Twitter Archives - Good Shepherd News - Fastest Growing Religious, Free Speech & Political Content https://goodshepherdmedia.net/tag/twitter/ Christian, Political, ‎‏‏‎Social & Legal Free Speech News | Ⓒ2024 Good News Media LLC | Shepherd for the Herd! God 1st Programming Tue, 22 Aug 2023 10:18:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Good-Shepherd-News-Logo-150x150.png Twitter Archives - Good Shepherd News - Fastest Growing Religious, Free Speech & Political Content https://goodshepherdmedia.net/tag/twitter/ 32 32 Tucker Carlson Show on Twitter – The Show Must Go On https://goodshepherdmedia.net/tucker-carlson-show-on-twitter-the-show-must-go-on/ Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:00:28 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=14779 Tucker Carlson on Twitter – The Show Must Go On

Tucker Carlson Show on Twitter gets more views than entire networks!

Tucker Carlson, conservatives cheer Musk’s Twitter buy: ‘We’re back’ 

Click Here is the story of Tucker Carlson releases first episode on Twitter: ‘We’re grateful to be here’

]]> Tucker Carlson releases first episode on Twitter: ‘We’re grateful to be here’ https://goodshepherdmedia.net/tucker-carlson-releases-first-episode-on-twitter-were-grateful-to-be-here/ Tue, 06 Jun 2023 08:31:41 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=14598 Tucker Carlson releases first episode on Twitter: ‘We’re grateful to be here’

Tucker Carlson’s New Show on Twitter

On June 6, Carlson debuted “Tucker on Twitter,” in which the conservative personality Tucker Carlson

https://youtu.be/OwVzS577RP4

If you would like to see all his TUCKER ON TWITTER SHOW FEED Click Here

The Tucker Carlson Show on Twitter

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released the first episode of his new show on Twitter Tuesday evening.

“Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson,” the host said, opening the 10-minute video while seated behind a desk at what appears to be his home in rural Maine.

Carlson then offered commentary on a reported explosion at a dam in Ukraine that sparked widespread evacuations in the war-torn country.

The conservative pundit used the episode to deride the American news media and politicians who have defended U.S. involvement in the country’s war with Russia

Carlson was ousted from his perch hosting Fox’s 8 p.m. hour earlier this year and neither he nor the network have publicly commented on what led to his departure. Several reports have surfaced in recent weeks suggesting that his ouster was connected to disparaging comments the host made about network leadership in text messages and made public as part of its now-settled defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems.

Carlson remains under contract with Fox and it’s unclear if his production of content for the social media platform would violate the terms of his agreement with the network. The pundit has separately accused the network of violating its contract by leaking unflattering material about him to the press.

In a cryptic video posted just says after his ouster, Carlson announced he would bring a version of his old Fox show to Twitter, which is owned by billionaire Elon Musk.

“As of today we have come to Twitter, which we hope will be the short wave radio under the blankets,” Carlson said, closing his first video on the platform. “We’re told there are no gatekeepers here. If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave. But in the meantime, we’re grateful to be here.” source

Tucker Carlson Posts First Installment of New Show on Twitter

The 10-minute video was similar to a stripped-down version of his former Fox program.

Tucker Carlson, the sidelined prime-time Fox News host, on Tuesday released the first installment of what he said would be his new show on Twitter, potentially setting up a confrontation with the cable network, where he remains under contract until early 2025.

The 10-minute video, Mr. Carlson’s first extended commentary since Fox took him off the air in April, was similar to a stripped-down version of what his roughly three million Fox viewers would have seen on his nightly program.

There were no guests or produced segments — only a monologue from Mr. Carlson, in which he hit some familiar themes. He expressed sympathy for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and mocked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He accused the mainstream media of lying. He wrapped up by declaring that U.F.O.s and extraterrestrial life are “actually real.”

“As of today, we’ve come to Twitter,” Mr. Carlson said in the video. “We’re told there are no gatekeepers here. If that turns out to be false, we’ll leave.”

He signed off the show, called “Tucker on Twitter,” by promising to be back with “much more, very soon.”

Fox management took Mr. Carlson off the air after concluding that he was too much of a liability. The two sides have not reached an agreement about the terms of a departure, including what kind of programming he could continue to make. Anchors like Mr. Carlson usually also have terms in their contracts that prevent them from making unsanctioned media appearances.

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Carlson announced last month that he would take a version of his Fox show to Twitter.

He was ousted after the Fox board discovered a racist text message that he had sent to one of his producers and that was among the evidence amassed by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its defamation lawsuit over false claims of election fraud that the network aired.

Fox settled with Dominion for $787.5 million on the day the trial was set to begin in April. Tucker

 

]]> The Twitter Files Parts 1-15: A Comprehensive Summary, Analysis, and Discussion of Ramifications for American Institutions (updated 1.19.23) https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-parts-1-15-a-comprehensive-summary-analysis-and-discussion-of-ramifications-for-american-institutions-updated-1-19-23/ Sat, 21 Jan 2023 11:39:15 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=9478 The Twitter Files Parts 1-15: A Comprehensive Summary, Analysis, and Discussion of Ramifications for American Institutions (updated 1.19.23)

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.
  • 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 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  source

]]> The Twitter Files: Part 15 – How Pfizer And BioNTech Used Twitter To Suppress Critics And Vaccine Skeptics https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-15-how-pfizer-and-biontech-used-twitter-to-suppress-critics-and-vaccine-skeptics/ Wed, 18 Jan 2023 06:35:46 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=9446 The Twitter Files Part 15:
How Pfizer And BioNTech Used Twitter To Suppress Critics And Vaccine Skeptics

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) 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 Twitter Files: Part 14 – Russian bots – #ReleaseTheMemo Scandal  https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-14-russian-bots-releasethememo-scandal/ Fri, 13 Jan 2023 08:26:37 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=9106

The Twitter Files: Part 14 – #ReleaseTheMemo scandal

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.

Twitter files 14: This one was prepared by news veteran Matt Taibbi. From his Substack post: “Remember this one? Russian bots and trolls were blamed by virtually every major news organization in the country for amplifying the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. The files contain a mass of emails from executives blowing up this ridiculous story, once and for all. / “The #ReleaseTheMemo scandal was one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of our media, but taken seriously by all but one or two mainstream editors at the time. All citing the same dubious source — the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” trumpeted by former FBI counterintelligence official and current MSNBC contributor Clint Watts — they insisted Russians deployed Twitter bot-armies to whip up cyber-support for Republican congressman Devin Nunes. Nunes had just released a classified memo alleging Democrats and the FBI used the infamous paid oppositional research dossier of ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain secret FISA surveillance authority on Trump-connected figures like Carter Page, amid other improprieties. / “We now know Twitter internally found no evidence, as in zero, that Russians were anywhere near this story.”

From TF 14:

 

The significance of this (and probably other) Russian influence claims is that the mainstream media pros — whose news sense we are all supposed to trust — either did not suspect anything or pretended that they did not. They entirely failed to ask critical questions. That’s why we hear very little about the steady stream of Twitter revelations from them now. The big question is what news institutions that the public can trust will replace them?

Here are capsule summaries of all the Twitter files up to 13 so far, with links and glossary.

There is a danger, if we get caught up in the latest revealing file dump, of failing to see the momentous big picture, which is that Big Tech control of the news, with the tacit support of Big Media and the U.S. federal government, means that we did not get a very good picture of what was happening in the last few years by turning to the internet. Here are three instances to ponder:

● If you relied on legacy mainstream media for coverage of Elon Musk’s Twitter reforms, you probably heard plenty of angst from former employees but you may not have heard about the crackdown on using the platform for child sex abuse:

To those who aren’t aware yet, last week Twitter did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation. (ONLY on tweets with content images/videos) this was not previously available and was a separate form that wasn’t easy to find.

I’m grateful to see these changes. pic.twitter.com/AI88XdX9HW— Eliza (@elizableu) November 20, 2022

It may relevant that Musk has ten kids himself.

● Facebook, eager to please the White House, apparently suppressed true information about the COVID vaccines in order to combat “vaccine hesitancy”: “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable information. This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level because it is important for people to be able to discuss both their personal experiences and concerns about the vaccine, but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” In short, if you thought that Facebook was manipulating your news in order to get compliance, you were right. No wonder 2022 has been dubbed the year conspiracy theory became conspiracy fact. Or as some wags now say, these days the lead time between a conspiracy theory and today’s news is six months.

● Non-compliant media have also been a target. A recent lawsuit by the attorneys-general of Missouri and Louisiana show that the White House was after Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.

“‘How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,’ Flaherty claimed. ‘Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?’” – The Federalist (January 10, 2023)

For the purpose of creating public trust, there’s nothing like the White House stage managing news in order to protect its political narrative…

At any rate, the current plunge in public trust of legacy mainstream media needs to be supplemented by growing scrutiny among users of Big Tech social media. They’re not an answer to the problem.

You may also wish to read: As the Twitter files drop, ponder the future of mainstream media. Mainstream media are largely ignoring the story for reasons that go to the heart of their own growing weakness and unstoppable decline. Journalism will never matter anywhere near as much to the MSM again as doing what their betters want. And they view those who follow the story as a threat.

and

Big Tech censorship goes well beyond Twitter. Big Tech media is not, in itself, an answer to current legacy mainstream media if we would like to know information that our betters would prefer that we didn’t. Governments that gain control of media generally want an absolute rewrite of history so that it re-emerges as a PR machine for their governance.

source

 

Twitter Files: Top Democrats peddled false Russian bots narrative about Nunes memo, despite Twitter warnings

Twitter officials called Adam Schiff and others ‘congressional trolls’ for pushing fake bots narrative about #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag

Brian Flood

By Brian Flood | Fox News

Twitter Files prove government was ‘in the censorship business in a huge way’: Matt Taibbi

‘Griftopia’ author Matt Taibbi sounds off on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ on what he’s learned through releasing Elon Musk’s Twitter Files.

Journalist Matt Taibbi unveiled part 14 of the Twitter Files on Thursday, diving into the “Russiagate lies” and how he says a “fake tale of Russian bots” helped Democrats denounce the famous Devin Nunes report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Emails and memos show that high-powered Democrats peddled a narrative of Russian bots despite being told directly by Twitter that there wasn’t a connection to the Kremlin.

The lengthy Twitter thread began with Taibbi noting that “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.'”

He then indicated “Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence,” and shared an email in which Twitter executives appeared to inform Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the social media platform “has not identified any significant activity connected to Russia with respect to Tweets posting original content to this [#ReleaseTheMemo] hashtag.”

Journalist Matt Taibbi unveiled part 14 of the “Twitter Files” on Thursday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

Elon Musk has been vocal about being transparent when it comes to Twitter’s past and present actions curating content on the platform, including censored content. The Twitter owner has enlisted independent journalists to slowly release evidence of these actions in a series dubbed the “Twitter Files” that continue to expose once-secret communications.

“Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored,” Taibbi wrote. “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,” Taibbi continued. “Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a ‘joke.'”

Taibbi pointed out that on Jan. 23, 2018, Feinstein and Schiff “published an open letter saying the hashtag ‘gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.’”

placeholder“Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal followed suit, publishing a letter saying, ‘We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans,’” Taibbi wrote.

“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),” Taibbi noted; Watts is an MSNBC contributor. But Twitter officials found no authentic Russian connection to the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and informed Democrats as such.

“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,” Taibbi wrote.

He then noted that then-Twitter exec Emily Horne wrote, “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… it’s a comms play for ASD.”

Then-Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth also warned “all the swirl is based on Hamilton,” and other Twitter execs echoed that notion.

Twitter staffers tried to stop Blumenthal from releasing his letter, to no avail.

“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,” Taibbi wrote. “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.”

placeholder

“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,” Taibbi wrote. “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.”

Taibbi then shared a series of headlines in which media outlets pushed the Russian bots narrative.

Twitter also discovered no Kremlin source for other hashtags that mainstream and liberal media outlets blamed on sinister Russian activity.

“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,” Taibbi wrote.

But media organizations aren’t the only ones refusing to speak with Taibbi.

“The staffs of Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal also declined comment,” Taibbi wrote.

placeholder

Asked for comment, Nunes told Taibbi that the “Russia collusion hoax” was one of the “greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

“The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines,” Taibbi wrote. “Twitter had no editorial input on this story. Searches were carried out by third parties, so the documents could be limited.”

This marked the 14th installment of the Twitter Files, which began going viral last month shared by prominent independent journalists including Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shallenberger, Lee Fang and David Zweig.

Previous Twitter Files have covered a wide range of topics, including 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 Donald Trump; efforts by the White House and government officials to suppress content; and the existence of shadow-banning of prominent conservatives.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn and David Rutz contributed to this report. 

Brian Flood is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to brian.flood@fox.com and on Twitter: @briansflood. 

Democrats and media organizations knowingly propagated
the ‘Russiagate theory’ hoax to discredit Donald Trump’s election victory: Twitter Files

The story was covered in detail by journalist Matt Taibbi who emphasised that Twitter employees found no evidence of Russian influence in the 2016 US elections, yet they continued to allow Democrats and media organisations to use their platform to push the notion that Trump had Moscow’s backing.

On Thursday (January 12), the 14th tranche of the ‘Twitter Files’ was released on the social media platform, which exposed how the Democratic Party leaders and the mainstream media organisations used the ‘Russiagate theory’ to discredit the 2016 victory of the former US President Donald Trump.

The story was covered in detail by journalist Matt Taibbi who emphasised that Twitter employees found no evidence of Russian influence in the 2016 US elections, yet they continued to allow Democrats and media organisations to use their platform to push the notion that Trump had Moscow’s backing. “Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored,” he pointed out.

Former US House of Representative, Devin Nunes, had submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee on January 18th, 2018, pointing out several flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Although the report was verified by the US Justice Department a year later in December 2019, the Democrats went all-out to cast aspersions on the memo presented by Devin Nunes.

The sceptics included Democratic leaders Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congressman Adam Schiff, Senator Richard Blumenthal and leftist propaganda outlets such as MSNBC, The Washington Post and others.

Interestingly, Democrats and their lap-dog media had unilaterally relied on an online dashboard called ‘Hamilton 68’, published by a national security advocacy group ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’ to further their claims. The dashboard claimed to expose Twitter activity related to the supposed ‘Russian disinformation campaign.’

However, internal communications now show that Twitter employees (who are mostly Democratic Party supporters) had failed to gather any evidence that could lend credence to the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Yoel Roth, former Global Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, pointed out, “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with release the memo (hashtag) and…none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

‘Twitter Files 14.0’ revealed how attempts made by top executives to stop Democrats from posting unverified claims about Russiagate were in vain.

“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,” emphasised one concerned Twitter employee about the political well-being of Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal.

“Executives eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims,” wrote journalist Matt Taibbi.

It became clear that Democrats went ahead with their outlandish claims about the ‘bogus’ Russian disinformation campaign, despite warnings from top Twitter employees.

Later, it dawned upon the Twitter employees that they were being exploited by the Democratic Party leader. “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions,” noted one executive.

“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,” noted journalist Matt Taibbi.

“…Reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence,” the author of ‘Twitter Files 14.0’ added.

Matt Taibbi said, “Russians weren’t just blamed for #ReleaseTheMemo but #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow – to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times.”

Interestingly, the above-mentioned news outlets and Democratic Party leaders who peddled the Russiagate conspiracy theory refused to speak to Matt Taibbi.

While speaking about the matter, ex-US House of Representative member Devin Nunes said, “Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work.”

 

He added, “By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

 

“This #ReleaseTheMemo episode is just one of many in the #TwitterFiles. The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines,” journalist Matt Taibbi concluded.

Democrats peddled debunked ‘bot’ conspiracy to denounce memo exposing ‘abuses’ in the Trump-Russia investigation – even though Twitter told them there was NO EVIDENCE of Moscow’s involvement, new files reveal

  • 14th Twitter Files installment dives into spread of discredited Russia theory 
  • Centers on 2018 memo from Devin Nunes on flaws of Trump-Russia links 
  • Democrats said the memo was being promoted on Twitter by ‘Russian bots’
  • But Twitter executives found no evidence Moscow was behind the push
  • It warned the Democrats, but they kept publicly pushing the false claims
  • The social media company failed to issue a public statement on their findings  

By WILLS ROBINSON FOR source

Democrats peddled false narratives that Russian bots were promoting a memo about the Trump-Russia investigation – even though Twitter told them they had found no evidence of Moscow’s involvement, according to a new installment of the Twitter Files.

The 14th installment of the social media company’s files released by journalist Matt Taibbi showed executives tried to warn senior Democrats about a debunked ‘Russian bot’ theory in 2018.

The Democrats claimed Devin Nunes’s 2018 memo, which exposed flaws in the investigation linking Donald Trump to Russia before the 2016 election, was being amplified by Kremlin-backed entities on social media.

Twitter employees said the claims weren’t true and shared their findings with the Democrats, but their efforts were in vain because politicians kept pushing the theory anyway.

Instead of publicly challenging the claims, Twitter was instead told by outside counsel to issue a vague statement saying they take bots and foreign interference ‘seriously’, Taibbi writes.

Twitter stood by and let Democrats peddle false narratives about ‘Russiagate’ – even though they found no evidence of Moscow’s involvement, according to a new dump of files from the social media company. Rep. Adam Schiff (left) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (right) pushed false claims that Russia was behind a campaign

It is further evidence of how Russiagate theories and the discredited Steele Dossier were able to be publicized with little challenge.

‘Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored’, Taibbi wrote.

In 2018, Democrats discredited the Republican memo on FBI surveillance abuse by falsely suggesting it was being promoted by ‘Russian bots’ with the hashtag ReleaseTheMemo.

The memo, written by former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, pointed out flaws in the investigation into Trump’s supposed links to Moscow.

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Nunes’s memo was verified by the Department of Justice a year later.

California Democrats Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff wrote an open letter saying the ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was being promoted by ‘Russian influence operations’.

And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) then said it was ‘reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans’.

Taibbi wrote that: ‘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.’

The dashboard claimed to expose Twitter activity connected to any ‘Russian disinformation campaign’.

Twitter’s Global Policy Communications Chief Emily Horne, who went on to work at the White House and National Security Council, told her colleagues to be ‘skeptical’ of the Hamilton 68 dashboard and said it was a ‘comms play’ for the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

 

Twitter executives wrote to Feinstein and Schiff saying they had found no evidence of Russian activity connected to the Release The Memo hashtag

Twitter execs responded internally by saying: ‘We are feeding congressional trolls’ and compared the situation to the story: ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’

Their own internal investigations on the ‘bot’ theory had found ‘not any… significant activity connected to Russia’.

Ex-trust and safety chief Yoel Roth, who resigned over his role in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, also couldn’t find any Russian connection to the bid to discredit the memo.

‘I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo,’ Roth wrote according to Taibbi. ‘None of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia’.

Twitter reached out to Senator Blumenthal’s office to explain that bots were not responsible, but they were ignored.

Staffers even tried to offer the Democrat other information that could be seen as ‘wins’ for him.

‘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 staffer wrote.

But Blumenthal went ahead and published the false claims anyway, and Twitter executives grew ‘frustrated’ with the fact their work was being swept under the rug.

Their efforts to try and combat the claims waned, and they didn’t release statements on the record saying the ‘bot’ theory was false.

News outlets continued to push the false narrative.

Twitter execs responded internally by saying: ‘We are feeding congressional trolls’.

They also said Democrats were putting the ‘cart before the horse’ by assuming the social media campaign was started by Russia.

Twitter senior executives compared the situation to the story: ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’.

‘He’ll want a glass of milk, which will lead to a wave of other exhausting requests, at the end of which he’ll want a glass of milk. And one more cookie’, Taibbi wrote.

On the bombshell claims, Nunes told Taibbi: ‘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.’

Taibbi concluded: ‘This #ReleaseTheMemo episode is just one of many in the #TwitterFiles. The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines’.

Twitter Files part 14 sheds light on “Russian bots” and #ReleaseTheMemo

It began in 2018 when Senators Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff wrote the platform a letter regarding trending hashtags and Russian disinformation campaigns. Twitter pointed out that both the politicians and the media didn’t only lack the evidence but had evidence the accounts were not Russian. However, the platform was “roundly ignored.”

Backtracking to a week before Twitter received the letter, Republican Devin Nunes submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee that detailed the abuses by the FBI in obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance authority against those connected to former President Trump. Included was the role played by the Steele Dossier.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

In December 2019, a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz verified Nunes’ assertions virtually.

“We also found that the FBI’s interviews of Steele, his Primary Sub-Source, a second sub-source, and other investigative activity revealed potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports,” the report read. “Among other things, regarding the allegations attributed to Person 1, the Primary Sub-source’s account of these communications, if true, was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a “well-developed conspiracy” in Reports 95 and 102 attributed to Person 1.”

The report also pointed out that the FBI filed three renewal applications with the FISC in 2017, repeating the seven “significant errors contained in the first FISA application.” Yet, the report found another ten errors in the three renewal applications. Taibbi noted that despite that, the national media denounced Nunes’ report in January and February 2018 in “oddly identical language, calling it a ‘joke.’

Senators Feinstein and Schiff also wrote an open letter claiming that the hashtag “gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.

The senators claimed that Nunes’ memo “distorts” classified information. “But note they didn’t call it incorrect,” Taibbi wrote.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal also wrote a letter. “We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans citizens and undermined our democratic processes through our elections and public policy debates.”

The letter asked Twitter to notify users who interacted with tweets created by the accounts tracked by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). The senators and members of the media pointed to the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence official, created The letter asked Twitter to notify users who interacted with tweets created by the accounts tracked by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.”

The Hamilton 68 dashboard was described as a project with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshal Fund and tracked around 600 accounts that it claimed were tied to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns. Bret Schafer, an analyst who helped run the project, spoke about the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.

“I’ve never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it,” he said. Taibbi noted that the dashboard “was vague in how it reached its conclusions.”

Twitter executives didn’t quite trust the dashboard and the key complaints were that Hamilton 68 seemed to be the only source of information and no one was checking with Twitter. Global Policy Communications Chief Emily Horne encouraged skepticism of the dashboard’s take. In the screenshots below, Horne pointed out that it was a comms play for ASD.

“They’ve made a very strong media push in the last week, piggybacking on Clint’s testimony.”

Off the record, she said, “I encourage you to be skeptical of Hamilton 68’s take on this, which, as best as I can tell, is the only source for these stories. 1) Hamilton 68 does not release the accounts that make up their dashboard, so no one can verify the accounts they include are, in fact, Russian automated accounts, and 2) it is extraordinarily difficult for outside researchers, who do not have access to our full API and internal account signals, to say with any degree of certainty that an account they believe is behaving suspiciously is 1) automated and 2) Russian.”

“If you speak with them, I encourage you to press them on how they can be sure of both of these claims when they do not have access to internal signals and data.”

Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, wasn’t able to find any Russian connection to the hashtag and noted that after reviewing accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with the hashtag, none showed any signs or affiliation to Russia. Instead, Twitter found that the engagement was “overwhelmingly organing and driven by strong VIT engagement). VIT is an acronym for very important Tweeters, and these included Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr., and Congressman Steve King.

When Twitter brought this up to a Blumenthal staffer, the staffer tried to wave them off “because we don’t believe these are bots.”

Another Twitter executive pointed out that if Blumenthal would lay off on this, “it seems like there are other wins we could offer him.” However, the senator published his letter, which led to the platform’s executives being frustrated over what they viewed as a circular process.

“Twitter spent a lot of resources to respond to the initial request, and the reward from Blumental shouldn’t be round after round of requests for user notice. It also doesn’t do anything to fix the problem. That distracts our team from the real iq fight.”

Twitter executives later realized that they were”feeding congressional trolls” and compared the requests to a popular children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Although Twitter believed that there were no Russians in the story, it stopped challenging Russia’s claims on the record. Outside counsel from firms advised Twitter to use language such as “With respect to particular hashtags, we take seriously any activity that may represent an abuse of our platform.”

This resulted in reports from several mainstream media outlets pushing the “Russian bots” story without any evidence. Taibbi noted that several media outlets that played up the “Russian bots” story declined to comment. So did the staff for Senators Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal. Nunes shared a comment.

“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.”

]]> The Twitter Files: Part 13 – Pfizer Secretly Pressed Twitter to Hide Posts Challenging the Company’s COVID Shots https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-13-pfizer-secretly-pressed-twitter-to-hide-posts-challenging-the-companys-covid-shots/ Tue, 10 Jan 2023 07:07:40 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=9107 Twitter Files: Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb flagged tweets questioning COVID vaccine

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)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

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.

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.

 

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

]]> The Twitter Files: Part 12 – FBI ‘Belly Button’ Feeds Flood of Govt Influence https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-12-fbi-belly-button-feeds-flood-of-govt-influence/ Wed, 04 Jan 2023 07:50:59 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=8220 The Twitter Files: Part 12 – FBI ‘Belly Button’ Feeds Flood of Govt Influence

First Twitter Files Drop of 2023

 

While conservatives still await the so-called “Fauci Files,” the 12th edition of the Twitter Files released Tuesday night continued to detail how the FBI became the “conduits” to amass censorship requests to feed through the “belly button” of the social media company.

The past Twitter Files have already called the FBI the “doorman” for myriad government agencies seeking to influence Twitter, but independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s latest edition details how a media pressure campaign caused frustration at Twitter, inundated it with government censorship orders, and forced it to request the FBI to feed requests through a single cord attached at the company “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,” Taibbi wrote to start his 40-post thread, which started to delve into the COVID-19 pandemic era of Twitter’s release of internal communications.

Former President Donald Trump administration’s State Department started an intelligence group called the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that did not sit well with anti-Trump Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was also growing frustrated with media reports attacking Twitter for not monitoring COVID-19 narratives.

“Twitter was also trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Roth,” Taibbi wrote. “‘If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,’ said policy director Carlos Monje.”

The frustration boiled over at Twitter when the Trump administration sought to decouple social media from accounts tied to the China amid the breakout of COVID-19, which included Canada and CNN accounts.

“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,” according to Taibbi.

“Roth saw GEC’s move as an attempt by the GEC to use intel from other agencies to ‘insert themselves’ into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others,” he continued.

Problems continued when Roth’s hesitancy to accept GEC’s recommendations versus others led to the GEC to further leverage the media to force Twitter’s hand.

But the anti-Trump Roth did not like working with the Trump State Department, effectively choose to cut the GEC out of influencing Twitter’s censorship regime.

“A deeper reason was a perception that unlike the DHS and FBI, which were ‘apolitical,’ as Roth put it, the GEC was ‘political,’ which in Twitter-ese appeared to be partisan code,” Taibbi wrote. “‘I think they thought the FBI was less Trumpy,’ is how one former DOD official put it.”

“After spending years rolling over for Democratic Party requests for ‘action’ on ‘Russia-linked’ accounts, Twitter was suddenly playing tough,” Taibbi continued. “Why? Because, as Roth put it, it would pose ‘major risks’ to bring the GEC in, ‘especially as the election heats up.'”

Amid the fight between government and Twitter, the Roth-comfortable FBI proposed to be the “conduits” to feed the requests through the “belly button” of the private Big Tech company, because Roth wanted a small “circle of trust.”

Once the FBI spigot was fully connected, Twitter became bloated with censorship requests.

“Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more,” according to Taibbi.

It even ventured into the absurd, as anti-Trump Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sought to have a journalist he did not like to be banned, Paul Sperry. Twitter responded “we don’t do this,” but ultimately it would relent and ban Sperry anyway.

Eventually, the FBI umbilical cord was fully effective in receiving bans, according to Taibbi.

“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,” Taibbi continued.

Twitter was inundated, and confused, leaving the FBI frustrated it would not get immediate results on censorship requests.

“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,” Taibbi concluded. “Twitter wasn’t just paid. For the amount of work they did for government, they were underpaid.” source

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reportedly promised Twitter it would be “the belly button” for requests from intelligence agencies to the tech industry, newly released documents show.

“Will the industry partners rely on the FBI to be the belly button for the USG? We can do that as well,” FBI Agent Elvis Chan reportedly asked former Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth in an email, according to the latest “Twitter Files” installment reported by journalist Matt Taibbi.

Chan was reportedly asking Roth about monthly calls between intelligence agencies and the tech industry led by the FBI, Taibbi said. Chan was reportedly pushing for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to be included in the weekly call, according to emails shared by Taibbi.

Twitter reportedly pushed back against including the GEC in the meetings because it was “political” unlike the “apolitical” intelligence agencies. Roth expressed concerns about the GEC being “press happy” and said it would be a “major risk” to bring it into the weekly call, Taibbi reported.

Chan proposed a compromise to Twitter and Facebook where the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would serve as “conduits in and out from the USG,” Taibbi continued.

Chan reportedly told Roth, “State/GEC, NSA, and CIA have expressed interest in being allowed on in listen mode only,” on a “one-way” channel with the FBI, DHS, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Taibbi’s thread showed.

Roth and Chan reportedly ended up agreeing to an industry call on Signal, an encrypted text messaging app, Taibbi added. Twitter reportedly frequently received requests from the FBI, DHS and other intelligence agencies, Taibbi found. The Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, National Security Agency and the State Department were reportedly among the government agencies sending requests to Twitter, according to Taibbi.

The latest installment of the Twitter Files revealed the FBI’s desire for Twitter to rely on it to be the belly button of the U.S. government (USG). The first Twitter Files installment of 2023 revealed shared the events that led up to the intelligence community’s influence on Twitter. Following that installment, journalist Matt Taibbi released another, which revealed the Global Engagement Center’s (GEC) role.

Taibbi described the GEC as “a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department,” and screenshots revealed how this new entity would go directly to the media. In one such instance, a report titled, Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns, was released, which wrecked a bit of havoc for Twitter.

 

Twitter’s then Trust and Safety head, Yoel Roth, pointed out the motives of Clemson’s Media Forensic Hub when it complained that Twitter hadn’t “made a Russia attribution” in some time.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

Credit: Matt Taibbi

Roth told researchers like Clemson that Twitter would be happy to work directly with them instead of the media. He was unsuccessful. Simultaneously, Twitter was trying to reduce the number of agencies that had access to Roth. Twitter’s then-policy director, Carlos Monje, pointed out that once Twitter gave these agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, access to Roth.

“If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,”  Monje said.

Taibbi noted that the GEC report appeared to be based on DHS data that was circulated earlier that week. The data included accounts that followed two or more Chinese diplomatic accounts and ended up with a list “nearly 250,000” names long. The list included Canadian officials and a CNN account.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

In an email, Roth said that the GEC attempted to insert itself into conversations Twitter had with several government agencies, including the FBI and DHS. The GEC began to agree to loop Twitter in before going public; however, the agency used a technique that trapped Twitter previously.

“The delta between when they share material and when they go to the press continues to be problematic,” a comms official wrote, adding that they primed the media to be “curios and inquisitive of this dynamic, too.”

Credit: Matt Taibbi

This led to Twitter’s disputing a State Department claim that China coordinated coronavirus disinformation accounts. The FBI then informed Twitter that the GEC wanted to be included in their regular “industry call” between companies like Twitter and Facebook and the DHS and FBI. At first, Twitter didn’t want to go this route. Executives at Facebook and Google were united with Twitter in its opposition to the GEC’s inclusion.

“The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests. The relative lack of discretion and caution from senior GEC leadership in sharing reports/analysis based on shaky methodology. A limited track record of successful collaboration with industry.”

Roth noted that an actor such as GEC being introduced to a stable and trusted group of practitioners and experts, especially with the election heating up, posed major risks.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

Roth added that another reason was that the DHS and FBI were “apolitical,” whereas the GEC was “political.”

“GEC has a track record of actively advancing specific ideological agendas (e.g., their work w/r/t Iran). We should not lose sight of this distinction,” Roth wrote.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

The FBI argued for a compromise solution that would allow other U.S. government (USG) agencies to participate in the industry calls, with the FBI and DHS acting as sole conduits. When Roth reached out to FBI agent Elvis Chan with concerns, Chan reassured the Twitter executive that it would be a “one-way” channel and “State/GEC, NSA, and CIA have expressed interest in being allowed on in listen mode only.”

“We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan told Roth, adding that the  DHS agency Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “will know what’s going on in each state.” Chan then asked if the industry could “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the USG.”

Credit: Matt Taibbi

The group eventually chose Signal due to its operational security. Following that, Twitter began taking requests from various government bodies starting with the Senate Intel Committee (SSCI), which needed reassurance that Twitter was taking FBI direction.

Twitter also received various requests from officials wanting individuals they didn’t like to be banned from the platform. In the screenshot below, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asked Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

At the time, Twitter refused. However, Sperry was later suspended. “No, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do this,” Twitter replied.

 

Twitter honored many of the requests, including those from the GEC, to ban accounts the GEC identified as “GRU-controlled” and linked “to the Russian government.”

A former CIA staffer working at Twitter called the GEC requests “Our window on that is closing,” which meant that the days Twitter could say no to serious requests were over. In the Twitter Files that were released earlier today, Taibbi noted that in public, Twitter would remove content at its “sole discretion.”

Privately, the platform would “off-board” anything that was “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” That was in 2017. By 2020, agencies were flooding Twitter with “identifications” or users that it wanted Twitter to remove.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

Taibbi pointed out that some reports were only a paragraph long and that Twitter would be forwarded an Excel document without further explanation. Twitter was also warned about the publicity surrounding a book written by former Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokhin, who alleged “corruption by the U.S. government” – specifically by Joe Biden.

Screenshots reveal that by mere weeks before the 2020 election, Twitter was so confused by the multiple streams of incoming requests that staffers had to ask the FBI which was which.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

Taibbi noted that this led to the situation described in an earlier Twitter Files release by Michael Shellenberger on December 19, 2022.

In that release, it was revealed that Twitter was paid $3,415,323. Taibbi noted that Twitter wasn’t just paid but underpaid for the amount of work it did for the government. source

]]> The Twitter Files: Part 10 – Twitter And “Other Government Agencies” https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-10-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate/ Tue, 27 Dec 2022 21:52:49 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=7405

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.”

Michael Kratsios, the chief technology officer during the Trump administration, "led" efforts on behalf of the White House to "combat misinformation" during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the "Twitter Files" shared by writer David Zweig. ( Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Michael Kratsios, the chief technology officer during the Trump administration, “led” efforts on behalf of the White House to “combat misinformation” during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the “Twitter Files” shared by writer David Zweig. ( Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“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.

Both the administrations of former President Trump and current President Biden have leaned on tech companies like Twitter to moderate content pertaining to COVID, according to the 10th installment of the "Twitter Files" shared by independent writer David Zweig. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Both the administrations of former President Trump and current President Biden have leaned on tech companies like Twitter to moderate content pertaining to COVID, according to the 10th installment of the “Twitter Files” shared by independent writer David Zweig. (Photo by James Devaney/GC Images | Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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.

Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel and former FBI general counsel Jim Baker has repeatedly surfaced in Elon Musk's "Twitter Files." (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)
Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel and former FBI general counsel Jim Baker has repeatedly surfaced in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.” (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)
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.

Download PDF Twitter Files Part 10 Summary PDF and here is the PDF source

]]> The Twitter Files: Part 9 – CIA, State Department, other Agencies Coordinated https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-9-cia-state-department-other-agencies-coordinated/ Mon, 26 Dec 2022 11:21:46 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=7221

The Twitter Files: Part 9 – CIA, State Department, other Agencies Coordinated

Twitter Files part 9: Vast web of coordination between tech giant and CIA, State Department, other agencies

Latest batch of documents claim that the FBI was simply the ‘doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship’ across multiple agencies

Twitter Files Supplemental • Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi)

By Scott Whitlock | Fox News

Substack writer Matt Taibbi released the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” on Christmas Eve, detailing that coordination between the tech giant and government agencies went way beyond the FBI. In a massive series of tweets, Taibbi insisted that the FBI was simply the “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 journalist explained that Twitter had so many interactions with OGAs (or “other government agencies” as they are called in the tweets), the company couldn’t keep them all straight: He explained, “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.”

Many on the left are sounding the alarm about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. (FOX)
Many on the left are sounding the alarm about Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. (FOX)

He explained how some of the coordination developed, specifically growing out of FBI connections: “On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to [a] pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming conference:”

Taibbi noted that 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.’” He added that “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.’”

Twitter owner Elon Musk conducted a Twitter poll on whether Congress should approve a $1.7 trillion government spending bill. (Getty Images)
Twitter owner Elon Musk conducted a Twitter poll on whether Congress should approve a $1.7 trillion government spending bill. (Getty Images)

What was discussed in these meetings? Usually “foreign matters.”

But Taibbi added, “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:”

Just as Twitter was having so many meetings with governmental agencies that it couldn’t keep them straight, the company was also inundated with FBI requests on “problem accounts.”

Less than six weeks before the 2020 election, FBI agent Chan contacted Twitter exec Stacia Cardille about having identified more “Twitter handles which appear to provide misleading information” in them.

Noting how unusual it all seemed, Taibbi remarked of what the latest batch of Twitter files uncovered: “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.”

Taibbi revealed an October 1, 2020, e-mail, just over a month before the presidential election, an unnamed Twitter exec described being left “waiting for more evidence” when it came to Russian influence claims from the State Department. This person admitted, “Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution.

Taibbi offered his own paraphrase of what this could mean: “Translation: ‘more aggressive’ ‘government partners’ had closed Twitter’s ‘window’ of independence.”

The journalist concluded the latest edition of the Twitter Files by noting, “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 eight of the Twitter Files showed how the platform “directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations. Part seven showcased the FBI’s attempts to discredit information about Hunter Biden and his foreign business dealings.

FBI blasted for dismissing Twitter Files as misinformation: ‘Chilling’

‘If the FBI was smart they wouldn’t have said anything about the Twitter Files,’ one user wrote

By Jeffrey Clark | Fox News

The FBI’s claim that the Twitter Files were the work of “conspiracy theorists” set off a firestorm online this week.

The FBI issued its controversial response after an installment of the Twitter Files found the agency regularly contacted employees at Twitter to flag accounts that were deemed as spreading “misinformation.”

It wasn’t long before the agency labeled the Twitter Files themselves as “misinformation.”

A split image of an FBI agent in an official windbreaker and the Twitter logo on a blue screen. (iStock and AP Photo/Gregory Bull, respectively)
A split image of an FBI agent in an official windbreaker and the Twitter logo on a blue screen. (iStock and AP Photo/Gregory Bull, respectively)

A split image of an FBI agent in an official windbreaker and the Twitter logo on a blue screen. (iStock and AP Photo/Gregory Bull, respectively)

“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” the FBI wrote.

George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley said the FBI’s response was “chilling.”

“It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. This week saw another FBI ‘nothing-to-see-here’ statement to the Twitter files,” Turley wrote.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald summed up the FBI’s apparent position on the Twitter Files.

“Anyone who questions the FBI — or finds it disturbing that they’re ‘partnering’ with Big Tech on what should and should not be permitted to be said on the internet — is a hateful, crazy, unhinged anti-American conspiracy theorist,” he wrote.

“Un-freaking-real,” one user wrote in a mega-viral post with over 78,000 likes on Twitter.

“If the FBI was smart they wouldn’t have said anything about the Twitter Files,” human trafficking advocate Eliza Bleu wrote.

Another user reacted to the news: “When you thought the world couldn’t get any crazier, the FBI now claims that the words of its own agents in tons of emails revealed by #TwitterFiles are conspiracy theories and misinformation.”

Former Rolling Stone journalist and Substack writer Matt Taibbi shared hidden communications between Twitter and FBI employees in the days surrounding the contentious 2020 presidential election. The viral Twitter thread revealed several posts that the FBI flagged as concerning for Twitter employees.

Major media networks largely skipped coverage of the Twitter Files from Dec. 9-12, 2022. (Getty Images)
Major media networks largely skipped coverage of the Twitter Files from Dec. 9-12, 2022. (Getty Images)

Taibbi related a tweet from one of the accounts on Nov. 8: “I want to remind republicans to vote tomorrow, Wednesday November 9.”

Another tweet flagged by the FBI was an apparent joke about voting times: “Americans, Vote today. Democrats you vote Wednesday 9th.”

Taibbi argued that a third tweet, referenced in an email by an FBI employee, was satirical: “For every negative comment on this post, I’m adding another vote for the democrats” and “If you’re not wearing a mask, I’m not counting your vote.”

Three of the four accounts were suspended, according to the email chain, and the fourth account was subject to review by another Twitter employee, according to the email chain.

Fox News’ Jake Gibson and Adam Sabes contributed to this report.

 

 

 

 

FBI notified Twitter about users ‘potentially’ violating terms: Twitter Files

The FBI reportedly flagged accounts to Twitter that could ‘potentially’ violate the company’s terms

By Adam Sabes | Fox News

YOUR TAX DOLLARS PAID GOVERNMENT TO GO OVER YOUR POST ON TWITTER THEN CONTACT TWITTER FOR POSSIBLE TWITTER VIOLATIONS!

Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over Twitter in late October. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images )
Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over Twitter in late October. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images )

Employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation regularly contacted workers at Twitter to notify them of accounts that “may” constitute violations of the company’s terms of service, new Twitter Files released Friday reveal.

Substack writer and journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted several internal emails between Twitter workers and FBI employees as part of the sixth installment of the Twitter Files.

“Hello Twitter contacts, FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy,” one email FBI employee wrote in an email on Nov. 10, 2022.

The email would go on to list several Twitter accounts that might violate the social media company’s terms of service.

In response, a Twitter employee said that three of the four accounts were suspended.

“I’ve reviewed this already from the TD perspective and suspended three of the accounts for multi-account abuse and ban evasion violations,” the Twitter employee wrote.

The Twitter employee asked someone else at the company to review the fourth account flagged by the FBI for “possible civic misinformation.”

Taibbi said that one of the accounts tweeted on Nov. 8 “I want to remind republicans to vote tomorrow, Wednesday November 9.”

One tweet flagged by the FBI states “Americans, Vote today. Democrats you vote Wednesday 9th.”

Another tweet flagged by the FBI in the email states that one user “claimed in her posts that she is a ballot counter in her state and, in additional posts, states ‘For every negative comment on this post, I’m adding another vote for the democrats’ and ‘If you’re not wearing a mask, I’m not counting your vote.'”

The Twitter Files revealed communications between Twitter employees and FBI agents. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The Twitter Files revealed communications between Twitter employees and FBI agents. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Taibbi said that the tweet from the user claiming to be a ballot counter was satirical.

Additionally, Stacia Cardille, a former attorney for Twitter, appeared to suggest in a summary of her meeting with government law enforcement agencies to Twitter’s former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker on Sept. 16, 2021, that the FBI could share classified information with the social media giant.

“I participated in our monthly (soon to be weekly) 90-minute meeting with FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI, and industry peers on election threats. A few items to note:,” Cardille wrote. “I explicitly asked if there were any impediments with the ability of the government to share classified information or other relevant information with industry. FBI was adamant that no impediments to information sharing exist.”

The Twitter logo is seen on a phone in this photo illustration in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2019. (Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images)
The Twitter logo is seen on a phone in this photo illustration in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2019. (Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images)

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for the FBI said “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.”

 

 

 

 

Download PDF Twitter Files Part 9 Summary PDF and here is the PDF source

]]> The Twitter Files: Part 8 Pentagon’s Covert PsyOp Campaign for the US Military https://goodshepherdmedia.net/the-twitter-files-part-8-pentagons-covert-psyop-campaign-for-the-us-military/ Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:19:48 +0000 https://goodshepherdmedia.net/?p=6904 The Twitter Files: Part 8 Pentagon’s Covert PsyOp Campaign for the US Military

Under Jack Dorsey the criminal ring leader Social Media giant Twitter was quietly aiding the Pentagon’s covert online PsyOp campaign

While assisting in undermining the integrity of our elections by invading our free will with lies

How Twitter Quietly Aided The Pentagon’s Covert Online Psyop • Lee Fang (@Ihfang)

 

https://youtu.be/Yh-3kP845Ac

 

 

Twitter Files Part 8: The platform ‘directly supported’ the US military’s influence operations.

by Leonard Parker

Investigative journalist Lee Fang published the eighth issue of the Twitter Files on Tuesday, highlighting how the social media juggernaut “quietly supported the Pentagon’s covert online PsyOp campaign.”

“Despite promises to shut down covert government propaganda networks, Twitter documents show the social media giant directly supported US military influencing operations,” Fang wrote to open the lengthy thread detailing the company’s role an alleged online psychological operation describes opinion-forming in the Middle East and beyond.

Elon Musk has been vocal about being transparent when it comes to this Twitter’s past and present actions Curate content on the Platform, including censored content. The Twitter owner has recruited journalists to slowly release evidence of these actions in a series called “Twitter Files,” which continues to uncover once-secret communications.Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over Twitter in late October and immediately fired several top executives. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto, CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images (photo illustration))

Fang announced that he was “given access to Twitter for a few days” but did not sign or agree to anything specific. He added that Twitter had “no control” over his reporting, but the searches were conducted by a Twitter lawyer, so what he saw could be limited.

The viral thread explained that Twitter “has claimed for years that they are making a concerted effort to expose” and “thwart” government-backed platform manipulation, including testifying to Congress, but the findings suggest that this is not the case case is.

“[B]Behind the scenes, Twitter gave authorization and special protection to the US military’s online psychological manipulation operations. Despite knowing that Pentagon propaganda accounts were using covert identities, Twitter hasn’t banned many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active,” Fang wrote.

Fang’s examples included a 2017 email from US Central Command that listed 52 Arabic-language accounts used to “amplify specific messages.” Twitter allegedly helped give the accounts additional visibility and stripped them of spam and abuse flags.

The accounts, which tweeted about “US military priorities in the Middle East,” were initially openly linked to the government, but the relationship was eventually hidden from users, according to Fang.

“CENTCOM then changed policies and deleted disclosures of ties to the Twitter accounts,” Fang wrote. “A Twitter official who spoke to me said he felt duped by the covert postponement. Still, many emails from 2020 show that senior Twitter executives were well aware of the DoD’s vast network of fake accounts and covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts.”

TWITTER FILES PART 6 REVEAL THE FBI’S LINKS TO THE TECH GIANT: “AS IF IT WAS A SUBSIDIARY”

On Monday, the seventh edition of the “Twitter Files” addressed how the FBI and intelligence agencies “discredit factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign operations.”

Independent writer Michael Shellenberger exposed what he called the FBI’s “lobby campaign” that eventually “worked” when Twitter censored Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop.

Journalist Matt Taibbi went viral with the first episode in early December with his “Twitter files,” which focused on Twitter’s internal discussions that led to it censoring Hunter Biden’s laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, with some officials Had trouble explaining how it had violated its “hacked file” material policy.

It was later revealed that the first batch of “Twitter files” were reviewed without Musk’s knowledge by Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s General Counsel and was involved in the Russia investigation but worked for Twitter ahead of the 2020 election. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.

TWITTER FILES “SUPPLEMENTARY” SHOW EVEN TRUST AND SECURITY CHIEF NOT “COMFORTABLE” WITH FBI “CLEAR” ANSWERS

Fang continued to put Baker in the spotlight on the eighth episode of “Twitter Files.”

Fang also shared emails from other Twitter attorneys and executives, including speculation that the Pentagon wanted to retroactively classify its social media activity “to avoid embarrassment.”

“In several other emails from 2020, senior Twitter executives/lawyers discussed the covert network and even recirculated CENTCOM’s 2017 list and shared another list of 157 undisclosed Pentagon accounts, again mainly focused on military affairs in the Middle East,” Fang wrote.

“Many of these secret U.S. military propaganda accounts, while not discovered by Twitter until 2020 (but possibly earlier), continued to tweet this year, some not being suspended until May 2022 or later, according to records I have reviewed,” wrote catch.

Fang noted, “In August 2022, a Stanford Internet Observatory report exposed a covert US military propaganda network on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and other apps using fake news portals and deeply faked images and memes against US foreign opponents,” including Russia , China and Iran.

He was able to confirm from CENTCOM’s 2017 email that Stanford correctly identified one.

“In later reports, Twitter was cast as an unbiased hero for ‘removing a network of fake user accounts representing pro-Western political positions.’ Media covering the story described Twitter as consistently applying its policies and proactive in suspending the DoD network,” Fang wrote. “The reality is much grimmer. Twitter has been actively supporting CENTCOM’s network since 2017 and as late as 2020 knew these accounts were covert/intended to manipulate discourse, in violation of Twitter’s policies and promises. They waited years for the lockdown. “

Fang wrote that “Twitter’s communications team remained in close contact with reporters throughout the process and worked to minimize Twitter’s role.”

“Behaviour with the US military’s covert network stands in stark contrast to how Twitter has boasted since 2016 about quickly identifying covert accounts linked to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela and others delete,” Fang wrote.

Fang capped off the thread with a link to an article he wrote for The Intercept that provides “more details” about Twitter’s relationship with “government-backed covert propaganda campaigns.”

In the article The Intercept, he wrote that Twitter “provided direct authorization and internal protections for the US military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, and whitelisted a number of accounts at government request.” and the Pentagon “has used this network, including US government-created news portals and memes, to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and beyond.”

According to Fang, Twitter has been directly supporting the Pentagon for at least five years.

The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington on March 2, 2022. ((AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File))

The second episode of Twitter Files, previously published by Weiss, revealed Twitter’s “blacklist” of prominent conservatives, including Fox News anchor Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, a longtime opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic, who has spoken out against lockdowns.

Internal memos also reveal that Twitter officials admit that popular account Libs of TikTok has never violated its policy on “hateful behavior,” despite allegedly being fined multiple times for doing so.

These revelations appear to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in 2018, saying under oath that Twitter has not censored or banned conservatives.

CNN’S ‘TWITTER FILES’ COVERAGE OF HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY HAS CLEAR OMISSIONS

The third, fourth, and fifth episodes of the “Twitter Files” focused on former President Trump’s permanent suspension in connection with the January 2021 Capitol riots. Taibbi reported how Twitter was disseminating election-related tweets from various users in the run-up to the 2020 election were “flagged” as problematic by the FBI.

Part six of the “Twitter Files” highlights Twitter’s close ties to the FBI. Taibbi claimed law enforcement was acting like a “subsidiary” of the tech giant, unveiling notices showing the FBI, up to 80 agents, were systematically flagging Twitter users for tweets containing “possibly hurtful content” related to the election contained.

In response to these “Twitter files,” an FBI spokesman told Fox News Digital, “The FBI regularly works with private sector entities to obtain specific information regarding the subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities of actors with malicious influence in the… provide abroad. Private sector companies make independent decisions about what action, if any, to take on their platforms and for their customers after being notified by the FBI.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.

 

Twitter Files Part 8: Platform ‘directly assisted’ U.S. military’s influence operations

‘Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations,’ Lee Fang wrote

By Brian Flood | Fox News

Twitter Files Part 8: Platform ‘directly assisted’ U.S. military’s influence operations

Investigative journalist Lee Fang released the eighth edition of the “Twitter Files” on Tuesday, putting a spotlight on how the social media juggernaut “quietly aided the Pentagon’s covert online PsyOp campaign.”

“Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations,” Fang wrote to kick off the lengthy thread detailing the company’s role in an alleged online psychological operation aimed at shaping opinion in the Middle East and beyond.

Elon Musk had been vocal about being transparent when it comes to Twitter’s past and present actions curating content on the platform, including censored content. The Twitter owner has enlisted journalists to slowly release evidence of these actions in a series dubbed the “Twitter Files” that continue to expose once-secret communications.

Fang disclosed he was “given access to Twitter for a few days” but didn’t sign or agree to anything specific. He added that Twitter “had no input” into his reporting, but searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney so what he saw could be limited.

The viral thread explained that Twitter “has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect” and “thwart gov-backed platform manipulation,” including in testimony to Congress, but findings indicate that is not the case.

“[B]ehind 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,” Fang wrote.

Fang’s examples included a 2017 email from U.S. Central Command listing 52 Arab-language accounts it used to “amplify certain messages.” Twitter allegedly helped give the accounts additional visibility and made them exempt from spam and abuse flags.

The accounts, which tweeted about “U.S. military priorities in the Middle East,” were initially openly affiliated with the government, but the relationship was eventually hidden from users, according to Fang.

“CENTCOM then shifted strategies & deleted disclosures of ties to the Twitter accounts,” Fang wrote. “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.”

On Monday, the seventh edition of “Twitter Files” delved into how the FBI and intelligence community “discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.”

Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed what he called an “influence campaign” by the FBI that eventually “worked” when Twitter censored Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop.

Journalist Matt Taibbi went viral with the first installment in early December with his “Twitter Files” focusing on Twitter’s internal discussions leading to it censoring 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” were vetted without Musk’s knowledge by Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s general counsel and was involved in the Russia probe, but was working for Twitter ahead of the 2020 election, got involved. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.

Fang continued to put a spotlight on Baker in the eighth installment of “Twitter Files.”

Fang also shared emails from other Twitter lawyers and executives, including speculation that the Pentagon wanted to retroactively classify its social media activities “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,” Fang wrote.

“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,” Fang wrote.

Fang noted, “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,” including Russia, China and Iran.

He was able to confirm that Stanford correctly identified one from CENTCOM’s 2017 email.

“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,” Fang wrote. “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.”

Fang wrote that “Twitter’s comms team was closely in touch with reporters, working to minimize Twitter’s role” throughout the process.

“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,” Fang wrote.

Fang concluded the thread with a link to a piece he wrote for The Intercept that has “more detail” about Twitter’s relationship with “government-backed covert propaganda campaigns.”

In The Intercept article, he wrote that Twitter “provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government” and the Pentagon “has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.”

Twitter has been directly assisting the Pentagon for at least five years, according to Fang.

The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington, March 2, 2022. ((AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File))
The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington, March 2, 2022. ((AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File))

he second installment of Twitter Files previously 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 reveal Twitter staffers admitting that the popular 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, saying 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 events 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.

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 the FBI, as many as 80 agents, systemically flagged Twitter users for tweets that included “possible violative content” pertaining to the election.

In response to that “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.”

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report. 

Twitter Files #8 sequel unmasks US military PsyOps accounts

By Al Mayadeen

The eighth release of the so-called Twitter Files, coordinated with new Twitter chief Elon Musk,
focuses on how the company gave protections to US military PsyOps accounts.

Reporter Lee Fang revealed in the most recent disclosure of the infamous Twitter Files that Twitter provided accounts associated with US military psychological operations with additional safeguards on the social media network.

“Twitter has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed platform manipulation… But behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval and special protection to the US military’s online psychological influence ops,” Fang tweeted.

 

 

 

The eighth extension of the Twitter Files showed that a US Central Command representative gave a list of 52 Arabic-language accounts in 2017, asking for preferential service for six of the accounts and “whitelist” privileges for others.

According to Fang, Twitter authorized the whitelist request, giving accounts without the typical blue checkmark verified status, thereby exempting them from spam alerts and increasing the likelihood that they will appear on the network.

The exposure also revealed that several of the accounts remained operational for more than two years despite Twitter’s knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts employed hidden identities.

High-ranking Twitter employees discussed the covert network in 2020 and shared the 2017 list, as well as 157 additional secret Pentagon accounts, as per Fang.

Twitter Files #8 eviscerated that a cross-platform US military propaganda network that promoted anti-Russian and anti-Chinese narratives was exposed in August, citing a Stanford Internet Observatory research.

Twitter whitelisted one of the accounts that Stanford had discovered, the files noted.

What are they?

Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, is the mastermind behind the so-called Twitter Files. He has stated that he wants to demonstrate “what really happened” about behind-the-scenes content moderation choices at the social media business before he acquired it in October.

Three journalists, Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, have been delving into internal documents and conversations to highlight the company’s decision-making process surrounding some high-profile actions, such as banning former President Donald Trump in January 2020. The Twitter Files have been released in bits and pieces throughout December.

 

 

 

‘LESSONS LEARNED’:

@joerogan

offers advice to Americans outraged by COVID-19 restrictions infringing on their lives. fxn.ws/3TsRB88

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Download PDF Twitter Files Part 8 Summary PDF and here is the PDF source

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