Officials from the bureau even asked for Twitter to hand over the locations from where the Twitter accounts were being operated, in a disturbing move that many saw as an attack on the First Amendment.
One user targeted by the FBI, who goes by @Lexitollah, said: 'Seems like prima facie 1A violation.'
Charlie Hurt, the opinion editor of The Washington Examiner, said it was 'a clear violation of the First Amendment.'
He told Tucker Carlson: 'They were actually opening up new back channels on platforms I've not heard of before, in order to keep in touch with one another.
'If this was happening during the Pentagon Papers, and we were seeing this level of collusion between the federal government and news, there would rightly be an outcry.'