For all we know it could be "you can play nicely and remove it when we tell you to "look into it", or we will look further into your company"

That’s possible but you’d expect to see some sign of it: internal emails or messages, legal advice, etc. when those threats were made or guidelines from the legal department about what things the regular trust and safety people can’t ignore.

What’s telling is that Musk’s people can’t find anything like that. If this was happening you’d think there’d be at least one example where someone is saying they have to yank something even though it’s not in violation of the rules. Instead, what we see is bending over backwards to keep people like Trump or Raichik from having the rules applied to them, with no mention of government pressure to yank them.

No, you wouldn't expect anything like that at all. Nobody passing kindergarten would write down something so blatantly illegal.

First, you’d think the same thing about almost any crime but there’s a long history of that happening.

More importantly, however, as I explained you’d see the presence of that policy even if they managed to keep the conspiracy perfectly. There’d have been cases where something didn’t meet the rules for being banned but someone overruled them to do it anyway, unexplained policy changes following a private meeting, someone setting out hard lines for the moderators, etc. Twitter had a ton of people doing moderation and there’s no way you get that many people to work on a daily basis without stated policies or someone accidentally saying something they knew, or that not a single one of them wouldn’t have gone public or talked to Musk.

That's passing into "ignore your lying eyes and read between the lines" territory, which isn't an argument from evidence but an argument from political ideology.

Just reaching out in the name of FBI, tacitly threatens repercussions. The government can certainly make life difficult for the most law-abiding company or citizen if you get on the wrong side of it. And everyone knows this.