The FBI paid Twitter millions in tax dollars to censor, suspend and harass Twitter users who only wanted to share the truth.
Earlier today, Twitter released another traunch of tweets, this one focused on the FBI and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In one of the tweets, Twitter reports that the FBI paid Twitter millions for their work censoring free speech.
The sixth batch of Twitter Files, published on Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi, has revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were regularly flagging content to Twitter for censorship between January 2020 and November 2022 and that some of the flagged content contained jokes and satirical comments.
According to Taibbi, there were more than 150 emails between the FBI and former Head of Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth and a “surprisingly high number” of these emails were FBI requests for Twitter to “take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”
Taibi noted that the the FBI’s social media-focused task force is known as FTIF and was created in the wake of the 2016 election. Since its inception, this task force has grown to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to “identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.”
Taibbi shared several examples of the FBI’s censorship requests and said Twitter employees would often look for reasons to suspend accounts after receiving these requests.
These censorship request emails reveal that the FBI would target both large and small accounts and sometimes issue preservation letters and request location information for the flagged accounts. Some of the large accounts that were flagged include those of Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) (which has over 873,000 followers) and actor Billy Baldwin (which has over 204,000 followers). However, accounts with as few as 15 followers were also flagged to Twitter by the FBI.
The FBI has refused to say how many social media companies it works with, defending their actions after it emerged that agents from the bureau regularly met with Twitter executives and handed over lists of accounts they found questionable.
Officials from the bureau even asked for Twitter to hand over the locations from where the Twitter accounts were being operated, in a disturbing move that many saw as an attack on the First Amendment.
One user targeted by the FBI, who goes by @Lexitollah, said: ‘Seems like prima facie 1A violation.’
Charlie Hurt, the opinion editor of The Washington Examiner, said it was ‘a clear violation of the First Amendment.’
He told Tucker Carlson: ‘They were actually opening up new back channels on platforms I’ve not heard of before, in order to keep in touch with one another.
‘If this was happening during the Pentagon Papers, and we were seeing this level of collusion between the federal government and news, there would rightly be an outcry.’
In the latest release of ‘THE TWITTER FILES,’ journalist Matt Taibbi details how Twitter acted as a ‘subsidiary’ of the FBI.
As a reminder, parts 1-3 of the series covered respectively, Twitter’s decision to interfere in the 2020 election by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, how the company created secret blacklists, and how they justified removing former President Donald Trump despite internally agreeing that he didn’t break any rules (parts one, two and three).
The major left leaning U.S. news networks have spent only 14 minutes between them covering Elon Musk’s ongoing release of the Twitter files, which have highlighted a policy of censorship based on the partisan political alignment of woke former company executives and employees.
The data drops, which have also revealed that former Twitter execs, were regularly meeting with U.S. intelligence officials and policing content at their behest, have been almost completely ignored by the likes of CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.
Fox News reports that Grabian’s analysis of news transcripts shows the term “Twitter files” has only been used six times by anchors.
The report notes that “CNN covered the story for three minutes, only on Dec. 9, while MSNBC spent two minutes on the story the same day, as well as five minutes on Dec. 11 and four minutes on Dec. 12.”
“CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News have not discussed the Twitter files in the last week,” it adds.
Under the direction of Elon Musk, troves of files regarding Twitter’s dealings have been made public. We’re seeing just how much government bureaucrats colluded with the tech company to justify the suppression of stories which detailed the extent of the Biden family corruption. We can safely assume that government officials also had discussions with other media outlets because the suppression of the story was almost universal. Any journalist worth a lick would have known about the kickbacks to Hunter from Burisma, and would have been aware of the video which recorded Joe Biden dangling $1 billion of taxpayer money to coerce the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor looking into the corruption.
Now, most media outlets are also suppressing the Twitter Files. These agencies are clearly more outraged at Musk’s transparency than with government interference in elections, which just illustrates the media’s willingness to aid and abet. They are clearly out to silence Musk.
When Trump and other conservatives talked about a “Deep State” of government bureaucrats, the complicit media called the claim a conspiracy theory — yet when bureaucrats seek to control the narrative and talking points and subjugate what should be a free press, that is exactly what we’re talking about.
The media and other government officials claimed that everything Dr. Fauci said was gospel, no matter how much he got wrong. They squelched people who disagreed so the public wouldn’t challenge government edicts. They falsely labeled the theory that the Wuhan lab was the origin source as a disproven conspiracy theory.
The Washington Post ran a story mocking the notion there may be nefarious actors in our unchecked federal agencies which was titled, “The ‘deep state’: From scholarly critique to toxic conspiracy theory”. The piece read:
Even Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, who has become America’s Doctor in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, has been accused of being a deep state actor.
One of the silliest efforts to discredit the entrenchment of a “Deep State” was made by CNN, which declared:
President Donald Trump is deeply invested in the idea that there is a ‘Deep State’ embedded within the government bureaucracy – and centered in the Department of Justice – which actively worked to defeat him in 2016 and then sought to undermine him once he won the presidency.
That conspiracy theory, which has never had much merit, suffered a near-fatal blow Friday afternoon when the Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
That might be the most ridiculous circular logic I’ve ever read — there’s no “Deep State” because a corrupt government bureaucracy failed to find fault in one of their own. Gee, that’s convincing.
Former FBI and CIA operatives have been exposed as central figures in the Twitter Files‘ recent revelations that the social media platform engaged in a sweeping censorship and election interference operation.
“Exclusive: Bari doesn’t name too many names but the head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team when secret actions were taken to stifle conservative accounts happened under Jeff Carlton, who worked for both CIA & FBI,” Ngo wrote. “He just deleted his LinkedIn. But I have an archive. @elonmusk”
A Trust & Safety leader from Twitter named Ella Irwin chimed in to try to correct the record.
“This is actually false,” she claimed. “I would recommend checking information like this before posting. Jeff stepped into this role as part of Twitter 2.0.”
However, Jeff Carlton’s archived LinkedIn profile shows that he was on the Strategic Response Team, albeit in a different role prior to November 2022. (Carlton appears to have been promoted.)
He was a Senior Program Manager rom May 2021 to November 2022. The profile says he, “Built and led a programs team that optimizes intake, new workflow integration, training and quality, systems and tooling, and knowledge management for Twitter’s Strategic Response Team.”
In November 2022, he switched to a Senior Manager, where he now “leads Twitter’s Strategic Response Team of 50+ employees / agents in resolving the highest-profile Trust & Safety escalations. Manage crises and non-standard incidents in content moderation and customer support to promote ‘healthy public conversations’.”
In the archived LinkedIn page, it details Jeff Carlton’s experience in the intelligence community, including his assignments working with the FBI and CIA.
“Former Intelligence Officer transitioned to managing high-profile content moderation and customer support escalations in Social Media / Trust & Safety. Head of Twitter’s Strategic Response Team,” the now-scrubbed LinkedIn profile stated.
A new Twitter Files investigation has revealed the many tools that company executives employed to blacklist and shadowban conservative voices. The thread posted to Elon Musk’s platform reveals that the internal Twitter name for shadowbanning is “visibility filtering.”
Released by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss in yet another lengthy Twitter thread, the revelations on Thursday showed that several mainstream conservative voices, from Charlie Kirk to Dan Bongino, were shadowbanned by the social media company under the rubrics of “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” At one point, Twitter even placed Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, under the label “Trends Blacklist” for arguing that coronavirus lockdowns would harm children. Per Weiss:
Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya 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, who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to “Do Not Amplify.”
Emails between an employee at the United States (US) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Twitter have revealed that at least one CDC staff member and the US Census Bureau had access to Twitter’s dedicated “Partner Support Portal” which allows approved government partners to flag content to Twitter for censorship.
The emails were released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal and show Twitter enrolling a CDC employee into this portal through their personal account in May 2021 (pages 182-194).
On May 10, 2021, the CDC’s Carol Crawford sent Twitter employee Todd O’Boyle a list of example posts highlighting “two issues that we [the CDC] are seeing a great deal of misinfo about.” O’Boyle responded by saying that enrolling in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal is the best way for Crawford to get posts like this reviewed in the future.
Hellbound and Down 
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