Edible vaccines produced in lettuce – Edible mRNA vaccine in lettuce chloroplasts

The concept of embedding vaccines, particularly mRNA-based vaccines, into everyday foods such as lettuce and tomatoes is a growing research area that, while innovative, poses profound concerns about consumer rights, health safety, and ecological balance.

Emerging Research on Edible Vaccines Recent studies have proposed incorporating mRNA vaccines into the chloroplasts of lettuce and other edible plants, with the aim of creating an easily distributable vaccination method. Researchers argue that this could potentially streamline vaccine distribution, reduce cold storage dependency, and simplify global vaccination efforts (MDPI, 2016; PMC8329267, 2021).

In Mexico, researchers have developed TOMAVAC, a tomato-based edible COVID-19 vaccine intended to produce antibodies against the virus (ResearchGate, 2024). Similarly, initiatives in Tennessee and other regions suggest modifying lettuce for drug delivery, sparking debates on public health ethics and regulatory oversight (Newsweek, 2024).

Potential Risks and Ethical Concerns Despite optimistic claims from proponents, critical analysis highlights alarming potential risks associated with edible mRNA vaccines. Firstly, the long-term health implications of consuming genetically altered foods containing mRNA vaccines remain insufficiently studied. Historically, rushed approvals, as observed with some COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, have raised public distrust due to emerging side effects and limited transparency regarding long-term safety profiles.

Moreover, edible vaccines could unintentionally expose consumers to pharmaceutical interventions without informed consent. Introducing mRNA vaccines into widespread food sources could result in involuntary medical treatments, infringing upon individual rights to bodily autonomy and informed medical consent.

Ecological and Agricultural Risks Embedding mRNA vaccines in plants risks unintended cross-contamination and gene flow into wild ecosystems. These genetically modified plants, if released into open agriculture, could potentially disrupt ecological balance, affecting pollinators, soil microbiology, and non-target plant species. This bioengineering initiative poses profound ecological risks, extending beyond controlled laboratory environments into broader ecosystems.

Transparency and Consumer Rights The move towards edible vaccines embedded in everyday foods raises significant transparency issues. Consumers must retain the unequivocal right to know precisely what they are consuming. If vaccines are embedded in common produce, clear labeling and stringent regulations would be essential, yet enforcing such oversight presents considerable practical challenges.

Regulatory Gaps and Precautionary Principle Currently, regulatory frameworks remain insufficiently equipped to address the rapid advancement and deployment of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) intended for medical consumption. The pace of biotech innovation is often far ahead of existing regulation, potentially placing consumers at risk. Advocates for cautious progression emphasize the precautionary principle: rigorous and comprehensive risk assessments must precede widespread adoption.

Conclusion While edible mRNA vaccines offer a superficially appealing solution to vaccine distribution challenges, the unresolved health, ethical, ecological, and regulatory concerns cannot be overlooked. Protecting consumer rights, ensuring transparent labeling, and thoroughly evaluating ecological and health impacts must be paramount. Without addressing these critical factors comprehensively, altering our fundamental food supply with edible vaccines is an endeavor fraught with significant and lasting risks.

Tennessee Moves to Classify ‘Vaccine Lettuce’ as a Drug

Abill that would classify as a drug certain foods with vaccine materials added to them was passed by the Tennessee Senate and now awaits Governor Bill Lee’s signature into law amid concerns about research on putting immunity boosters into lettuce.

The proposed law, HB 1894, was passed in a 23-6 Senate vote last Thursday after getting the House’s green light in a 73-22 vote in early March.

It would classify any food that “contains a vaccine or vaccine material” as a drug under Tennessee law, meaning the food would have to be labeled accordingly. The bill defines vaccine material as a substance intended to “stimulate the production of antibodies and provide immunity against disease.”

The legislation would not ban vaccine-imbued foods from being sold in the state but would require them to carry the same sort of medical labeling as injectable vaccines or medications.

While proponents of the measure cited ongoing research into this method of conveying vaccines and the need to give people the recommended dose of a vaccine, opponents questioned the bill’s necessity and whether such foodstuffs would ever be sold alongside their unvaccinated counterparts at grocery stores.

During a debate on the bill before Thursday’s vote, state Senator Heidi Campbell, a Democrat, asked for evidence of “any instances of there being food offered in the state of Tennessee that contains vaccines.”

Speaking of the research, she said that “the idea that this would somehow correlate to some kind of a retail offering of vegetables, especially when that vegetable would cost many thousands of dollars, just seems to me [to be] messy to be passing legislation for that reason.”

Senate advocates of the bill said that they did not know of any specific examples of vaccine-imbued foods being sold but that the bill was to ensure regulations are in place if such sales occur. They also noted the relative inexpensiveness of some vaccines and lettuce.

State Representative Scott Cepicky, a Republican who originally sponsored the bill, said in February that lettuces containing vaccines would require a prescription “to make sure that we know how much of the lettuce you have to eat based off of your body type so we don’t under-vaccinate you—which leads to the possibility of the efficacy of the drug being compromised—or we overdose you based off how much lettuce is [eaten],” according to Nashville’s WKRN-TV.

A research project, funded by a $500,000 federal grant, at the University of California is looking into whether pathogen-targeting mRNA, like that used in COVID-19 vaccines, could be implanted in the cells of edible plants to replicate and then be consumed.

“We are testing this approach with spinach and lettuce and have long-term goals of people growing it in their own gardens,” Juan Pablo Giraldo, an associate professor at the university’s Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, who is leading the research, said in 2021. “Farmers could also eventually grow entire fields of it.”

The idea of edible vaccines is not new. A 2013 scientific paper noted attempts to put vaccines against various diseases, such as measles, hepatitis B and cholera, into foodstuffs like potatoes, bananas, corn, soybeans and rice.

Researchers say that successfully placing vaccines in plants would mean they don’t have to be stored at low temperatures, which is the case for many injectable vaccines. source

While large companies and public sector consortiums in the United States, Canada, China and Europe are running at full speed to develop a vaccine grown in genetically modified (GM) tobacco plants, a research group at a Mexican university is working toward the same terrorzing objective, but with a different and innovative strategy. They are using bioinformatics and computational genetic engineering to identify candidate antigens for a vaccine that can be expressed in tomato plants. Eating the fruit from these plants would then confer immunity against COVID-19.

sources

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8329267/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38260078/

https://allianceforscience.org/blog/2020/05/gmo-tomato-as-edible-covid-vaccine-mexican-scientists-work-to-make-it-a-reality/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590262825000218

http://mdpi.com/1422-0067/17/10/1715

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44222-025-00299-1

https://www.uottawa.ca/faculty-science/please-pass-salad-edible-vaccines-produced-lettuce-protect-against-covid-19

https://youtu.be/hyOEwQXCU7E?si=XDUdq3sb7c4e73I3

hough the responses of different countries to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have been diverse, certain measures have been generally applied. The template is summed up in a strategy that has contributed greatly to containing the virus, albeit at the cost of severely disrupting the economic and social order: lockdown. But in the cascade of empty streets and closed shops, there is one country that, like the famous Gaulish village of Asterix, has resisted and continues to resist this interference in the freedom of its citizens: Sweden. This Scandinavian nation of 10.3 million inhabitants has never imposed a lockdown, something that has been both commented on and criticised. When seen in the light of the months that have now passed, has the Swedish model failed or can anything be learned from it?

At the beginning of March, with the coronavirus spreading across the globe, extraordinary measures began to be imposed in Europe. According to a study conducted by Imperial College London (ICL) and published in Nature in June, Sweden recommended the voluntary isolation of those infected and joined other countries in advocating social distancing, with only high schools and universities being closed and public events banned at a later date. Of the 11 countries studied, it was the only one that never imposed a mandatory lockdown, keeping its borders open, as well as its bars and restaurants.

The Swedish constitution prevents the declaration of a state of emergency that restricts the free movement of citizens in times of peace. Unlike in other countries, the adoption of measures has been controlled by the experts of the Public Health Agency, which in practice has left decisions in the hands of its main epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell. He is the mastermind of the dissonant Swedish strategy based on the idea that the pandemic was a marathon and not a sprint, so the measures had to be sustainable in the long term. Tegnell’s plan did not explicitly defend the objectives of achieving herd immunity and protecting the economy, although these two ideas were surreptitiously present.

TRUST AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY

While Sweden’s response to the pandemic was beginning to attract criticism in international forums, the domestic reaction was more favourable. In April, 63% of the population was confident in the country’s ability to contain the outbreak, with 73% supporting the Public Health Agency. In an interview in Nature, Tegnell justified his voluntary measures to flatten the contagion curve, based on trust and individual responsibility: “Closedown, lockdown, closing borders — nothing has a historical scientific basis, in my view,” he said. “Nowhere in Europe has been able to slow down the spread considerably.”

However, there was no lack of internal reproaches for Tegnell’s strategy. In Sweden’s leading newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, 22 scientists signed a letter censuring what they called a failure, particularly because of the high mortality rate in nursing homes, a problem acknowledged by the chief epidemiologist himself. On April 22nd, according to the genetic epidemiologist Paul Franks at the University of Lund, Sweden ranked tenth in the world in terms of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with 17.3, a very high rate compared to its neighbours Denmark (6.4), Norway (3.4) and Finland (2.6).

At the time, Franks predicted that if the simulations were correct, the number of infections and deaths in Stockholm —which has borne the brunt of the Swedish outbreak— should start to decline. Until effective treatments or vaccines are available, “the ultimate burden of deaths may be the same in countries who opt for lockdown as in those who adopted more liberal containment strategies,” he wrote.

INFECTION AND MORTALITY RATES

The ICL study revealed that as of May 4 and despite Sweden’s lax approach, this Nordic country maintained a population infection rate of 3.7%, lower than those of countries that imposed strict lockdowns such as Italy (4.6%), United Kingdom (5.1%), Spain (5.5%) and Belgium (8%), and its mortality rate among those infected was in eighth place. However, while the measures taken in Italy, the United Kingdom and Spain had saved 630,000, 470,000 and 450,000 lives, respectively, the Swedish strategy had only prevented 26,000 deaths. With data from May 26, a report from the University of Oxford placed Sweden in eighth place in the world in terms of mortality among the sick, above Spain. According to Johns Hopkins University, Sweden currently has the seventh highest number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the world, with almost 56, but remains below Italy (58), Spain (61), the United Kingdom (69) and Belgium (86).

Thus, despite the fact that Sweden’s data are notoriously worse than those of its Nordic neighbours, freedom of movement has not raised its infection or mortality rates above those of the most affected European countries. But the debate goes on. The Public Health Agency has warned that the number of deaths could double from the current 5,600-plus. On July 21, in the USA Today, 25 Swedish doctors and scientists wrote: “Don’t do what we did. It’s not working.” If that weren’t enough, some analysts say that keeping the country open has not had as positive an economic effect as might be expected.

For his part, Tegnell continues to defend his strategy at every turn, claiming that the rate of contagion is dropping in Sweden and that the country’s healthcare system and intensive care units (ICU) have not been overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases. However, a recent study conducted by the University of Uppsala and published in Clinical Infectious Diseases reveals that a large proportion of deaths have occurred outside ICUs because patients with poor prognoses were not admitted, thereby avoiding healthcare system overload at the expense of increasing the number of deaths.

AN AWARENESS IN SWEDEN OF THE COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

Given all this, even accepting that the results of the Swedish model so far have not been as catastrophic as might be expected, would the strategy work in the same way in other countries? Some experts have stressed that there is an awareness in Sweden of the collective responsibility for the defence of the country that dates back to the Second World War. According to the Uppsala University study, almost a third of the population voluntary isolated themselves, a figure that might have been difficult to achieve in other countries.

But above all, perhaps the final answer to the Swedish question lies in the possibility of achieving the much sought-after herd immunity. On this point, the current consensus is clear; with approximately 6% of the population infected, Sweden is still a long way from the 60% required. But perhaps the consensus could change. Recent studies that take into account the heterogeneity of the population in terms of susceptibility to the virus —the most susceptible become infected earlier, increasing the resistance of the remaining population— suggest that in the best case scenario the herd immunity threshold could be lowered to just 10% of the population. As to whether Sweden will go down in COVID-19 history as a mistake or a valid alternative, the jury, in this case a Viking one, is still out.

UPDATE: SEPTEMBER 2021

THE SWEDISH EXPERIMENT IN RETROSPECT

The Swedish strategy, based on voluntary measures, has remained largely unchanged over the past year, although in autumn 2020 the use of face masks was temporarily recommended during peak traffic hours on public transport and certain non-essential spaces were closed. In September 2021, the Swedish government announced the removal of most of the remaining restrictions, citing the 70% vaccination rate for those aged 16 and above. However, the country maintains higher COVID death rates than its Nordic neighbours, with around 145 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants—nearly ten times more than Norway, eight times more than Finland and three times more than Denmark—but its overall 11% infection rate also puts it above other countries hard hit by COVID-19, such as Italy and the UK.

For all these reasons, the Swedish case has continued to be the subject of analysis and debate, without there being a unanimous conclusion. In August 2021, a modelling study in Scientific Reports showed that the UK would have doubled its pandemic mortality if the Swedish model had been adopted, while Sweden could have reduced it by less than half had it followed the UK strategy. Meanwhile, the Swedish approach has continued to garner criticism from experts, both at home and abroad, in the media and in specialist journals such as The Lancet. Despite this, a recent Ipsos global survey ranks Sweden seventh in the world in health crisis management, below countries such as Australia and New Zealand that have adopted the most forceful strategies against the pandemic, but ahead of some of its Nordic neighbours and more than 50 nations.

The progression of the pandemic in Sweden is also being used to explore the influence of factors other than restrictions on the dynamics of successive waves. For example, a preprint (preliminary study, not yet published) by two Swedish researchers proposed that a low level of seroprevalence, well below the commonly accepted threshold of herd immunity, could actually have a greater protective effect on the population than restrictive measures, an effect that breaks down when new variants of the virus appear.

In any case, and regardless of the final verdict of history on Sweden’s risky strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic, one thing that certain experts have highlighted is that, if the Nordic country has managed to maintain comparatively contained infection and death figures, it has been thanks to its demographics, as it is a country with a low population density. source

Sweden’s no-lockdown COVID strategy was broadly correct, commission suggests

Sweden should have adopted tougher early measures and the government assumed clearer leadership as COVID-19 hit, though the mostly voluntary no-lockdown strategy was broadly correct, a commission reviewing the country’s pandemic response said on Friday.

Sweden polarized opinion at home and abroad with its handling of the pandemic, opting against the lockdowns implemented by many countries and adopting a largely voluntary approach of promoting social distancing and good hygiene.

The commission — set up by the government under pressure from parliament — said Sweden’s broad policy was “fundamentally correct.”

“It meant that citizens retained more of their personal freedom than in many other countries,” the report says.

But the panel of eight experts, including professors of economics and political science, said the government should have taken clearer leadership and acted sooner when it comes to measures such as capacity limits and masks.

“The Government should have assumed leadership of all aspects of crisis management from the outset,” the commission said in the report. It found the government had too one-sided a dependence on assessments made by the Public Health Agency.

“In February-March 2020, Sweden should have opted for more rigorous and intrusive disease prevention and control measures.”

‘Remarkable’ delay in indoor caps cited

The findings could become a liability for the ruling Social Democrats with a general election due in September. More than 17,000 people have died from or with COVID-19 in Sweden, far more per capita than among Nordic neighbours but less than in most European countries that opted for lockdowns.

Figures from statistics agency Eurostat showed the country had 7.7 per cent more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years, among the lowest excess mortality rates in Europe.

“In the light of current knowledge … the Commission is not convinced that extended or recurring mandatory lockdowns, as introduced in other countries, are a necessary element in the response to a new, serious epidemic outbreak.”

Moreover, the report argues the “right balance” was struck in terms of the education sector. Preschool and elementary schools were kept open, with universities and the equivalent of high schools switched to remote learning.

But a number of criticisms were levelled at the central government and its main public health agency, including in areas concerning preparedness and unclear jurisdictional lines.

“In a crisis, there must be no uncertainty about who is in charge,” the experts wrote.

Read the commission report summary:

 

Faults were found particularly in the early weeks of the pandemic. Unlike many developed and Western nations, Sweden did not order temporary closures of many indoor spaces in early or mid-March 2020, dogged in part by questions whether there was a legal or legislative basis to do so.

The commission said it was “remarkable that it took until 29 March 2020 for the limit on public gatherings and events to be lowered to 50 people.”

In April, the country’s daily pandemic reports were regularly advising of triple-digit COVID death totals.

Recently shed Omicron-related restrictions

In January 2021, Sweden experienced another very significant coronavirus wave. The commission said more could have been done in the fall of 2020 to prepare for that possibility, which scientific experts had warned about for countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

“The Public Health Agency should not have dismissed the use of masks as a disease prevention and control measure in indoor settings and on public transport,” the commission said.

Sweden made some adjustments in early January to its approach in light of the Omicron variant’s sweep across much of the world, but earlier this month said they were no longer needed. Restaurants and bars are now open, with no time or capacity limits.

The country’s health agency said it was scrapping large-scale testing, as it was deemed too expensive in relation to the benefits. Sweden spent the equivalent of about $67 million Cdn per week on testing for the first five weeks of this year and around $3 billion since the start of the pandemic. source

Introduction

• Elon Musk, after taking control of Twitter and firing most of its upper-level management (and many of its rank-and-file employees), promised to release internal documentation that illustrated the degree to which Twitter had shadow-banned and censored content from conservative-leaning sources.
• To date (12-21-22), 10 file dumps have been released by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang, David Zweig, Alex Berenson, and their various associates, after heavy analysis of documents provided by Musk and his inner circle.
  • It is important to note that these files are not open to the public other than what the journalists and authors decide to share, and that Musk is “vetting” the files before passing them along to these journalists.
• Each of the below hyperlinks takes you directly to the official Twitter thread corresponding to the data dump in question, with the author’s name and the general topic highlighted in bold.
  • Each bullet-point is a direct quotation from the author, or a consolidated quotation. Editorial discretion was utilized to cut out extraneous or tangential information, and keep focus on the more extraordinary findings.

Quick Bullets

As shown in Parts 1 and 7, Twitter—primarily at the FBI and intelligence community’s urging—systematically suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. Initially, Twitter was resistant to the FBI’s probes and requests for information. However, over time, the FBI became deeply embedded within Twitter in terms of a revolving door of personnel, the granting of top-secret security clearances to Twitter executives, and the opening of myriad direct communication lines in which the FBI and other intelligence agencies could directly influence Twitter’s censorship activities. Central to this effort was former FBI general counsel James Baker—a well-connected and powerful member of the intelligence community—who until very recently was deputy counsel for Twitter.

As shown in Parts 6 and 8, the aforementioned synergies with the FBI/Intelligence Community/Department of Defense have been endemic within Twitter, as well as other social media companies. Taibbi goes so far as to call Twitter an “FBI subsidiary,” and the published evidence more than substantiates his claim. Moreover, Twitter has been heavily supporting the U.S. military’s covert operations overseas, creating AI generated deep fakes, developing false propaganda against foreign regimes, and whitelisting fake accounts operated by the intelligence community to spread disinformation and promote psychological influence operations, all in order to artificially instill popular support for foreign policy decisions—whether they be interventionist or oriented around retrenchment.

As shown in Parts 2 through 5, Twitter systematically censored free speech and blacklisted conservative / contrarian voices including Dr. Jay Battacharya, Dan Bongino, Charlie Kirk, Kayleigh McEnany, the popular “Libs of Tiktok” account, and President Donald Trump. Mechanisms for doing so included building large blacklists, preventing disfavored tweets from trending, limiting visibility of entire accounts and trending topics, blocking search results, limiting the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability, among other insidious tactics.

As shown in Parts 3 through 5, which focus mostly upon the decision to ban Trump’s account, the political ideologies of Twitter employees and executives played a substantial role in decision-making. In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, and 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to Democrats, respectively. The ultimate decision to ban Trump was based on no specific policy violation—in fact, many of the Twitter employees responsible for determining these policy violations clearly indicated no such violations occurred. Moreover, to truly illustrate the blatant hypocrisy of this move, Twitter did not de-platform other world leaders who much more clearly incited their populations to violence, including leaders from Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Iran, and Malaysia. In a particularly telling excoriation of Twitter’s decision, jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny criticized the ban as “an unacceptable act of censorship.” Navalny would know, considering he has been one of the most heavily persecuted advocates of free speech in the world, and is currently serving out a ten-year prison sentence in a brutal Russian gulag.

As shown in Part 9, the FBI was hardly the only government agency actively weaponizing Twitter to serve governmental interests. The CIA, Department of Defense, and other security, military, and intelligence task forces consistently used their clout to censor information deemed adverse to their goals.

As shown in Part 10, Twitter–often after government coercion–suppressed any information that went against the established Covid-19 narrative, including posts and research by leading experts in their fields. Twitter and the CDC decided what “The Science” entailed. For anyone who does not understand what science is at a fundamental level: it is the means of discerning truths from gathered evidence via the scientific method. What it decidedly is NOT is a consensus-based ideology pushed and promoted by ministries of truth, that actively censor dissenting viewpoints. In fact, the whole point of science is to welcome alternative research and debate.

Parts 11 and 12 show how the intelligence community became so intertwined with Twitter, beginning with the aftermath of the 2016 election. Despite the outcry from the left that Russian interference and disinformation via social media had led to President Trump’s victory, Twitter found little evidence in support of this. Still, threats from politicians and intelligence agencies–who often threatened to go directly to major media outlets and bypass Twitter–forced Twitter to enter the content moderation game. They quickly became a subsidiary of the U.S. government, specifically the national security apparatus. Twitter was even directly paid over $3 million by the FBI for its services.

Part 13 details how former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and current Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb used Twitter to suppress speech that he deemed adverse to his own interests.

Part 14 discusses how RussiaGate–universally proclaimed by the left as a primary reason Trump was unfit for office, and the basis for their investigation–was a complete hoax. And, Democratic congressmen knew this. Still, they pressured Twitter to push the false narrative, among many other media sources.

Part 15 discusses how the pharmaceutical industry, including the vaccine makers, used social media including Twitter to suppress any speech against vaccine policy, labeling it as misinformation, shadowbanning accounts and removing content.

See below for a section-by-section summary.

Part One – Taibbi –Hunter Biden Laptop Story Suppression

• 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.”
• Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:
• 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.
  • Twitter Profile: Summary • OpenSecrets
• On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. 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.
• 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.”
• 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. “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.”
• 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.
• Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
• To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”
• 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:
• 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:
• Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:
• “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.”

Part Two – Weiss – Twitter’s Secret Blacklists

• 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
• 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.
• Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
• Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
• 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.”
• What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning. “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.
• “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. All without users’ knowledge.
• “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.
• 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.
• 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.” 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.
• 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.”
• 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.”
  • 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.
  • Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
  • 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.”
  • 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.”
• In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.
• [Yoel Roth] requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering. 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. 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.”

Part Three – Taibbi – Trump Twitter Ban Prelude (Up to January 6, 2020)

• 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.”
• 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.
• Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives…the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.
• 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.
• On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a [Slack] 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”). 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. 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.
• During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.
• 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.” 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.”
• 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).
• 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.

Part Four – Shellenberger – Trump Twitter Ban Prelude, Continued (January 7, 2020)

• 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
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• On J8, Twitter says its [Trump] 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.”
• 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.”
• 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”
• 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.”
• “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.”
  • And as @bariweiss will show tomorrow, that’s exactly what happened.

Part Five – Weiss – Trump Twitter Ban, January 8, 2020

• On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.
• 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!!!”
• 7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
• After January 6, Twitter employees organized to demand their employer ban Trump. “There is a lot of employee advocacy happening,” said one Twitter employee. “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.
• 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. “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.” Another staffer agreed: “Don’t see the incitement angle here.”
• “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.” 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.”
• 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”
• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • But Twitter executives did ban Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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.
• “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.
• Dorsey requested simpler language to explain Trump’s suspension. Roth wrote, “god help us [this] makes me think he wants to share it publicly”
• One hour later, Twitter announces Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
• Many at Twitter were ecstatic. And congratulatory: “big props to whoever in trust and safety is sitting there whack-a-mole-ing these trump accounts”
• By the next day, employees expressed eagerness to tackle “medical misinformation” as soon as possible:
• 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.”
• 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. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.

Part Six – Taibbi – Twitter: “The FBI Subsidiary”

• Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
• Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts. 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.
• What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines.
• “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.
• 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.
• 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.” Agent Chan passed the list on to his “Twitter folks.” Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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?
• 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”:
• The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”
• 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.
• 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.
  • Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”
  • State governments also flagged content.
  • 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
  • “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:
  • 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):
    • 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
  • 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.
• 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.

Part Seven – Shellenberger – The FBI and the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

• 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.
• 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 the New York Post.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.’”
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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…”
• 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).”
• 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.
• 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).”
• 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).”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• As general counsel of the FBI, Baker played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• By mid-Sept, 2020, Chan & Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from FBI & Twitter could communicate. They also agree to create a “virtual war room” for “all the [Internet] industry plus FBI and ODNI” [Office of the Director of National Intelligence].
• On Oct 14, shortly after @NYPost publishes its Hunter Biden laptop story, Roth says, “it isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else,” but adds, “this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation.”
• In response to Roth, Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy. Baker does so over email, and in a Google doc, on October 14 and 15.
• And yet it’s inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The Post had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019.
• As for the FBI, it likely would have taken a few *hours* for it to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden. Indeed, it only took a few days for journalist @peterschweizer to prove it.
• By 10 am, Twitter execs had bought into a wild hack-and-dump story “The suggestion from experts – which rings true – is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware”
• There is evidence that FBI agents have warned elected officials of foreign influence with the primary goal of leaking the information to the news media. This is a political dirty trick used to create the perception of impropriety
• In 2020, the FBI gave a briefing to Senator Grassley and Johnson, claiming evidence of “Russian interference” into their investigation of Hunter Biden. The briefing angered the Senators, who say it was done to discredit their investigation.
• “The unnecessary FBI briefing provided the Democrats and liberal media the vehicle to spread their false narrative that our work advanced Russian disinformation.”
• Notably, then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker was investigated *twice,* in 2017 and 2019, for leaking information to the news media. “You’re saying he’s under criminal investigation? That’s why you’re not letting him answer?” Meadows asked. “Yes”
• In the end, the FBI’s influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story. By Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work.
• The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time. “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021.
• And the pressure from the FBI on social media platforms continues In Aug 2022, Twitter execs prepared for a meeting with the FBI, whose goal was “to convince us to produce on more FBI EDRs” EDRs are an “emergency disclosure request,” a warrantless search.
• In response to the Twitter Files revelation of high-level FBI agents at Twitter, @Jim_Jordan said, “I have concerns about whether the government was running a misinformation operation on We the People.”
• Anyone who reads the Twitter Files, regardless of their political orientation, should share those concerns.

Part Eight – Fang – How Twitter Aided the Pentagon’s Covert 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Full report from Feng found at The Intercept.

Part Nine – Taibbi – Twitter and “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. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.”
• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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:
• 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.”
• “Other Government Agency (the place where I worked for 27 years),” says retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.
• 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.”
• The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.
• These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.
• 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.”
• The FITF meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an “OGA briefing,” usually about foreign matters (hold that thought).
• 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:
• Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish:
• Especially as the election approached in 2020, the FITF/FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending lists of hundreds of problem accounts:
• 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:
• 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.
• 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:
• “Foreign meddling” had been the ostensible justification for expanded moderation since platforms like Twitter were dragged to the Hill by the Senate in 2017:
• The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions.
• “Found no links to Russia,” says one analyst, but suggests he could “brainstorm” to “find a stronger connection.” “Extremely tenuous circumstantial chance of being related,” says another. “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?”
• 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:
• 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:
• “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.”
• Translation: “more aggressive” “government partners” had closed Twitter’s “window” of independence.
• “Other Government Agencies” ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia:
• Former CIA agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou believes he recognizes the formatting of these reports. “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.”
• 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.
• These reports are far more factually controversial than domestic counterparts.
• 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.”
• Another report asserts a list of accounts accusing the “Biden administration” of “corruption” in vaccine distribution are part of a Russian influence campaign:
• 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:
• One report says a site “documenting purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians” is directed by Russian agents:
• 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?
• 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?
• 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.

Part 10 – Zweig – How Twitter Rigged the Covid-19 Debate

• 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.
• The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.
• Both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.
• 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.
• It wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.
• 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:
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  • 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
  • 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. With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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:
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust & Safety, had to explain that optimism wasn’t misinformation.
• 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”
• 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.
• 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?

Part 11 — Taibbi — How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In

• In August 2017, when Facebook decided to suspend 300 accounts with “suspected Russian origin,” Twitter wasn’t worried. Its leaders were sure they didn’t have a Russia problem.
• “We did not see a big correlation.” “No larger patterns.” “FB may take action on hundreds of accounts, and we may take action on ~25.”
• “KEEP THE FOCUS ON FB”: Twitter was so sure they had no Russia problem, execs agreed the best PR strategy was to say nothing on record, and quietly hurl reporters at Facebook:
• “Twitter is not the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling right now – the spotlight is on FB,” wrote Public Policy VP Colin Crowell:
• In September, 2017, after a cursory review, Twitter informed the Senate it suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined.
• Receiving these meager results, a furious Senator Mark Warner of Virginia – ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee – held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.”
• “KEEP PRODUCING MATERIAL” After meeting with congressional leaders, Crowell wrote: “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.”
• “TAKING THEIR CUES FROM HILLARY CLINTON” Crowell added Dems were taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who that week said: “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.”
• In growing anxiety over its PR problems, Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force” to proactively self-investigate. The “Russia Task Force” started mainly with data shared from counterparts at Facebook, centered around accounts supposedly tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). But the search for Russian perfidy was a dud:
  • OCT 13 2017: “No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend).”
  • OCT 18 2017: “First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT.”
  • OCT 23 2017: “Finished with investigation… 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.”
  • Twitter’s search finding “only 2” significant accounts, “one of which is Russia Today,” was based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines like “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”:
• The failure of the “Russia task force” to produce “material” worsened the company’s PR crisis.
• “Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB… they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,” Johns Hopkins Professor (and Intel Committee “expert”) Thomas Rid told Politico.
• As congress threatened costly legislation, and Twitter began was subject to more bad press fueled by the committees, the company changed its tune about the smallness of its Russia problem.
• In Washington weeks after the first briefing, Twitter leaders were told by Senate staff that “Sen Warner feels like tech industry was in denial for months.” Added an Intel staffer: “Big interest in Politico article about deleted accounts. Twitter “pledged to work with them on their desire to legislate”:
• “REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS” This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.
• Twitter soon settled on its future posture. In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.” Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”
• Twitter let the “USIC” into its moderation process. It would not leave. Wrote Crowell, in an email to the company’s leaders: “We will not be reverting to the status quo.”

Part 12 — Taibbi — Twitter and the FBI ‘Belly Button’

• 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.
• 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.”
• 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.”
• 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.
• 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.”
• “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.”
• “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.
• 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.
• 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:
• 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.
• “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.”
• “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.”
• 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.”
• 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:
• Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more:
• 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:
• “WE DON’T DO THIS” Even Twitter declined to honor Schiff’s request at the time. Sperry was later suspended, however.
• 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:
• 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.
• 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.
• “USIC” requests often simply began “We assess” and then provided lists (sometimes, in separate excel docs) they believed were connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency and committing cyber ops, from Africa to South America to the U.S.:
• One brief report, sent right after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year, flagged major Russian outlets like Vedomosti and http://Gazeta.ru. Note the language about “state actors” fits Twitter’s internal guidance.
• Some reports were just a paragraph long and said things like: “The attached email accounts… were possibly used for “influence operations, social media collection, or social engineering.” Without further explanation, Twitter would be forwarded an excel doc:
• They were even warned about publicity surrounding a book by former Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokhin, who alleged “corruption by the U.S. government” – specifically by Joe Biden.
• By the weeks before the election in 2020, Twitter was so confused by the various streams of incoming requests, staffers had to ask the FBI which was which
• “I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR WORK LOAD”: Requests poured in from FBI offices all over the country, day after day, hour after hour: If Twitter didn’t act quickly, questions came: “Was action taken?” “Any movement?”
• Wrote senior attorney Stacia Cardille: “My in-box is really f— up at this point.”
• It all led to the situation described by @ShellenbergerMD two weeks ago, in which Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor. Twitter wasn’t just paid. For the amount of work they did for government, they were underpaid.

Part 13 – Berenson – Pfizer’s Suppression of Covid-19 Vaccine Debate

• On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb – a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers – saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.
• The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.
  • It came not from an “anti-vaxxer” like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but from Dr. Brett Giroir, a physician who had briefly followed Gottlieb as the head of the Food & Drug Administration. Further, the tweet actually encouraged people who did not have natural immunity to “Get vaccinated!”
• Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.
• Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.
  • The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.”
• Through Jira, an internal system Twitter used for managing complaints, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to the Twitter “Strategic Response” team. That group was responsible for handling concerns from the company’s most important employees and users.
• “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote – failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots.
• A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did notviolate any of the company’s misinformation rules.
• Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it. It remains tagged even though severallarge studies have confirmed the truth of Giroir’s words.
• A week later, on Sept. 3, 2021, Gottlieb tried to strike again, complaining to O’Boyle about a tweet from Justin Hart. Hart is a lockdown and Covid vaccine skeptic with more than 100,000 Twitter followers.
• “Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of <>0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling,” Hart had written.
• Why Gottlieb objected to Hart’s words is not clear, but the Pfizer shot would soon be approved for children 5 to 11, representing another massive market for Pfizer, if parents could be convinced Covid was a real threat to their kids.
• O’Boyle referred to “former FDA Commissioner Gottlieb” when he forwarded the report, again ignoring Gottlieb’s current work for Pfizer.
• This time, though, Gottlieb’s complaint was so far afield that Twitter refused to act.
• At the same time, Gottlieb was also pressing Twitter to act against me [Alex Berenson], as I disclosed on Substackon Oct. 13, 2022, drawing on documents that Twitter’s pre-Musk regime provided to me as part of my lawsuit against it. (Gottlieb’s action was part of a larger conspiracy that included the Biden White House and Andrew Slavitt, working publicly and privately to pressure Twitter until it had no choice but to ban me.
• The morning after I wrote that article, Gottlieb appeared on CNBC, the financial news channel where he is a contributor, and offered what at best was a seriously misleading explanation of his actions and his motives.
• Gottlieb did not deny pressing Twitter on me – he could not, given the documents I had released the night before.
• But in an interview with Joe Kernan of CNBC, Gottlieb said he had asked Twitter to act only because he was concerned if tweets raised the threat of violence against vaccine advocates.
• “The inability of these platforms to police direct threats, physical threats about people, that’s my concern about what’s going on in that ecosystem,” Gottlieb said.
• “I’m unconcerned about debate being made,” Gottlieb told Kernan. “I’m concerned about physical threats being made for people’s safety.”
• In a tweet that morning, Gottlieb doubled down, writing: Respectful debate and dialogue is one thing, and should be encouraged and protected. But there’s no place for targeted harassment, and misleading dialogue which can instigate a small but persuadable group of people to make targeted and dangerous threats.
• But Brett Giroir’s tweet about natural immunity was the definition of “respectful debate and dialogue.” And in his own emailto Todd O’Boyle, Gottlieb did not raise any security concerns about it. He simply complained that it might wind up “driving news coverage.
• Gottlieb is not just a Pfizer board member. He is one of seven members of the board’s executive committee and the head of its regulatory and compliance committee, which oversees “compliance with laws, regulations, and internal procedures applicable to pharmaceutical sales and marketing activities.”
• Pfizer has a long history of violating drug industry laws and ethics rules.
  • In 2009, it agreed to pay $2.3 billion, the largest health care fraud settlement in American history, for fraudulently marketing several drugs.
  • In 1996, it conducted a clinical trial of an antibiotic in Nigeria in which 11 children died and which became the inspiration for John le Carre’s novel The Constant Gardner.
• So how will Pfizer react to the black-and-white proof from Twitter’s records that one of its most powerful board members secretly tried to suppress debate on the mRNA jabs that have has been by far its best-selling product since 2020?
• And will CNBC continue to let Gottlieb use it to mislead the public?

Part 14 – Taibbi – The RussiaGate Lies

• 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.”
• 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.”
• Twitter warned politicians and media the not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored.
• 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”:
• The Nunes assertions would virtually all be verified in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019.
• Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a “joke”:
• 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.”
  • Feinstein/Schiff said the Nunes memo “distorts” classified information, but note they didn’t call it incorrect.
• Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal followed suit, publishing a letter saying, “We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans.”
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
  • “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.
  • “All the swirl is based on Hamilton,” said Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
  • “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.
• 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.”
• “We investigated, found that engagement as overwhelmingly organic, and driven by VITs” – Very Important Tweeters, including Wikileaks and congressman Steve King.
• 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.”
• When Twitter spoke to a Blumenthal staffer, they tried to “wave him off” because “we don’t believe these are bots.”
• 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.”
• 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.”
• Blumenthal published his letter anyway.
• 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.
• 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.”
• Eventually Twitter staff realize “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions” but “just wants to get credit for pushing us further.”
• Ultimately senior executives talked about “feeding congressional trolls” and compared their situation to the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
• 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.
• 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.”
• As a result, reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence.
• Russians weren’t just blamed for #ReleaseTheMemo but #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow – to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times.
• NBC, Politico, AP, Times, Business Insider, and other media outlets who played up the “Russian bots” story – even Rolling Stone – all declined to comment for this story.
• The staffs of Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal also declined comment.
• Who did comment? Devin Nunes. “Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work… By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

Part 15 – Fang – How Big Pharma Used Social Media to Shape Content Around Vaccine Policy

• In 2020, it was clear that the pandemic would require rapid innovation. Early on, there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis.
• But global drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit. Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines.
• BIO, the lobby group that represents biopharma, including Moderna & Pfizer, wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines.
• That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer’s vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines.
• Twitter’s reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine.
• The potential “fake accounts” that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here’s one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone.
• It’s not clear what actions Twitter ultimately took on this particular request. Several Twitter employees noted in subsequent messages that none of this activism constituted abuse. But the company continued monitoring tweets.
• In a separate push, Pfizer & Moderna’s lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects, which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid “misinformation.”
• BIO provided $1,275,000 to the campaign, part of which is revealed through tax forms. The PGP campaign, called “Stronger,” helped Twitter create content moderation bots, select which public health accounts got verification, helped crowdsource content takedowns.
• Many of the tweets the BIO-funded campaign focused on were truly unhinged misinfo, like claims that vaccines include microchips. But others Stronger lobbied Twitter on were more of a grey area, like vaccine passports & vaccine mandates, policies that coerce vaccination.
• The Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included direct regular emails with lists of tweets to takedown & others to verify. Here’s an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter’s lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended.
• Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry.
• For more detail, see Fang’s piece on The Intercept.

By Jack McPherrin source

by Sophia Flores source

This illustration picture taken on November 23, 2020 shows a bottle reading “Vaccine Covid-19” and a syringe next to the Pfizer and Biontech logo. (Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)[/caption]

Pfizer partner BioNTech pushed for social media platforms to censor activists who demanded low-cost generic vaccines for low-come countries.
Global drug giants saw the pandemic as an opportunity to make an immense amount of profit. Unbeknown to the public, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz in order to crush any effort to share patents for new COVID- related medicines. This included therapeutics and vaccines.
In 2021, BIO, the lobby group that represents Moderna and Pfizer, wrote to the newly inaugurated Biden administration demanding that the United States government sanctions any country that was attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost COVID medicine or vaccines.
In addition, the company reached out to Twitter to let the social media company know that they should censor users who asked about generic low-cost vaccines.
5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer’s vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines. pic.twitter.com/6cVIRcUDZV
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
Twitter quickly responded to the request. It’s not clear how the platform censored posts where people asked for poorer countries to get access to the vaccines, however, moderators kept moderating activist tweets.
6. Twitter’s reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine pic.twitter.com/Bt9YNJUlN1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
In a different push, BIO fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects. Public Good Projects worked alongside Twitter to set content moderation rules around COVID “misinformation.”
The company provided $1,275,000 to that particular campaign. The campaign focused on tweets that had unhinged misinformation. They also focused on vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and policies that coerce vaccination.
10. BIO provided $1,275,000 to the campaign, part of which is revealed through tax forms. The PGP campaign, called “Stronger,” helped Twitter create content moderation bots, select which public health

The CDC says the ‘safety signal’ wasn’t seen in the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine

By Adam Sabes | Fox News

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that a preliminary COVID-19 vaccine “safety signal” has been identified and is investigating whether the Bivalent Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine creates an increased risk of ischemic stroke in people 65 and older.

In the Friday statement, the CDC said that the preliminary signal hasn’t been identified with the Bivalent Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.

“Following the availability and use of the updated (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccines, CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a near real-time surveillance system, met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent,” the CDC said.

According to the CDC, an ischemic stroke “occurs when blood clots or other particles block the blood vessels to the brain.”

In the statement, the CDC pointed out that a large study of updated bivalent vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech “using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services database revealed no increased risk of ischemic stroke.”

The agency also said that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by CDC and FDA has not seen an increase in reporting of ischemic strokes following the updated (bivalent) vaccine.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for Pfizer said, “Pfizer and BioNTech have been made aware of limited reports of ischemic stroke that have been observed in the CDC Vaccine Safety DataLink (VSD) database in people 65 and older following vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 Vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech.”

Liesl Eibschutz, a medical student from Dartmouth University, loads a syringe with Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine before giving it to people on the first day that people ages 16 and up can receive the vaccine at Kedren Health in Los Angeles on April 15, 2021. ( Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

“Neither Pfizer and BioNTech nor the CDC or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have observed similar findings across numerous other monitoring systems in the U.S. and globally and there is no evidence to conclude that ischemic stroke is associated with the use of the companies’ COVID-19 vaccines,” the spokesperson continued.

“Compared to published incidence rates of ischemic stroke in this older population, the companies to date have observed a lower number of reported ischemic strokes following the vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent vaccine. The CDC continues to recommend vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 vaccine for all authorized ages and indications.”

This August 2022 photo shows vials of Pfizer’s updated COVID-19 vaccine during production in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  (Pfizer via AP)

The CDC isn’t recommending a change in vaccine practice.

Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel said that this isn’t “proof” of a link between the vaccine and strokes.

“This is not proof. This is that they see there may be a link here, and they want to investigate it, and they’re trying to be transparent,” he said.

CDC & FDA Identify Preliminary COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signal for Persons Aged 65 Years and Older

source CDC

Transparency and vaccine safety are top priorities for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). U.S. government agencies use multiple, complementary safety monitoring systems to help detect possible safety signals for vaccines and other medical countermeasures as early as possible and to facilitate further investigation, as appropriate. Often these safety systems detect signals that could be due to factors other than the vaccine itself.

All signals require further investigation and confirmation from formal epidemiologic studies. When one system detects a signal, the other safety monitoring systems are checked to validate whether the signal represents an actual concern with the vaccine or if it can be determined to be of no clinical relevance.

Following the availability and use of the updated (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccines, CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a near real-time surveillance system, met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent. Rapid-response investigation of the signal in the VSD raised a question of whether people 65 and older who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent were more likely to have an ischemic stroke in the 21 days following vaccination compared with days 22-42 following vaccination.

This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent. There also may be other confounding factors contributing to the signal identified in the VSD that merit further investigation. Furthermore, it is important to note that, to date, no other safety systems have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal:

• A large study of updated (bivalent) vaccines (from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services database revealed no increased risk of ischemic stroke
• A preliminary study using the Veterans Affairs database did not indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke following an updated (bivalent) vaccine
• The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by CDC and FDA has not seen an increase in reporting of ischemic strokes following the updated (bivalent) vaccine
• Pfizer-BioNTech’s global safety database has not indicated a signal for ischemic stroke with the updated (bivalent) vaccine
• Other countries have not observed an increased risk for ischemic stroke with updated (bivalent) vaccines

Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal. CDC and FDA will continue to evaluate additional data from these and other vaccine safety systems. These data and additional analyses will be discussed at the upcoming January 26 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

No change in vaccination practice is recommended. CDC continues to recommend that everyone ages 6 months of age and older stay up-to-date with COVID-19 vaccination; this includes individuals who are currently eligible to receive an updated (bivalent) vaccine. Staying up-to-date with vaccines is the most effective tool we have for reducing death, hospitalization, and severe disease from COVID-19, as has now been demonstrated in multiple studies conducted in the United States and other countries:

• Data have shown an updated COVID-19 vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization from COVID-19 by nearly 3-fold compared to those who were previously vaccinated but have not yet received the updated vaccine.
• Data have shown that the updated COVID-19 vaccine also reduces the risk of death from COVID-19 by nearly 19-fold compared to those who are unvaccinated.
• Other preliminary data from outside the U.S. have demonstrated more than 80% protection against severe disease and death from the bivalent vaccine compared to those who have not received the bivalent vaccine.

Overall safety data for the bivalent COVID-19 vaccines are available here.

Alex Berenson shared the 13th installment of Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News

The latest Twitter Files involving the tech giant’s response to the pandemic puts a focus on Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and sitting board member of prominent COVID vaccine manufacturer Pfizer.

Alex Berenson, a vocal COVID contrarian whose past commentary on the vaccine has received scorn by critics and praise by fans, was the latest to be granted access to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, publishing his findings on his “Unreported Truths” Substack newsletter.

Berenson shared an August 2021 email Gottlieb sent to Twitter’s senior public policy manager Todd O’Boyle flagging a tweet written by former Trump administration official Dr. Brett Giroir, who had written “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no scientific justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.”

According to Berenson, O’Boyle forward Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s “Strategist Response” team, writing “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”

Giroir’s tweet was later slapped with a “misleading” label and blocked any ability to like or share the tweet, telling Twitter users “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb is the latest figure to be swept up in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.” (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)

Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor who was a prominent media pundit in the height of the pandemic, flagged another tweet in Sept. 2021, one from Substack writer and COVID policy critic Justin Hart, which read “Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of ~0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”

“Why Gottlieb objected to Hart’s words is not clear, but the Pfizer shot would soon be approved for children 5 to 11, representing another massive market for Pfizer, if parents could be convinced Covid was a real threat to their kids,” Berenson wrote.

In the August 2021 tweet Gottlieb flagged, Berenson was critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“This is whats promoted on Twitter. This is why Tony needs a security detail,” Gottlieb told Twitter at the time.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member and former FDA commissioner, was prominently featured in the media’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. (Chris Usher/CBS via Getty Images)

In reaction to the latest Twitter Files, Gottlieb issued his own thread suggesting the disclosed emails don’t tell the whole story.

“In the past, I’ve raised concerns with Twitter related to the safety of me and others, and threats being made on the platform. This included direct as well as specific threats. Sometimes it included statements that I believed were purposely false and inflammatory,” Gottlieb wrote Monday. “The selective disclosure of my private communications with Twitter stokes the threat environment. So does actions that empower people who’ve shown little restraint when it comes to purposeful vitriol. It instigates more menacing dialogue, with potentially serious consequences.”

Gottlieb went on to share other emails he sent to Twitter flagging threatening tweets directed towards him and his family.

Alex Berenson, former New York Times writer and vocal COVID policy critic, was the latest to be tapped by Elon Musk to report on the “Twitter Files.” (Fox News)

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This marked the 13th installment of the Twitter Files, which began going viral last month shared by prominent independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shallenberger, Lee Fang and David Zweig.

Previous Twitter Files have covered a wide range of topics from the company’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, the internal pressure it faces to permanently ban former President Trump, efforts by the White House and government officials to suppress content, to the existence of shadow-banning of prominent conservatives.

The Twitter Files: Part 13 – Pfizer Secretly Pressed Twitter to Hide Posts Challenging the Company’s COVID Shots

 Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb secretly pressed Twitter to hide posts challenging his company’s massively profitable Covid jabs

Growing distrust of mainstream media should be supplemented by scrutiny among users of Big Tech social media. They’re not an answer to the problem.

First, as Elon Musk continues to dump the files out the window at Twitter — to the dismay of the media elite that generally knew and approved of censorship of views other than their own, especially where COVID-19 or U.S. federal politics was concerned:

Twitter files 13: Handled by independent journalist Alex Berenson — once banned from Twitter for criticizing the government response to the pandemic: “Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb secretly pressed Twitter to hide posts challenging his company’s massively profitable Covid jabs /To funnel his demands, Gottlieb used the same Twitter lobbyist the White House did – fresh evidence of overlap between the company selling mRNA shots and the government forcing them on the public.”

Twitter Files 13: Pfizer’s Dr. Scott Gottlieb Lobbied for Censorship

Former Food & Drug Administration chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer director, lobbied for the censorship of tweets that might have harmed the bottom line of the company he was representing, according to the latest Twitter Files.

“Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on COVID public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021,” according to Alex Berenson, an author on the pandemic and a former The New York Times reporter.

“Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.”

Giroir was a more recent FDA chief under the Trump administration, too, but Gottlieb called the tweet “corrosive,” fearing it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage,” according to Berenson’s review of internal Twitter emails.

Twitter moved the request by calling Gottlieb a former FDA chief, without mentioning he was sitting on Pfizer’s board.

The conflict of interest and using government authority is the latest damning evidence of censorship of Trump-connected voices on Twitter, and the first of perhaps many promised by Musk under the loose heading of “Fauci Files” — a reference to retired White House COVID-19 face Dr. Anthony Fauci.

source source

New Twitter files allege platform suppressed medical opinions, information on COVID

WASHINGTON (TND) — Journalist David Zweig started a new chapter in the “Twitter Files” saga Monday with a thread of tweets examining the social media platforms’ alleged errors in trying to curb the spread of misinformation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Zweig reported the story in conjunction with The Free Press, the right-of-center media company founded by ousted New York Times editor (and fellow “Twitter Files” writer) Bari Weiss.

This thread shifts the focus on the “Twitter Files” – a series of information drops of previously private and internal communications from the company made available to a select group by owner Elon Musk – from its recent series hurling allegations of wrongdoing and censorship collusion between Twitter and the FBI, as well as the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities writ large. Previous entries included a trilogy diving into discussions at Twitter in the lead up to the ban on former President Trump’s account in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Twitter’s handling of the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Zweig divided his narrative into two parts Monday: the first focusing on alleged pressure from the Biden White House on Twitter to moderate or ban certain “anti-vaxxer” accounts; the second breaks down how the social media platform moderated content from voices that sought to disrupt the established wisdom on pandemic response.

“In the summer of 2021, President Biden said social media companies were ‘killing people’ for allowing vaccine misinformation,” writes Zweig in a tweet. “Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.” He notes that Berenson then sued Twitter, during which legal process internal documents revealed that the White House had asked company officials about kicking him off the platform. “They had only one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off the platform,” wrote a Twitter employee in a Slack channel. “Otherwise their questions were pointed but fair.” Zweig then points out that Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, wrote in a summary of White House meetings with the White House during December 2022, members of the Biden team were “very angry in nature” as they were dissatisfied with the company’s handling of and lack of action on several accounts.

This point has been a common thread in the “Twitter Files,” between authors like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and now, Zweig, as The National Desk has previously reported. They frequently cite instances of government requests, especially ones that come from a place of frustration, as examples of overreach or censorship by the government and therefore major proof of wrongdoing and possible violations of the First Amendment. What the “Twitter Files” fails to contextualize in those claims is that Twitter never had to follow the FBI or Biden White House’s requests for moderation, nor do users on their platform have a right to say whatever they want. As a private company, Twitter is not bound by free speech and does not have to continue to allow voices and statements that it finds violate its policies.

Zweig then expands this argument of alleged overreach by Twitter when it comes to COVID by looking at how the social media platform handled moderating contents and accounts that challenged the recommended guidelines for dealing with the novel coronavirus as laid out by the Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization and others.

He starts by breaking down the – very potentially real – problems with Twitter’s strategy, which lied in the strategy – and its implementation – itself. “There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process,” wrote Zweig. “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.”

On the note of nuance, he follows up with the second broad area of failure. This revolved around the company hiring contractors in locations like the Philippines who did not have the proper training to handle the science-heavy tweets around COVID. “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,” he reports.

While those kinds of missteps could definitely lead to botched attempts to moderate content in a balanced and fair way, Zweig continues by alleging that the personal outlooks and opinions of Twitter’s employees, which bent towards “establishment dogmas,” informed the AI and the final decisions that led to purported censorship. “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.”

Zweig then cites examples from a handful specific accounts where he claims the social media company went out of its way to censor “legitimate” information, data and expert opinions on COVID-19 that deviated from the norm of the global medical community.

He leads off with the case of Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish-born biostatistician who was then a professor of medicine at Harvard’s Medical School. Kulldorff co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration” with three other medical professors, advocating for an end to lockdowns and a herd immunity approach to addressing COVID-19. One of Kulldorff’s tweets from March 2021, saying those with prior infection and children do not need to be vaccinated, was flagged with a label calling the information “misleading.” He was banned the next month.

Zweig alleges that this was overstep by Twitter as Kulldorff was offering an “expert opinion” on COVID strategy shared by “numerous other countries” – though he fails to cite a single country with that outlook. However, experts agree that the protection from natural antibodies gained as a result of COVID infection do not last indefinitely (granted neither do vaccines, hence why booster shots are needed), which is concerning for his lassiez-faire attitude towards immunization.

Furthermore, the “Great Barrington Declaration” he co-authored was immediately decried in the highest terms across the medical community. “Not only is there no proof of lasting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, but the strategy would place an unacceptable burden on healthcare workers, as well as the economy,” wrote Dr. Deepti Gurdasani of Queen Mary University of London, in an open letter signed by 80 medical researchers to The Lancet, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the world.

The head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that strategies like those Kulldorf advocated for are “scientifically and ethically problematic.” “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic,” he said in a press briefing a week after the declaration was published.

Zweig then cites the tweets of a “self-proclaimed public health fact checker” with 18,000 followers that were also flagged as misinformation. The fact checker admits on her website that she had just started to keep track of COVID data in May 2020 and that she does not have any formal training in epidemiology.

The last major example he cites is when Twitter labeled a tweet by physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik as “misinformation.” Jamrozik shared a graph from a 2022 study that tracks the number of cardiac arrests among participants in the study (ages 16-39) following their receipt of a COVID mRNA vaccine. While Zweig alleges this as wrongdoing because a physician was sharing the results of a published study, he neglected to say that the study was about the under 40 population of Israel and the study furthermore stated that it did not establish “causal relationships between” vaccines and heart attacks.

In a follow-up tweet Monday, Musk said there was “Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread.” He promised a follow up piece coming next week to feature “leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions.”

So it seems, the “Twitter Files” are winding up for 2022.

cited

Twitter Files Part 11 shows how ‘PR crisis’ following 2016 election allowed company to embrace intel community

Matt Taibbi shared 2023’s first batch of “Twitter Files”

Twitter files allege ‘very angry’ Biden team targeted journalists over COVID tweets: Howard Kurtz

‘Media Buzz’ host Howard Kurtz discusses the latest batch of Twitter files that reveal the Biden and Trump administrations attempted to suppress COVID content they did not agree with.

The first “Twitter Files” of 2023 dove into the tech giant’s evolution from its resistance to its embrace of the intel community.

In the eleventh installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” Substack writer Matt Taibbi reported about the “PR crisis” Twitter underwent in 2017 when Democrats pummeled the tech giant for its apparent inaction of investigating Russian influence on the platform as Facebook was public with uprooting suspicious foreign accounts following the 2016 presidential election.

Amid pressure, Twitter launched a “Russia Task Force” to investigate whether the Kremlin had such a foothold on the platform, even after it had suspended several suspected Russia-linked accounts.

“First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT,” an October 2017 memo shared by Taibbi read at the time.

Another read, “Finished with investigation… 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.”

Taibbi cited a report from BuzzFeed News that had flagged 45 “fake propaganda accounts” to Twitter, which were later suspended, and “leaks” from Congress published in the media and proposed legislation from lawmakers that further pressured the tech giant to take action.

“This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement,” Taibbi wrote Tuesday.

He then highlighted the discrepancy between Twitter’s “external” policy, which was that it would remove content “in our soul discretion,” while its “internal guidance” read that “any user identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations against targets associated with U.S. or other elections… shall not be allowed to advertise on Twitter.”

“We will not be reverting to the status quo,” Twitter’s then-Public Policy VP Colin Crowell told his colleagues at the time.

Each installment of the “Twitter Files” was shared by the journalists in lengthy Twitter threads addressing various controversies. Taibbi went viral with the first installment in early December with his “Twitter Files” focusing on Twitter’s internal discussions leading to it censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, with some officials struggling to explain how it violated its “hacked materials” policies.

It was later revealed that the first batch of “Twitter Files” was vetted without Musk’s knowledge by Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s general counsel and was involved in the Russia probe. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.

Baker was swept up Taibbi’s reporting about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, telling his colleagues at the time, “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked” but added, “it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”

Additionally, Taibbi initially reported, “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.” It is unclear whether Baker’s involvement in vetting the “Twitter Files” led Taibbi to draw that conclusion and whether Baker omitted files that would have shown the federal government intervening in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Jim Baker was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s deputy general counsel after revelations that he had vetted the first batch of the Twitter Files without Musk’s knowledge. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)

The second installment published by The Free Press editor Bari Weiss revealed Twitter’s “blacklisting” of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.

Internal communications also reveal Twitter staffers admitting that the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok never violated its “hateful conduct” policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.

Those revelations appear to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in 2018, when he testified under oath that Twitter did not censor or shadowban conservatives.

The third, fourth and fifth installments of the “Twitter Files” focused on the permanent suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot in January 2021.

Taibbi reported how Twitter circulated election-related tweets from various users leading up to the 2020 election that were “flagged” by the FBI as being problematic.

Independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss were tapped by Elon Musk to report on the “Twitter Files.” (Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage, Bari Weiss)

Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed that Dorsey was phoning it in as he was on vacation while his deputies were pushing to deplatform Trump, with Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth particularly spearheading efforts to censor other users pertaining to tweets about the 2020 election. It became known that Roth met on a weekly basis with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Inteligence in the weeks leading up to the election.

Weiss addressed the pressure Twitter management was facing from its employees who called for Trump’s permanent suspension, though the Free Press editor also revealed several Twitter staffers who enforce policies did not believe Trump’s tweets from Jan. 6 actually violated its rules.

However, it was Vijaya Gadde, then-Twitter’s head legal chief, who asked if Trump’s tweets could be “coded incitement to further violence.” Moments later, the so-called “scaled enforcement team” suggested that based on how Twitter interprets Trump’s tweets, it could violate the violence incitement policies.

Part six of the “Twitter Files” put a spotlight on Twitter’s close ties with the FBI. Taibbi alleged the law enforcement agency was acting like a “subsidiary” of the tech giant, revealing communications that showed FBI agents systemically flagged Twitter users for tweets that included “possible violative content” pertaining to the election.

In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, “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.”

The FBI’s routine contact with Twitter regarding users that would ultimately face punishment for their tweets has raised major flags about potential First Amendment violations.

FBI headquarters building is seen in Washington, U.S. Pro-Russian hackers have claimed to have hacked the FBI website this week. (REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)

In part seven, Shellenberger framed the Twitter’s coziness with the FBI in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop story, showing the FBI’s requests for Twitter to share sensitive data of its users, which Twitter refused to give, and the agency’s repeated inquiries into whether Twitter has seen foreign activity leading up to the 2020 election, something Twitter at the time said it hadn’t. On Oct. 13, 2020, just one day before the New York Post broke its Hunter Biden story that was quickly censored, Twitter received ten unknown documents from the FBI through its secure one-way Teleport channel.

One email from February 2021 shows the FBI paid Twitter over $3.4 million since October 2019 over the course of their partnership, as Twitter’s policies seek reimbursements when it comes to producing information as part of a legal process.

Roth had even participated in what was dubbed the “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” with the Aspen Institute in September 2020 to elaborately simulate how the media and Big Tech should handle something like the Hunter Biden laptop.

The FBI remained defiant amid criticism, telling Fox News in a statement “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers… It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Part eight, shared by Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang, exposed Twitter’s assistance in the Pentagon’s foreign influencing campaigns, allowing the military to use covert accounts to push out propaganda overseas despite it being against Twitter’s own policies. Taibbi separately reported in the ninth installment about Twitter’s constant interactions with “OGAs” (other government agencies) including the CIA.

The tenth batch of Twitter Files, this time reported by writer David Zweig, focused on COVID and the platform’s efforts to enforce its so-called “misinformation” policy, reporting “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.” Zweig highlighted a memo written by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, who claimed the Biden team was “very angry” about Twitter not taking action to “de-platform” various accounts based on meetings with the White House. Musk teased there’s “much more” Twitter Files to reveal in 2023 particularly about COVID and how top doctors and scientists were “actively suppressed on Twitter,” presumably for going against the White House-approved narrative.

Joseph A. Wulfsohn is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to joseph.wulfsohn@fox.com and on Twitter: @JosephWulfsohn.

Latest ‘Twitter Files’ alleges rigged COVID debate
Tom Dempsey, Devan Markham

The Twitter Files: Part 11 – How Twitter Rigged The COVID Debate

The latest Twitter Files investigative report has dropped, this time from author and journalist David Zweig. In this edition, Zweig unveils Twitter and the U.S. Government’s efforts to censor info that was true but inconvenient to government policy, discredit doctors and other experts who disagreed, and suppress ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s own data.

“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19,” Zweig tweeted. “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.”

Check out Zweig’s investigation below:

The Twitter Files: Part 10 – Twitter And “Other Government Agencies”

Twitter Files Part 10:
Trump, Biden White Houses leaned on tech giant to moderate content during COVID

David Zweig went viral with reporting that implicates both Trump and Biden administrations

Twitter And “Other Government Agencies” • Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi)

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News

The latest installment of the “Twitter Files” shed light on how both the past and current administrations leaned on tech giants to moderate content during the coronavirus pandemic.

Independent writer David Zweig went viral on Monday with reporting on behalf of Bari Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, on how the U.S. government “pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.”

“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,” Zweig wrote. Citing Twitter’s “meeting notes” with the Trump administration, one name-dropped then-White House Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios, who “led the Trump administration’s calls for help from the tech companies to combat misinformation.”

“Areas of focus included conspiracies around 5G cell towers, runs on grocery stores, and misinformation that could stoke panic buying and behaviors,” the memo read, according to Zweig.

The memo revealed other companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft participated in “weekly” calls with the Trump administration to discuss “general trends” that were happening on their platforms.

The “Twitter Files” noted that when President Biden took over, “one of the first meeting quests from the Biden White House was about COVID misinformation” and that Biden’s staff “focused on vaccines and hight profile anti-vaxxer accounts, including Alex Berenson.”Another memo, written in December 2022 by Twitter’s head of U.S. public policy Lauren Culbertson, alleged the Biden administration was “not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more and to de-platform several accounts.”

“Because of this dissatisfaction, we were asked to join other calls. They were very angry in nature,” Culbertson wrote, according to Zweig’s reporting.

Zweig continued, “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. 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.”

The latest “Twitter Files” could implicate up to three potential 2024 hopefuls; former President Trump, who last month launched his third bid for the presidency, former Vice President Mike Pence, who led the coronavirus task force during the Trump administration, and President Biden, who has repeatedly said he intends to seek re-election.

Fox News Digital asked Kratsios, representatives for both Trump and Pence as well as the Biden White House whether they ever suggested, encouraged, requested or demanded Twitter or any other tech company to either suppress or remove content related to COVID and whether they had any concerns that such inquiries would be in violation of the First Amendment.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, cited a post the former president made about the “Twitter Files” on his social media app Truth Social, which specifically knocked former Twitter lawyer and ex-FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who Zweig reported wanted Twitter to suppress the then-president’s Twitter account over an optimistic COVID tweet from Oct. 2020. Cheung also shared a campaign statement touting Trump’s record combating COVID, but did not respond to the multiple inquiries regarding the Trump administration’s apparent role in social media censorship.

Neither Kratsios, Pence’s office, nor the Biden White House responded to Fox News’ requests for comment. Twitter also did not respond to a request for comment.

Each installment of the “Twitter Files” was shared by the journalists tapped by Twitter owner Elon Musk to address various controversies. Substack writer Matt Taibbi went viral with the first installment in early December with his “Twitter Files” focusing on Twitter’s internal discussions leading to it censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, with some officials struggling to explain how it violated its “hacked materials” policies.

It was later revealed that the first batch of “Twitter Files” was vetted without Musk’s knowledge by Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s general counsel and was involved in the Russia probe. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.

Baker was swept up in Taibbi’s reporting about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, telling his colleagues at the time, “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked” but added, “it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”

Additionally, Taibbi initially reported, “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.” It is unclear whether Baker’s involvement in vetting the “Twitter Files” led Taibbi to draw that conclusion and whether Baker omitted files that would have shown the federal government intervening in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The second installment published by Weiss revealed Twitter’s “blacklisting” of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.

Internal communications also revealed Twitter staffers admitting that the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok never violated its “hateful conduct” policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.

Those revelations appear to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in 2018, when he testified under oath that Twitter did not censor or shadowban conservatives.

The third, fourth and fifth installments of the “Twitter Files” focused on the permanent suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot in January 2021.

Taibbi reported how Twitter circulated election-related tweets from various users leading up to the 2020 election that were “flagged” by the FBI as being problematic.

Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed that Dorsey was phoning it in as he was on vacation while his deputies were pushing to deplatform Trump, with Roth particularly spearheading efforts to censor other users pertaining to tweets about the 2020 election. It became known that Roth met on a weekly basis with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Intelligence in the weeks leading up to the election.

Weiss addressed the pressure Twitter management was facing from its employees who called for Trump’s permanent suspension, though the Free Press editor also revealed several Twitter staffers who enforce policies did not believe Trump’s tweets from Jan. 6 actually violated its rules.

However, it was Vijaya Gadde, then-Twitter’s head legal chief, who asked if Trump’s tweets could be “coded incitement to further violence.” Moments later, the so-called “scaled enforcement team” suggested that based on how Twitter interprets Trump’s tweets, it could violate the violence incitement policies.

Part six of the “Twitter Files” put a spotlight on Twitter’s close ties with the FBI. Taibbi alleged the law enforcement agency was acting like a “subsidiary” of the tech giant, revealing communications that showed FBI agents systemically flagged Twitter users for tweets that included “possible violative content” pertaining to the election.

In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, “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.”

The FBI’s routine contact with Twitter regarding users that would ultimately face punishment for their tweets has raised major flags about potential First Amendment violations.

In part seven, Shellenberger framed the Twitter’s coziness with the FBI in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop story, showing the FBI’s requests for Twitter to share sensitive data of its users, which Twitter refused to give, and the agency’s repeated inquiries into whether Twitter has seen foreign activity leading up to the 2020 election, something Twitter at the time said it had not. On Oct. 13, 2020, just one day before the New York Post broke its Hunter Biden story that was quickly censored, Twitter received 10 unknown documents from the FBI through its secure one-way Teleport channel.

One email from February 2021 shows the FBI paid Twitter over $3.4 million beginning October 2019 over the course of their partnership, as Twitter’s policies seek reimbursements when it comes to producing information as part of a legal process.

Roth had even participated in what was dubbed the “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” with the Aspen Institute in September 2020 to elaborately simulate how the media and Big Tech should handle something like the Hunter Biden laptop.

The FBI remained defiant amid criticism, telling Fox News in a statement, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers… It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Part eight, shared by Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang, exposed Twitter’s assistance in the Pentagon’s foreign influencing campaigns, allowing the military to use covert accounts to push out propaganda overseas despite it being against Twitter’s own policies. Taibbi separately reported in the ninth installment about Twitter’s constant interactions with “OGAs” (other government agencies) including the CIA.