appreciate the significance of the point Matt was making: *Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government. Google frequently makes links disappear, for example," Musk said.
Taibbi's earlier point, to which Musk refers, outlines that "the government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government."