TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @lhfang
@lhfang - Lee Fang
If Trump picks JD Vance, the entire country will hear Ohio focused narratives that do not play well for any Democrat. The lackluster response to the chemical spill in East Palestine and the spike in Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
Exclusive -- we obtained leaked high-level internal Israeli gov docs. Emails and memos show effort to influence American policy & politics while evading FARA foreign agent lobby disclosure law. Published in partnership with The Guardian & Jack Poulson. https://substack-proxy.glitch.me/articles/www-leefang-com-p-leaked-israeli-docs-reveal-effort.html
@lhfang - Lee Fang
Israeli politicians, media figures and soldiers fighting in Gaza calling for killing children and ethnically cleansing the territory of Palestinians on a daily basis. The level of media blackout and denial in America is the biggest form of self censorship of I’ve seen.
@ytirawi - Younis Tirawi | يونس
Exclusive 🧵 to the [@CIJ_ICJ] (!): disturbing language Israeli military commanders and officers calling to “kill civilians”, “kill children”, “starve Gazans to death”, “erase Gaza”, & “spread diseases among civilians”. 1. Commander & Major. Avinoam Goelman, 98 divsion ->> https://t.co/VOGbu7VizO
@lhfang - Lee Fang
I talked previously to several lawmakers in Congress who explained that devotion to Israel -- including U.S. weapons and money -- is part of their religious belief, grounded in the Bible. This dynamic separates Israel-Palestine from a lot of other geopolitical concerns. https://t.co/3gsLukoyrM
@lhfang - Lee Fang
1. TWITTER FILES PART 8 *How Twitter 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
2. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
3. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
4. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
5. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
6. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
7. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
8. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
9. 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.”
@lhfang - Lee Fang
10. 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.”
@lhfang - Lee Fang
11. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
12. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
13. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
14. 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. https://public-assets.graphika.com/reports/graphika_stanford_internet_observatory_report_unheard_voice.pdf
@lhfang - Lee Fang
15. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
16. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
17. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
18. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
19. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
20. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
21. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given access to Twitter for a few days. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited. https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/twitter-dod-us-military-accounts/
@lhfang - Lee Fang
If you want details about how I go about my reporting, a little more about myself, and further documentation & discussion, I just started a Substack. Sign up here: https://leefang.substack.com/p/creating-a-substack
@lhfang - Lee Fang
Denise George, the Virgin Islands AG leading the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein was suddenly fired by the governor in Dec. Now she says under oath that Epstein had “political influence over or with the governor,” who pressured her to exempt Epstein from a sex offender law.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
The Biden Justice Dept intervened to slow and potentially block the release of social media censorship documents from CISA, the gov agency tasked with shaping content moderation policies at Twitter and Facebook.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
Kate Starbird, the academic advising the CISA social media censorship effort, called public record requests from journalists “harassment” and likened them to a Ddos cyber hack of her team. More info here https://www.leefang.com/p/biden-justice-dept-intervened-to
@lhfang - Lee Fang
1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES. How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy. The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
2. 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. https://medicinespatentpool.org/news-publications-post/new-agreement-under-c-tap-aims-to-improve-global-access-to-covid-19-testing-technologies
@lhfang - Lee Fang
3. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
4. 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. https://theintercept.com/2021/03/03/vaccine-coronavirus-big-pharma-biden/
@lhfang - Lee Fang
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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
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
@lhfang - Lee Fang
7. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
8. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
9. 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."
@lhfang - Lee Fang
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 accounts got verification, helped crowdsource content takedowns.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
11. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
12. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
13. 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.
@lhfang - Lee Fang
14. Here is my reported piece w/more detail. I was given some access to Twitter emails. I signed/agreed to nothing, Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by a Twitter attorney, so what I saw could be limited. https://theintercept.com/2023/01/16/twitter-covid-vaccine-pharma/
@lhfang - Lee Fang
15. Thanks @davidzweig and @lwoodhouse for help, and look for more Twitter reporting from @mtaibbi, @ShellenbergerMD, @bariweiss/@TheFP and others. You can find me on Substack here https://leefang.substack.com/p/creating-a-substack