It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.
Tag: twitter
Twitter Files: Company Exaggerated Russian Influence to Appease Media, Democrats
Twitter deliberately exaggerated the extent of Russian influence on its platform in an attempt to appease the media and Democrats, even after internal investigations into the matter proved a “dud,” according to journalist Matt Taibbi, who released another batch of the Twitter Files today.
Twitter initially tried to stay out of the spotlight on the Russia issue in 2017, hoping Facebook would remain the main target of scrutiny from the media and Democrats. Twitter’s PR department even agreed on a media strategy to “keep the focus on FB.”
But after being slammed by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) for an “inadequate” response to allegations of Russian meddling, Twitter’s public policy VP said the company should “keep producing material” on Russian interference to satisfy the Democrats. As a result, Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force,” to investigate Russian influence on the platform.
But the task force found little evidence of significant Russian involvement on the platform. In October 2017, the task force reported that it had found “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).”
New Twitter Files Reveal How Company Allowed Intelligence Agencies to Influence It
A series of tweets by investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has revealed how Twitter came under the influence of American intelligence agencies after concerns about foreign influence put the company under the spotlight.
Until August 2017, Twitter was not on many people’s radars with regard to the Trump–Russia foreign influence scandal. In September that year, Twitter informed the Senate that its cursory review led to the suspension of 22 possible Russian accounts as well as 179 accounts possibly linked to the initial set of accounts. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), who was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, called Twitter’s report “frankly inadequate on every level.”
Facing growing anxiety over its public relations problems, Twitter started a “Russia Task Force” to investigate the issue.
“First round of RU investigation … 15 high-risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT,” said an October 2017 Twitter memo shared by Taibbi. RT refers to the television network Russia Today, which is controlled by the state.
“Finished with investigation … 2,500 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,” said a message from the same month.
Twitter Files Reveal Politicians, Officials Evading the Constitution’s Restrictions
In recent years, social media firms, financial institutions, and hosting platforms have denied services to disfavored customers, sometimes for political reasons. The response from many quarters (myself included) has been that people have free association rights and can generally do business as they please.
But what if these outfits are private-ish, enacting policy on behalf of politicians to spare them pushback or allow for end-runs around constitutional protections? They do so out of ideological agreement, fear of government retaliation, or a mix of both. That messy scenario is what the Twitter Files reveal of the relationship between the social media giant and federal officials. It’s a glimpse of a bigger problem.
“The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about COVID-19 and the pandemic,” wrote David Zweig of The Free Press, who joined Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Free Press founder Bari Weiss in revealing Twitter’s collaboration with the state at the request of new owner Elon Musk. “Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.”
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security also leaned on the platform to suppress what officials considered election-related “misinformation.” The files revealed internal disputes over what crossed the line, with decisions based on judgment calls. The employment of former feds and what The Dispatch‘s David French terms “an ideological monoculture” ensured that such decisions generally deferred to authority, especially after the Biden administration took office.
But Twitter isn’t a special case. In 2021, President Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by allowing discussion of government-disfavored ideas about COVID-19 response. “White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki singled out a dozen specific anti-vaccine Facebook accounts and called on the platform to ban them,” Reason‘s Robby Soave noted at the time.
Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech
Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.
From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.
Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.
“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”
The FBI flagged tweets on Ukraine and vaccines
The latest Twitter Files revelations have shed light on the US government’s “constant contact” with the platform, showing the push for censorship of accounts that were critical of aspects of war in Ukraine or the Covid-19 vaccine.
The latest release suggests Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference supposedly occurring on their platform.
“The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in the latest revelations.
“‘Found no links to Russia,’ says one analyst, but suggests he could ‘brainstorm’ to ‘find a stronger connection.’”
Mysterious Government Agencies Participated in Suppressing Twitter Content: Twitter Files
Mysterious government agencies were involved in censoring content along with Twitter Inc. on the social media platform, journalist Matt Taibbi said in newly-released Twitter Files.
The files—which mostly were internal communications among Twitter executives and employees—show that unspecified agencies worked with Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company.
The agencies were usually referred to as “Other Government Agencies,” or OGA, inside Twitter.
In one email from June 29, 2020, FBI San Francisco Field Office official Elvis Chan asked Twitter executives if he could invite an “OGA” to attend an upcoming event.
“I wanted to follow up to see if I could forward this invitation to an OGA?” he wrote.
New ‘Twitter Files’ Release on Christmas Eve Exposes FBI Denials About Political Censorship Operation
Despite the FBI’s denials that evidence that the nation’s premier law enforcement agency colluded with Big Tech platform Twitter to unconstitutionally censor Americans’ political speech, a brand-new Twitter Files dump shows that the FBI did just that.
The latest Twitter Files revelations starts off with independent journalist Matt Taibbi discussing the FBI’s response to the first batches of Twitter disclosures.
“It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried ‘conspiracy theorists’ publishing ‘misinformation,’ whose ‘sole aim’ is to ‘discredit the agency,’” Taibbi wrote, referencing the way the FBI dismissed censorship allegations as a conspiracy theory.
The Christmas Eve revelations suggested that the FBI acted as a “doorman to the vast program of social media surveillance and censorship.” Taibbi says more government agencies were involved – from the “State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
FBI responds to Twitter censorship allegations, blames “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation”
Responding to allegations in the Twitter Files that it regularly communicated with Twitter employees, flagging content and accounts that potentially violated the platform’s terms of service, the FBI has suggested that what it did wasn’t censorship as it did not ask Twitter to “take action.”
FBI officials said that they provided information to Twitter so that the platform could make a decision on whether or not to take action.
“We are providing it so that they can take whatever action they deem appropriate under their terms of service to protect their platform and protect their customers, but we never direct or ask them to take action,” the FBI officials said.
The allegations that the FBI and Twitter were in close contact were made in the sixth installment of the Twitter Files, released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.
FBI lashes out at ‘conspiracy theorists’ over ‘Twitter Files’ criticism
The FBI slammed the Elon Musk-allied journalists who have released internal documents relating to censorship decisions at Twitter, calling them “conspiracy theorists” for alleging that the agency had encouraged the platform to censor news about Hunter Biden.
The FBI published a statement on Wednesday responding to Monday’s release of what Musk and his allies are calling the Twitter Files, which elaborated on the company’s communications with the FBI. The journalist who released the files, Michael Shellenberger, said they showed the agency secretly influencing Twitter to remove the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
“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,” the law enforcement agency said on Wednesday in a statement provided toFox News. “As evidenced in this correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public.”
“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” the agency added.
Hellbound and Down 
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