The F.B.I./Biden/Twitter Files
justintrouble.substack.com
The F.B.I./Biden/Twitter Files
updated feb 19, 2023
C O N T E N T S
The Tip of the Iceberg - Facebook Colludes With the Feds
Leading Up to The Twitter Files
Elon’s Intro
The Twitter Files Part 1
Side Notes
The Twitter Files Supplimental 1
Lee Fang Tweets
The Twitter Files 2
Elon Interlude 1
The Twitter Files 3
Note to Readers on the "Twitter Files"
Elon Interlude 2
The Twitter Files 4
The Twitter Files 5
Matt Taibbi Discusses the Twitter Files & More
The Twitter Files 6
Side Notes 2
The Twitter Files Supplimental 2
Side Notes 3
The Twitter Files 7
The Twitter Files 8
The F.B.I.’s Pathetic Denial
Satire About Former CEO Parag Agrawal Being Arrested for Child Porn Misaken for Real News
The New York Times Asks For Access to Twitter Files
The Twitter Files: Twitter & “Other Government Agencies”
More
Twitter Files Thread - The Spies Who Loved Twitter
FBI Buried the Biden Laptop
The Twitter Files: How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate
The Twitter Files Elon Musk Slams CISA Censorship Network as ‘Propaganda Platform’
More
The Twitter Files - Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”
REEEEEE!
#Pfizer Files
Twitter Banning of Scientists, Doctors, Journalists & Activists
White House Pressured Facebook to Censor Accurate Info on Covid ‘Vaccines’
The Twitter Files 14
The Twitter Files - Supplemental - More Adam Schiff Ban Requests, and "Deamplification"
Updated Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary
The Twitter Files 15
More Stuff
The Twitter Files 16
Media Reporting on the Twitter Files
Perhapse the best summary of this matter can be found in…
Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary - For those who haven't been following, a compilation of one-paragraph summaries of all the Twitter Files threads by every reporter. With links and notes on key revelations
by Matt Taibbi
On October 27, 2021, CISA, a subsection of the DHS published this video…
The Tip of the Iceberg - Facebook Colludes With The Feds
On October 31, 2022, The Intercept published Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang. This would be referred to as, “just the tip of a much larger iceberg” by The FFO as we’ll see below. At any rate, The Intercept included the following in the report,
Key Takeaways
Though DHS shuttered its controversial Disinformation Governance Board, a strategic document reveals the underlying work is ongoing.
DHS plans to target inaccurate information on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
Facebook created a special portal for DHS and government partners to report disinformation directly.
The work is primarily done by CISA, a DHS sub-agency tasked with protecting critical national infrastructure.
DHS, the FBI, and several media entities are having biweekly meetings as recently as August.
DHS considered countering disinformation relating to content that undermines trust in financial systems and courts.
The FBI agent who primed social media platforms to take down the Hunter Biden laptop story continued to have a role in DHS policy discussions.
Leading Up to The Twitter Files
On November 9, 2022, The Foundation for Freedom Online published, DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events by Mike Benz.
In an opening summary, Benz writes about Twitter that the…
Network throttled millions of posts ahead of 2020 election, blocked “emerging narratives” from reaching “virality threshold.”
Censors boast on video of getting tech companies to ban entire categories of election speech under threat of “huge regulatory pressure.”
Months before the 2020 election, censors systematically targeted all speech categories that could challenge a future “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario.
Next, referring to the article above, Benz writes,
Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most undercovered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.
What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.
The size, scale and speed of DHS's censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:
22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
120 analysts monitoring social media “misinformation” in up to 20-hour shifts;
15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
<1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.
The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.
While The Intercept rightly noted that DHS's “truth cops“ now take on a range of other topics – such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions – it all started from, and grew out of, DHS's speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.
That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.
At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been publishing and sharing research findings about a wide span of shocking components to DHS's speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to vow aggressive probes into DHS's “government censorship by proxy.”
The whole story, however, has not all been published in one place. In this report, we seek to provide a comprehensive history and network map of DHS's public-private censorship network, as told through a deep dive into its first mission — the censorship of the 2020 election.
Along the way, we will highlight the network's role in censoring the ongoing 2022 midterm elections.
In the final section of this report, we will cover a particularly disturbing aspect of this story — DHS's pre-censorship of speech that could “cast doubt” on a so-called “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario, months in advance of such an exact sequence playing out.
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Elon’s Intro
The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …
This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.
What really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter will be published on Twitter at 5pm ET!
The Twitter Files Part 1
2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:
11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/s…
12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.
NOTE: I did not fail to include numbers 13 through 15. Matt Taibbi skipped from 12 to 16. As he tweeted above, “let’s jump forward”.
17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”
20.This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:
21. Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy: https://t.co/EdTa2xbXn1
22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem...
23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.
24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
25.You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”:
26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.
27. Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”:
29. A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:
30. In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.
Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:
32.Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:
33.Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.”
34.NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it's a "tipping point," complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.”
35.Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”:
36.Twitter files continued:
"THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE”
Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it's "not absolute"
An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get "unfucked" (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.
There are multiple instances in the files of Dorsey intervening to question suspensions and other moderation actions, for accounts across the political spectrum
The problem with the "hacked materials" ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official/law enforcement finding of a hack. But such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a "whirlwind" 24-hour, company-wide mess.
It's been a whirlwind 96 hours for me, too. There is much more to come, including answers to questions about issues like shadow-banning, boosting, follower counts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more. These issues are not limited to the political right.
Side Notes
Looking forward to going through all the tweets complaining about “PR for the richest man on earth,” and seeing how many of them have run stories for anonymous sources at the FBI, CIA, the Pentagon, White House, etc. mediaite.com/online/the-twe…
Six Degrees from James Baker: A Familiar Figure Reemerges With the Release of the Twitter Files – JONATHAN TURLEY
The Twitter Files Supplimental
On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay.
We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.
The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated.
Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @bariweiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
@bariweiss Baker is a controversial figure. He has been something of a Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016, from the Steele Dossier to the Alfa-Server mess. He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into leaks to the press.
@bariweiss The news that Baker was reviewing the “Twitter files” surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to “exit” Baker Tuesday.
@bariweiss Reporters resumed searches through Twitter Files material – a lot of it – today. The next installment of “The Twitter Files” will appear @bariweiss. Stay tuned.
Lee Fang Tweets
Twitter's former top attorney James Baker was formerly an FBI attorney who passed on fake dirt from the Hillary campaign’s operatives in 2016, alleging a secret online portal from Russia's Alfa Bank to Trump. Now attempted to shape the “Twitter Files.”
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
The Hillary campaign, secretly using tech experts, attempted to pass off this fabricated evidence to a number of media outlets. We received the info and published a debunk of the “Alfa Bank” story. Nevertheless, tons of media ran with it.
The Twitter Files Part 2
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.
13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”
14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”
17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
The Twitter Files, Part Deux!! 🍿🍿
Bari Weiss @bariweiss
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:
20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”
21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.
22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.
23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:
24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”
25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”
26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”
27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by @AbigailShrier @ShellenbergerMD @NellieBowles @IsaacGrafstein and the team The Free Press @TheFP.
Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: thefp.com.
28. The authors have broad and expanding access to Twitter’s files. The only condition we agreed to was that the material would first be published on Twitter.
29. We're just getting started on our reporting. Documents cannot tell the whole story here. A big thank you to everyone who has spoken to us so far. If you are a current or former Twitter employee, we'd love to hear from you. Please write to: tips@thefp.com
Elon Interlude 1
The Twitter Files Part 3
The Twitter Files, Part 3
Deplatforming the President
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th...
3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.
4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @ShellenbergerMD will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @bariweiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 5. Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 8. The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As @bariweiss reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 12. These initial reports are based on searches for docs linked to prominent executives, whose names are already public. They include Roth, former trust and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and recently plank-walked Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 13. One particular slack channel offers an unique window into the evolving thinking of top officials in late 2020 and early 2021.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 14. On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”).
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 14. On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”).
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 15. There was at least some tension between Safety Operations – a larger department whose staffers used a more rules-based process for addressing issues like porn, scams, and threats – and a smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs like Roth and Gadde.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 16. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 17. During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content. While we’re still at the start of reviewing the #TwitterFiles, we’re finding out more about these interactions every day.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 18. Policy Director Nick Pickles is asked if they should say Twitter detects “misinfo” through “ML, human review, and **partnerships with outside experts?*” The employee asks, “I know that’s been a slippery process… not sure if you want our public explanation to hang on that.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 19. Pickles quickly asks if they could “just say “partnerships.” After a pause, he says, “e.g. not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI):
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 21. Roth’s report to FBI/DHS/DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone:
“We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML” (fuck my life).
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 21. Roth’s report to FBI/DHS/DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone:
“We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML” (fuck my life).
There is no part 22.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 23. Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an “Aspen Institute thing,” then take a call with Apple.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 24. Here, the FBI sends reports about a pair of tweets, the second of which involves a former Tippecanoe County, Indiana Councilor and Republican named @JohnBasham claiming “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham The FBI's second report concerned this tweet by @JohnBasham:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 25. The FBI-flagged tweet then got circulated in the enforcement Slack. Twitter cited Politifact to say the first story was “proven to be false,” then noted the second was already deemed “no vio on numerous occasions.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 26. The group then decides to apply a “Learn how voting is safe and secure” label because one commenter says, “it’s totally normal to have a 2% error rate.” Roth then gives the final go-ahead to the process initiated by the FBI:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham The FBI's second report concerned this tweet by @JohnBasham:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 27. Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.
This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 31. In one case, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee joke-tweets about mailing in ballots for his “deceased parents and grandparents.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 32. This inspires a long Slack that reads like an @TitaniaMcGrath parody. “I agree it’s a joke,” concedes a Twitter employee, “but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet a crime.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath The group declares Huck’s an “edge case,” and though one notes, “we don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire,” they ultimately decide to leave him be, because “we’ve poked enough bears.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 33. "Could still mislead people... could still mislead people," the humor-averse group declares, before moving on from Huckabee
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 33. Roth suggests moderation even in this absurd case could depend on whether or not the joke results in “confusion.” This seemingly silly case actually foreshadows serious later issues:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 34. In the docs, execs often expand criteria to subjective issues like intent (yes, a video is authentic, but why was it shown?), orientation (was a banned tweet shown to condemn, or support?), or reception (did a joke cause “confusion”?). This reflex will become key in J6.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 35. In another example, Twitter employees prepare to slap a “mail-in voting is safe” warning label on a Trump tweet about a postal screwup in Ohio, before realizing “the events took place,” which meant the tweet was “factually accurate”:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 36. “VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED” Trump was being “visibility filtered” as late as a week before the election. Here, senior execs didn’t appear to have a particular violation, but still worked fast to make sure a fairly anodyne Trump tweet couldn’t be “replied to, shared, or liked”:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath "VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED": the group is pleased the Trump tweet is dealt with quickly
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath 37. A seemingly innocuous follow-up involved a tweet from actor @RealJamesWoods, whose ubiquitous presence in argued-over Twitter data sets is already a #TwitterFiles in-joke.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 38. After Woods angrily quote-tweeted about Trump’s warning label, Twitter staff – in a preview of what ended up happening after J6 – despaired of a reason for action, but resolved to “hit him hard on future vio.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 39. Here a label is applied to Georgia Republican congresswoman Jody Hice for saying, “Say NO to big tech censorship!” and, “Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person balloting… It’s just common sense.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 40. Twitter teams went easy on Hice, only applying “soft intervention,” with Roth worrying about a “wah wah censorship” optics backlash:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 41. Meanwhile, there are multiple instances of involving pro-Biden tweets warning Trump “may try to steal the election” that got surfaced, only to be approved by senior executives. This one, they decide, just “expresses concern that mailed ballots might not make it on time.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 42. “THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE”: Even the hashtag #StealOurVotes – referencing a theory that a combo of Amy Coney Barrett and Trump will steal the election – is approved by Twitter brass, because it’s “understandable” and a “reference to… a US Supreme Court decision.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 43. In this exchange, again unintentionally humorous, former Attorney General Eric Holder claimed the U.S. Postal Service was “deliberately crippled,”ostensibly by the Trump administration. He was initially hit with a generic warning label, but it was quickly taken off by Roth:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 44. Later in November 2020, Roth asked if staff had a “debunk moment” on the “SCYTL/Smartmantic vote-counting” stories, which his DHS contacts told him were a combination of “about 47” conspiracy theories:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 45. On December 10th, as Trump was in the middle of firing off 25 tweets saying things like, “A coup is taking place in front of our eyes,” Twitter executives announced a new “L3 deamplification” tool. This step meant a warning label now could also come with deamplification:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 46. Some executives wanted to use the new deamplification tool to silently limit Trump’s reach more right away, beginning with the following tweet:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 47. However, in the end, the team had to use older, less aggressive labeling tools at least for that day, until the “L3 entities” went live the following morning.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 48. The significance is that it shows that Twitter, in 2020 at least, was deploying a vast range of visible and invisible tools to rein in Trump’s engagement, long before J6. The ban will come after other avenues are exhausted
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 49. In Twitter docs execs frequently refer to “bots,” e.g. “let’s put a bot on that.” A bot is just any automated heuristic moderation rule. It can be anything: every time a person in Brazil uses “green” and “blob” in the same sentence, action might be taken.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 50. In this instance, it appears moderators added a bot for a Trump claim made on Breitbart. The bot ends up becoming an automated tool invisibly watching both Trump and, apparently, Breitbart (“will add media ID to bot”). Trump by J6 was quickly covered in bots.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 51. There is no way to follow the frenzied exchanges among Twitter personnel from between January 6thand 8th without knowing the basics of the company’s vast lexicon of acronyms and Orwellian unwords.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 52. To “bounce” an account is to put it in timeout, usually for a 12-hour review/cool-off:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 53. “Interstitial,” one of many nouns used as a verb in Twitterspeak (“denylist” is another), means placing a physical label atop a tweet, so it can’t be seen.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 54. PII has multiple meanings, one being “Public Interest Interstitial,” i.e. a covering label applied for “public interest” reasons. The post below also references “proactive V,” i.e. proactive visibility filtering.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 55. This is all necessary background to J6. Before the riots, the company was engaged in an inherently insane/impossible project, trying to create an ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between humans.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods This project was preposterous yet its leaders were unable to see this, having become infected with groupthing, coming to believe – sincerely – that it was Twitter's responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 56. When panic first breaks out on J6 there’s a fair share of WTF-type posts, mixed in with frantic calls for Twitter to start deploying its full arsenal of moderation tools. “What is the right remediation? Do we interstitial the video?” asks one employee, in despair:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 57. The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 58. Roth groans about Coudrey: “THIS asshole,” but still seems determined to stick at least superficially to rules, itching to act “if” this “constitutes incitement.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 59. At 2:39 p.m. PST, a comms official asked Roth to confirm or deny a story that they’d restricted Trump’s ability to tweet. Roth says, “We have not.”
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 60. Minutes later, Roth executed the historic act of “bouncing” Trump, i.e. putting him in timeout. “I hope you… are appropriately CorpSec’d,” says a colleague.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods This theme of Policy perhaps being stressed by queries from Communications executives – who themselves have to answer the public’s questions – occasionally appears. Two days later, you see chatter about pulling Comms out of the loop:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 61. The first company-wide email from Gadde on January 6th announced that 3 Trump tweets had been bounced, but more importantly signaled a determination to use legit “violations” as a guide for any possible permanent suspension:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 62. “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?” Safe to say Trump’s “Go home with love & in peace” tweet mid-riot didn’t go over well at Twitter HQ:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 63. A few last notes about January 6th. Roth at one point looked and found Trump had a slew of duplicate bot applications:
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 64. By the end of the first day, the top execs are still trying to apply rules. By the next day, they will contemplate a major change in approach. Watch @ShellenbergerMD this weekend for the play-by-play of how all that went down.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 65. By January 8th, which @bariweiss will describe Sunday, Twitter will be receiving plaudits from “our partners” in Washington, and the sitting U.S. president will no longer be heard on the platform.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 66. Lastly, people on the left, right, and in between want to know what else is in the #TwitterFiles, from suppression/shadow-banning of leftists to lab-leak theorists, or amplification of military propaganda or conservative accounts. We know everyone has questions.
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham @TitaniaMcGrath @RealJamesWoods 67. And while we’ve stumbled on tidbits here and there about topics ranging from COVID to foreign policy, the reality is the data sets are enormous and we’re still working through them.
More is coming. Good night, all.
Note to Readers on the "Twitter Files"
On the irony of releasing the “Twitter Files” on Twitter: “It’s using the uncontrollable virality of the medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an instrument of social control.”
Elon Interlude 2
The Twitter Files Part 4
Deplatforming the President (cont.) https://t.co/Q51Ala4SNz
Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD
1. TWITTER FILES, PART 4
The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7
As the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban
On Jan 7, senior Twitter execs:
- create justifications to ban Trump
- seek a change of policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders
- express no concern for the free speech or democracy implications of a ban
This #TwitterFiles is reported with @lwoodhouse
For those catching up, please see:
Part 1, where @mtaibbi documents how senior Twitter executives violated their own policies to prevent the spread of accurate information about Hunter Biden’s laptop;
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
Part 2, where @bariweiss shows how senior Twitter execs created secret blacklists to “de-amplify” disfavored Twitter users, not just specific tweets;
Bari Weiss @bariweiss
And Part 3, where @mtaibbi documents how senior Twitter execs censored tweets by Trump in the run-up to the Nov 2020 election while regularly engaging with representatives of U.S. government law enforcement agencies.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump.
“Blocking a world leader from Twitter,” it wrote in 2018, “would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
Twitter Public Policy @Policy
But after the events of Jan 6, the internal and external pressure on Twitter CEO @jack grows.
Former First Lady @MichelleObama , tech journalist @karaswisher , @ADL , high-tech VC @ChrisSacca , and many others, publicly call on Twitter to permanently ban Trump.
Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia the week of January 4-8, 2021. He phoned into meetings but also delegated much of the handling of the situation to senior execs @yoyoel , Twitter’s Global Head of Trust and Safety, and @vijaya Head of Legal, Policy, & Trust.
As context, it's important to understand that Twitter’s staff & senior execs were overwhelmingly progressive.
In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
In 2017, Roth tweeted that there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.”
In April 2022, Roth told a colleague that his goal “is to drive change in the world,” which is why he decided not to become an academic.
On January 7, @jack emails employees saying Twitter needs to remain consistent in its policies, including the right of users to return to Twitter after a temporary suspension
After, Roth reassures an employee that "people who care about this... aren't happy with where we are"
Around 11:30 am PT, Roth DMs his colleagues with news that he is excited to share.
“GUESS WHAT,” he writes. “Jack just approved repeat offender for civic integrity.”
The new approach would create a system where five violations ("strikes") would result in permanent suspension.
“Progress!” exclaims a member of Roth’s Trust and Safety Team.
The exchange between Roth and his colleagues makes clear that they had been pushing @jack for greater restrictions on the speech Twitter allows around elections.
The colleague wants to know if the decision means Trump can finally be banned. The person asks, "does the incitement to violence aspect change that calculus?”
Roth says it doesn't. "Trump continues to just have his one strike" (remaining).
Roth's colleague's query about "incitement to violence" heavily foreshadows what will happen the following day.
On January 8, Twitter announces a permanent ban on Trump due to the "risk of further incitement of violence."
On J8, Twitter says its ban is based on "specifically how [Trump's tweets] are being received & interpreted."
But in 2019, Twitter said it did "not attempt to determine all potential interpretations of the content or its intent.”
https://t.co/2jW1s5pH4W
The *only* serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization. It was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as “site-integrity-auto."
"This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope... This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world..."
Twitter employees use the term "one off" frequently in their Slack discussions. Its frequent use reveals significant employee discretion over when and whether to apply warning labels on tweets and "strikes" on users. Here are typical examples.
Recall from #TwitterFiles2 by @bariweiss that, according to Twitter staff, "We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do."
Bari Weiss @bariweiss
Twitter employees recognize the difference between their own politics & Twitter's Terms of Service (TOS), but they also engage in complex interpretations of content in order to stamp out prohibited tweets, as a series of exchanges over the "#stopthesteal" hashtag reveal.
Roth immediately DMs a colleague to ask that they add "stopthesteal" & [QAnon conspiracy term] "kraken" to a blacklist of terms to be deamplified.
Roth's colleague objects that blacklisting "stopthesteal" risks "deamplifying counterspeech" that validates the election.
Indeed, notes Roth's colleague, "a quick search of top stop the steal tweets and they’re counterspeech"
But they quickly come up with a solution: "deamplify accounts with stopthesteal in the name/profile" since "those are not affiliated with counterspeech"
But it turns out that even blacklisting "kraken" is less straightforward than they thought. That's because kraken, in addition to being a QAnon conspiracy theory based on the mythical Norwegian sea monster, is also the name of a cryptocurrency exchange, and was thus "allowlisted"
Employees struggle with whether to punish users who share screenshots of Trump's deleted J6 tweets
"we should bounce these tweets with a strike given the screen shot violates the policy"
"they are criticising Trump, so I am bit hesitant with applying strike to this user"
What if a user dislikes Trump *and* objects to Twitter's censorship? The tweet still gets deleted. But since the *intention* is not to deny the election result, no punishing strike is applied.
"if there are instances where the intent is unclear please feel free to raise"
Around noon, a confused senior executive in advertising sales sends a DM to Roth.
Sales exec: "jack says: 'we will permanently suspend [Trump] if our policies are violated after a 12 hour account lock'… what policies is jack talking about?"
Roth: "*ANY* policy violation"
What happens next is essential to understanding how Twitter justified banning Trump.
Sales exec: "are we dropping the public interest [policy] now..."
Roth, six hours later: "In this specific case, we're changing our public interest approach for his account..."
The ad exec is referring to Twitter’s policy of “Public-interest exceptions," which allows the content of elected officials, even if it violates Twitter rules, “if it directly contributes to understanding or discussion of a matter of public concern”
https://t.co/xTs14fD8V9
Roth pushes for a permanent suspension of Rep. Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh)”
It's a kind of test case for the rationale for banning Trump.
“I’m trying to talk [Twitter’s] safety [team] into... removal as a conspiracy that incites violence.”
Around 2:30, comms execs DM Roth to say they don't want to make a big deal of the QAnon ban to the media because they fear "if we push this it looks we’re trying to offer up something in place of the thing everyone wants," meaning a Trump ban.
That evening, a Twitter engineer DMs to Roth to say, "I feel a lot of debates around exceptions stem from the fact that Trump’s account is not technically different from anybody else’ and yet treated differently due to his personal status, without corresponding _Twitter rules_.."
Roth's response hints at how Twitter would justify deviating from its longstanding policy. "To put a different spin on it: policy is one part of the system of how Twitter works... we ran into the world changing faster than we were able to either adapt the product or the policy."
The evening of January 7, the same junior employee who expressed an "unpopular opinion" about "ad hoc decisions... that don’t appear rooted in policy," speaks up one last time before the end of the day.
Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD
Earlier that day, the employee wrote, "My concern is specifically surrounding the unarticulated logic of the decision by FB. That space fills with the idea (conspiracy theory?) that all... internet moguls... sit around like kings casually deciding what people can and cannot see."
The employee notes, later in the day, "And Will Oremus noticed the inconsistency too...," linking to an article for OneZero at Medium called, "Facebook Chucked Its Own Rulebook to Ban Trump."
"The underlying problem," writes @WillOremus , is that “the dominant platforms have always been loath to own up to their subjectivity, because it highlights the extraordinary, unfettered power they wield over the global public square...
"... and places the responsibility for that power on their own shoulders… So they hide behind an ever-changing rulebook, alternately pointing to it when it’s convenient and shoving it under the nearest rug when it isn’t.”
“Facebook’s suspension of Trump now puts Twitter in an awkward position. If Trump does indeed return to Twitter, the pressure on Twitter will ramp up to find a pretext on which to ban him as well.”
Indeed. And as @bariweiss will show tomorrow, that’s exactly what happened.
/END
The Twitter Files Part 5
Under pressure from hundreds of activist employees, Twitter deplatforms Trump, a sitting US President, even though they themselves acknowledge that he didn’t violate the rules:
Bari Weiss @bariweiss
1. On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.
2. 6:46 am: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
3. 7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
4. For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate.
5. “Our mission is to provide a forum that enables people to be informed and to engage their leaders directly,” the company wrote in 2019. Twitter’s aim was to “protect the public’s right to hear from their leaders and to hold them to account.”
https://t.co/rtQjkQQxSs
6. But after January 6, as @mtaibbi and @ShellenbergerMD have documented, pressure grew, both inside and outside of Twitter, to ban Trump.
7. There were dissenters inside Twitter.
“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.”
8. But voices like that one appear to have been a distinct minority within the company. Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.
9. After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee.
10. “We have to do the right thing and ban this account,” said one staffer.
It’s “pretty obvious he’s going to try to thread the needle of incitement without violating the rules,” said another.
11. In the early afternoon of January 8, The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban. “We must examine Twitter’s complicity in what President-Elect Biden has rightly termed insurrection.”
12. But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer.
13. “It's pretty clear he's saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.”
15. “I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” wrote Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official. “I’ll respond in the elections channel and say that our team has assessed and found no vios”—or violations—“for the DJT one.”
16. She does just that: “as an fyi, Safety has assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.”
17. (Later, Navaroli would testify to the House Jan. 6 committee:“For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing—if we made no intervention into what I saw occuring, people were going to die.”)
18. Next, Twitter’s safety team decides that Trump’s 7:44 am ET tweet is also not in violation. They are unequivocal: “it’s a clear no vio. It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration”
19. To understand Twitter’s decision to ban Trump, we must consider how Twitter deals with other heads of state and political leaders, including in Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
20. In June 2018, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweeted, “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah.
21. In October 2020, the former Malaysian Prime Minister said it was “a right” for Muslims to “kill millions of French people.”
Twitter deleted his tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the platform. The tweet below was taken from the Wayback Machine:
22. Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, incited violence against pro-Biafra groups.“Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war,” he wrote, “will treat them in the language they understand.”
Twitter deleted the tweet but didn't ban Buhari.
23. In October 2021, Twitter allowed Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to call on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region.
Twitter allowed the tweet to remain up, and did not ban the prime minister.
24. In early February 2021, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government threatened to arrest Twitter employees in India, and to incarcerate them for up to seven years after they restored hundreds of accounts that had been critical of him.
Twitter did not ban Modi.
25. But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.
26. Less than 90 minutes after Twitter employees had determined that Trump’s tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy, Vijaya Gadde—Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust—asked whether it could, in fact, be “coded incitement to further violence.”
27. A few minutes later, Twitter employees on the “scaled enforcement team” suggest that Trump’s tweet may have violated Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy—if you interpreted the phrase “American Patriots” to refer to the rioters.
28. Things escalate from there.
Members of that team came to “view him as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”
29. Two hours later, Twitter executives host a 30-minute all-staff meeting.
Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde answer staff questions as to why Trump wasn’t banned yet.
But they make some employees angrier.
30. “Multiple tweeps [Twitter employees] have quoted the Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders,” relays Yoel Roth to a colleague.
31. Dorsey requested simpler language to explain Trump’s suspension.
Roth wrote, “god help us [this] makes me think he wants to share it publicly”
32. One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
34. And congratulatory: “big props to whoever in trust and safety is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts”
35. By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible:
36. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth,” wrote another employee, “which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.”
36. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth,” wrote another employee, “which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.”
37. But Twitter’s COO Parag Agrawal—who would later succeed Dorsey as CEO—told Head of Security Mudge Zatko: “I think a few of us should brainstorm the ripple effects” of Trump's ban. Agrawal added: “centralized content moderation IMO has reached a breaking point now.”
38. Outside the United States, Twitter’s decision to ban Trump raised alarms, including with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, and Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
39. Macron told an audience he didn’t “want to live in a democracy where the key decisions” were made by private players. “I want it to be decided by a law voted by your representative, or by regulation, governance, democratically discussed and approved by democratic leaders.”
40. Merkel’s spokesperson called Twitter’s decision to ban Trump from its platform “problematic” and added that the freedom of opinion is of “elementary significance.”
Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.”
41. Whether you agree with Navalny and Macron or the executives at Twitter, we hope this latest installment of #TheTwitterFiles gave you insight into that unprecedented decision.
42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and to put that choice into context.
43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.
44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.
45. This was reported by @ShellenbergerMD, @IsaacGrafstein, @SnoozyWeiss, @Olivia_Reingold, @petersavodnik, @NellieBowles. Follow all of our work at The Free Press: @TheFP
46. Please click here to subscribe to The Free Press, where you can continue reading and supporting independent journalism:
Matt Taibbi Discusses The Twitter Files & More
Episode 16: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn
The makeup episode, in which @walterkirn and I
discuss the material that's come out in the "Twitter Files," laugh about the press reaction, and answer some questions we've received:
Lol
Matt Orfalea @0rf
Twitter Files Part 6
2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.
6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.
7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.
10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.
11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines:
12.An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:
14.Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromMA, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8:
15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @ClaireFosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding:
16. “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging.
17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @fromMA – were suspended.
18.In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”:
21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter:
22.When told of the FBI flagging, @lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”
24.In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:
25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”
26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?
27.At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”
28. About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”
29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets:
30.Here, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on:
31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”:
32.The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”
33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.
34.While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”:
35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them:
36.There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI:
37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”:
39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.
40.“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet:
41.Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS):
42.If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS:
43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.
44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.
45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @bariweiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.
Side Notes 2
Here’s the FBI just a month ago asking Twitter for *location* information on a bunch of Twitter users, including the conservative news site @RSBNetwork. The FBI asks Twitter to “voluntarily provide” info and helpfully suggests these users violated Terms of Service.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.
The FBI pulled hundreds of agents off financial crime to War on Terror stuff in the 00's, resulting in missed signs of the financial crisis, incentives to invent terror plots. Now tons get assigned to social media so they inundate Twitter w/ takedown requests for joke accounts.
From the Twitter Files: Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary:
The latest documents show, in bulk, the master-canine relationship between the FBI and Twitter
Episode 17: "America This Week," in which @walterkirn and @mtaibbi discuss new Twitter Files/FBI revelations.
An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
“I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they're supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
The FBI replies to @mtaibbi "The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about”
“…what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them."
This FBI response is disingenuous on multiple fronts. None of this expains flagging the silly jokes of ordinary Americans with low follower counts. Also, they are clearly not doing this in service of investigating crime. This is about domestic intelligence and opinion control.
Jon Nicosia @NewsPolitics
Josh, earlier this year I interviewed an FBI agent literally pulled off a child exploitation detail to chase misdemeanor J6 cases. Here the point is agents flagging social media instead of real work. This makes me “Pizzagate-curious”? How desperate for a point can you get?
Josh Marshall @joshtpm
Being on that committee you should know:
- How much has been spent, and how many DHS/DOJ employees have been assigned, to monitoring and flagging social media?
- Why is the FBI asking for "location information" about ordinary Americans and media outlets like @RSBNetwork?
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
- What "law enforcement" objective is served by asking for Billy Baldwin's location information?
- Why is the FBI/DHS in the business of analyzing and flagging social media content at all? When were these programs created and who approved them?
Elon Musk chimed in…
@mtaibbi @RSBNetwork Congressman Lieu, were you aware of this program and did you approve it? Simple questions require simple answers.
The growing panic is evident. This hold-the-line warning is meant to stop a cascading failure in the once insurmountable wall of social-media censorship. If Facebook were to restore free-speech protections, the control over social media could evaporate...
...Democrats fear Facebook and other social media companies might “backslide” into free speech as Facebook is faced with declining revenues and ordering layoffs. These members specifically want assurances that those layoffs will not reduce the staff censoring social media...
...The letter to Clegg is reminiscent of another letter sent by several congressional Democrats to cable-TV carriers last year, demanding to know why they continue to carry Fox News.
The Twitter Files Supplimental 2
2.In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats.
3.The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.”
5.Chan underscored this: “There was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company,” he wrote, referring to the United States Intelligence Community.
6.The task force demanded to know how Twitter came to its unpopular conclusion. Oddly, it included a bibliography of public sources - including a Wall Street Journal article - attesting to the prevalence of foreign threats, as if to show Twitter they got it wrong.
7.Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.”
8.He added he was not “comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC) demanding written answers.” The idea of the FBI acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community is interesting, given that many agencies are barred from domestic operations.
9.He then sent another note internally, saying the premise of the questions was “flawed,” because “we've been clear that official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter.” Note the italics for emphasis.
10.Roth suggested they “get on the phone with Elvis ASAP and try to straighten this out,” to disabuse the agencies of any notion that state propaganda is not a “thing” on Twitter.
11.This exchange is odd among other things because some of the “bibliography” materials cited by the FITF are sourced to intelligence officials, who in turn cited the public sources.
12.The FBI responded to Friday’s report by saying it “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”
13.That may be true, but we haven’t seen that in the documents to date. Instead, we’ve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans – and Billy Baldwin.
Side Notes 3
Notes from the Twitter Files: Twitter and the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)
Twitter didn't just take moderation requests from government, it made rapid attitude adjustments. More below:
No. It should be driven by the FBI, DHS, and ODNI, right? https://t.co/jxt2S2ADeS
Judd Legum @JuddLegum
It is very odd that people (cough, @tedlieu) think the FBI/DHS relationship with Twitter and other platforms is a partisan story. It’s taken place and grown under both Republican and Democratic administrations. This concerns everyone.
Back in 2012 Congressional *Dems* hosted an investigation of the Dept of Homeland Security for violating civil liberties and chilling First Amendment speech for simply engaging in social media/Twitter *monitoring*. Now bc of polarization Dems defend direct DHS/FBI intervention.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
Note the language in this email by former Twitter executive: the company is dealing with “the Bureau (and by extension the IC).” Remember that some intelligence agencies have used the FBI as a legal end-around to pursue domestic missions: aclu.org/other/more-abo…
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
The context: January 8th, 2021, a few hours before Trump was banned from the platform.
emmabrody9 @emmabrody9
Then hastily reassured them that they would agree. But then, reading comprehension skills aren’t a prerequisite for public office.
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
Once we had a standard in this country that the FBI had to at least have some indication of possible crime to initiate investigations. No longer. They can “pre-assess” at will, with no chargeable crime in sight, and people like you are fine with it.
Reasonable Liberal @itouchcoral
Here we go…
Michael Shellenberger @ShellenbergerMD
The Twitter Files Part 7
1. TWITTER FILES: PART 7
The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020
In Twitter Files #6, we saw the FBI relentlessly seek to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.
The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him
On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for, and takes, Hunter Biden's laptop.
nypost.com/2020/10/14/ema…
By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time. In early Oct, Giuliani gives it to @nypost
Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emails JP Mac Isaac.
Hunter and Mesires had just learned from the New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day.
7. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.
8. The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate.
9. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.
Why is that? What, exactly, happened?
10. On Dec 2, @mtaibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article.
Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
11. First, it's important to understand that Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China's government, for which Hunter offered no real work.
Here's an overview by investigative journalist @peterschweizer
12. And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation.
This is from a sworn declaration by Roth given in December 2020.
fec.gov/files/legal/mu…
13. They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The FBI basically came to us [and] was like, ‘Hey... you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016 election. There's about to be some kind of dump similar to that.'"
14. Were the FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden based on *any* new intel?
No, they weren't
“Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan in Nov.
15. Indeed, Twitter executives *repeatedly* reported very little Russian activity.
E.g., on Sept 24, 2020, Twitter told FBI it had removed 345 “largely inactive” accounts “linked to previous coordinated Russian hacking attempts.” They “had little reach & low follower accounts."
16. In fact, Twitter debunked false claims by journalists of foreign influence on its platform
"We haven’t seen any evidence to support that claim” by @oneunderscore__ @nbc News of foreign-controlled bots.
“Our review thus far shows a small-scale domestic troll effort…”
17. After FBI asks about a WaPo story on alleged foreign influence in a pro-Trump tweet, Twitter's Roth says, "The article makes a lot of insinuations... but we saw no evidence that that was the case here (and in fact, a lot of strong evidence pointing in the other direction).”
18. It's not the first time that Twitter's Roth has pushed back against the FBI. In January 2020, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process.
19. Pressure had been growing:
“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”
20. Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting.
“[W]e haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context).”
21. Despite Twitter’s pushback, the FBI repeatedly requests information from Twitter that Twitter has already made clear it will not share outside of normal legal channels.
22. Then, in July 2020, the FBI’s Elvis Chan arranges for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections.
23. On August 11, 2020, the FBI's Chan shares information with Twitter's Roth relating to the Russian hacking organization, APT28, through the FBI's secure, one-way communications channel, Teleporter.
24. Recently, Yoel Roth told @karaswisher that he had been primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out.
When it did, Roth said, "It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells."
25. In Aug, 2020, FBI’s Chan asks Twitter: does anyone there have top secret clearance?
When someone mentions Jim Baker, Chan responds, "I don't know how I forgot him" — an odd claim, given Chan's job is to monitor Twitter, not to mention that they worked together at the FBI.
26. Who is Jim Baker? He's former general counsel of the FBI (2014-18) & one of the most powerful men in the U.S. intel community.
Baker has moved in and out of government for 30 years, serving stints at CNN, Bridgewater (a $140 billion asset management firm) and Brookings
27. As general counsel of the FBI, Baker played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump
28. Baker wasn't the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter.
Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy.
29. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.
30. Efforts continued to influence Twitter's Yoel Roth.
In Sept 2020, Roth participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential "Hack-and-Dump" operation relating to Hunter Biden
The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it
31. The organizer was Vivian Schiller, the fmr CEO of NPR, fmr head of news at Twitter; fmr Gen. mgr of NY Times; fmr Chief Digital Officer of NBC News
Attendees included Meta/FB's head of security policy and the top nat. sec. reporters for @nytimes @wapo and others
The Twitter Files Part 8
Yikes!
Lee Fang @lhfang
1. TWITTER FILES PART 8
*How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign*
Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations.
2. Twitter has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect & thwart gov-backed platform manipulation. Here is Twitter testifying to Congress about its pledge to rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations & deceptive propaganda.
3. But behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active.
4. In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & “whitelist” abilities for the others.
5. The same day CENTCOM sent the list, Twitter officials used a tool to grant a special “whitelist” tag that essentially provides verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags.
6. The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East, including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and “accurate” U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists.
7. CENTCOM then shifted strategies & deleted disclosures of ties to the Twitter accounts. The bios of the accounts changed to seemingly organic profiles. One bio read: “Euphrates pulse.” Another used an apparent deep fake profile pic & claimed to be a source of Iraqi opinion.
8. One Twitter official who spoke to me said he feels deceived by the covert shift. Still, many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts.
9. For example, Twitter lawyer Jim Baker mused in a July 2020 email, about an upcoming DoD meeting, that the Pentagon used "poor tradecraft" in setting up its network, and were seeking strategies for not exposing the accounts that are “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG.”
10. Stacia Cardille, another Twitter attorney, replied that the Pentagon wanted a SCIF & may want to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
11. In several other 2020 emails, high-level Twitter executives/lawyers discussed the covert network and even recirculated the 2017 list from CENTCOM and shared another list of 157 undisclosed Pentagon accounts, again mostly focused on Middle East military issues.
12. In a May 2020 email, Twitter’s Lisa Roman emailed the DoD w/two lists. One list was accounts “previously provided to us” & another list Twitter detected. The accounts tweeted in Russian & Arabic on US military issues in Syria/ISIS & many also did not disclose Pentagon ties.
13. Many of these secretive U.S. military propaganda accounts, despite detection by Twitter as late as 2020 (but potentially earlier) continued tweeting through this year, some not suspended until May 2022 or later, according to records I reviewed.
14. In August 2022, a Stanford Internet Observatory report exposed a U.S. military covert propaganda network on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter & other apps using fake news portals and deep fake images and memes against U.S. foreign adversaries.
15. The U.S. propaganda network relentlessly pushed narratives against Russia, China, and other foreign countries. They accused Iran of "threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth," and of harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.
16. The Stanford report did not identify all of the accounts in the network but one they did name was the exact same Twitter account CENTCOM asked for whitelist privileges in its 2017 email. I verified via Twitter’s internal tools. The account used an AI-created deep fake image.
17. In subsequent reporting, Twitter was cast as an unbiased hero for removing “a network of fake user accounts promoting pro-Western policy positions.” Media covering the story described Twitter as evenly applying its policies & proactive in suspending the DoD network.
18. The reality is much more murky. Twitter actively assisted CENTCOM’s network going back to 2017 and as late as 2020 knew these accounts were covert/designed to deceive to manipulate the discourse, a violation of Twitter’s policies & promises. They waited years to suspend.
19. Twitter’s comms team was closely in touch with reporters, working to minimize Twitter’s role. When the WashPost reported on the scandal, Twitter officials congratulated each other because the story didn’t mention any Twitter employees & focused largely on the Pentagon.
20. The conduct with the U.S. military’s covert network stands in stark contrast with how Twitter has boasted about rapidly identifying and taking down covert accounts tied to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela, and others since 2016.
21. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given access to Twitter for a few days. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited.
If you want details about how I go about my reporting, a little more about myself, and further documentation & discussion, I just started a Substack. Sign up here:
The F.B.I.’s Pathetic Denial
🚨BREAKING: The FBI responds to @elonmusk releasing the Twitter files:
"It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency."
Satire About Former CEO Parag Agrawal Being Arrested for Child Porn Misaken for Real News
On October 1, 2022, blue check marked Gurbaksh Singh Chahal (@gchahal) with nearly 200,000 followers, self-described as,
CEO, @Procurenet, @Medriva, @BNNBreaking Founder, @ChahalNonProfit @belimitlesscom Author | 3 wins $400MM+ | FT: I troll fake news media & bad politicians
tweeted the following (archived here)…
.@paraga rather make money off selling child porn on @Twitter rather than show how terrorists killing children.
You gotta take a dirty shower every fucking day...no matter how much you get paid a day...to do that dirty shit you mother fucker.
Notice that his self-description included,
I troll fake news media & bad politicians
So, apparently he was just trolling. On December 24, 2022, IFP News published “Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal arrested for child porn” which states that,
Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, has been arrested for possession of child pornography after a tip off from Elon Musk.
and that Agrawal was arrested by the F.B.I. at his home in California for possession of that material. Furthermore, they report,
The executive not only collected child abuse material off of Twitter and other social media platforms, he turned a blind eye to users that shared the same material on the social media platform.
Twitter was a haven for child porn until Elon Musk took over.
Musk stated to the Vancouver Times that even more arrests are expected in the future. The billionaire has repeatedly stated that tackling child porn is Twitter’s #1 priority.
https://vancouvertimes.org/former-twitter-ceo-parag-agrawal-arrested-for-child-porn/
The IFP does not seem to be satirical. However, they cite “Former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal arrested for child porn” by The Vancouver Times, published the day before on December 23, 2022 and under their ’Details’ section of their website, The Vancouver Times states,
About Us
Vancouver Times is the most trusted source for satire on the West Coast. We write satirical stories about issues that affect conservatives.
Some people have tweeted about this apparently without realizing that they it was satire.
The New York Times Asks For Access to Twitter Files
The Twitter Files: Twitter & “Other Government Agencies”
After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday.
2.It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.”
3.They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?
4.The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.
5.The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors - from local cops to media to state governments.
6.Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying.
7.A chief end result was that thousands of official “reports” flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.
8.On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming conference:
9.OGA, or “Other Government Organization,” can be a euphemism for CIA, according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors. Chuckles one: “They think it's mysterious, but it's just conspicuous."
10.“Other Government Agency (the place where I worked for 27 years),” says retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.
11. It was an open secret at Twitter that one of its executives was ex-CIA, which is why Chan referred to that executive’s “former employer.”
12.The first Twitter executive abandoned any pretense to stealth and emailed that the employee “used to work for the CIA, so that is Elvis’s question.”
13.Senior legal executive Stacia Cardille, whose alertness stood out among Twitter leaders, replied, “I know” and “I thought my silence was understood.”
15.“I invited the FBI and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille says to Baker, adding pointedly: “No need for you to attend.”
16.The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.
17. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.
18.One of the most common forums was a regular meeting of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), attended by spates of executives, FBI personnel, and – nearly always – one or two attendees marked “OGA.”
19.The FITF meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an “OGA briefing,” usually about foreign matters (hold that thought).
20. Despite its official remit being “Foreign Influence,” the FITF and the SF FBI office became conduit for mountains of domestic moderation requests, from state governments, even local police:
21. Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish:
22.Especially as the election approached in 2020, the FITF/FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending lists of hundreds of problem accounts:
23. Email after email came from the San Francisco office heading into the election, often adorned with an Excel attachment:
24. There were so many government requests, Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them:
25. The FBI was clearly tailoring searches to Twitter’s policies. FBI complaints were almost always depicted somewhere as a “possible terms of service violation," even in the subject line:
26. Twitter executives noticed the FBI appeared to be aasigning personnel to look for Twitter violations.
27.“They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” remarked Cardille.
28. Even ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker agreed: “Odd that they are searching for violations of our policies.”
29.The New York FBI office even sent requests for the “user IDs and handles” of a long list of accounts named in a Daily Beast article. Senior executives say they are “supportive” and “completely comfortable” doing so.
30. It seemed to strike no one as strange that a “Foreign Influence” task force was forwarding thousands of mostly domestic reports, along with the DHS, about the fringiest material:
31. “Foreign meddling” had been the ostensible justification for expanded moderation since platforms like Twitter were dragged to the Hill by the Senate in 2017:
32. Yet behind the scenes, Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference supposedly occurring on their platform and others:
33. The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions.
34. “Found no links to Russia,” says one analyst, but suggests he could “brainstorm” to “find a stronger connection.”
36. “No real matches using the info,” says former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth in another case, noting some links were “clearly Russian,” but another was a “house rental in South Carolina?”
37. In another case, Roth concludes a series of Venezuelan pro-Maduro accounts are unrelated to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, because they’re too high-volume:
38.The Venezuelans “were extremely high-volume tweeters… pretty uncharacteristic of a lot of the other IRA activity,” Roth says.
39. In a key email, news that the State Department was making a wobbly public assertion of Russian influence led an exec – the same one with the “OGA” past - to make a damning admission:
40. “Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I've generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” he says. “Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution.”
41. Translation: “more aggressive” “government partners” had closed Twitter’s “window” of independence.
42. “Other Government Agencies” ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia:
43. Former CIA agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou believes he recognizes the formatting of these reports.
44.“Looks right on to me,” Kiriakou says, noting that “what was cut off above [the “tearline”] was the originating CIA office and all the copied offices.”
45. Many people wonder if Internet platforms receive direction from intelligence agencies about moderation of foreign policy news stories. It appears Twitter did, in some cases by way of the FITF/FBI.
47. One intel report lists accounts tied to “Ukraine ‘neo-Nazi’ Propaganda.’” This includes assertions that Joe Biden helped orchestrate a coup in 2014 and “put his son on the board of Burisma.”
48. Another report asserts a list of accounts accusing the “Biden administration” of “corruption” in vaccine distribution are part of a Russian influence campaign:
49. Often intelligence came in the form of brief reports, followed by long lists of accounts simply deemed to be pro-Maduro, pro-Cuba, pro-Russia, etc. This one batch had over 1000 accounts marked for digital execution:
50. One report says a site “documenting purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians” is directed by Russian agents:
51. Intel about the shady origin of these accounts might be true. But so might at least some of the information in them – about neo-Nazis, rights abuses in Donbas, even about our own government. Should we block such material?
52. This is a difficult speech dilemma. Should the government be allowed to try to prevent Americans (and others) from seeing pro-Maduro or anti-Ukrainian accounts?
53. Often intel reports are just long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives”:
54. Sometimes - not always -Twitter and YouTube blocked the accounts. But now we know for sure what Roth meant by “the Bureau (and by extension the IC).”
55. The line between “misinformation” and “distorting propaganda” is thin. Are we comfortable with so many companies receiving so many reports from a “more aggressive” government?
56.The CIA has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by third parties, so what I saw could be limited.
More
Watch @bariweiss, @ShellenbergerMD, @lhfang, and this space for more, on issues ranging from Covid-19 to Twitter's relationship to congress, and more.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The only solution is taking platforms out of the moderation game. The content-layer of the internet should be moved to neutral protocols.
*You* should be the one who decides what you can read. Not a company. Not a government.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
Mainstream outlets try to grind every news story into grade D partisan hamburger and Twitter Files coverage is no exception. The Washington Post even called me a “conservative journalist” for a few minutes.
This isn’t a left or right project. The question that interests me, how these companies have been absorbed as intelligence arms, is more future/dystopia than blue/red. But that story is hard to sell, se we’re getting the usual stupidity.
Obviously, I know voices on the left have been “moderated” a lot, because I’ve been interviewing them for years: taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-cen…
But we’re all trying to triage time and instead of looking up individual accounts, most of us have been looking at broader search terms to start, like “FBI,” “Covid,” “DHS,” etc.
I did look up account(s) connected to Julian Assange. His “PV2” page doesn’t show anything unusual, just automated suspensions of an abandoned account, and I found no record of, say, a government-initiated action.
That doesn’t mean such intervention doesn’t exist. It may be in a Slack or an email somewhere. It’s a big haystack. We’ll keep looking.
A few actions hit both Republicans and Democrats. Some FBI offices were clearly running searches of “November 4” to catch people trying to trick others into not voting, and this snared both Biden and Trump voters in silly numbers.
There are interesting/ambiguous details, like a decision we found in which the company considered restricting all moderation decisions involving Biden or Trump to four senior executives:
But Twitter did have a clear political monoculture. I ran searches for both “RNC” and “DNC,” cross-referenced against senior executives. “RNC” turned up pages about Republicans suing the company. “DNC” returned mountains of insistent moderation demands.
In multiple instances Twitter initially decided not to remove videos lampooning Joe Biden because they were obvious parodies “unlikely to cause offline harm or generate confusion.”
These included a "deceptively edited" video of Biden coughing: reuters.com/article/uk-fac…
And a "Todos Con Biden" Trumo spoof:
Usually Twitter was responding to complaints from one very voluble DNC staffer and still applied warning labels to such content. In one case, they refused to do either.
“Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President's speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the staffer, who fumed, "These rules need revision."
In the process, they sent a graph of their bizarre moderation flow chart, which among other things showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material. This seemed more interesting than the fate of a Biden coughing mashup.
If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcment officials are pushing on the levers.
People will try to make this story about who did and did not benefit and argue this endlessly. But the utility of the project is showing everyone how the machine worked - which we're trying to do.
In the process, they sent a graph of their bizarre moderation flow chart, which among other things showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material. This seemed more interesting than the fate of a Biden coughing mashup.
If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcment officials are pushing on the levers.
“Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President's speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the staffer, who fumed, "These rules need revision."
In the process, they sent a graph of their bizarre moderation flow chart, which among other things showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material. This seemed more interesting than the fate of a Biden coughing mashup.
If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcment officials are pushing on the levers.
People will try to make this story about who did and did not benefit and argue this endlessly. But the utility of the project is showing everyone how the machine worked - which we're trying to do.
Congressman, why is a “Foreign Influence” task force sending Excel spreadsheets full of joke tweets from low-follower accounts in Maryland, Kentucky, and Ohio? Why does the FITF spend so much time reviewing domestic speech?
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
Here a top Twitter staffer admitted the government’s “aggressive” demands for validation of foreign influence theories could no longer be resisted: “Our window” on independence is closing, he said.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
It was so obvious the FBI was assigning personnel specifically to look for Twitter term-of-service violations — an effort funded by taxes, instead of fighting crime — that two of the company’s top lawyers wondered what the hell was going on:
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
Twitter Files Thread - The Spies Who Loved Twitter
FBI Buried the Biden Laptop
1/ The FBI buried the #BidenLaptop since 2019.
What's on it?
Joe Biden was the architect of the 1994 Crime Bill that sent millions of people to prison for doing what his son is doing here.
2/ After a 13-month investigation, the @MarcoPolo501c3 report fully documents 459 violations of state and federal laws found on the #BidenLaptop.
It includes 140 business-related crimes, 191 sex-related offenses, and 128 drug-related crimes.
marcopolousa.substack.com/p/report-on-th…
3/ The Biden family made more than $30 million from officials linked to Chinese intelligence.
Hunter, Jimmy, and Sara Biden partnered with the "spy chief of China" (Hunter's words) and CEFC Energy to spread China's Belt & Road initiative.
Joe knew everything.
5/ Hunter sent a text to Hallie Biden saying that he was involved in "brokering a deal with Vladimir Putin," and China had arrested "CIA operatives" in retaliation for the DOJ arresting his "client the chief of intelligence of China."
6/ If you are a Biden, you can collect $30 million from the Chinese government, work with the "spy chief of China," broker a $9 billion oil & gas deal for Vladimir Putin, and the FBI will work with big tech companies to conceal your family's crimes.
kanekoa.substack.com/p/exclusive-hu…
7/ The Bidens made millions from Chinese oil, gas, and coal before Joe canceled American pipelines, banned drilling for oil & gas, and declared war on U.S. energy production.
8/ The real story is that the Biden family was getting rich from business with our enemies, they were selling access to the US government, and Joe Biden was getting paid.
Hunter text messaged his daughter, saying, "unlike Pop, I won't make you give me half your salary."
9/ @MarcoPolo501c3 released a 630-page report with 2,020 citations that fully document 459 crimes committed by the Biden family & their business associates.
You can read it for free here.
10/ The FBI framed @realDonaldTrump as a Russian agent, spied on him, and raided his home.
The DOJ and the corporate media will continue to persecute Trump's family while they cover up the #BidenLaptop containing substantial evidence of the Biden family's treasonous crimes.
The Twitter Files - How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate
1. THREAD:
THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*
2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.
3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. This reporting, for The Free Press, @TheFP, is one piece of that important story.
4. The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.
5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @TheFP showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.
6. At the onset of the pandemic, according to meeting notes, the Trump admin was especially concerned about panic buying. They came looking for “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation” about “runs on grocery stores.” But . . . there were runs on grocery stores.
7. It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.
8. When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid. The focus was on “anti-vaxxer accounts.” Especially Alex Berenson:
9. In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.
9. In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.
10. Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson.
alexberenson.substack.com/p/jesse-jackso…
11. A December 2022 summary of meetings with the White House by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, adds new evidence of the White House’s pressure campaign, and cements that it repeatedly attempted to directly influence the platform.
12. Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more.
13. Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech.
14. But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.
15. There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process:
First, much of the content moderation was conducted by bots, trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for such nuanced work.
16. Second, contractors, in places like the Philippines, also moderated content. They were given decision trees to aid in the process, but tasking non experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate
17 Third, most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter who chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees, and subjectively decided escalated cases and suspensions. As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias
19. Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.
20. Exhibit A: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter.
21. Internal emails show an “intent to action” by a moderator, saying Kulldorff’s tweet violated the company’s Covid-19 misinformation policy and claimed he shared “false information.”
22. But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines.
23. After Twitter took action, Kulldorff’s tweet was slapped with a “Misleading” label and all replies and likes were shut off, throttling the tweet’s ability to be seen and shared by many people, the ostensible core function of the platform:
24. In my review of internal files, I found countless instances of tweets labeled as “misleading” or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.
25. A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.*
26. Internal records showed that a bot had flagged the tweet, and that it received many “tattles” (what the system amusingly called reports from users). That triggered a manual review by a human who– despite the tweet showing actual CDC data–nevertheless labeled it “Misleading”
27. Tellingly, the tweet by @KelleyKga that was labeled “Misleading” was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation.
Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a “misleading” label.
28. Whether by humans or algorithms, content that was contrarian but true was still subject to getting flagged or suppressed
This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” even though the owner of this account, @_euzebiusz_, a physician, was referring to the results of a published study
29. Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended from Twitter after receiving multiple strikes for misinformation. One of his strikes was for a tweet referring to the results from a peer reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.
30. A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid.
31. The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children.
32. That this tweet was not only flagged by a bot, but its violation manually affirmed by a staff member is telling of both the algorithmic and human bias at play. Bostom’s account was suspended for months and was finally restored on Christmas Day.
33. Another example of human bias run amok was the reaction to this tweet by Trump. Many Trump tweets led to extensive internal debates, and this one was no different.
34. In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy.
35. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation.
36. Remember @KelleyKga with the CDC data tweet? Twitter’s response to her is clarifying: “we will prioritize review and labeling of content that could lead to increased exposure or transmission.”
37. Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was “The Science” . . .
38. Information that challenged that view, such as showing harms of vaccines, or that could be perceived as downplaying the risks of Covid, especially to children, was subject to moderation, and even suppression. No matter whether such views were correct or adopted abroad.
39. What might this pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been a more open debate on Twitter and other social media platforms—not to mention the mainstream press—about the origins of Covid, about lockdowns, about the true risks of Covid in kids, and much more?
40. Thanks to @ShellenbergerMD, @lwoodhouse, @lhfang and the team @TheFP for their help reporting this story.
The Twitter Files Elon Musk Slams CISA Censorship Network as ‘Propaganda Platform’
1/ THREAD🚨 #TwitterFiles
@elonmusk slams CISA censorship network as 'propaganda platform.'
This DHS-backed censorship consortium used 120 analysts to censor millions of social media posts on elections and covid-19.
kanekoa.substack.com/p/elon-musk-sl…
2/ The DHS outsourced censorship to the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), comprised of four organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika.
3/ On the 2020 election:
•120 analysts monitored 15 tech platforms
•22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation”
•Entire “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling
The EIP claimed every "repeat spreader of election misinformation" was on the right.
4/ This Orwellian speech control network also flagged popular populist-right YouTube channels, including @scrowder, @BlazeTV, @JudicialWatch, and even the @GOP War Room, as “mis- and disinformation” spreaders.
5/ The @FFO_Freedom report comprehensively details the US government’s role in outsourcing censorship to this public-private network.
Founder @MikeBenzCyber extensively documented the individuals involved and the flow of taxpayer funds ($40M) to domestic censorship.
6/ The DHS quietly corrupted CISA's mission when it designated domestic disinformation as cyber attacks on "critical cognitive infrastructure."
foundationforfreedomonline.com/11-9-22.html
@FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber
7/ But CISA had a First Amendment problem. The US government cannot sandblast millions of voters off the Internet because of their speech about elections.
CISA needed private sector partners to do dirty work. And that's where EIP stepped in:
@FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber
8/ CISA "lacked the funding and the legal authorizations" to do grand-scale censorship and get away with it. So CISA partnered with EIP, who "filled the gap of the things the government could not do themselves."
@FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber
9/ So, who are these unelected bureaucrats who get to play judge, jury, and executioner and control the thoughts of millions of Americans?
“The main character in the CISA side of this story is its then-director, Chris Krebs.”
foundationforfreedomonline.com/11-9-22.html
@FFO_Freedom @MikeBenzCyber
10/ Chris Krebs political bias and his affinity for domestic censorship:
•Called Trump a national security threat
•Pleased with #BidenLaptop censorship
•Passionately censored covid-19 and elections
•Wanted lawyers and doctors disbarred
•Wanted conservative media bankrupted
11/ Alex Stamos, a former Facebook exec, is the founder of the EIP censorship network and Krebs' business partner.
Stamos is a member of the CFR, a member of the Aspen Institute, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, and he loves censoring his political opponents.
12/ In Jan. 2021, Alex Stamos compared “over half of the Republicans in Congress” to ISIS.
He called on Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to block OANN and Newsmax and said:
“We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.”
13/ Kate Starbird is the head of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public director and CISA’s “disinformation” advisor subcommittee.
US government grants have funded her work on domestic censorship since 2013.
14/ The EIP's Starbird used advanced monitoring AI to map out entire networks of people who spread a narrative.
This allowed the EIP to stalk every chain in what they deemed a "false narrative" and to systematically censor entire belief systems at scale:
@FFO_Freedom
15/ In October 2018, Starbird told her Facebook followers to vote Democrat to hold Trump responsible for "corruption and collusion" and his "racist, anti-LGBT agenda."
Starbird claimed Trump's “nationalism” didn’t stand for “patriotism” but instead stood for “white supremacy."
16/ Kate Starbird heads CISA's disinformation advisory panel with Vijaya Gadde, the recently fired top lawyer at Twitter, who famously banned the former President and opposed @elonmusk proposal to roll back Twitter censorship policies.
17/ Graham Brookie is the figure who led the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and a previous Obama White House National Security Council member.
The Atlantic Council is a NATO think-tank with seven living CIA directors as members.
18/ Brookie, a government-funded disinformation expert, dedicated much of his time during President Trump’s years in the White House to promoting the false narrative that the President of the United States was a Russian agent controlled by Vladimir Putin.
19/ In Oct. 2020, Brookie would call the #BidenLaptop “laundered unverified misinfo.”
When DNI John Ratcliffe stated that the laptop was legitimate, Brookie publicly condemned Ratcliffe’s “credibility” and accused him of “politicizing intel.”
20/ Incredibly, the Atlantic Council's disinfo lab tasked by the DHS to censor the 2020 election tweeted its director's disdain for the President days before the election.
"Trump is hands down the most significant accelerant and amplifier for disinformation in the election."
21/ Ben Nimmo, a Facebook exec, leads the censorship role at Graphika and is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab.
He was a NATO press officer and was briefly listed as a senior fellow at the UK Institute for Statecraft.
22/ “Donald Trump is right that someone is trying to rig the US election, but it is not Hillary Clinton: it is the Kremlin, and Trump is an accomplice, whether or not he realizes it,” Nimmo lamented in 2016.
The Pentagon awarded Graphika $5 million in 2021 for more censorship.
23/ In June 2019, at an Atlantic Council conference, Nimmo trained journalists on how to spot “disinformation” in Trump tweets and Brexit ads.
Senior journalists were encouraged to hold up placards reading “Bullsh*t” to Trump tweets and Brexit slogans:
@FFO_Clan
24/ The EIP defined "delegitimization" as speech that “casts doubt” on the election process or outcome.
This accounted for 72% of the censorship tickets and targeted over 99% of the post throttled by narrative, focusing on voting machines and vote-by-mail.
@MikeBenzCyber
25/ In effect, the left was allowed to discuss the vulnerabilities of voting machines after the 2016 election, and the right was banned from social media platforms for discussing those very same vulnerabilities after the 2020 election.
26/ The EIP collaborated with its Big Tech partners to systematically censor any delegitimization of vote-by-mail as disinformation.
In effect, they sided with the left and pre-banned criticism of vote-by-mail at the narrative level five months before the 2020 election.
27/ The political establishment and the left used the covid-19 crisis to push for nationwide mail-in voting, which increased the number of ballots cast by mail from 28.8 million in 2016 to 66.4 million in 2020, a massive 131% increase.
28/ The percentage of Democrats voting by mail rose from 26% in 2016 to 60% in 2020, while Republican voters only saw a rise from 21% to 32%.
In short, the extra 37 million ballots cast by mail during the 2020 election swung the election to the EIP's preferred candidate.
29/ In Europe, 74% of nations ban mail-in ballots for citizens living inside their country.
Brazil, Russia, Israel, Mexico, and a host of additional developed nations have also banned mail-in voting due to security concerns.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…
30/ In 2012, the NYT wrote, "all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots."
In 2016, Slate wrote, "the only voting fraud schemes with the potential to actually swing elections involved mail-in ballots."
nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/…
31/ Regardless of your opinion on voting machines or mail-in voting, it’s clear that this public-private censorship network conspired with big tech & big government to censor one side of the discussion.
In Feb. 2021, the EIP expanded its focus to censor covid-19 disinformation.
32/ The DHS-backed censorship network launched the Virality Project, a collaboration between the EIP and the National Conference on Citizenship’s Algorithmic Transparency Institute, New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and Tandon School of Engineering.
33/ The censorship consortium monitored “keyword-based queries and cluster-based community lists of key public figures and influencers” on all of the Big Tech platforms and mass-censored entire narratives that questioned the safety, efficacy, and necessity of the mRNA vaccines.
34/ Maddie de Garay, a 12-year-old girl in the Pfizer vaccine trial, went from healthy to paralyzed 12 hours after her second dose.
Pfizer labeled it "abdominal pain."
The VP said, "The claim that the daughter was harmed by the vaccine has not been proven."
35/ The Virality Project:
“The idea that natural immunity from infection is superior to immunity from vaccination became a political talking point raised repeatedly by right-leaning political influencers, despite inconclusive scientific evidence.”
36/ The DHS-censorship network claims that there are no warning signs in regard to the safety of these mRNA vaccines in VAERS, the UK’s Yellow Card reporting site, EudraVigilance (used in the European Economic Area), and the World Health Organization’s VigiAccess.
37/ This authoritarian censorship network that operates in a constellation of NATO, DHS, and State Department-funded NGOs cannot be allowed to censor inconvenient truths, facts, & narratives under the guise of protecting the public from "misinformation."
38/ Earlier this month, the head of the EIP, @alexstamos, asked @elonmusk for “transparency” regarding the Tesla CEO tweeting, “the rules were enforced against the right, but not against the left.”
Musk responded to the CISA censorship czar, “You operate a propaganda platform.”
The first tweet in the above thread linked to The Twitter Files - Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In - This DHS-backed censorship network used 120 analysts to censor millions of social media posts on elections and covid-19 by KanekoaTheGreat (December 28, 2022). This cites DHS Censorship Agency Had Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On ‘Red Mirage, Blue Shift’ Election Events by
,
More
Belated ATW podcast with my patient friend @walterkirn on the Twitter Files, Shirley Jackson, the Truman Show come to life, and more:
The FBI, explaining to Twitter they'll handle info from the "USIC," while the DHS agency CISA will send domestic reports:
"We can give you everything we're seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies. CISA will know what is going on in each state."
More soon #TwitterFiles
Which U.S. agency had a "mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests," according to Twitter executives?
Check here tomorrow. Apologies for the delay #TwitterFiles
The Twitter Files - Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”
2.By 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts.
3.In February, 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center – a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department – went to the media with a report called, “Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.”
4.The GEC flagged accounts as “Russian personas and proxies” based on criteria like, “Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,” blaming “research conducted at the Wuhan institute,” and “attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.”
5.State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode “led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.” ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.
6.The GEC still led directly to news stories like the AFP’s headline, “Russia-linked disinformation campaign led to coronavirus alarm, US says,” and a Politico story about how “Russian, Chinese, Iranian Disinformation Narratives Echo One Another.”
7.“YOU HAVEN’T MADE A RUSSIA ATTRIBUTION IN SOME TIME” When Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub complained Twitter hadn’t “made a Russia attribution” in some time, Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth said it was “revelatory of their motives.”
8.“WE’RE HAPPY TO WORK DIRECTLY WITH YOU ON THIS, INSTEAD OF NBC.” Roth tried in vain to convince outsider researchers like the Clemson lab to check with them before pushing stories about foreign interference to media.
9.Twitter was also trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Roth. “If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,” said policy director Carlos Monje.
10.When the State Department/GEC – remember this was 2020, during the Trump administration – wanted to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts it claimed would “amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation” about COVID, Twitter analysts were beside themselves.
11.The GEC report appeared based on DHS data circulated earlier that week, and included accounts that followed “two or more” Chinese diplomatic accounts. They reportedly ended up with a list “nearly 250,000” names long, and included Canadian officials and a CNN account:
12.Roth saw GEC’s move as an attempt by the GEC to use intel from other agencies to “insert themselves” into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others:
13.The GEC was soon agreeing to loop in Twitter before going public, but they were using a technique that had boxed in Twitter before. “The delta between when they share material and when they go to the press continues to be problematic,” wrote one comms official.
15.“IT MAKES SENSE TO PUSH BACK ON GEC PARTICIPATION IN THIS FORUM” When the FBI informed Twitter the GEC wanted to be included in the regular “industry call” between companies like Twitter and Facebook and the DHS and FBI, Twitter leaders balked at first.
16.Facebook, Google, and Twitter executives were united in opposition to GEC’s inclusion, with ostensible reasons including, “The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.”
17.A deeper reason was a perception that unlike the DHS and FBI, which were “apolitical,” as Roth put it, the GEC was “political,” which in Twitter-ese appeared to be partisan code.
“I think they thought the FBI was less Trumpy,” is how one former DOD official put it.
18.After spending years rolling over for Democratic Party requests for “action” on “Russia-linked” accounts, Twitter was suddenly playing tough. Why? Because, as Roth put it, it would pose “major risks” to bring the GEC in, “especially as the election heats up.”
19.When senior lawyer Stacia Cardille tried to argue against the GEC’s inclusion to the FBI, the words resonated “with Elvis, not Laura,” i.e. with agent Elvis Chan, not Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) unit chief Laura Dehmlow:
20.Eventually the FBI argued, first to Facebook, for a compromise solution: other USG agencies could participate in the “industry” calls, but the FBI and DHS would act as sole “conduits.”
21.Roth reached out to Chan with concerns about letting the “press-happy” GEC in, expressing hope they could keep the “circle of trust small.”
22."STATE... NSA, and CIA" Chan reassured him it would be a “one-way” channel, and “State/GEC, NSA, and CIA have expressed interest in being allowed on in listen mode only.”
23."BELLY BUTTON" “We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan explained, but the DHS agency CISA “will know what’s going on in each state.” He went on to ask if industry could “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the USG."
24.They eventually settled on an industry call via Signal. In an impressive display of operational security, Chan circulated private numbers of each company’s chief moderation officer in a Word Doc marked “Signal Phone Numbers,” subject-lined, “List of Numbers.”
25.Twitter was taking requests from every conceivable government body, beginning with the Senate Intel Committee (SSCI), which seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction. Execs rushed to tell “Team SSCI” they zapped five accounts on an FBI tip:
26.Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more:
27.They also received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned. Here, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry:
28.“WE DON’T DO THIS” Even Twitter declined to honor Schiff’s request at the time. Sperry was later suspended, however.
29.Twitter honored almost everyone else’s requests, even those from GEC – including a decision to ban accounts like @RebelProtests and @bricsmedia because GEC identified them as “GRU-controlled” and linked “to the Russian government,” respectively:
30.The GEC requests were what a former CIA staffer working at Twitter was referring to, when he said, “Our window on that is closing,” meaning they days when Twitter could say no to serious requests were over.
31.Remember the 2017 “internal guidance” in which Twitter decided to remove any user “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as a state-sponsored entity committing cyber operations? By 2020 such identifications came in bulk.
REEEEEE!
Watching some of the most famous, most powerful and richest men red-pill themselves into disaster. Pretty wild!
Matt Taibbi...what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day. Should be a cautionary tale for everyone. Selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on Earth. Well, he'll eat well for the rest of his life I guess. But is it worth it?
Matt Taibbi always was, and still remains, a fraud. Doing PR for the richest person in the world should come as no surprise.
One minute you're scourging Goldman Sachs, the next you're doing PR for the richest man in the world, funny old life
Taibbi now doing comms for the world’s richest man on his own platform
Elon Musk @elonmusk
@WesleyLowery Thats my read, too -- that the appropriate policy people made a call without government interference and were later overturned on appeal.
More curious about the process now... A journalist agrees to terms they refuse to describe to do social media PR for the richest man alive??
Editors are great not just because they make your work sharper, but because you can ask them things like "Hey should I be doing PR work for the richest man on the planet" and they'll say "Nah"
Kind of a bummer to see the guy who made a meal out of Goldman Sachs dancing for the world’s richest man on a Friday night.
Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world's richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you're speaking truth to power.
Taibbi became prominent by writing columns in Rolling Stone about Wall Street greed, and now he’s doing an errand for the world’s richest man
Taibbi is a hack carrying water for a billionaire but I don’t think he’s a hack carrying water for the richest man in the world at this point. Not after blowing $44 billion on Twitter and with Tesla stock down by over 50% in the past year.
“jOuRnaLiSm iS aBoUt SpEaKiNg tRuTh to pOwEr,” i, a supposedly serious journalist, say as i write up a press release for one of the richest people in the world on a site that they own and are desperate to drive traffic to
I don’t really expect the world’s richest man to have even a passing familiarity with what the First Amendment does and doesn’t mean.
@mtaibbi knows *exactly* what it does and doesn’t mean, and he carries water for @elonmusk anyway. Despicable.
The Taibbi thread is a great example of overwriting when you don’t have the goods but you don’t want to admit you’re just doing pr for the world’s richest person
From calling Goldman Sachs a “vampire squid” to giving free PR to the world’s richest billionaire. Man, what a career journey
The Taibbi thing is so depressing. I was a defender well into his semi-recent heel turn, but to see a once-great journalist turn into a pathetic lap dog for the world's richest man is too much.
Presumably Taibbi was the most credible guy the world's richest man could get to do this, which speaks to its Brobdingnagian bullshit level.
Tom Bonier @tbonier
Making a deal to do PR for the richest man in the world in exchange for exposure while advocating some kind of vague centrism is a fitting bookend to his past few years.
BORG @borgposting
Going from Rolling Stone magazine writing about corporate corruption and power to tweeting a political hit job assigned by the richest man in the world is a wild fucking ride that all the drugs in Hunter Thompson trunk could cause. This is all Taibbi.
@jimstinson @oneunderscore__ He didn't *get* the story. It was handed to him so he could do PR for the world's richest man
Watching Matt's unbelievable fall into lazy, reactionary commentator and now pr hand for the world's richest man is depressing.
Justin Baragona @justinbaragona
We don’t perform as a PR person to the richest man on the planet, but we do center how policy impacts The People over billionaires.
100% independent, no PAC $, no corporate funds.
Check our our new newsletter launched Nov 6 ish, which is already a best seller👇🏼
Sarah Reese Jones @PoliticusSarah
The biggest question to answer involves your journalistic integrity. Honest reporters reveal any conflicts of interest beyond just writing "I had to agree to certain conditions," presumably with the world's richest man who's pushing a far-right political agenda.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
#Pfizer Files
1/ THREAD🚨 #PfizerFiles
Pfizer has habitually engaged in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribed physicians, & suppressed adverse trial results.
This is no secret, yet this fact continues to be brushed under the rug by politicians & the media.
kanekoa.substack.com/p/pfizers-hist…
2/ Pfizer’s CEO @AlbertBourla claimed during a November 2021 interview that a group of “medical professionals” intentionally circulating “misinformation” critical of the Pfizer vaccine were “criminals.”
The Pfizer CEO must have forgotten the history of his own company.
3/ In 1994, Pfizer paid the Justice Department to settle claims that the company lied to get federal approval for a heart valve and then covered up safety concerns even as the device killed hundreds of patients.
Pfizer paid $200M to settle lawsuits.
nytimes.com/1994/07/02/bus…
4/ In 1996, Pfizer gave an experimental drug to 200 Nigerian children without informing their parents that an approved cure existed or that their children were subjects of a medical experiment.
Eleven children died.
Others suffered brain damage, organ failure, or paralysis.
5/ In 2001, Pfizer was sued on behalf of 30 Nigerian families who alleged their "children were used as human guinea pigs."
The families claimed Pfizer violated the Nuremberg Code and exposed their children to "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment."
The case was dismissed.
6/ In 2007, the Nigerian government sued Pfizer for $7 billion and accused the company of "carrying out illegal trials" that "killed or disabled children."
Nigeria claimed Pfizer did not inform local health authorities or parents that the children were part of an experiment.
7/ It gets even worse.
In 2010, leaked State Department cables alleged that Pfizer had hired investigators to blackmail Nigeria's Attorney General into dropping the $7 billion lawsuit against Pfizer.
theguardian.com/business/2010/…
8/ The leaked cables claimed Pfizer passed "a series of damaging articles" to the media that accused the Attorney General of corruption and warned him that more negative articles would come out if he didn't drop the case.
Nigeria dropped the case in 2009.
9/ In 2002, Pfizer agreed to pay $49 million to settle allegations that the drug company defrauded the federal government and 40 states by charging too much for its cholesterol treatment Lipitor.
Pfizer's revenue for Lipitor in 2001 was $6.45 billion.
nytimes.com/2002/10/29/bus…
10/ In 2008, the NYT published an article entitled, “Experts Conclude Pfizer Manipulated Studies.”
Pfizer delayed the publication of negative studies, spun negative data more positively, and suppressed negative findings to promote Neurontin.
nytimes.com/2008/10/08/hea…
11/ Dr. Kay Dickersin, a John Hopkins Professor of Medicine, who reviewed the Pfizer studies, concluded that 80% of the positive studies were published in full journal articles.
Yet, only 38% of negative studies were published, and some only partially.
nytimes.com/2008/10/08/hea…
12/ In 2009, Pfizer paid $750M to settle 35,000 claims that its drug, Rezulin, was responsible for 63 deaths and dozens of liver failures.
The FDA did not remove Rezulin from the market until three years after the UK had, despite a mounting death toll.
latimes.com/archives/la-xp…
There seems to be no tweet numbered 13.
14/ In 2009, Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion, then the largest healthcare fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the US.
Pfizer pled guilty to paying kickbacks to doctors and illegally promoting — Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox, and Lyrica.
justice.gov/opa/pr/justice…
15/ CNN's Anderson Cooper: If Pfizer is too big to fail and even the biggest fine in history is just a few months' profits, then what's going to stop it from illegally promoting other drugs?
Critics say nothing.
They say it's the cost of doing business.
16/ In 2010, Pfizer was ordered to pay $142 million in damages for violating federal anti-racketeering laws by its fraudulent sale and marketing of Neurontin.
The jury found that Pfizer violated the RICO act.
yourlawyer.com/defective-drug…
17/ In 2010, Pfizer admitted that it paid $20 million to 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals for consulting and speaking on its behalf during the last six months of 2009.
The disclosure was required due to a settlement agreement for the illegal promotion of drugs.
18/ In 2010, Blue Cross filed a lawsuit against Pfizer, accusing the pharmaceutical giant of illegally bribing 5,000 doctors with lavish Caribbean vacations, golf games, cash payments, massages, and other recreational activities.
cbsnews.com/news/blue-cros…
19/ In 2012, the SEC charged Pfizer with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for bribing foreign healthcare professionals in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Serbia.
Pfizer settled for $60 million.
sec.gov/news/press-rel…
20/ In 2012, Pfizer paid $1.2 billion to settle claims by nearly 10,000 women that its drug, Prempro, caused breast cancer.
This included punitive damages for the pharmaceutical giant withholding warnings about the risk of breast cancer.
fiercepharma.com/regulatory/pfi…
21/ In 2012, Pfizer paid $55 million to settle criminal charges for illegally promoting its proton pump inhibitor Protonix.
In 2016, Pfizer paid $784 million to settle a medicare fraud case for its promotion of Protonix.
brianmahany.com/news/598_Mahan…
22/ There are over 13,000 proton pump inhibitor lawsuits pending in federal court — which claim that Pfizer and other drug manufacturers — withheld warning signs of kidney disease, acute interstitial nephritis, and kidney failure.
drugwatch.com/proton-pump-in…
23/ In 2013, Pfizer paid $273 million to settle claims by over 2000 people that its drug, Chantix, caused suicidal thoughts and severe psychological disorders.
fiercepharma.com/sales-and-mark…
24/ @BernieSanders: "Virtually every major drug company has either been convicted of fraud or reached a settlement."
"Is fraud the business model of the pharmaceutical industry?"
25/ Pfizer has habitually engaged in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribed physicians, and suppressed adverse trial results.
This is no secret, yet big government, big tech, and big media banned scientific criticism of Pfizer's covid-19 vaccines.
26/ This Pfizer presentation got Dr. Robert Malone (@RWMaloneMD) banned from Twitter.
"Pfizer's own 6-month report data on its COVID-19 inoculation shows greater illness and death in the inoculation arm than the placebo arm."
27/ @RWMaloneMD tells @joerogan that he was banned for sharing:
"...a fantastic video... by the Covid Care Alliance group that summarizes all the malfeasance, and data manipulation, and misinterpretation of the Pfizer vaccines, and their clinical trials."
28/ Dr. Robert Malone (@RWMaloneMD) was banned from Twitter for sharing this 40-minute video presentation created by the @CCCAlliance, a coalition of over 500 independent doctors, scientists, and health care practitioners.
Can we discuss it now❓
canadiancovidcarealliance.org/wp-content/upl…
29/ The video is a fact-based scientific critique of Pfizer's covid-19 vaccine clinical trials.
Considering Pfizer's history of corruption, scientists, doctors, and journalists should not have been banned from social media for asking these questions.
Elon Musk @elonmusk
30/ The @CCCAlliance alleged that 84% of the Pfizer report authors had a conflict of interest.
They were either employed, owned stock, or received grants from Pfizer.
For example, the two BioNTech founders, who gained more than $9 billion from the vax, co-authored the report.
31/ Pfizer unblinded the trial after two months ruining long-term safety data & did not track biomarkers before & after vaccination:
•D-dimer for clotting
•C-reactive protein for inflammation
•Troponins for cardiac damage
•Blood oxygen for hypoxia
•Amyloid for Alzheimer's
32/ It was left to the discretion of Pfizer's investigators whether or not to test participants for covid-19.
They did not test 3,410 suspected cases (1,594 vaccinated & 1,816 placeboes) who were symptomatic with covid-19.
Why didn't Pfizer remove subjectivity & test everyone?
One response was…
…to which the account responded…
@ZubyMusic Absolutely. They are white collar criminals who prioritize profits over human lives. The report that got @RWMaloneMD banned from Twitter is mind blowing. No one talks about the increase in illness and death in the vaccinated arm of the trial.
Another person added…
@KanekoaTheGreat @ZubyMusic @RWMaloneMD You should look into the CEO and how he worked on the failed horse vaccine
Model Y - End of the ICE age @ModelYendofICE
Someone else responded to @ZubyMusic with…
Twitter Banning of Scientists, Doctors, Journalists & Activists
1/ During the last 3 years, @Twitter has banned many scientists, doctors, journalists, and activists. This 𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗 tells the stories of many censorship victims.
Please RT so @elonmusk gets aware of the sad fact that many of us are still banned and waiting to get reinstated.
2/ 𝗗𝗿 𝗠𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗲 𝗝𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘀 (@molsjames) is an American Intensivist (ICU doc), NYC ICU volunteer and saw 2000 covid patients in ICU-banned from Twitter for 4 months for calling out the AMA for failure to have CPT codes for C19 Vaccine Injury.
3/ 𝗡𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝗛𝘂𝗱𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@NickHudsonCT) is a South African actuary who is still banned for quoting a public health figure stating that masks make the wearer a vested participant in the lie they've been told and for arguing that Pfizer Phase III trials were fraudulently designed.
4/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗮 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗟𝗼𝘂𝗽𝗶𝘀 (@DrLoupis) is a Danish/Greek MD who was banned for 3 months for discussing European excess mortality. She has been through two medical boards for questioning the Covid policy from the beginning.
5/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗡𝗮𝗼𝗺𝗶 𝗪𝗼𝗹𝗳 (@naomirwolf) is a fierce freedom fighter, exposer of the Pfizer documents, and CEO of @DailyClout. She was banned on 6/5/21 for correctly expressing concern over the effects of the mRNA jabs on menstrual cycles. theguardian.com/books/2021/jun…
6/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗦𝗶𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗸 (@goddeketal; that's me) is a biotechnologist who was banned for 18 months for praising VitD, questioning the efficacy of masks & stating that viruses usually become weaker over time. He lost his job at the university for speaking out on @Twitter.
7/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗲 (@RWMaloneMD) is a doctor & pioneer of mRNA technology. He was banned for 1 year without any warning for posting a link to the Canadian Covid Care Alliance vid questioning the safety & effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccines.metro.co.uk/2021/12/31/pro…
8/ 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗩𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗙𝗼𝘅 (@VigilantFox), a now popular Substacker and citizen journalist, was banned for nine months for cutting and sharing viral clips of top doctors, scientists, and dissenting voices speaking out against the mainstream Covid-19 narrative.
9/ 𝗧𝗲𝘅𝗮𝘀 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗮𝘆 (@TexasLindsay_) is an American living in Dallas, Texas. She was permanently de-platformed for nearly 5 months for sharing a news clip of Tucker Carlson in which he read from The Lancet and Twitter wrongly labelled it as Covid misinformation.
10/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗞𝗮𝘁 𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗲𝘆 (@KLVeritas) is a Croatian-born, American-trained board-certified family physician and president of two medical associations who was suspended from Twitter and censored for sharing Paul Alexander's substack on Monkey Pox.
11/ 𝗘𝗺𝗺𝗮 𝗪𝗼𝗼𝗱𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲 (@EWoodhouse7) is the eponym of Dr Jessica Hockett, who now works in education policy following a 20-year career with K12 schools & organizations. She was banned for 6.5 months after directly quoting a WSJ article on toddler vaccine development.
12/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗕𝗼𝘄𝗱𝗲𝗻 (@MdBreathe) is an Otolaryngologist and Sleep Medicine specialist in Houston TX who was banned from Twitter for 5 months after exposing collusion between the CDC and Twitter with a viral tweet with over 1M views.
13/ Dr. Bowden was also suspended from Houston Methodist hospital for saying “ivermectin works” and “vaccine mandates are wrong” on Twitter, the hospital claiming she was spreading dangerous misinformation.
14/ 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘇 (@tracybeanz) is an American journalist who was reporting on COVID and election integrity at the time she was banned for 23 months with no specific offending tweet identified.
15/ She was first told it was for “platform manipulation and spam” and upon appeal that she violated the “Coordinated Harmful Activity Policy.” Because of her suspension, her business was adversely affected, and people were unable to obtain life-saving information about Covid-19.
16/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗟𝘆𝗻𝗻 𝗙𝘆𝗻𝗻 (@Fynnderella1) is an American MD who was banned for 18 months for no reason, perhaps evading a ban for an account already reinstated. The original ban was for stating that the SC2 spike protein is itself pathogenic & masks don't mitigate viral spread.
17/ 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗶 (@robinmonotti) is a UK-based architect & filmmaker who was banned for 20 months after questioning the zoonotic origin theory of SARSCoV2 & whether Covid19 injections are being miscategorized as vaccines. No official reason was ever given for his ban
18/ 𝗞𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗸𝗼𝗮 (@KanekoaTheGreat) is an American independent journalist who was banned for 23 months for reporting on the 'most secure election in American history.' Twitter broke its own 5-strike policy and permanently suspended his account on his 2nd strike.
19/ This inspired him to garner the support of half a million subscribers on Substack, Telegram, and alternative social media platforms where he continues his quest to become a 'misinformation superspreader.'
20/ 𝗖𝗵𝗶𝗲𝗳 𝗡𝗲𝗿𝗱 (@TheChiefNerd) is an engineer & journalist who was banned for sharing adverse event data related to the COVID-19 “vaccines” after his father was vaccine injured. He lost his career in the Pharma Industry for not complying with the vaxx mandates.
21/ 𝗘𝗹 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗼 𝗠𝗮𝗹𝗼 (@boriquagato) is a cat who was banned for 24 months without warning for reasons that were never disclosed but likely owed to his opposition to covid lockdowns and mask mandates.
22/ 𝗝𝗼𝗲𝗹 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝘆 (@RealJoelSmalley) is a data scientist who was banned for 14 months for sharing information from experts about the risks of COVID "vaccination" for pregnant women and the potential for vaccine-acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
23/ 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗱 𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗶𝗻𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@EmeraldRobinson) is the WH Correspondent for Newsmax TV. Before, she served as the chief WH Correspondent for OAN. As part of her WH coverage, Robinson has travelled with the president reporting live during the Helsinki and Singapore Summits.
24/ 𝗠𝗶𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗲𝗹 𝗣 𝗦𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 (@MichaelPSenger) is an American attorney who was banned for 10 months for opining that, though they may not be willing to face it, the vast majority have realized that every COVID policy has been one giant fraud.
25/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗣𝗮𝘂𝗹 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝗯𝘂𝗿𝗴 (@docbrandenburg) is a German physician and transplant immunologist who was banned for 14 months now for pointing out the fact, that "social distancing" and "mask mandates" against COVID lack scientific proof of efficacy.
26/ He was eventually banned for stating "No, there is NO medical reason for people without symptoms of illness to limit their social contact with each other." His current handle is @pblive_stream.
@pblive_stream 27/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘀 𝗕𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 (@Thomas_Binder) is a Swiss internist and cardiologist with thesis in immunology and virology who was banned for 22 months for sharing Doctors for COVID Ethics first open letter to the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
@pblive_stream @Thomas_Binder 28/ He was forcibly detained psychiatrically for six days for doing nothing else than his duty as a doctor ("First do no harm!") and speaking out on @Twitter. He's still banned. His current account is @Tom_Rumi.
@pblive_stream @Thomas_Binder @Twitter @Tom_Rumi 29/ 𝗠. 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗱 𝗧𝗿𝗲𝗯𝗼𝗻𝘆 MD FAAC (@doc_singing) is an American Internist who was banned for 6 months for "ban evasion" even though he never had another account.
@pblive_stream @Thomas_Binder @Twitter @Tom_Rumi @doc_singing 30/ 𝗔𝗯𝗶𝗿 𝗕𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗮𝗻 (@abirballan), Masters in Public Health, was banned twice ‘permanently’ from Twitter. Her last ban lasted 10 months for sharing a video by Dr Peter McCullough stating the conditions for assuming vaccine causality of adverse events.
31/ 𝗗𝗿. 𝗣𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗠𝗰𝗖𝘂𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵, MD, MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) is an American Cardiologist, Internist and Epidemiologist who was banned for 2 months for sharing a video clip about children and the risk of myocarditis.
White House Pressured Facebook to Censor Accurate Info on Covid ‘Vaccines’
Many think social media companies only censored "vaccine misinformation." But a recently-released email shows Facebook reassuring the White House that they were censoring "often-true content” that "does not contain actionable misinformation" but was "discouraging vaccines."
What's more, said the Facebook executive, "We'll remove these Groups, Pages, and Accounts when they are disproportionately promoting this sensationalized content. More on this front as we proceed to implement."
There is a pattern here of the Biden White House intimidating Twitter and Facebook execs into censoring "legitimate findings and questions about our Covid policies" @davidzweig
thefp.com/p/how-twitter-…
The Twitter Files #14
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #14
THE RUSSIAGATE LIES
One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag
2.At a crucial moment in a years-long furor, Democrats denounced a report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation, saying it was boosted by Russian “bots” and “trolls.”
3.Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence:
“We are feeding congressional trolls.”
“Not any…significant activity connected to Russia.”
“Putting the cart before the horse assuming this is propaganda/bots.”
4.Twitter warned politicians and media the not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored.
5.On January 18th, 2018, Republican Devin Nunes submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee detailing abuses by the FBI in obtaining FISA surveillance authority against Trump-connected figures, including the crucial role played by the infamous “Steele Dossier”:
6.The Nunes assertions would virtually all be verified in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019.
7.Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a “joke”:
It seems there is no number 8. Here’s number 9…
9.On January 23rd, 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) published an open letter saying the hashtag “gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.”
9b. Feinstein/Schiff said the Nunes memo "distorts" classified information, but note they didn't call it incorrect.
10.Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal followed suit, publishing a letter saying, “We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans.”
11.Feinstein, Schiff, Blumenthal, and media members all pointed to the same source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts, under the auspices of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).
12.The dashboard, which featured a crude picture of Vladimir Putin deviously blowing evil red Twitter birds into the atmosphere, was vague in how it reached its conclusions.
13.Inside Twitter, executives panned Watts, Hamilton 68, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Two key complaints: Hamilton 68 seemed to be everyone’s only source, and no one was checking with Twitter.
14.“I encourage you to be skeptical of Hamilton 68’s take on this, which as far as I can tell is the only source for these stories,” said Global Policy Communications Chief (and future WH and NSC spokesperson) Emily Horne.
She added: “It’s a comms play for ASD.”
16.“If ASD isn’t going to fact-check with us, we should feel free to correct the record on their work,” said Policy VP Carlos Monje.
17.Roth couldn’t find any Russian connection to #ReleaseTheMemo – at all. “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and… none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”
18.“We investigated, found that engagement as overwhelmingly organic, and driven by VITs” – Very Important Tweeters, including Wikileaks and congressman Steve King.
19.A staffer for “DiFi” – Feinstein – agreed it would be “helpful to know” how Hamilton 68 goes by “the process by which they decide an account is Russian.”
But, only AFTER Feinstein published her letter about Russian influence.
20.When Twitter spoke to a Blumenthal staffer, they tried to “wave him off” because “we don’t believe these are bots.”
21.Added another: “It might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer that it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there because it could come back to make him look silly.”
22.One Twitter exec even tried to negotiate, implying an undisclosed future PR concession if Blumenthal would lay off on this:
“It seems like there are other wins we could offer him.”
24.Execs eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims.
25.They expressed this explicitly to Blumenthal’s camp, saying “Twitter spent a lot of resources” on this request and the reward from Blumenthal shouldn’t be round after round of requests.”
“We can’t do a user notice each time this happens.”
26.Eventually Twitter staff realize “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions” but “just wants to get credit for pushing us further.”
27.Ultimately senior executives talked about “feeding congressional trolls” and compared their situation to the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
28.In the story, if you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want a glass of milk, which will lead to a wave of other exhausting requests, at the end of which he’ll want a glass of milk. And one more cookie.
29.The metaphor for the endless Russia requests was so perfect, one exec wrote, “I’m legit embarrassed I didn’t think of that first.”
30.Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record.
31.Outside counsel from DC-connected firms like Debevoise and Plimpton advised Twitter to use language like, “With respect to particular hashtags, we take seriously any activity that may represent an abuse of our platform.”
The Twitter Files - Supplemental - More Adam Schiff Ban Requests, and "Deamplification"
2.Staff of House Democrat @AdamSchiff wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down. This important use of taxpayer resources involved an ask about a “Peter Douche” parody photo of Joe Biden. The DNC made the same request: https://t.co/fM2Y2jxVKw
Nate's Liver - Commentary @SilERabbit
3.The real issue was Donald Trump retweeted the Biden pic. To its credit Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious “humorous intent” and “any reasonable observer” - apparently, not a Schiff staffer - could see it was doctored.
4.Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein didn’t give up, claiming there was a “slippery slope concern here.”
5.Twitter also refused requests for bans of content about Schiff and his staff, e.g. “complete suppress[ion of] any and all search results about Mr. Misko and other Committee staffers.” Twitter said this would not be “conceivable.”
6.Even when Twitter didn’t suspend an account, that didn’t mean they didn’t act. Schiff’s office repeatedly complained about “QAnon related activity” that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine “whistleblower” or the Steele dossier:
7.Twitter policy at the time didn’t ban QAnon, but “deamplified” such accounts. About the batch of tweets that included those above, Twitter execs wrote: “We can internally confirm that a number of the accounts flagged are already included in this deamplification.”
8.Schiff’s office had a concern about “deamplification,” though: it might make it harder for law enforcement to track the offending Tweeters.
9.“WE APPRECIATE GREATLY”
“We are curious whether any deamplification measures implemented by Twitter’s enforcement team – which we appreciate greatly – could… impede the ability of law enforcement to search Twitter for potential threats about Misko and other HPSCI staff.”
10.For more, watch @ShellenbergerMD, @bariweiss, @lhfang, @davidzweig, @AlexBerenson, and others.
Twitter had no editorial input. Searches were carried out by third parties, so the documents could be limited.
More Taibbi Stuff
A consistent theme of the #TwitterFiles has been concrete evidence that Russiagate headlines were manufactured by politicians and media — the thread below blows up the absurd #ReleaseTheMemo panic stoked by @SenFeinstein, @SenBlumenthal, and @AdamSchiff, among others.
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
It’s odd to watch media figures who blew the Trump-Russia story in the most humorous ways act like they didn’t. Here are clips of you scoffing in the wake of Nunes memo at anyone foolish enough to mistrust “the FBI, the FBI!”:
youtu.be/JOmgciEWxPM
msnbc.com/the-beat-with-…
Chris Hayes @chrislhayes
Congressman, I’m an American citizen, I love my country, and accusing me of repeating “Kremlin talking points” when I report something you find inconvenient is beyond reprehensible. You and your sleazy red-baiting pals in congress should be ashamed.
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
Also my story wasn’t about 2016 or the GRU. It was about the grossly dishonest campaign by your congressional colleagues to depict the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag as driven by Russian influence. Care to address the actual story?
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
What @tedlieu leaves out is that the DOJ indicted 12 individuals they knew would never show up in court, but had to drop two related cases of companies that did fight back, rather than go through discovery: nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/…
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
The office of @AdamSchiff said they "appreciate greatly" Twitter's efforts to deamplify certain accounts, but worried such shadow bans might "impede the ability of law enforcement" to search for certain accounts:
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
The office of @AdamSchiff often asked Twitter to take down tweets on the grounds that they were "QAnon related" activity, but see below - they were often just run-of-the-mill political criticism:
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
Congressman, I’m an American citizen, I love my country, and accusing me of repeating “Kremlin talking points” when I report something you find inconvenient is beyond reprehensible. You and your sleazy red-baiting pals in congress should be ashamed.
Ted Lieu @tedlieu
It’s odd to watch media figures who blew the Trump-Russia story in the most humorous ways act like they didn’t. Here are clips of you scoffing in the wake of Nunes memo at anyone foolish enough to mistrust “the FBI, the FBI!”:
youtu.be/JOmgciEWxPM
msnbc.com/the-beat-with-…
Chris Hayes @chrislhayes
Updated Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary
The Twitter Files 15
4.“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.”
5.These are quotes by Twitter executives about Hamilton 68, a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence and was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years.
6.The “dashboard” was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).
7.The ASD advisory council includes neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, ex-Hillary for America chief John Podesta, and former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security.
8.News outlets for years cited Watts and Hamilton 68 when claiming Russian bots were “amplifying” an endless parade of social media causes – against strikes in Syria, in support of Fox host Laura Ingraham, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.
9.Hamilton 68 was the source for stories claiming Russian bots pushed terms like “deep state” or hashtags like #FireMcMaster, #SchumerShutdown, #WalkAway, #ReleaseTheMemo, #AlabamaSenateRace, and #ParklandShooting, among many others.
10. The secret ingredient to Hamilton 68’s analytical method? A list: “Our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence activities online,” was how the site put it at launch.
11. Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming "the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down." All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about “Russian bots” never really knew what they were describing.
12. Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data.
Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them.
13.“These accounts,” they concluded, “are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.”
“No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.”
“Hardly illuminating a massive influence operation.”
14. In layman’s terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.
15.It was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.
16. Twitter immediately recognized these Hamilton-driven news stories posed a major ethical problem, potentially implicating them.
“Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” Roth wrote.
17.Some Twitter execs badly wanted to out Hamilton 68. After Russians were blamed for hyping the #ParklandShooting hashtag, one wrote:
“Why can’t we say we’ve investigated… and citing Hamilton 68 is being wrong, irresponsible, and biased?”
18.Yoel Roth wanted a confrontation. “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote.
However, there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy.
19.“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said future White House and NSC spokesperson Emily Horne.
20.“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” wrote Carlos Monje, the future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
21. So the “legitimate people,” as one Twitter exec called them, never found out they’d been used as fodder for mountains of news stories about “Russian influence.” Because the #TwitterFiles contain the list, they’ve begun finding out.
22.“I’m shocked,” says Sonia Monsour, who as a child lived through civil war in Lebanon. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online.”
23. “I’ve written a book about the U.S. Constitution,” says Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas. “How I made a list like this is incredible to me.”
24. “When I was growing up, my father told me about the McCarthyite blacklist,” says Oregon native Jacob Levich. “As a child it would never have occurred to me that this would come back, in force and broadly, in a way… designed to undermine rights we hold dear.”
25. Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was on the list. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles about British comic @Holbornlolz: “A wind-up merchant… I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.”
26. I’m listed as a foreign bot?” said conservative media figure Dennis Michael Lynch. “As a proud taxpaying citizen, charitable family man, and honest son of a U.S. Marine, I deserve better. We all do!”
27. Consortium editor Joe Lauria too was angered to find he was on the list, which targeted voices across the spectrum: “Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’”
28.What makes this an important story is the sheer scale of the news footprint left by Hamilton 68’s digital McCarthyism. The quantity of headlines and TV segments dwarfs the impact of individual fabulists like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass.
29.Hamilton 68 was used as a source to assert Russian influence in an astonishing array of news stories: support for Brett Kavanaugh or the Devin Nunes memo, the Parkland shooting, manipulation of black voters, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation…
30.These stories raised fears in the population, and most insidious of all, were used to smear people like Tulsi Gabbard as foreign “assets,” and drum up sympathy for political causes like Joe Biden’s campaign by describing critics as Russian-aligned.
31.Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter:
32.It was a lie. The illusion of Russian support was created by tracking people like Joe Lauria, Sonia Monsour, and Dave Shestokas. Virtually every major American news organization cited these fake tales— even fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact.
33.Twitter didn’t have the guts to out Hamilton 68 publicly but did try to speak to reporters off the record. “Reporters are chafing,” said Horne. “It’s like shouting into a void.”
34.Roth was offended by the idea that tweets on certain themes suggested subversion. “Can we talk about how incredibly condescending…? If you talk about these themes, you must have been duped by Russian propaganda.”
35.Again, even Roth, like most Twitter execs an ardent Democratic partisan, saw that the Hamilton scheme would lead people “to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.”
36.At least two other research institutions that used similar methodologies – and were cited as sources in news stories – were also criticized in Twitter email correspondence.
37.MSNBC, Watts, the Washington Post, Politico, Mother Jones (which did at least 14 Hamilton 68 stories), the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and the offices of politicians like Dianne Feinstein all refused comment, unless this counts:
38.This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source:
39.Perhaps most embarrassingly, elected officials promoted the site, and invited Hamilton “experts” to testify. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders.
40.The mix of digital McCarthyism and fraud did great damage to American politics and culture. News outlets that don't disavow these stories, or still pay Hamilton vets as analysts, shouldn't be trusted. Every subscriber to those outlets to write to editors about the issue.
41.For more from the #TwitterFiles, follow @bariweiss, @lhfang, @ShellenbergerMD, @TheFP, and others. Twitter had no input into this story. Searches were conducted by a third party, so material may have been left out.
More
WTF? “The consensus among younger journalists is that we got it all wrong,” Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor in chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, told us. “Objectivity has got to go.”
“Opinion Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust” by The Washington Post
NEW SUBSTACK POST:
House Oversight Hearing On Twitter’s Election Interference Validates Loomer #RICO Lawsuit
Please SUBSCRIBE and SHARE. Thank you!
The Twitter Files 16
2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the “U.S. intelligence community”:
3. These and at least a dozen other newsworthy revelations produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months:
4. Then House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.
The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!
5. Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.
6. If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?
7. Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like:
“Rand Paul visit excitement”
“Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)”
Being followed by rival Eric Brakey
Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.”
8. King’s office declined comment. If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like:
9. So as not to focus only on Dems or those who caucus with Democrats, here’s a contribution from Republican Mark Lenzi, a State Department official most famous for offering to donate his brain to science after a claimed brush with Havana syndrome.
10. Lenzi wrote to Twitter bluntly asking to remove 14 accounts distinguished among other things by skepticism of Russiagate: “The below are some Russian controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete.”
11.A government official, writing from a State department email, asks to “delete” 14 accounts that are engaged in legit speech and for which no evidence is shown they're Russian controlled or bots (in fact, we at Racket know some of these people). A clear First Amendment issue.
12. I noted before there were many crazy requests in Twitter records from officials wanting foes taken off Twitter, with Californian Adam Schiff’s effort to ban a reporter and stop “any and all search results” about a staffer making Angus King’s spreadsheet gambit look tame.
13. The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they're about. Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.
14. The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that's not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.
15. Beginning in March, we'll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
16. Until then, if you found yourself on King's list, please DM or write in to Racket.News. I'm on vacation next week, but we'll mock up "Angus King Told Twitter I Was Suspicious, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" shirts when I get back.
17. Thanks to #TwitterFiles contributors like @ShellenbergerMD and @lhfang, and thanks also to Racket researchers. Searches were performed by a third party and material may have been left out.
Media Reporting on The Twitter Files
“Chief Twit Elon Musk says 'tyranny is all that lies ahead' if free speech is lost in America as he prepares to release sensitive 'Twitter Files' on suppression: 'This is a battle for the future of civilization'“ by The Daily Mail (November 28, 2022)
“Let the ‘Revolution’ Begin: Elon Musk to Publicly Release “Free Speech Suppression Files” on Twitter'“ by The Gateway Pundit (November 28, 2022)
“Elon Musk says he plans to publish 'the Twitter Files' about free speech suppression on the social-media platform” by Business Insider (November 29, 2022)
“Released Twitter emails show how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story” by CNN (December 2, 2022)
“Elon Musk to drop Twitter files on NY Post-Hunter Biden laptop censor today” by The New York Post (December 2, 2022)
“Journalist Matt Taibbi Details Twitter Censorship Efforts Of Hunter Biden Laptop Story” by OAN (December 2, 2022)
“Actor James Woods To Sue The DNC Over Twitter Censorship” by OAN (December 2, 2022)
“More Twitter Files Released Show Bias And Censorship” by OAN (December 2, 2022)
“Elon Musk’s Big ‘Twitter Files’ Reveal Turns Into Snoozefest” by Rolling Stone (December 2, 2022)
“‘Twitter Files’ Touted by Musk Reveal How Execs Debated Decision to Block NY Post Account Over Hunter Biden Articles” by Variety (December 2, 2022)
“Musk teases ‘Round 2’ of Twitter files showing company suppressed Hunter Biden laptop” by FOX News (December 3, 2022)
“Trump Responds To Massive Twitter Files Drop – “Fraud” – “TOTALLY CORRUPT”” by The Gateway Pundit (December 3, 2022)
“DEVELOPING: Elon Musk to Release ‘Episode 2 of Twitter Files’ Today – Will Expose Shadowbanning, Boosting, Follower Counts Etc” by The Gateway Pundit (December 3, 2022)
“Thoughts on the ‘Twitter Files’” by National Review (December 3, 2022)
“Elon Musk promotes release of internal Twitter documents rehashing platform’s block of Hunter Biden story” by NBC News (December 3, 2022)
“ELON MUSKSET TO DROP NEW BATCH OF #TWITTERFILES ...On Hunter Biden Laptop” by TMZ (December 3, 2022)
“Elon Musk's 'Twitter files': Emails reveal internal struggle on handling of Hunter Biden laptop” by USA Today (December 3, 2022)
“Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds” by The Washington Post (December 3, 2022)
“Elon Musk speaks out on ‘Twitter Files’ release detailing platform’s inner workings” by CNN (December 4, 2022)
“Matt Taibbi, Selected to Release the Hunter Biden Laptop Twitter Files, Has a Checkered Past” by The Gateway Pundit (December 4, 2022)
“Elon Musk Blasts the Corporate Media for Ignoring the Twitter Files, Which Exposed Hunter Biden Laptop Censorship” by The Gateway Pundit (December 4, 2022)
“Sorry, Donald: Here are the real takeaways from The Twitter Files” by The New York Post (December 4, 2022)
“One-On-One With John Zadrozny, Deputy Director Of Investigations For America First Legal” by OAN (December 6, 2022)
“The White House Refers To The Twitter Files As “Old News” And A “Distraction”” by OAN (December 6, 2022)
“Twitter Files: Founder Jack Dorsey Urges Musk To Release ‘Everything Without Filter’” by Forbes (December 7, 2022)
“Elon Musk tells Jack Dorsey 'important' Twitter files were 'hidden' from bosses, suggests some were 'deleted'“ by FOX News (December 7, 2022)
“Jordan: JCPA Media Cartel Bill Allows More Big Tech Collusion” by OAN (December 7, 2022)
“Elon Musk's second installment of 'Twitter Files' reveals 'secret blacklists,' Bari Weiss reports” by FOX News (December 8, 2022)
“TWITTER FILES, PT. 2: Documents Reveal Secret Blacklists and Censorship of Conservative Users – Something former Owner Jack Dorsey Said Was Not Happening” by The Gateway Pundit (December 8, 2022)
“Elon Musk Takes a Swipe at Former Twitter Execs Following Release of Twitter Files Pt. 2 — Announces BIG CHANGE Coming to Twitter” by The Gateway Pundit (December 8, 2022)
“Former NYT columnist Bari Weiss releases ‘Twitter Files Part Two’” by The Hill (December 8, 2022)
“Latest ‘Twitter Files’ Allege Blacklisting of Conservatives” by Rolling Stone (December 8, 2022)
“Elon Musk’s Twitter Files Are a Feast for Conspiracy Theorists” by Wired (December 8, 2022)
“Elon Musk’s Twitter Files Are Bait” by The Atlantic (December 9, 2022)
“Twitter Files 2: Elon Musk’s Hyped Up Exposé Unveils ‘Secret Blacklists’ And ‘Shadow Banning’ —Which Seem Very Similar To His Own Policies” by Forbes (December 9, 2022)
“Kari Lake Calls On Elon Musk To Release All of Katie Hobbs Twitter Files And Unblock The Gateway Pundit On Twitter” by The Gateway Pundit (December 9, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter Files Part 3 Released: How Trump Was Removed From Twitter” by The Gateway Pundit (December 9, 2022)
“‘Twitter Files’ part 3 details ‘internal debate’ over Trump’s ban after Jan. 6 riot” by The New York Post (December 9, 2022)
“One-On-One With Terry Schilling, President Of American Principles Project” by OAN (December 9, 2022)
“Trump Weighs In On Twitter Files Part 2” by OAN (December 9, 2022)
“Twitter Files Part 3: The Suppression Continues” by OAN (December 9, 2022)
“Twitter Files part 4 drop showing executives' approach to 'change of policy for Trump alone'“ by FOX News (December 10, 2022)
“CAUGHT IN LIES: Latest Twitter Files Release Reveals Feds and Twitter Both Caught Lying, Hiding Evidence in Major Lawsuit; Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt Calls Them Onto the Carpet” by The Gateway Pundit (December 10, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter Files Part 4: Senior Execs Create Justifications to Ban Trump – Seek a Change of Policy for Trump Alone, Distinct From Other Political Leaders” by The Gateway Pundit (December 10, 2022)
“With new Twitter files, Musk forces a free-speech reckoning for politicians and pundits” by The Hill (December 10, 2022)
“The ‘Twitter Files’ Is What It Claims to Expose” by New York Magazine (December 10, 2022)
“Latest ‘Twitter Files’ reveals how workers pushed for new policy to ban Trump” by The New York Post (December 10, 2022)
““My Pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci” – Twitter Owner ELON MUSK to Release the Twitter Files on COVID and Dr Fauci” by The Gateway Pundit (December 11, 2022)
“Latest Twitter Files Report Reveals Twitter Banned US President Trump at the Behest of Michelle Obama and Others” by The Gateway Pundit (December 11, 2022)
“Twitter Files: The Removal Of Trump, Employees Try To Justify Ban” by OAN (December 11, 2022)
“Former top Twitter official forced to leave home due to threats amid ‘Twitter Files’ release” by CNN (December 12, 2022)
“Why news organizations are largely skeptical of Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ theater” by CNN (December 12, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter Files Part 5: The Day Twitter Permanently Banned Trump – Even Though Trust and Safety Team Privately Concluded He Never Violated Policies” by The Gateway Pundit (December 12, 2022)
“Twitter Files, Part 5: Twitter Team Viewed Trump as Leader of Terrorist Group Responsible for Violence and Deaths Comparable to Hitler” by The Gateway Pundit (December 12, 2022)
“Fifth ‘Twitter files’ release details furious debate to ban Trump — despite no policy violations” by The New York Post (December 12, 2022)
“Twitter Files Show Internal Chaos Leading To Trump Ban” by OAN (December 12, 2022)
“Twitter Files: The Removal Of Trump, The Final Straw” by OAN (December 12, 2022)
“Schneider: CNN Pundit’s Critique Of “Twitter Files” Is “Height Of Hypocrisy”” by OAN (December 12, 2022)
“Fifth ‘Twitter files’ release details furious debate to ban Trump — despite no policy violations” by The New York Post (December 12, 2022)
“Twitter Files Part 5 reveals staffers who didn't believe Trump violated 'incitement' policy” by The New York Post (December 12, 2022)
“Twitter files: CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS blackout coverage of Elon Musk leaks” by FOX News (December 13, 2022)
“TechScape: I read Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ so you don’t have to” by The Guardian (December 13, 2022)
“The real revelation from the ‘Twitter Files’: Content moderation is messy” by CNN (December 14, 2022)
“Twitter Files: What they are and why they matter” by CBS News (December 14, 2022)
“What to make of the Twitter Files?” by The Economist (December 14, 2022)
““It’s Unequivocal. And the Twitter Files Make It Overt” – Dr. Robert Malone Speaks Out on the Deep State, Big Tech, and DNC Cabal Working Together to Remove Trump from Office (VIDEO)” by The Gateway Pundit (December 14, 2022)
“‘My fault alone’: Jack Dorsey takes ‘blame’ for scandals revealed in ‘Twitter Files’” by The New York Post (December 14, 2022)
“Twitter Broke Its Own Rules To Ban Trump While Keeping World Leaders Who "Incited Violence"" by Public (December 14, 2022)
“Jack Dorsey on Musk’s Twitter files: ‘There’s nothing to hide’ / Jack Dorsey says maybe don’t threaten the lives of his old employees. ‘There was no ill intent or hidden agendas.’” by The Verge (December 14, 2022)
“The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity” by The Atlantic (December 15, 2022)
“Elon Musk claims the FBI paid Twitter to ‘censor info from the public.’ Here’s what the Twitter Files actually show” by CNN (December 15, 2022)
“Elon Musk is using the Twitter Files to discredit foes and push conspiracy theories” by NPR (December 15, 2022)
“Why the Twitter Files actually matter” by Vox (December 15, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter Files Part 6: The FBI’s Constant Contact with Twitter” by The Gateway Pundit (December 16, 2022)
“FBI Responds to Twitter Files, Pt. 6 – Shows Their Utter Contempt for the American People and First Amendment” by The Gateway Pundit (December 16, 2022)
“The FBI’s Ties To Twitter” by OAN (December 16, 2022)
“The Twitter Files “Drops” to Date Exclude Details of FBI and Twitter Actions with the EIP and TGP Truth Bombs They Were So Afraid of After 2020 Election” by The Gateway Pundit (December 17, 2022)
“Daily Recap Podcast w/ Chris Paul: Twitter Files and Meltdowns, Pelosi Attacker’s Son Chimes In, Pope Asks to “Be Humble” This Christmas, Send Savings to Ukraine and More!” by The Gateway Pundit (December 17, 2022)
“The Censorship Disclosed in the Twitter Files Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg” by The Gateway Pundit (December 17, 2022)
“The ‘Twitter Files’ Congressman on Elon Musk and Taming Silicon Valley” by Politico (December 17, 2022)
“Opinion: Congress needs to subpoena Musk and the entire ‘Twitter Files’” by CNN (December 18, 2022)
“TWITTER FILES SUPPLEMENTAL DROPS: Matt Taibbi Releases Twitter and Federal Task Force” by The Gateway Pundit (December 18, 2022)
“Latest ‘Twitter Files’ show FBI repeatedly bullied executives over not reporting ‘state propaganda’ enough” by The New York Post (December 18, 2022)
“Twitter Files Part 7: FBI, DOJ 'discredited' information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings” by FOX News (December 19, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter Files Part 7 Released: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop” by The Gateway Pundit (December 19, 2022)
“White House Refuses to Comment on Latest Twitter Files Showing FBI’s Involvement Suppressing Hunter Biden Laptop Story (VIDEO)” by The Gateway Pundit (December 19, 2022)
“Rep. Jordan: Twitter Files Continue To Expose” by OAN (December 19, 2022)
“Schneider: CNN Pundit’s Critique Of Twitter Files Is Height Of Hypocrisy” by OAN (December 19, 2022)
“Twitter Files Part 7: The FBI & The Laptop” by OAN (December 19, 2022)
“The key Twittergate revelations: FBI paid Twitter $3.5m to handle its requests, told it to delete accounts (after warning the site about Hunter leak), removed posts for Biden campaign and shadow banned conservatives” by The Daily Mail (December 20, 2022)
““Did You Approve Hidden State Censorship in Direct Violation of the Constitution?” Elon Musk Calls Out Adam Schiff After Documents Reveal Schiff’s Office Was Emailing Twitter” by The Gateway Pundit (December 20, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter Files Part 8: How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign” by The Gateway Pundit (December 20, 2022))
“‘Want to see heads roll’: AG Garland, FBI’s Wray face likely ‘Twitter Files’ subpoena” by The New York Post (December 20, 2022)
“Twitter boosted Pentagon propaganda efforts in the Middle East, files show” by The New York Post (December 20, 2022)
“BREAKING: Twitter directly assisted in US military psy-ops” by The Post Millennial (December 20, 2022)
“Twitter helped US military with Middle East psyops, 'Twitter Files' show” by The Washington Examiner (December 20, 2022)
“FBI Behind Twitter's Censorship Of The Hunter Biden Laptop” by Public (December 20, 2022)
“New ‘Twitter Files’ Shows Company Helped The Military Battle Foreign Adversaries Trying To Hurt U.S.” by The Daily Wire (December 21, 2022)
“Twitter Is Said to Have Struggled Over Revealing U.S. Influence Campaign” by The New York Times (December 22, 2022)
“FBI, Members Of Congress Respond To Twitter Files” by Public (December 22, 2022)
“Elon And Me On The Twitter Files” by Public (December 27, 2022)
“Former Top CIA Analyst Condemns FBI For Censorship & Misinformation” by Public (January 11, 2023)
“Congress To Investigate "Weaponization" Of FBI, Twitter Files, & Treatment Of Hunter Biden Laptop” by Public (January 11, 2023)
“Under White House Pressure, Facebook Censored Accurate Covid Vaccine Information” by Public (January 12, 2023)
“America Needs Truth and Reconciliation on Russiagate” by Matt Taibbi (January 12, 2023)
“House Oversight Hearing on Twitter’s Election Interference Validates Loomer RICO Lawsuit” by Laura Loomer (February 11, 2023)
That is all for the time being. I will update this when more is released. Please subscribe and share! Thanks.
~ Justin Trouble
∴ Liberty ∴ Strength ∴ Honor ∴ Honesty ∴ Justice ∴ Truth ∴ Love ∴