An Irish Twitter Files? Gript Garda Snooping Hints at Wider Espionage at X’s European HQ

A sloppy legal attempt by An Garda Siochána to access Gript’s private X messages indicates the ease with which Irish authorities and other actors may have once had free reign to spy on Twitter users before Elon Musk’s takeover of the company and its Dublin HQ.

The ominous revelation came to light last week when Gript revealed that Gardaí had approached the publication under the terms of Article 63 of the Criminal Justice Act 1994, meant to target narcotics trafficking, demanding access to the website’s X account and private messages therein.

One of just under a dozen accounts where similar demands were made, Gardaí cloaked their requests under the guise of investigations into the Newtownmountkennedy agitation last year over a planned direct provision centre in the area resulting in riots with the request flatly refused by Gript’s editorial board.

Coming three years after the revelations of the global “Twitter Files,” which documented extensive co-operation between various governments, intelligence agencies, and third-party NGOs with the social media giant, one wonders if the public can read between the lines at the significance of the request to Gript.

Dublin’s Silicon Docklands was the apex of 2010s woke capitalism. A symbiotic relationship existed between Twitter, various (ex) state officials, and a variety of left-of-centre NGOs with this network cemented during the Same Sex Marriage campaign of 2015, which acted as a petri dish for social media propogandising. 

The Burkean has previously documented indications that Twitter’s progressive management may have snooped on users courtesy of off-the-cuff remarks by Ruairí McKiernan, with the rumour mill proactive former company employees following the mass layoffs enacted by Musk’s takeover. 

It is alleged by many within and without this Twitter nexus that spying on political dissidents was a regular feature at the Fenian Street HQ of the company, often using left-leaning NGOs as a conduit for the Irish state. Not just a regular branch office but the EU headquarters of the social media organ, the discrete relationship provided many officials in the Twitter milieu with substantial advantages in navigating domestic Irish politics.

While there is no indication of their personal involvement, prominent domestic Irish elites such as RTE’s former frontman Mark Little financially benefited from their position within the company acting as intermediaries between Twitter, the Irish state and a complex transatlantic relationship now firmly in the process of being undone by the new Trump administration.

The fact that An Garda Siochána only now requires formal court proceedings to access Twitter’s treasure trove highlights the potential that such an avenue was at their disposal throughout the 2010s, a sentiment buoyed on by the confidence of a prominent insider figure like Ruairí McKiernan.

Liasons between Mark Zuckerberg himself and various NGO apparatchiks was a regular feature during the late 2010s, with an eye on crushing patriotic dissident around the migration issues further strengtehning the conjecture.

Ireland is a small political ecosystem and one to which Twitter in its real hayday in Dublin was firmly wired into. Perhaps an opaque mystery for now, a future Irish Twitter Files may lift the lid on a world of intrigue between domestic actors and the social media giant as the site’s EU HQ moonlighted as an effective hub of discrete intelligence gathering.