Tag: twitter

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.

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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.”

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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.’”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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FBI Paid Twitter $3.4 Million in US Tax Dollars for Administration Costs Related to the Staff’s Time Spent Working with the FBI

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.

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FBI flagged jokes and satirical accounts to Twitter for censorship

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.

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Twittergate deepens: FBI REFUSES to reveal how many social media firms it is secretly influencing – amid accusations it broke the law by pushing Twitter to remove accounts and hand over user location details, new trove reveals

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.’

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