Tag: twitter

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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THE TWITTER FILES: Twitter… The FBI Subsidiary

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).

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NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC Have Spent Just 14 MINUTES Combined Covering The ‘Twitter Files’

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.

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Deep State interference was a conspiracy theory, until it wasn’t

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.

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FBI and CIA Connections to Twitter Exposed Amid Massive Election Interference and Censorship Operation

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.

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