TruthArchive.ai - Tweets Saved By @mtaibbi
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Having worked in the business for 30+ years I can say journalism always had problems, but across-the-board wholesale invented narratives are new.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
There are obviously multiple levels to the story described in the declassified Durham report, but there's no version of it that isn't damning for the FBI, CIA, and Hillary Clinton.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Even if the foreign intercepts about a "plan" to vilify Trump are incorrect or overstated, they were taken seriously by the intelligence agencies - who went on to conceal their existence while professing to objctively analyze Trump-Russia connections. https://t.co/HKwNOpMI52
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
"FULLY ALERTED" Durham explains the FBI “was fully alerted to the possibility that at least some of the information it was receiving about the Trump campaign might have its origin either with the Clinton campaign or its supporters, or... the product of Russian disinformation." https://t.co/aSYPrnDn5K
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
The report adds: "Despite this awareness, the FBI appears to have dismissed the [intelligence information] as not credible without any investigative steps actually having been taken to either corroborate or disprove the allegations.” https://t.co/vkyHyGAEeO
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
In other words, by failing to take the steps to figure out if the Russian reports were accurate, the FBI/CIA could not possibly have conducted a real "Intelligence Community Assessment" of the 2016 election.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
There's no innocent explanation for covering up this crucial background in later investigations in search of "collusion." The ICA was just the first in a line of shams.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
A brief 🧵 on the new report released by @DNIGabbard today, which conclusively blows up core Russiagate myths: https://www.racket.news/p/in-brutal-document-release-the-russia?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false https://t.co/prUaDiM4wY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
On December 9th, 2016, @BarackObama ordered a new Intelligence Community Assessment to find out: "what happened" that election year? News outlets within hours leaked the answer: Vladimir Putin "aspired" to help Donald Trump, for whom he had a "clear preference." https://t.co/NjRjsPc8jk
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
The report released today, which was conducted eight years ago and has been locked at Langley ever since, reveals that conclusion was based on just four pieces of evidence: https://t.co/9TCgfuVDqC
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
"FIVE PEOPLE READ IT FIVE WAYS" The second was a “scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment” of one sentence that the report’s five CIA authors read “five ways” and left out. @JohnBrennan ordered it back in https://t.co/5ONNpOG6IG
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
"IMPLAUSIBLE - IF NOT RIDICULOUS" The third was an email with “no date, no identified sender, no clear recipient, and no classification": https://t.co/YScYUIUV6j
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
And the fourth was an assertion supposedly corroborated by multiple sources - all absent. The "liaison reporting" didn't mention Trump and was anyway from 2014, before he was a candidate. https://t.co/7MhG2ne9kz
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
"WE DON'T HAVE DIRECT INFORMATION" The report was written by just five CIA analysts hand-picked by Brennan. “We don’t have direct information that Putin wanted to get Trump elected," two pleaded. https://t.co/rhLhPZyMhr
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
"WE WERE TO PUSH THIS" Analysts pleaded with the intelligence chiefs to leave out the Steele material, but orders were clear. “Our instructions were that anything we had was to be used,” an FBI source said. “We were to push this.” https://t.co/0LrBK5g36P
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
When @JohnBrennan was confronted with the Steele Dossier's flaws, he replied: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?" https://t.co/mHG8E8DCbc
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
FBI Director James Comey said the Dossier was "important" to keep in: https://t.co/hvQApDTmfw
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
This story is an exact sequel to the WMD affair, when analysts were ordered by Dick Cheney to "find the WMD sites." It even involved some of the same people. https://t.co/PxHxHsyEPE
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
"WE FOUND WHAT WASN'T REALLY THERE" James Clapper was in charge of image analysis before the Iraq war, and boasted his images "carried the day" for Colin Powell in his speech to the UN. He copped to finding things that "weren't really there." https://t.co/mF0gRQaifK
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
This obnoxious story ruined lives, divided families, and paralyzed the country. And it was all, demonstrably now, based on a lie. for more see http://Racket.news
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to "#Walkaway" from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative @MeshaMainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” Facebook Group, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/8/brandon-straka-500k-strong-walk-away-page-banned-b/
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. The #TwitterFiles contained material about federal interest in #WalkAway, including exculpatory Twitter analyses that contrasted with coverage describing #WalkAway as a “Kremlin operation.” These documents should have been published earlier. I apologize to @BrandonStraka. https://t.co/7EyACc0wyR
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. On May 26, 2018, little-known New York actor Straka launched #Walkaway, a Facebook group for disappointed Democrats ready to “walk away” from their party. Straka’s first video quickly went viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51UGcghHZsk&t=8s
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. By June 30, #WalkAway had 16,000 members on Facebook. Straka was scheduled for a week of appearances with the likes of @TuckerCarlson and @LauraIngraham. The group was gaining renown. Then things took a bizarre turn.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. On July 1, 2018, a firm called New Knowledge tweeted, “The #walkaway campaign is an excellent example of how organic discussions about divisive topics are co-opted by domestic extremists,” adding the site was “amplified by foreign actors for maximum disruption.” https://t.co/bjlN6tf5dv
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. New Knowledge cited the Hamilton 68 dashboard in declaring #WalkAway “by far the top hashtag amplified by the network of Russia-linked Twitter accounts.” New Knowledge did not mention that its CEO, Jonathon Morgan, designed the Hamilton dashboard. https://t.co/FIqpCFTQwG
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. New Knowledge identified a handful of obvious fake images culled from the clip-art site Shutterstock, declaring some of #Walkaway’s accounts “clearly fake.” Straka was horrified. “They were definitely bots, but had nothing to do with us. I thought, ‘What’s going on?’” https://t.co/61RITAEkGy
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. New Knowledge’s complaints about #Walkaway were retweeted that day by a UK site, the Integrity Initiative. A day later, the Washington Post wrote there was “little actual evidence to suggest that #WalkAway represents a mass conversion of…even thousands.” https://t.co/NchbAk26Cz
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. Within Twitter, future Pete Buttigieg aide Carlos Monje wrote to fellow execs, “We’re getting some incoming qs on #walkaway from House Intel” – the minority office of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) where Adam Schiff was ranking member. https://t.co/BmVfW6MKbo
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. Analysts quickly concluded #WalkAway was real. “Surprisingly, there’s only a small amount of fake engagement,” said one analyst on July 11th, adding, “The majority of users that are using #Walkaway are legitimate users.” https://t.co/qUxKeqS4UB
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth concluded, “On the whole, while there are a very, very small number of accounts tweeting with this hashtag that look suspicious (several hundred out of ~200k overall), the overall volume... seems legitimate and US-based.” https://t.co/arkwDaRgDa
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13. Of the suspicious accounts, 19 tweeted “28 times about #Walkaway.” This looked like a small group of actors inserting conspicuous fakes. The firm found a suspicious spike from between June 23 and July 4 – when #Walkaway was first accused of being “amplified” by Russians.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14. Monje, the future Buttigieg aide, thanked the team for its work and announced he would have to bring the news to congress. “We owe HPSCI a call about it.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. However, Twitter neither pushed back hard with congress nor went public. The firm had been through episodes with Hamilton 68, the press, Schiff, and the same House Committee. Had it spoken out before, #WalkAway and others would not have faced accusations of “foreign” collusion.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. As noted in previous Twitter Files reports, Roth exposed the Hamilton 68 method as “bullshit” in October of 2017. The “dashboard” that purported to track 600 accounts linked to “Russian influence was actually “pure bluster,” tracking ordinary people, not Russians.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. Hamilton accounts “strongly preference pro-Trump accounts… to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump.” It was a scam: Gather pro-Trump users. Declare them Russian. Then, watch topics the accounts follow/share. Finally, announce: “Russia loves Trump!” https://t.co/P5bqGFzdC2
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18. Therefore, when Twitter in early 2018 received questions from Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) claiming Russia was boosting hashtags like #SchumerShutdown and #ReleaseTheMemo, Twitter knew they were bogus. https://t.co/5jNq4jadDM
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19. CRY RUSSIA Some Twitter execs wanted to go public: “The sooner we can get it out there that this was an organic movement, the better… It signals to other members that they will look foolish if they cry 'Russia!' every time something happens on social media that they don't like. :)”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20. But senior executives realized neither HPSCI nor Hamilton’s sponsor, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, was interested in hearing their reports. True or false, the Russia bot story was a public relations boon for everyone – “a comms play for the members,” Monje said.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21. “It’s also a comms play for ASD,” said Horne, a future National Security Council spokesperson under Joe Biden. They wanted to tread lightly: ASD’s advisory council contained former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and DHS, John Podesta, and future Biden security chief Jake Sullivan.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22. Execs talked about confronting congress and the ASD with “our knowledge” – that the Hamilton dashboard was fake – and trying to “reorient” all parties to more “accurate” statements. Most of all, “We should reach out privately to maintain the relationship,” Monje said. https://t.co/HdcmJ6DPRB
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23. Neither congress nor ASD “reoriented." With #WalkAway, congress sent questions citing Hamilton 68, and Roth snapped: “This feels like we’re continuing to give Hamilton68 too much ground on the issue… almost like we’re acknowledging that there’s something to it.” https://t.co/o3wXVqD2ue
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24. No sooner did Twitter decide not to push back than CNN, on July 17, 2018, released a new story, citing Hamilton 68 to call #WalkAway “pure propaganda, a psychological operation.” By then, #Walkaway had over 100,000 real members. https://t.co/3MrqartjPb
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25. Steven Colbert did a #WalkAway bit: “Russian trolls make things trend!” His source? A Daily Dot article relying on Hamilton 68, showing Straka over a headline: “Russian trolls on Twitter pose as ex-Democrats for #WalkAway movement.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Heivcahkc&t=146s https://t.co/E40lMIIsNi
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. Attention bred more complaints. On October 11th, Twitter received a “massive” spreadsheet of 38,000 suspected inauthentic accounts from ther Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), including #Walkaway https://t.co/cC3U7MOKJE
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27. Tired of saying no to influential politicians, one Twitter official urged they “confirm” the requests, saying: “We would love to be able to confirm this and land a positive example of our partnership to silence the… critiques” about refusing too many removal demands. https://t.co/Xqe1wXWLBu
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28. Twitter then received a letter from Mother Jones, asking them to confirm research by http://Factcheck.Me, which labeled #WalkAway “38% bot activity” and asked “what Twitter is trying to do to curb this kind of unhealthy user activity.” The firm did work w/the DNC. https://t.co/kXK4t1xEg5
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29. Factcheck and Botcheck were two related companies begun by a pair of Berkeley students named Rohan Phadte and Ash Bhat, whom Wired praised as the College Kids who “will do what Twitter won’t”: https://t.co/PekicIlh6H
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30. Twitter regarded the firms in the same light as Hamilton 68, with Roth writing: "The Botcheck people use a similarly flawed methodology... this is truly a nothingburger... journalists continuing to lean on deeply flawed tools... capitalize on the bot media frenzy. https://t.co/hKsVTqWYqK
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31. Policy chief Pickles added: "Doesn’t publish data, does sell consultancy. Definition of monetizing the problem." https://t.co/0Qp4kkebMQ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32. Bhat when originally contacted strongly disagreed with Twitter’s assessment, said his methodology was sound, and suggested some news outlets confused terms like “bot” and “bot-like.” (More to come on that at Racket.)
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33. By December, 2018 it was such a given that #Walkaway was Russian-affiliated that even a former high-ranking Homeland Security official like Suzanne Spaulding described Straka’s group as an attempt by Putin to divide America, adding of too-online Americans: https://t.co/qRRqu8idVW
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34. On December 19th, two days after submitting a high-profile report on Russian bots to the Senate, New Knowledge and Morgan were outed by the New York Times in a scheme that involved funneling fake Russian accounts to the campaign of Senate candidate Roy Moore: https://t.co/053EnkotQ8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35. The scheme induced press outlets to write scare headlines about Russians and Roy Moore. Twitter received press queries about Moore bots, similar to the ones about #Walkaway. https://t.co/52VOllhcBD
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36. Meanwhile, the UK-based Integrity Initiative, #Walkaway’s other early accuser, exploded in scandal when the hacker Anonymous leaked its classified plans for global speech-control initiatives. https://t.co/SOlYV773tA
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37. The Integrity Initiative was investigated because it listed itself as a Scottish charity. Scottish authorities concluded it was not one, among other things because its “purposes were not entirely charitable.” https://t.co/uNJgeB4qIk
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38. It came out the group bashed Jeremy Corbyn as a “useful idiot” for Russia, saying his “open visceral anti-westernism helped the Kremlin cause... as if he had been secretly peddling Westminster tittle-tattle for money.” Red-baiting was used against left and right. https://t.co/61tDS3vMly
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39. Despite the collapse and exposure of New Knowledge and (eventually) Hamilton 68, accusations of Russian ties to #WalkAway stuck. No press outlet has apologized, nor did anyone at Twitter ever tell Straka or others accused by Hamilton about the dubious claims.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40. Straka would go on to be arrested for being outside the Capitol on January 6th. To some, this will always mean CNN, Steven Colbert, and others were entitled to lie about him. But make no mistake: the Russia and bot accusations were a fraud, and they're owed a correction.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
More soon at http://Racket.News
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Steele was the source of multiple major pre-election stories claiming to link Trump to the Kremlin, most notably the two below. Worse, Clinton issued official reactions to these stories as if the source were not her employee: https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-s-intel-officials-probe-ties-between-trump-adviser-and-kremlin-175046002.html https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gave-fbi-info-alleging-russian-operation-cultivate-donald-trump/
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Since @elonmusk published parts of these conversations, I might as well include others. I was under a “blanket search ban” at one point and a lot of my 1.9 million followers still don’t see my content. https://t.co/k29MFxLUTC
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.By 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.In February, 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center – a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department – went to the media with a report called, “Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.The GEC flagged accounts as “Russian personas and proxies” based on criteria like, “Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,” blaming “research conducted at the Wuhan institute,” and “attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode “led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.” ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.The GEC still led directly to news stories like the AFP’s headline, “Russia-linked disinformation campaign led to coronavirus alarm, US says,” and a Politico story about how “Russian, Chinese, Iranian Disinformation Narratives Echo One Another.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.“YOU HAVEN’T MADE A RUSSIA ATTRIBUTION IN SOME TIME” When Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub complained Twitter hadn’t “made a Russia attribution” in some time, Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth said it was “revelatory of their motives.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8.“WE’RE HAPPY TO WORK DIRECTLY WITH YOU ON THIS, INSTEAD OF NBC.” Roth tried in vain to convince outsider researchers like the Clemson lab to check with them before pushing stories about foreign interference to media.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.Twitter was also trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Roth. “If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,” said policy director Carlos Monje.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.When the State Department/GEC – remember this was 2020, during the Trump administration – wanted to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts it claimed would “amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation” about COVID, Twitter analysts were beside themselves.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11.The GEC report appeared based on DHS data circulated earlier that week, and included accounts that followed “two or more” Chinese diplomatic accounts. They reportedly ended up with a list “nearly 250,000” names long, and included Canadian officials and a CNN account:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12.Roth saw GEC’s move as an attempt by the GEC to use intel from other agencies to “insert themselves” into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13.The GEC was soon agreeing to loop in Twitter before going public, but they were using a technique that had boxed in Twitter before. “The delta between when they share material and when they go to the press continues to be problematic,” wrote one comms official.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14.The episode led to a rare public disagreement between Twitter and state officials:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15.“IT MAKES SENSE TO PUSH BACK ON GEC PARTICIPATION IN THIS FORUM” When the FBI informed Twitter the GEC wanted to be included in the regular “industry call” between companies like Twitter and Facebook and the DHS and FBI, Twitter leaders balked at first.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16.Facebook, Google, and Twitter executives were united in opposition to GEC’s inclusion, with ostensible reasons including, “The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17.A deeper reason was a perception that unlike the DHS and FBI, which were “apolitical,” as Roth put it, the GEC was “political,” which in Twitter-ese appeared to be partisan code. “I think they thought the FBI was less Trumpy,” is how one former DOD official put it.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18.After spending years rolling over for Democratic Party requests for “action” on “Russia-linked” accounts, Twitter was suddenly playing tough. Why? Because, as Roth put it, it would pose “major risks” to bring the GEC in, “especially as the election heats up.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.When senior lawyer Stacia Cardille tried to argue against the GEC’s inclusion to the FBI, the words resonated “with Elvis, not Laura,” i.e. with agent Elvis Chan, not Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) unit chief Laura Dehmlow:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20.Eventually the FBI argued, first to Facebook, for a compromise solution: other USG agencies could participate in the “industry” calls, but the FBI and DHS would act as sole “conduits.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21.Roth reached out to Chan with concerns about letting the “press-happy” GEC in, expressing hope they could keep the “circle of trust small.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22."STATE... NSA, and CIA" Chan reassured him it would be a “one-way” channel, and “State/GEC, NSA, and CIA have expressed interest in being allowed on in listen mode only.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23."BELLY BUTTON" “We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan explained, but the DHS agency CISA “will know what’s going on in each state.” He went on to ask if industry could “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the USG."
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24.They eventually settled on an industry call via Signal. In an impressive display of operational security, Chan circulated private numbers of each company’s chief moderation officer in a Word Doc marked “Signal Phone Numbers,” subject-lined, “List of Numbers.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25.Twitter was taking requests from every conceivable government body, beginning with the Senate Intel Committee (SSCI), which seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction. Execs rushed to tell “Team SSCI” they zapped five accounts on an FBI tip:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26.Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27.They also received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned. Here, the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff asks Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28.“WE DON’T DO THIS” Even Twitter declined to honor Schiff’s request at the time. Sperry was later suspended, however.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29.Twitter honored almost everyone else’s requests, even those from GEC – including a decision to ban accounts like @RebelProtests and @BricsMedia because GEC identified them as “GRU-controlled” and linked “to the Russian government,” respectively:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30.The GEC requests were what a former CIA staffer working at Twitter was referring to, when he said, “Our window on that is closing,” meaning they days when Twitter could say no to serious requests were over.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31.Remember the 2017 “internal guidance” in which Twitter decided to remove any user “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as a state-sponsored entity committing cyber operations? By 2020 such identifications came in bulk.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32.“USIC" requests often simply began “We assess” and then provided lists (sometimes, in separate excel docs) they believed were connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency and committing cyber ops, from Africa to South America to the U.S.:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33.One brief report, sent right after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year, flagged major Russian outlets like Vedomosti and http://Gazeta.ru. Note the language about “state actors” fits Twitter’s internal guidance.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34.Some reports were just a paragraph long and said things like: “The attached email accounts… were possibly used for “influence operations, social media collection, or social engineering.” Without further explanation, Twitter would be forwarded an excel doc:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35.They were even warned about publicity surrounding a book by former Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokhin, who alleged “corruption by the U.S. government” – specifically by Joe Biden.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36.By the weeks before the election in 2020, Twitter was so confused by the various streams of incoming requests, staffers had to ask the FBI which was which:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37.“I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR WORK LOAD”: Requests poured in from FBI offices all over the country, day after day, hour after hour: If Twitter didn’t act quickly, questions came: “Was action taken?” “Any movement?”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38.Wrote senior attorney Stacia Cardille: “My in-box is really f--- up at this point.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39.It all led to the situation described by @ShellenbergerMD two weeks ago, in which Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor. Twitter wasn’t just paid. For the amount of work they did for government, they were underpaid.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40.For more on the #TwitterFiles, check out @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, @LHFang, and @davidzweig. For more on this story, read http://www.taibbi.substack.com
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.In August 2017, when Facebook decided to suspend 300 accounts with “suspected Russian origin,” Twitter wasn’t worried. Its leaders were sure they didn’t have a Russia problem.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.“We did not see a big correlation.” “No larger patterns.” “FB may take action on hundreds of accounts, and we may take action on ~25.” https://t.co/KA1nuXEtQS
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.“KEEP THE FOCUS ON FB”: Twitter was so sure they had no Russia problem, execs agreed the best PR strategy was to say nothing on record, and quietly hurl reporters at Facebook: https://t.co/O3JtmId6MJ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.“Twitter is not the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling right now - the spotlight is on FB,” wrote Public Policy VP Colin Crowell: https://t.co/2nzk8pLoCZ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.In September, 2017, after a cursory review, Twitter informed the Senate it suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.Receiving these meager results, a furious Senator Mark Warner of Virginia – ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee – held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.” https://t.co/DAkX13igEE
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8.“#Irony,” mused Crowell the day after Warner’s presser, after receiving an e-circular from Warner’s re-election campaign, asking for “$5 or whatever you can spare.” “LOL,” replied General Counsel Sean Edgett. https://t.co/pJyeeGzLtG
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.“KEEP PRODUCING MATERIAL” After meeting with congressional leaders, Crowell wrote: “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” https://t.co/WiEQJzxGZv
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.“TAKING THEIR CUES FROM HILLARY CLINTON” Crowell added Dems were taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who that week said: “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.” https://t.co/hLvh9rTNeP
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. In growing anxiety over its PR problems, Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force” to proactively self-investigate. https://t.co/A5u0uNuH0u
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12.The “Russia Task Force” started mainly with data shared from counterparts at Facebook, centered around accounts supposedly tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). But the search for Russian perfidy was a dud: https://t.co/UKjxyRTSnZ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13. OCT 13 2017: “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).” https://t.co/lmkVazTA5K
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14.OCT 18 2017: “First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT.” https://t.co/MjtuvEZkYY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15.OCT 20 2017: “Built new version of the model that is lower precision but higher recall which allows to catch more items. We aren’t seeing substantially more suspicious accounts. We expect to find ~20 with a small amount of spend.” https://t.co/22MNQwegQH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16.OCT 23 2017: “Finished with investigation… 2500 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.” https://t.co/Kkdyx4HDOr
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17.Twitter’s search finding “only 2” significant accounts, “one of which is Russia Today,” was based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines like “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”: https://t.co/rsANvZ9GfN
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18.The failure of the “Russia task force” to produce “material” worsened the company’s PR crisis.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.In the weeks after Warner’s presser, a torrent of stories sourced to the Intel Committee poured into the news, an example being Politico’s October 13, “Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes.” https://t.co/ZQLod4BRjl
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20.“Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB… they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,” Johns Hopkins Professor (and Intel Committee “expert”) Thomas Rid told Politico. https://t.co/J5Q3WYY3YI
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21.As congress threatened costly legislation, and Twitter began was subject to more bad press fueled by the committees, the company changed its tune about the smallness of its Russia problem.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22.“Hi guys.. Just passing along for awareness the writeup here from the WashPost today on potential legislation (or new FEC regulations) that may affect our political advertising,” wrote Crowell. https://t.co/wbHK1s949y
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22.“Hi guys.. Just passing along for awareness the writeup here from the WashPost today on potential legislation (or new FEC regulations) that may affect our political advertising,” wrote Crowell. https://t.co/EyaEwf9g9c
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23. In Washington weeks after the first briefing, Twitter leaders were told by Senate staff that “Sen Warner feels like tech industry was in denial for months.” Added an Intel staffer: “Big interest in Politico article about deleted accounts." https://t.co/gMD6rHVNPQ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24.Twitter “pledged to work with them on their desire to legislate”: https://t.co/BxMSdG3aNC
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25.“Knowing that our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight, I wanted to share some relevant highlights of the legislation Senators Warner, Klobuchar and McCain will be introducing,” wrote Policy Director Carlos Monje soon after. https://t.co/rh9Irov8vH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26.“THE COMMITTEES APPEAR TO HAVE LEAKED” Even as Twitter prepared to change its ads policy and remove RT and Sputnik to placate Washington, congress turned the heat up more, apparently leaking the larger, base list of 2700 accounts. https://t.co/ZydFYFSjLA
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27.Reporters from all over started to call Twitter about Russia links. Buzzfeed, working with the University of Sheffield, claimed to find a “new network” on Twitter that had “close connections to… Russian-linked bot accounts.” https://t.co/rHCWJULOBL
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28.“IT WILL ONLY EMBOLDEN THEM.” Twitter internally did not want to endorse the Buzzfeed/Sheffield findings: https://t.co/9xnr1mpHQo
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29. “SENATE INTEL COMMITTEE IS ASKING… POSSIBLE TO WHIP SOMETHING TOGETHER?” Still, when the Buzzfeed piece came out, the Senate asked for “a write up of what happened.” Twitter was soon apologizing for the same accounts they’d initially told the Senate were not a problem. https://t.co/mIUmJtRLVc
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30.“REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS” This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. https://t.co/DWSlHkk2cm
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture. In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.” Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” https://t.co/Jc94kEg2KR
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32.Twitter let the “USIC” into its moderation process. It would not leave. Wrote Crowell, in an email to the company’s leaders: “We will not be reverting to the status quo.” https://t.co/T5LCoRrPRM
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33.For more on the #TwitterFiles, check out @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, @LHFang, and @davidzweig. Watch this space shortly for another thread…
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
THREAD: Twitter Files Supplemental
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@bariweiss “My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@bariweiss The first batch of files both reporters received was marked, “Spectra Baker Emails.” https://t.co/24a9NhjosB
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@bariweiss Baker is a controversial figure. He has been something of a Zelig of FBI controversies dating back to 2016, from the Steele Dossier to the Alfa-Server mess. He resigned in 2018 after an investigation into leaks to the press.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@bariweiss The news that Baker was reviewing the “Twitter files” surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to “exit” Baker Tuesday.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@bariweiss Reporters resumed searches through Twitter Files material – a lot of it – today. The next installment of “The Twitter Files” will appear @bariweiss. Stay tuned.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15 MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD https://t.co/bLRpDpuWql
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” https://t.co/q2n6pCZRzv
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.” https://t.co/EHRWACkZu4
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” https://t.co/g7Ozzj4ST8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.These are quotes by Twitter executives about Hamilton 68, a digital “dashboard” that claimed to track Russian influence and was the source of hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories in the Trump years. https://t.co/KzCVBCm1hv
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.The “dashboard” was headed by former FBI counterintelligence official (and current MSNBC contributor) Clint Watts, and funded by a neoliberal think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). https://t.co/XW4JXfAlGM
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.The ASD advisory council includes neoconservative writer Bill Kristol, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, ex-Hillary for America chief John Podesta, and former heads or deputy heads of the CIA, NSA, and the Department of Homeland Security. https://t.co/Nug3CpF6iK
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8.News outlets for years cited Watts and Hamilton 68 when claiming Russian bots were “amplifying” an endless parade of social media causes – against strikes in Syria, in support of Fox host Laura Ingraham, the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. https://t.co/Qwf5UuKUkb
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.Hamilton 68 was the source for stories claiming Russian bots pushed terms like “deep state” or hashtags like #FireMcMaster, #SchumerShutdown, #WalkAway, #ReleaseTheMemo, #AlabamaSenateRace, and #ParklandShooting, among many others. https://t.co/d9uM8bYWVe
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. The secret ingredient to Hamilton 68’s analytical method? A list: “Our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence activities online,” was how the site put it at launch. https://t.co/8ipRLSfzOm
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. Hamilton 68 never released the list, claiming "the Russians will simply shut [the accounts] down." All those reporters and TV personalities making claims about “Russian bots” never really knew what they were describing. https://t.co/q89kuDPIIH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data. Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them. https://t.co/qRZyylALUe
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13.“These accounts,” they concluded, “are neither strongly Russian nor strongly bots.” “No evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” “Hardly illuminating a massive influence operation.” https://t.co/LMrgWVKe7k
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14. In layman’s terms, the Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians. In fact, apart from a few RT accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15.It was a scam. Instead of tracking how “Russia” influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. Twitter immediately recognized these Hamilton-driven news stories posed a major ethical problem, potentially implicating them. “Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” Roth wrote. https://t.co/JSDowtPzHY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17.Some Twitter execs badly wanted to out Hamilton 68. After Russians were blamed for hyping the #ParklandShooting hashtag, one wrote: “Why can’t we say we’ve investigated… and citing Hamilton 68 is being wrong, irresponsible, and biased?” https://t.co/1Pl5MLG7qw
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18.Yoel Roth wanted a confrontation. “My recommendation at this stage is an ultimatum: you release the list or we do,” he wrote. However, there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy. https://t.co/Ejg1VcH73R
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.“We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said future White House and NSC spokesperson Emily Horne. https://t.co/BRZEESQZlT
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20.“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” wrote Carlos Monje, the future senior advisor to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. https://t.co/JvfSkyUlfL
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21. So the “legitimate people,” as one Twitter exec called them, never found out they’d been used as fodder for mountains of news stories about “Russian influence.” Because the #TwitterFiles contain the list, they’ve begun finding out.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22.“I’m shocked,” says Sonia Monsour, who as a child lived through civil war in Lebanon. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23. “I’ve written a book about the U.S. Constitution,” says Chicago-based lawyer Dave Shestokas. “How I made a list like this is incredible to me.” https://t.co/nJYekHzEIJ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24. “When I was growing up, my father told me about the McCarthyite blacklist,” says Oregon native Jacob Levich. “As a child it would never have occurred to me that this would come back, in force and broadly, in a way… designed to undermine rights we hold dear.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25. Even Twitter execs were stunned to read who was on the list. Wrote policy chief Nick Pickles about British comic @Holbornlolz: “A wind-up merchant… I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian… I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.” https://t.co/kFCqyFjG0l
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. I’m listed as a foreign bot?” said conservative media figure Dennis Michael Lynch. “As a proud taxpaying citizen, charitable family man, and honest son of a U.S. Marine, I deserve better. We all do!” https://t.co/HhKE9FPfpO
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27. Consortium editor Joe Lauria too was angered to find he was on the list, which targeted voices across the spectrum: “Organizations like Hamilton 68 are in business to enforce an official narrative, which means excising inconvenient facts, which they call ‘misinformation.’” https://t.co/KtRKiE7C7G
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28.What makes this an important story is the sheer scale of the news footprint left by Hamilton 68’s digital McCarthyism. The quantity of headlines and TV segments dwarfs the impact of individual fabulists like Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. https://t.co/zfyjLb5Tkq
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29.Hamilton 68 was used as a source to assert Russian influence in an astonishing array of news stories: support for Brett Kavanaugh or the Devin Nunes memo, the Parkland shooting, manipulation of black voters, “attacks” on the Mueller investigation… https://t.co/GU9UCBLEeO
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30.These stories raised fears in the population, and most insidious of all, were used to smear people like Tulsi Gabbard as foreign “assets,” and drum up sympathy for political causes like Joe Biden’s campaign by describing critics as Russian-aligned. https://t.co/3lsuG1ZTrd
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31.Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter: https://t.co/dyNZNRFIdH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32.It was a lie. The illusion of Russian support was created by tracking people like Joe Lauria, Sonia Monsour, and Dave Shestokas. Virtually every major American news organization cited these fake tales— even fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact. https://t.co/zleliOsckq
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33.Twitter didn’t have the guts to out Hamilton 68 publicly but did try to speak to reporters off the record. “Reporters are chafing,” said Horne. “It’s like shouting into a void.” https://t.co/aJEJvcOu47
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34.Roth was offended by the idea that tweets on certain themes suggested subversion. “Can we talk about how incredibly condescending…? If you talk about these themes, you must have been duped by Russian propaganda.” https://t.co/gxRWq6jr4G
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35.Again, even Roth, like most Twitter execs an ardent Democratic partisan, saw that the Hamilton scheme would lead people “to assert that any right-leaning content is propagated by Russian bots.” https://t.co/XqepteKMOg
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36.At least two other research institutions that used similar methodologies – and were cited as sources in news stories – were also criticized in Twitter email correspondence.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37.MSNBC, Watts, the Washington Post, Politico, Mother Jones (which did at least 14 Hamilton 68 stories), the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and the offices of politicians like Dianne Feinstein all refused comment, unless this counts: https://t.co/N2mav6JhOW
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38.This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source: https://t.co/CyzGnVUjh5
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39.Perhaps most embarrassingly, elected officials promoted the site, and invited Hamilton “experts” to testify. Dianne Feinstein, James Lankford, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff, and Mark Warner were among the offenders. https://t.co/X97OmZ3dv1
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40.The mix of digital McCarthyism and fraud did great damage to American politics and culture. News outlets that don't disavow these stories, or still pay Hamilton vets as analysts, shouldn't be trusted. Every subscriber to those outlets to write to editors about the issue.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
41.For more from the #TwitterFiles, follow @BariWeiss, @LHFang, @ShellenbergerMD, @TheFP, and others. Twitter had no input into this story. Searches were conducted by a third party, so material may have been left out.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
42. For more on this story, read the detailed new story at http://racket.news
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
And a special thanks to @0rf for putting together video for this segment - much more to come.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. TWITTER FILES EXTRA The Senate, New Knowledge, and Manufacturing Russian Bot Hysteria Reporting by @SchmidtSue1 https://t.co/o8BRNYDQ89
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. On December 17, 2018, a new report to the Senate Intelligence Committee describing pervasive Russian bot activity generated scare headlines by the dozen: https://t.co/PusolurqIL
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. Virginia Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee called it a “bombshell”: https://t.co/JUvPzgqHzy
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. This was the peak of Russiagate panic. Stephen Colbert days later ran a feature about Robert Mueller rescuing Santa Claus – they were old “Nam” buddies, apparently – so they could deliver Donald Trump new orange “pajamas” for Christmas: https://t.co/tMBoymTgQ8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. Internally at Twitter, executives were calling BS on the Senate report, lead-authored by a firm called New Knowledge. “Nothing to see here,” wrote Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. https://t.co/4jBCOE1mF7
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. Regarding accounts identified by NK as Russian, Roth wrote “may be spam, but nothing insidious,” and “don’t want to throw fire on the NK report by making anyone think they’re correct.” https://t.co/Gq4cJ7ecaP
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. Twitter knew what the public didn’t: the CEO of New Knowledge, Jonathon Morgan, helped design the infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard, which Roth called “bullshit.” https://t.co/LyVUILhIH8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. Twitter’s Nick Pickles tied NK to Hamilton in describing its method: “They pick accounts that they have deemed to be IRA controlled, and then spin up bigger macro analysis of their activity.” https://t.co/V2lNuQ7W7N
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. He added: “We have met with them several times and they have gone out of their way to avoid giving any meaningful insight into their methodology.” https://t.co/8ZqmVB5yRq
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. Two days after the Senate report, the New York Times reported New Knowledge had been caught faking the existence of Russian bots and linking them to Republican Roy Moore in an Alabama Senate Race. https://t.co/MvrZWXF25W
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. Weeks later, it came out New Knowledge also ran a phony Facebook page boosting two campaigns to aid Democrat Doug Jones in the Alabama race. https://t.co/iMCEsvz53p
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. The Alabama projects were engineered by former Obama administration official Mikey Dickerson, and funded by billionaire Reid Hoffman, who subsequently apologized. https://t.co/5akEl4d9yp
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13. Reaction inside Twitter: “Pretty brutal for NK,” wrote Roth. https://t.co/iqfczPmmkp
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14. Pickles added the episode highlighted the “ongoing question of people who do this sort of work conflating basic spam issues with nefarious foreign influence.” https://t.co/L4Jd54z7nX
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. He would later add that NK decided to “engage in their own info ops in a special election,” adding that another Senate author, Graphika, had been “over-stating the problem”: https://t.co/eLCTfJFWcL
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. Former State Department official Daniel Fried said he hoped the Alabama incident would be “so scandalous and discredited that no one dares do it again,” adding “Putin’s ultimate victory” would be to “turn us into them.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNnycTohZfE
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. The Alabama/New Knowledge story was already public when NBC published a hit piece on then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s alleged Russia links citing New Knowledge as a source: https://t.co/PE1a8qPZTj
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18. The Senate Intel Committee has never fully answered questions about the methodology of its influential report - or about one of its author's ties to Hamilton 68. The episode also raises questions about news outlets who knew the Alabama story was coming but said nothing. https://t.co/Z6EorxIjs3
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19. A spokesperson for Warner told @SchmidtSue1, the reports “speak for themselves” and the Committee “did not endorse” them, rather encouraging Americans to “draw their own conclusions.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20. Neither Roth nor Pickles responded to requests to discuss New Knowledge. DiResta and Morgan did not respond to interview requests.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21. More at http://Racket.News from @SchmidtSue1: https://www.racket.news/p/twitter-files-extra-the-manufacture?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
The new Twitter Files stories show: 1) The CEO of the Senate’s top expert on Russian bots, New Knowledge, helped create the Hamilton 68 dashboard; https://t.co/J1y5IVvrGt
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2) New Knowledge also worked with the Democracy Integrity Project on another “dashboard” project, Disinfo 2018, used as a source to smear @TulsiGabbard; https://t.co/Xymk5zHP7X
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3) Twitter did not think the issues at New Knowledge were confined to its CEO. One executive also warned about the former NK research chief Renee DiResta, who led Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership: https://t.co/PART0Q5rxH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Senate Intelligence experts on Russian influence created multiple fake news schemes, one with an explicit aim to “influence the outcome of the AL senate race.” Why was New Knowledge not investigated for Project Birmingham? Why did ex-intelligence officials create Hamilton 68?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
For more read @SchmidtSue1 at https://www.racket.news/p/twitter-files-extra-the-manufacture?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. #CTIFiles3 SOCKPUPPETS AND SPIES In the #CTIFiles written about today by @shellenberger and @galexybrane, anti-disinformation warriors and officials offer instruction on COINTELPRO-style spy tactics, against a target they knew was forbidden – the American public
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. WHAT WE NEED: “SOCKPUPPETS ON TWITTER AND FACEBOOK” While #TwitterFiles confirmed use of defensive tactics like censorship/deamplification, the #CTIFiles show “anti-disinformation” operatives planning to go on offense to disrupt speech, using fake personas and spy tactics https://t.co/U47gPriHs4
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. “YOUR SPY DISGUISE…LOCK YOUR SHIT DOWN.” CTI League trainings instructed members on creating phony identities to infiltrate groups “like Boogaloo” https://t.co/JFN5P4Kacm
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. “BURNER PHONES” CTI League members were handed a “Big Book of Disinformation Response” that offered instruction in the use of burner phones and emails: https://t.co/fFMXVOjHx9
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. “CAN WE GET ALL TROLL ON THEIR BUMS?” In a CTI “incident report” about anti-lockdown memes, researchers asked if they had enough to ask for accounts to be taken down – and if not, “Can we get all troll on their bums”? https://t.co/fPJ0wWaYZm
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. “WE CAN ALSO TAKE ACTIONS LIKE TAKEDOWNS” A whistleblower told Public and Racket that the CTIL founder claimed to have induced the FBI to remove some content via DNS takedown, and a CTI incident report appears to refer to this capability https://t.co/sz2oSbi9V8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. “BASICALLY WE’RE USING MANY OF THE SAME TECHNIQUES AS THE BAD GUYS” Over and over in CTIL training videos and documents, participants talk about doing the same things as “the bad guys,” but supposedly for good reasons. https://youtu.be/SwoGo3-oU1E?si=nVcMxneNb9NPbk26
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. “EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN… AGAINST U.S. CITIZENS” In a training video, key CTIL member Pablo Breuer says the most capable agency for anti-disinfo work would be the Defense Department, only it's “expressly forbidden” to operate “against U.S. citizens” https://youtu.be/FWC1UzsDcIM?si=NX2lsz8lpyuGaeAH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. “THE PEOPLE WHO DO IT OVERSEAS ARE TYPICALLY THE CIA AND NSA” Breuer, of the Navy and SOCOM, adds the people who “do it overseas” are typically CIA, NSA, and DoD, but “intel collection agencies are not legally allowed to do those things” in the US https://youtu.be/XOuqbh_Lc50?si=-_rF5tyYCb1TWAXy
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. “WHAT DO WE DO WITH JOHN AND JANE Q CITIZEN THAT ACTUALLY WATCH FOX NEWS?” Explaining that the agencies currently doing this work domestically – DHS and the Global Engagement Center – are “not very capable,” he says, “We need to help them out.” https://youtu.be/p2p0J4X7vCE?si=yTKCXH0pUOdYcfuL
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. “THEY DID SOME REALLY INTERESTING FALSE FLAG OPERATIONS” In another CTIL training video, @rz_analyst lauds NATO member Turkey for “some really interesting false flags,” including to "pin ISIS bombings on the Kurds" https://youtu.be/zmM51R1IlOQ?si=WSQy5x-pGgT6lA0R
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. GPT: “THE GOOD GUYS CAN USE IT TOO” In another video, CTI leader/founder SJ Terp talks about new AI programs like ChatGPT generating “credible texts, credible sentences,” and though “the bad guys can use it,” so can the good guys, she says. https://youtu.be/V-g11XpzkRE?si=QXlbrGeOzKqC6xTA
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13. INFILTRATE, HONEYPOT, FAKE The AMITT framework developed in part by CTIL founders, features 223 tactical “counters” including fake sites, infiltration, and tabletop exercises to prep for misinformation – as happened with the Hunter Biden laptop story https://t.co/6EH44wMmVR https://t.co/yRxSHLmOk5
@shellenberger - Michael Shellenberger
30. Efforts continued to influence Twitter's Yoel Roth. In Sept 2020, Roth participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential "Hack-and-Dump" operation relating to Hunter Biden The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it https://t.co/lQSorONUSh
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14. “MAKE LIBERTY GREAT AGAIN… PROBABLY NOT OUR CURRENT TARGET” CTIL analysts were often unable or unwilling to distinguish legitimate speech – like opposing lockdowns – from “disinformation.” In this incident report, #openamericanow and “Make Liberty Great Again” are suspect https://t.co/9ylqCQJeft
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. “WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING” Another report lists a “Declaration of Independence is my permission slip” meme as a problem. That analysts feared even such memes is no surprise – one CTI doc noted satire was "sometimes used as a gateway drug into more worrying groups.” https://t.co/jox5Q4OWV1
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. “WE HAD SATIRE DETECTORS" CTIL’s Terp: “Things like satire are really hard. We actually had satire detectors at one thing I worked on because it just shows up as positive even though it's completely negative… irony just doesn't work on machines.” https://youtu.be/QCYzUXXgLDU?si=n4z3pu0CyRH4bobY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. “WE’RE ALREADY BUILDING AND USING BOTS” From an entry in the CTI “Big Book”: https://t.co/7LjdhsmNjW
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18. WATCHING LEFT MOVEMENTS, TOO CTIL often strayed from Covid to political matters, usually focused on Trump and Republicans, but not always. Docs show interest in the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (@USPCR_), the @DemSocialists , #HealthCareForAll,” and other progressives https://t.co/qswZC4WM1a
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19. “ELECTION 2020… A VERY END OF THE WORLD TYPE OF MOMENT” CTIL members were often extreme partisans who seemed to believe anything was justified to stop Donald Trump, whose potential election in 2020 was framed by one analyst as literal apocalypse https://youtu.be/ZPKqU7KJjFw?si=RSLLa0mPu43ZfOAm
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20: NEXT: “ANTI-DISINFORMATION” AS PARTISAN SCAM Watch this space soon for more about the CTI League’s political bias, its role in shaping election moderation operations, and more bizarre AMITT “counters” https://t.co/nXBj0CtEWr
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. Tuesday, @Shellenberger, @galexybrane and I began releasing the CTI League (CTIL) Files. Provided by a whistleblower, they detail activities of a group ostensibly formed for the narrow purpose of fighting Covid misinfo. We quickly found they had wider interests:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. “I DON’T KNOW A LOT, BUT…” The documents equal or exceed the #TwitterFiles in explosiveness, offering a devastating portrait of the digital censorship sector – from breathtaking authoritarian views to comic ignorance and lack of self-awareness. https://youtu.be/G1RoUIwfaqs?si=4wRm6KmYdesbsHDV
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. The CTIL story has enormous significance because of its close ties to the FBI, DoD, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CISA chief Chris Krebs boasted of CISA’s partnership with CTIL.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. A whistleblower told Public and Racket CTIL’s online meets were regularly attended by FBI and DHS operatives. The source added CTIL founder SJ Terp said the original go-ahead for the program came from the White House. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/best-practices-mitre-attckr-mapping
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. But the #CTIFiles are not just more confirmation of state-aided censorship efforts. They expose much more.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. Unlike the #TwitterFiles, which detail mostly defensive activity like censorship and deamplification, the #CTIFiles show members instructed in a wide array of “offensive” operations, including infiltration, creation of fake personas, use of burner phones, and more.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. “IMPAIR THE OPERATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS OF THE ENEMY” CTIL members repeatedly stressed building a “good guy analog” to disinfo programs of Russians, Chinese, even “Fox News Snorters," using an array of military-style “counters” to disrupt "the enemy” – American citizens? https://t.co/7I1kh6YCHK
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. “REPETITION IS TRUTH” The #CTIFiles also detail how marketing executives with no skills apart from corporate brand management shifted from manipulating perceptions of products to doing it for nation-states, policies, and political parties: https://youtu.be/LYivsKqSmYw?si=2sU-8-D4GagvZIVq
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. @CTILeague has been the subject of reporting before. Accounts like @pepesgrandma aka “Bad Kitty” months ago connected CTIL, DHS, and operations like the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). The whistleblower docs, however, tell a damning and irrefutable new story. https://t.co/4WdP4mLDxQ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. That the DHS and FBI partnered with a group that endorsed both censorship and “bad guy” offensive operations “against U.S. citizens” is only one of many key revelations. The size of this leak makes it difficult to summarize quickly.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. There are so many ugly details in the #CTIFiles, in fact, that the fastest way to introduce them is to release docs in bunches, by theme. In the next hours, days, and weeks, look for more threads in this space. First up, momentarily: SOCKPUPPETS AND SPIES. https://t.co/OZrVNdMMwS
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. For more, read “Big Brother is Flagging You” at http://Racket.News. and "New Documents Reveal US Department Of Homeland Security Conspiracy To Violate First Amendment And Interfere In Elections," at Public: https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/big-brother-is-flagging-you?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web https://public.substack.com/p/new-documents-reveal-us-department
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
THE OLD SURPRISE VISIT: A House Investigation Reveals Disturbing IRS Home Visit Practices https://www.racket.news/p/a-house-investigation-reveals-disturbing https://youtu.be/wLR98gYTRYM?si=PQDxKeEoPKggtbrm via @YouTube
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP Part One: October 2020-January 6th
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th...
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @Shellenbergermd will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @BariWeiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 5. Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech. https://t.co/tQ01n58XFc
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 6. As soon as they finished banning Trump, Twitter execs started processing new power. They prepared to ban future presidents and White Houses – perhaps even Joe Biden. The “new administration,” says one exec, “will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.” https://t.co/lr66YgDlGy
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways. https://t.co/Trgvq5jmhS
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 8. The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As @BariWeiss reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 11. After J6, internal Slacks show Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies. Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of “generic enough” calendar descriptions to concealing his “very interesting” meeting partners. https://t.co/kgC4eGykcO
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 12. These initial reports are based on searches for docs linked to prominent executives, whose names are already public. They include Roth, former trust and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, and recently plank-walked Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 13. One particular slack channel offers an unique window into the evolving thinking of top officials in late 2020 and early 2021.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 14. On October 8th, 2020, executives opened a channel called “us2020_xfn_enforcement.” Through J6, this would be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”). https://t.co/xH29h4cYt9
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 15. There was at least some tension between Safety Operations – a larger department whose staffers used a more rules-based process for addressing issues like porn, scams, and threats – and a smaller, more powerful cadre of senior policy execs like Roth and Gadde.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 16. The latter group were a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President. https://t.co/5ihsPCVo62
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 17. During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content. While we’re still at the start of reviewing the #TwitterFiles, we’re finding out more about these interactions every day.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 18. Policy Director Nick Pickles is asked if they should say Twitter detects “misinfo” through “ML, human review, and **partnerships with outside experts?*” The employee asks, “I know that’s been a slippery process… not sure if you want our public explanation to hang on that.” https://t.co/JEICGRTyz7
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 19. Pickles quickly asks if they could “just say “partnerships.” After a pause, he says, “e.g. not sure we’d describe the FBI/DHS as experts.” https://t.co/d3EaYJb5eR
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI): https://t.co/s5IiUjQqIY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 21. Roth’s report to FBI/DHS/DNI is almost farcical in its self-flagellating tone: “We blocked the NYP story, then unblocked it (but said the opposite)… comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots… in short, FML” (fuck my life). https://t.co/sTaWglhaJt
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 23. Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an “Aspen Institute thing,” then take a call with Apple. https://t.co/i771hD8aCD
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss 24. Here, the FBI sends reports about a pair of tweets, the second of which involves a former Tippecanoe County, Indiana Councilor and Republican named @JohnBasham claiming “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.” https://t.co/KtigHOiEwF
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham The FBI's second report concerned this tweet by @JohnBasham: https://t.co/8J8j5GlUVx
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 25. The FBI-flagged tweet then got circulated in the enforcement Slack. Twitter cited Politifact to say the first story was “proven to be false,” then noted the second was already deemed “no vio on numerous occasions.” https://t.co/LyyZ1opWAh
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 26. The group then decides to apply a “Learn how voting is safe and secure” label because one commenter says, “it’s totally normal to have a 2% error rate.” Roth then gives the final go-ahead to the process initiated by the FBI: https://t.co/lyZm4gmT19
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@ShellenbergerMD @bariweiss @JohnBasham 27. Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND "OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES"
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.” https://t.co/bEndZ9qj7i
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors - from local cops to media to state governments.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying. https://t.co/C8d8jntnC0
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.A chief end result was that thousands of official “reports” flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8.On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming conference: https://t.co/hj5xZiXvg2
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.OGA, or “Other Government Organization,” can be a euphemism for CIA, according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors. Chuckles one: “They think it's mysterious, but it's just conspicuous."
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.“Other Government Agency (the place where I worked for 27 years),” says retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. It was an open secret at Twitter that one of its executives was ex-CIA, which is why Chan referred to that executive’s “former employer.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12.The first Twitter executive abandoned any pretense to stealth and emailed that the employee “used to work for the CIA, so that is Elvis’s question.” https://t.co/5kL8xNRZcO
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13.Senior legal executive Stacia Cardille, whose alertness stood out among Twitter leaders, replied, “I know” and “I thought my silence was understood.” https://t.co/SkBObgCQZG
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14.Cardille then passes on conference details to recently-hired ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker. https://t.co/c60VEMDArB
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15.“I invited the FBI and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille says to Baker, adding pointedly: “No need for you to attend.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16.The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18.One of the most common forums was a regular meeting of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), attended by spates of executives, FBI personnel, and – nearly always – one or two attendees marked “OGA.” https://t.co/8J7zUZBgQZ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.The FITF meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an “OGA briefing,” usually about foreign matters (hold that thought). https://t.co/Yx0721VyXI
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20. Despite its official remit being “Foreign Influence,” the FITF and the SF FBI office became conduit for mountains of domestic moderation requests, from state governments, even local police: https://t.co/QDpBw7Olad
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21. Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish: https://t.co/3C9uNo2AYC
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22.Especially as the election approached in 2020, the FITF/FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending lists of hundreds of problem accounts: https://t.co/ETiIcPZxGw
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23. Email after email came from the San Francisco office heading into the election, often adorned with an Excel attachment: https://t.co/2xCKHPcBRE
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24. There were so many government requests, Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them: https://t.co/NRSyM6Z5Vu
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25. The FBI was clearly tailoring searches to Twitter’s policies. FBI complaints were almost always depicted somewhere as a “possible terms of service violation," even in the subject line: https://t.co/TiwyiZJTNZ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. Twitter executives noticed the FBI appeared to be aasigning personnel to look for Twitter violations.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27.“They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” remarked Cardille. https://t.co/asTlMhs2if
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28. Even ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker agreed: “Odd that they are searching for violations of our policies.” https://t.co/ini1eMznTA
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29.The New York FBI office even sent requests for the “user IDs and handles” of a long list of accounts named in a Daily Beast article. Senior executives say they are “supportive” and “completely comfortable” doing so. https://t.co/MfSX7NcZJF
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30. It seemed to strike no one as strange that a “Foreign Influence” task force was forwarding thousands of mostly domestic reports, along with the DHS, about the fringiest material: https://t.co/YlOQQeUbkw
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31. “Foreign meddling” had been the ostensible justification for expanded moderation since platforms like Twitter were dragged to the Hill by the Senate in 2017: https://t.co/b3wR2aUjcf
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32. Yet behind the scenes, Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference supposedly occurring on their platform and others: https://t.co/7V5KK7Qn4v
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33. The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34. “Found no links to Russia,” says one analyst, but suggests he could “brainstorm” to “find a stronger connection.” https://t.co/adrWBV1OgD
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35. “Extremely tenuous circumstantial chance of being related,” says another. https://t.co/nLnShIZTLc
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36. “No real matches using the info,” says former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth in another case, noting some links were “clearly Russian,” but another was a “house rental in South Carolina?” https://t.co/BAS97DxUt5
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37. In another case, Roth concludes a series of Venezuelan pro-Maduro accounts are unrelated to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, because they’re too high-volume: https://t.co/ySsjM4j0j9
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38.The Venezuelans “were extremely high-volume tweeters… pretty uncharacteristic of a lot of the other IRA activity,” Roth says.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39. In a key email, news that the State Department was making a wobbly public assertion of Russian influence led an exec – the same one with the “OGA” past - to make a damning admission:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40. “Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I've generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” he says. “Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution.” https://t.co/IZLaxEF6lY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
41. Translation: “more aggressive” “government partners” had closed Twitter’s “window” of independence.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
42. “Other Government Agencies” ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia: https://t.co/HH5PqKO4Bl
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
43. Former CIA agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou believes he recognizes the formatting of these reports.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
44.“Looks right on to me,” Kiriakou says, noting that “what was cut off above [the “tearline”] was the originating CIA office and all the copied offices.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
45. Many people wonder if Internet platforms receive direction from intelligence agencies about moderation of foreign policy news stories. It appears Twitter did, in some cases by way of the FITF/FBI.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
46. These reports are far more factually controversial than domestic counterparts.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
47. One intel report lists accounts tied to “Ukraine ‘neo-Nazi’ Propaganda.’” This includes assertions that Joe Biden helped orchestrate a coup in 2014 and “put his son on the board of Burisma.” https://t.co/BiTj9SIHgH
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
48. Another report asserts a list of accounts accusing the “Biden administration” of “corruption” in vaccine distribution are part of a Russian influence campaign: https://t.co/RPDDFNWaji
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
49. Often intelligence came in the form of brief reports, followed by long lists of accounts simply deemed to be pro-Maduro, pro-Cuba, pro-Russia, etc. This one batch had over 1000 accounts marked for digital execution: https://t.co/zkf4QdUv3E
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
50. One report says a site “documenting purported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians” is directed by Russian agents: https://t.co/2uzXLGP6CG
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
51. Intel about the shady origin of these accounts might be true. But so might at least some of the information in them – about neo-Nazis, rights abuses in Donbas, even about our own government. Should we block such material?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
52. This is a difficult speech dilemma. Should the government be allowed to try to prevent Americans (and others) from seeing pro-Maduro or anti-Ukrainian accounts?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
53. Often intel reports are just long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives”: https://t.co/6q7IX5S7WM
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
54. Sometimes - not always -Twitter and YouTube blocked the accounts. But now we know for sure what Roth meant by “the Bureau (and by extension the IC).” https://t.co/DpLix07ZvO
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
55. The line between “misinformation” and “distorting propaganda” is thin. Are we comfortable with so many companies receiving so many reports from a “more aggressive” government?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
56.The CIA has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by third parties, so what I saw could be limited.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Watch @bariweiss, @shellenbergerMD, @lhfang, and this space for more, on issues ranging from Covid-19 to Twitter's relationship to congress, and more.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. This system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D000067113
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Okay, there was more throat-clearing about the process, but screw it, let's jump forward
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20.This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21. Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20190717143909/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materials
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem...
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25.You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”: https://t.co/w1wBMlG33U
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err. https://t.co/2wJMFAUBoe
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27. Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” https://t.co/Rh5HL8prOZ
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”: https://t.co/tg4D0gLWI6
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29. A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30. In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern. https://t.co/TSSYOs5vfy
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights: https://t.co/U4FRLYYPaY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32.Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files: https://t.co/Tq6l7VMuQL
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33.Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.” https://t.co/UpBoq97QkB
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34.NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it's a "tipping point," complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.” https://t.co/2EE1NlWQ5k
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35.Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”: https://t.co/JTvXoQh6ZK
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36.Twitter files continued: "THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE” Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it's "not absolute" https://t.co/cWdNYIprp8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get "unfucked" (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1.TWITTER FILES: Supplemental More Adam Schiff Ban Requests, and "Deamplification"
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.Staff of House Democrat @AdamSchiff wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down. This important use of taxpayer resources involved an ask about a “Peter Douche” parody photo of Joe Biden. The DNC made the same request: https://t.co/fM2Y2jxVKw https://t.co/LIQMbns1B0
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.The real issue was Donald Trump retweeted the Biden pic. To its credit Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious “humorous intent” and “any reasonable observer” - apparently, not a Schiff staffer - could see it was doctored. https://t.co/QJtS6s506Z
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein didn’t give up, claiming there was a “slippery slope concern here.” https://t.co/qM1cJiZLFh
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.Twitter also refused requests for bans of content about Schiff and his staff, e.g. “complete suppress[ion of] any and all search results about Mr. Misko and other Committee staffers.” Twitter said this would not be “conceivable.” https://t.co/2HQrmp4fnY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.Even when Twitter didn’t suspend an account, that didn’t mean they didn’t act. Schiff’s office repeatedly complained about “QAnon related activity” that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine “whistleblower” or the Steele dossier: https://t.co/XKzY8AmB5R
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.Twitter policy at the time didn’t ban QAnon, but “deamplified” such accounts. About the batch of tweets that included those above, Twitter execs wrote: “We can internally confirm that a number of the accounts flagged are already included in this deamplification.” https://t.co/IWss2BoUKx
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8.Schiff’s office had a concern about “deamplification,” though: it might make it harder for law enforcement to track the offending Tweeters.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.“WE APPRECIATE GREATLY” “We are curious whether any deamplification measures implemented by Twitter’s enforcement team – which we appreciate greatly – could… impede the ability of law enforcement to search Twitter for potential threats about Misko and other HPSCI staff.” https://t.co/h7TRauK6j5
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.For more, watch @ShellenbergerMD, @BariWeiss, @LHFang, @DavidZweig, @AlexBerenson, and others. Twitter had no editorial input. Searches were carried out by third parties, so the documents could be limited.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. TWITTER FILES #17 New Knowledge, the Global Engagement Center, and State-Sponsored Blacklists
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. On June 8, 2021, an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab wrote to Twitter: “Hi guys. Attached you will find… around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior… and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. DFRLab said it suspected 40,000 accounts of being “paid employees or possibly volunteers” of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTU3__csFVoZD9DKuIc7Hcb_nyUrtiOd2p1NU_r6ZcWh9dlvYQ7KknxjJKfe6k7fhrIqQcLDWpOqwDY/pubhtml
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. “I have no connection to any Hindu folks... Just a Reagan Republican here in CT,” replied “Bobby Hailstone.” “A Hindu nationalist? I’ve never even been out of this country. Let alone the state of NJ,” said “Lady_DI816.” “These people are insane!” said “Krista Woods.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. Twitter agreed, one reason many of the accounts remain active. “Thanks, Andy,” replied Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. “I spot-checked a number of these accounts, and virtually all appear to be real people.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
@MarcChampion1 Marc! Hi, no, the GEC is fully an American government agency. The Atlantic Council is a sizable NGO/think-tank with a variety of funders, including the USG. The connection is that the DFRLab, an “anti-disinformation” think tank within the Atlantic Council, is funded by GEC.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. TWITTER FILES: Missouri v. Biden edition "Thank you for your ongoing collaboration!"
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Listen to This Article: The Elite War on Free Thought, by @mtaibbi https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/listen-to-this-article-the-elite?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web… https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/listen-to-this-article-the-elite?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12.An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14.Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa – were suspended.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18.In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his "Twitter folks":
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22.When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23.“I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That's crazy,” said @Tiberius444.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24.In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27.At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28. About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30.Here, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32.The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34.While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36.There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38.State governments also flagged content.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40.“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
41.Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS):
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
42.If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Twitter Files Extra: How the World's "No-Kidding Decision Makers" Got Organized by @NAffects The Atlantic Council is hosting its 360/0S Summit at RightsCon this week, and Twitter Files docs tell us how the VIP-room-within-a-VIP-room was formed https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/twitter-files-extra-how-the-worlds?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web… https://open.substack.com/pub/taibbi/p/twitter-files-extra-how-the-worlds?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
She’s saying I should have fact-checked the mention of CISA’s ties to EIP in the Stamos video. I don’t know how many different ways to say this: the CISA-EIP relationship is not a secret. It’s been announced publicly, and it’s on letter after letter in the Twitter Files. The idea even came from CISA interns at Stanford! All of the images below come from EIP’s own final report: https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr171zs0069/EIP-Final-Report.pdf…
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
We did fact-check them, over and over, although in this case it’s not a disputed “fact” that EIP and CISA were partners — the relationship has not only been announced publicly (see the EIP website below for instance), but it’s laid out in the innumerable “escalations” of content that reached Twitter by means of this system, and which we saw repeatedly in the Files. https://t.co/GelEyj14u6
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
Dear @mehdirhasan: here’s the EIP website saying it partnered with CISA, the CIS site saying the same thing, and the award showing CIS is a DHS contractor. You’re wrong on this and you convinced a politician to threaten me with jail as a result. This has gone too far.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1.TWITTER FILES #19 The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.“The release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Spring 2020 emails… has been used to exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci.” “Increased distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.“Reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway”; “natural immunity”; suggesting Covid-19 “leaked from a lab”; even “worrisome jokes”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.All were characterized as “potential violations” or disinformation “events” by the Virality Project, a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billons of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.Just before @ShellenbergerMD and I testified in the House last week, Virality Project emails were found in the #TwitterFiles describing “stories of true vaccine side effects” as actionable content.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.We’ve since learned the Virality Project in 2021 worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content. At least six major Internet platforms were “onboarded” to the same JIRA ticketing system, daily sending millions of items for review.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.Though the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8.This story is important for two reasons. One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.THE BEGINNING: On February 5, 2021, just after Joe Biden took office, Stanford wrote to Twitter to discuss the Virality Project. By the 17th, Twitter agreed to join and got its first weekly report on “anti-vax disinformation,” which contained numerous true stories.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. February 22, 2021: Stanford welcomed Twitter veterans like Yoel Roth and Brian Clarke, instructing them on how to join the group JIRA system. You can watch the friendly welcome video here: https://stanford.zoom.us/rec/play/3kP-3sUMn1NWGQ6LLWiL0PCBnogeXtu9dd0d4CLuWfPVxEyIRfqiNhLlxTFeM0B00-c7gQQVguQXvPLE.9w9N9sB2ajvv-1Ee?startTime=1612397858000&_x_zm_rtaid=xw-r1KIbTrmhAhuGmKAnmw.1678915071059.9b5561884fb7eae3bb562df989a7d371&_x_zm_rhtaid=622
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. March 2, 2021: "We are beginning to ramp up our notification process to platforms.” In addition to the top-7 platforms, VP soon gained "visibility" to “alternative platforms such as Gab, Parler, Telegram, and Gettr” – near-total surveillance of the social media landscape.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13.Through July of 2020, Twitter’s internal guidance on Covid-19 required a story be “demonstrably false” or contain an “assertion of fact” to be actioned. But the Virality Project, in partnership with the CDC, pushed different standards.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14.VP told Twitter that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” including things like “celebrity deaths after vaccine” or the closure of a central NY school due to reports of post-vaccine illness, should be considered "Standard Vaccine Misinformation on Your Platform."
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. In one email to Twitter, VP addressed what it called the “vaccine passport narrative,” saying “concerns” over such programs “have driven a larger anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms.” This was framed as a "misinformation" event.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16.VP routinely framed real testimonials about side effects as misinformation, from “true stories” of blood clots from AstraZeneca vaccines to a New York Times story about vaccine recipients who contracted the blood disorder thrombocytopenia.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17.By March of 2021, Twitter personnel were aping VP language, describing "campaigns against vaccine passports," "fear of mandatory immunizations," and "misuse of official reporting tools" as "potential violations."
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18. This echoed a report to Twitter by the Global Engagement Center re “Russia-linked” accounts: “While this account posts legitimate and accurate COVID-19 updates... it posts content that attacks Italian politicians, the EU, and the United States.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u2412d1uWlBr4w5wEEWv6H8Cl8PKyIW0/view
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.That same GEC report found in the #TwitterFiles identified former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, and former Italian Democratic Party Secretary Nicola Zingaretti (who’s been compared to Bernie Sanders) as “highly connective” accounts in a “Russia-linked” network.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20.The Virality Project helped pioneer the gauging of “disinformation” by audience response. If the post-vaccine death of a black woman named Drene Keyes in Virginia went unnoticed inspired mostly “anti-vaccine” comments on local media, it became a “disinformation” event.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21.VP warned against people “just asking questions,” implying it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation." It also described a "Worldwide Rally for Freedom planned over Telegram" as a disinformation event.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22."ALMOST ALWAYS REPORTABLE" It encouraged platforms to target people, not posts, using Minority Report-style “pre-crime” logic. Describing “repeat offenders” like Robert Kennedy, Jr., it spoke of a “large volume of content that is almost always reportable.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23.VP was repeatedly, extravagantly wrong. In one email to Twitter on “misinformation,” it spoke of wanting to “hone in” on an “increasingly popular narrative about natural immunity.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24.The VP in April 2021 mistakenly described “breakthrough” infections as “extremely rare events” that should not be inferred to mean “vaccines are ineffective.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25.Later, when “the CDC changed its methodology for counting Covid-19 cases among vaccinated people,” only counting those resulting in hospitalization or death, VP complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts RFK Jr. and “WhatsHerFace” retweeted the story to suggest “hypocrisy.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26.A few months later: “Breakthrough cases are happening.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27.In a chilling irony, the VP ran searches for the term “surveillance state.” As an unaccountable state-partnered bureaucracy secretly searched it out, the idea that “vaccines are part of a surveillance state” won its own thoughtcrime bucket: “conspiracy.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28.After about a year, on April 26, 2022, the VP issued a report calling for a “rumor-control mechanism to address nationally trending narratives,” and a “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” to be housed within CISA, at the Department of Homeland Security.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29. The next day, April 27, 2022, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced in a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing that a “Disinformation Governance Board” had been created, to be headed by the singing censor, Nina Jankowitz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ypfVsVA70M
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30.Even in its final report, VP claimed it was misinformation to suggest the vaccine does not prevent transmission, or that governments are planning to introduce vaccine passports. Both things turned out to be true.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31.The Virality Project was specifically not based on “assertions of fact,” but public submission to authority, acceptance of narrative, and pronouncements by figures like Anthony Fauci. The project's central/animating concept was, "You can't handle the truth."
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32. One of its four core partners, Pentagon-funded Graphika, explained in a report about “Fauxi” that because the public cannot be trusted to make judgements on its own, it must be shielded from truths that might undermine its faith in authority.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33. “This continual process of seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices,” Graphika wrote, in a report sent to Twitter, “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34.For this reason, the CDC-partnered project focused often on disinformation “events” involving Fauci, saying “release of Fauci’s emails foments distrust,” and deriding assertions he “misled the public.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35.A Cleveland Clinic study showed previous infection offered the “same immunity” as the vaccine, but VP said discovery was susbservient to narrative: “Whether or not... scientific consensus is changing, ‘natural immunity’ is a key narrative… among anti-vaccine activists.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36."OFTEN TRUE CONTENT" The Virality Project communications mirror those produced in the recent court case Louisiana vs Biden, which showed Facebook admitting to the WHO that it, too, was censoring true content.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37.From the start, Stanford explained the Virality Project would essentially continue the work of its 2020 Election Integrity Partnership. “The same JIRA system from the EIP is up and running,” they wrote.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38. In the last #TwitterFiles thread, we posted a video of EIP Director Alex Stamos describing that project as Stanford trying to “fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally. (h/t Foundation for Freedom Online). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbF2UXKV1q8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39.We also showed video in which Stamos introduced EIP Research Director Renee DiResta as having “worked for the CIA.” DiResta in 2021-2022 would be listed as a “Stanford scholar,” “leading” the Virality Project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsooGvgLh7U
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40. By October 2020, Stamos was hinting at the direction of the future Virality Project, telling a national cybersecurity conference that the “Anti-Disinformation” mission needed a new focus.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
41.“We talk way too much about foreign…it's sexy, and it's fun, and it's a little bit cold warry,” Stamos said, adding the “vast majority” of problems were now domestic. “We have like an 80-20 breakdown... I think that needs to be flipped.” https://youtu.be/PGglf56vEiA
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
42.VP’s partners: DOD-funded Graphika, the National Science Foundation funded Center for an Informed Public (CIP), the GEC-funded DFRLab, and the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics, or CSMaP.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
43.VP would later say it partnered with “several government agencies,” including the Office of the Surgeon General and the CDC. It reportedly also worked with DHS’s CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) and GEC, among others.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
44.To recap: America’s information mission went from counterterrorism abroad, to stopping “foreign interference” from reaching domestic audiences, to 80% domestic content, much of it true. The “Disinformation Governance Board” is out; but truth-policing is not.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
45. Special thanks to @NAffects for hard work on this story, with @Techno_Fog, @ShellenbergerMd, @bergerbell, @SchmidtSue1, @aaronjmate, and the http://racket.news team. Thanks especially to @MikeBenzCyber. Searches conducted by a third party; material may be left out.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1. TWITTER FILES: Statement to Congress THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. “MONITOR ALL TWEETS COMING FROM TRUMP’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT/BIDEN’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT” When #TwitterFiles reporters were given access to Twitter internal documents last year, we first focused on the company, which at times acted like a power above government.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. But Twitter was more like a partner to government. With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. Emails from the FBI, DHS and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. Many were obvious “misinformation,” like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election. But other official "disinfo" reports had shakier reasoning. The highlighted Twitter analysis here disagrees with the FBI about accounts deemed a “proxy of Russian actors":
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. Then we saw "disinfo" lists where evidence was even less clear. This list of 378 “Iranian State Linked Accounts” includes an Iraq vet once arrested for blogging about the war, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter and Truthout, a site that publishes Noam Chomsky.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. In some cases, state reports didn’t even assert misinformation. Here, a list of YouTube videos is flagged for “anti-Ukraine narratives”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. But the bulk of censorship requests didn’t come from government directly.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. Asked if Twitter’s marketing department could say the company detects “misinfo” with help of “outside experts,” a Twitter executive replied:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. We came to think of this grouping – state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center (GEC), along with “NGOs that aren’t academic” and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media – as the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. Twitter execs weren’t sure about Clemson’s Media Forensics Lab (“too chummy with HPSCI”), and weren’t keen on the Rand Corporation (“too close to USDOD”), but others were deemed just right.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13. NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team - or Signal group, as it were:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14. The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute - which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID - held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area," and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. Note Aspen recommended the power to mandate data disclosure be given to the FTC, which this committee just caught in a clear abuse of office, demanding information from Twitter about communications with (and identities of) #TwitterFiles reporters. https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/Weaponization_Select_Subcommittee_Report_on_FTC_Harrassment_of_Twitter_3.7.2023.pdf
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18. Naturally Twitter’s main concern regarding the Aspen report was making sure Facebook got hit harder by any resulting regulatory changes:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19. The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20. The #TwitterFiles show the principals of this incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back, claiming a special right to do what they say is bad practice for everyone else: be fact-checked only by themselves.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21.While Twitter sometimes pushed back on technical analyses from NGOs about who is and isn't a “bot,” on subject matter questions like vaccines or elections they instantly defer to sites like Politifact, funded by the same names that fund the NGOs: Koch, Newmark, Knight.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22. #TwitterFiles repeatedly show media acting as proxy for NGOs, with Twitter bracing for bad headlines if they don't nix accounts. Here, the Financial Times gives Twitter until end of day to provide a “steer” on whether RFK, Jr. and other vax offenders will be zapped.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23. Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24. The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other “anti-disinformation” labs are receiving huge public awards.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25. Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded Newsguard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective “risk” or “reliability” scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26. Perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations is the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), whose “Election Integrity Partnership” is among the most voluminous “flaggers” in the #TwitterFiles:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27. After public uproar “paused” the Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” of the DHS in early 2020, Stanford created the EIP to “fill the gaps” legally, as director Alex Stamos explains here (h/t Foundation for Freedom Online). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbF2UXKV1q8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28. EIP research manager Renee DiResta boasted that while filling “gaps," the EIP succeeded in getting “tech partners” Google, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter to take action on “35% of the URLS flagged” under “remove, reduce, or inform” policies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtcK59lfjrU
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29. According to the EIP’s own data, it succeeded in getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the runup to the 2020 vote.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30. It’s crucial to reiterate: EIP was partnered with state entities like CISA and GEC while seeking elimination of millions of tweets. In the #TwitterFiles, Twitter execs did not distinguish between organizations, using phrases like “According to CIS[A], escalated via EIP.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31. After the 2020 election, when EIP was renamed the Virality Project, the Stanford lab was on-boarded to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, absorbing this government proxy into Twitter infrastructure – with a capability of taking in an incredible 50 million tweets a day.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32. In one remarkable email, the Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.” None of the leaders of this effort to police Covid speech had health expertise.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33. This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34. Profiles portray DiResta as a warrior against Russian bots and misinformation, but reporters never inquire about work with DARPA, GEC, and other agencies. In the video below from @MikeBenzCyber, Stamos introduces her as having "worked for the CIA": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsooGvgLh7U
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35. DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36. This, ultimately, is the most serious problem with the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37. DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the #TwitterFiles. Although it claimed to track “Russian influence,” Hamilton really followed Americans like “Ultra Maga Dog Mom,” “Right2Liberty,” even a British rugby player named Rod Bishop:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38. Told he was put on the Hamilton list of suspected “Russian influence” accounts, Bishop was puzzled. “Nonsense. I’m supporting Ukraine,” he said.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39. As a result of Hamilton’s efforts, all sorts of people were falsely tied in press stories to “Russian bots”: former House Intel chief Devin Nunes, #WalkAway founder @BrandonStraka, supporters of the #FireMcMaster hashtag, even people who used the term “deep state”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40. Hamilton 68 was funded by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which in turn was funded by the German Marshall Fund, which in turn is funded in part by – the Department of State.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
41. The far worse scandal was “Project Birmingham,” in which thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts were created to follow Alabama Republican Roy Moore in his 2017 race for US Senate. Newspapers reported Russia seemed to take an interest in the race, favoring Moore.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
42. Though at least one reporter for a major American paper was at a meeting in September, 2018 when New Knowledge planned the bizarre bot-and-smear campaign, the story didn’t break until December, two days after DiResta gave a report on Russian interference to the Senate.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
43. Internally, Twitter correctly assessed the Moore story as far back as fall of 2017, saying it had no way if knowing if the Moore campaign purchased the bots, or if “an adversary purchased them… in an attempt to discredit them.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
44. Twitter told this to reporters who asked about the story contemporaneously. Moreover, after the story broke, Twitter's Roth wrote: “There have been other instances in which domestic actors created fake accounts… some are fairly prominent in progressive circles.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
45. Roth added, “We shouldn’t comment.” Repeatedly in the #TwitterFiles, when Twitter learned the truth about scandals like Project Birmingham, they said nothing, like banks that were silent about mortgage fraud. Reporters also kept quiet, protecting fellow “stakeholders.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
46. Twitter stayed silent out of political caution. DiResta, who ludicrously claimed she thought Project Birmingham was just an experiment to “investigate to what extent they could grow audiences… using sensational news,” hinted at a broader reason.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
47. “I know there were people who believed the Democrats needed to fight fire with fire,” she told the New York Times. “It was absolutely chatter going around the party.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
48. The incident underscored the extreme danger of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
49. By way of proof, no major press organization has re-examined the bold claims DiResta/New Knowledge made to the Senate – e.g. that Russian ads “reached 126 million people” in 2016 – while covering up the Hamilton and Alabama frauds. If the CIC deems it, lies stay hidden.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
50. In the digital age, this sprawling new information-control bureaucracy is an eerie sequel to the dangers Dwight Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address, when he said: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyZoUfNsUl8
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
51. Thanks to @ShellenbergerMD and reporters/researchers @Techno_Fog, @neffects, @bergerbell, @SchmidtSue1, @tw6384, and others for help in preparing this testimony. The Twitter Files searches are performed by a third party, so material may have been left out.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
TWITTER FILES #16 Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the “U.S. intelligence community”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3. These and at least a dozen other newsworthy revelations produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4. Then House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen. The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5. Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6. If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7. Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like: “Rand Paul visit excitement” “Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)” Being followed by rival Eric Brakey Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. King’s office declined comment. If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vS1PbfNEqDCKX7YFNEvXmm7Lil3Z5unKivX5SA5avFE9tF95kgkbDVJpeRhX4lCig/pubhtml
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9. So as not to focus only on Dems or those who caucus with Democrats, here’s a contribution from Republican Mark Lenzi, a State Department official most famous for offering to donate his brain to science after a claimed brush with Havana syndrome.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10. Lenzi wrote to Twitter bluntly asking to remove 14 accounts distinguished among other things by skepticism of Russiagate: “The below are some Russian controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11.A government official, writing from a State department email, asks to “delete” 14 accounts that are engaged in legit speech and for which no evidence is shown they're Russian controlled or bots (in fact, we at Racket know some of these people). A clear First Amendment issue.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12. I noted before there were many crazy requests in Twitter records from officials wanting foes taken off Twitter, with Californian Adam Schiff’s effort to ban a reporter and stop “any and all search results” about a staffer making Angus King’s spreadsheet gambit look tame.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13. The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they're about. Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14. The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that's not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15. Beginning in March, we'll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16. Until then, if you found yourself on King's list, please DM or write in to http://Racket.News. I'm on vacation next week, but we'll mock up "Angus King Told Twitter I Was Suspicious, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" shirts when I get back.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17. Thanks to #TwitterFiles contributors like @ShellenbergerMD and @LHFang, and thanks also to Racket researchers. Searches were performed by a third party and material may have been left out.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #14 THE RUSSIAGATE LIES One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
2.At a crucial moment in a years-long furor, Democrats denounced a report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation, saying it was boosted by Russian “bots” and “trolls.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
3.Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence: “We are feeding congressional trolls.” “Not any…significant activity connected to Russia.” “Putting the cart before the horse assuming this is propaganda/bots.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
4.Twitter warned politicians and media the not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
5.On January 18th, 2018, Republican Devin Nunes submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee detailing abuses by the FBI in obtaining FISA surveillance authority against Trump-connected figures, including the crucial role played by the infamous “Steele Dossier”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
6.The Nunes assertions would virtually all be verified in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
7.Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a “joke”:
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9.On January 23rd, 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) published an open letter saying the hashtag “gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
9b. Feinstein/Schiff said the Nunes memo "distorts" classified information, but note they didn't call it incorrect.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
10.Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal followed suit, publishing a letter saying, “We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
11.Feinstein, Schiff, Blumenthal, and media members all pointed to the same source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts, under the auspices of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD).
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
12.The dashboard, which featured a crude picture of Vladimir Putin deviously blowing evil red Twitter birds into the atmosphere, was vague in how it reached its conclusions.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
13.Inside Twitter, executives panned Watts, Hamilton 68, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Two key complaints: Hamilton 68 seemed to be everyone’s only source, and no one was checking with Twitter.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
14.“I encourage you to be skeptical of Hamilton 68’s take on this, which as far as I can tell is the only source for these stories,” said Global Policy Communications Chief (and future WH and NSC spokesperson) Emily Horne. She added: “It’s a comms play for ASD.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
15.“All the swirl is based on Hamilton,” said Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
16.“If ASD isn’t going to fact-check with us, we should feel free to correct the record on their work,” said Policy VP Carlos Monje.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
17.Roth couldn’t find any Russian connection to #ReleaseTheMemo – at all. “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and… none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
18.“We investigated, found that engagement as overwhelmingly organic, and driven by VITs” – Very Important Tweeters, including Wikileaks and congressman Steve King.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
19.A staffer for “DiFi” – Feinstein – agreed it would be “helpful to know” how Hamilton 68 goes by “the process by which they decide an account is Russian.” But, only AFTER Feinstein published her letter about Russian influence.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
20.When Twitter spoke to a Blumenthal staffer, they tried to “wave him off” because “we don’t believe these are bots.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
21.Added another: “It might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer that it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there because it could come back to make him look silly.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
22.One Twitter exec even tried to negotiate, implying an undisclosed future PR concession if Blumenthal would lay off on this: “It seems like there are other wins we could offer him.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
23.Blumenthal published his letter anyway.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
24.Execs eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
25.They expressed this explicitly to Blumenthal’s camp, saying “Twitter spent a lot of resources” on this request and the reward from Blumenthal shouldn’t be round after round of requests.” “We can’t do a user notice each time this happens.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
26.Eventually Twitter staff realize “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions” but “just wants to get credit for pushing us further.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
27.Ultimately senior executives talked about “feeding congressional trolls” and compared their situation to the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
28.In the story, if you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want a glass of milk, which will lead to a wave of other exhausting requests, at the end of which he’ll want a glass of milk. And one more cookie.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
29.The metaphor for the endless Russia requests was so perfect, one exec wrote, “I’m legit embarrassed I didn’t think of that first.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
30.Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
31.Outside counsel from DC-connected firms like Debevoise and Plimpton advised Twitter to use language like, “With respect to particular hashtags, we take seriously any activity that may represent an abuse of our platform.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
32.As a result, reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
33.Russians weren’t just blamed for #ReleaseTheMemo but #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow – to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
34.Re #SchumerShutdown and #ReleaseTheMemo, the internal guidance was, “Both hashtags appear to be organically trending.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
35.NBC, Politico, AP, Times, Business Insider, and other media outlets who played up the “Russian bots” story – even Rolling Stone – all declined to comment for this story.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
36.The staffs of Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal also declined comment.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
37. Who did comment? Devin Nunes. "Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work... By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
38.This #ReleaseTheMemo episode is just one of many in the #TwitterFiles. The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
39.For more, watch @ShellenbergerMD, @BariWeiss, @LHFang, @DavidZweig, @AlexBerenson, and more. Read http://Taibbi.Substack.Com for more on why “America Needs Truth and Reconciliation on Russiagate.”
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
40.Twitter had no editorial input on this story. Searches were carried out by third parties, so the documents could be limited.
@mtaibbi - Matt Taibbi
8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”
