Twitter Files Journalist Tells Ben Shapiro FBI Payments Shaped Twitter Policy: “Dangerous Incentive”

According to a Twitter Files journalist who spoke with Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro, the FBI’s payment of millions of dollars to Twitter to flag conservative tweets and accounts in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election created a “dangerous incentive” for the platform to comply with the bureau’s wishes.

Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger claimed that the payments were only one way the FBI persuaded Twitter to support the Biden campaign. Shellenberger was one of four individuals selected by Twitter owner Elon Musk to filter and distribute damning internal messages. According to an email Shellenberger made public earlier this week, Twitter accepted $3.4 million from the FBI as payment for the costs associated with “processing” the FBI’s demands for content moderation.

In an interview with Shapiro on Wednesday’s episode of his well-liked podcast and radio show, Shellenberger said, “What was intriguing about that is that they had decided they had not been taking the money before 2019.” “They then made the decision to take it in 2020.” This is just one of many indications that Twitter was essentially ultimately giving in to pressure from the intelligence community.

Of course, it provides an incentive, especially for a company like Twitter that was at the moment in the red. requesting the censoring of correct information while simultaneously asking the federal government to provide them millions of cash. It’s a tremendously risky inducement.

Shapiro referred to Shellenberger’s most recent disclosure as the Twitter Files’ most incriminating to date. Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Lee Fang have all narrated other tranches that have been made available on the platform. According to Shapiro, the FBI’s pressure on Twitter’s previous administration may have led to the platform’s repression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

By 2020, James Baker, a former top FBI lawyer who was instrumental in the spread of the Trump-Russia connection fabrication, had assumed a prominent job at Twitter, where he pressured the company to suppress the laptop story after it was first reported by the New York Post. In addition to exposing Hunter Biden as a venal degenerate, the laptop provided solid proof that the younger Biden sold his father’s influence to the adversaries of the United States. According to recent polls, burying the truth probably cost Trump a second term.

Twitter suspended the Post’s account and buried the report as a result of internal pressure from Baker and pressure from his former FBI colleagues in Washington. Shapiro pointed out that the degree of the FBI’s control over the effort is yet unknown.

Shapiro pointed out that there is “no kind of unambiguous document” in which the FBI just instructs Twitter to remove the Hunter Biden laptop. But documents that appear to be still secret were transferred between the FBI and Twitter.

Shellenberger concurred and added that Baker wasn’t the first former FBI agent Twitter has employed.

He said, “It’s crucial to remember that there were several top FBI personnel here at Twitter, including the former deputy chief of staff to James Comey, the FBI director at the time, as well as the general counsel (Baker), the chief counsel of FBI, who came to Twitter in the summer of 2020.

According to Shellenberger, “When you look at the engagements between FBI staff and Twitter employees, and you look at the behaviors of previous FBI senior executives at Twitter, it looks like a pattern of a disinformation campaign aimed at Twitter and at news media companies, essentially to prime, prepare, or condition them to perceive any information about under Biden as Russian disinformation.

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The FBI pressured Twitter’s Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth to find evidence of foreign intervention in the election, which Roth repeatedly claimed was not evident, according to other messages made public by Shellenberger.

They would claim, “Well, we uncovered 50 accounts that may have previously been associated with Russian hackers, but there’s very little activity on them, very few retweets or follows,” according to Shellenberger. “There simply wasn’t anything there, then. Everything appeared… pretextual, designed to train Twitter staff to believe there was significant foreign meddling when there wasn’t.

According to Shellenberger, Roth’s behavior while running Twitter’s content police has changed as a result of his most recent discoveries.

After spending more time with the files, my opinions on Yoel Roth have actually shifted a little, “Shellenberger claimed. “In my opinion, he was unquestionably quite progressive and woke. In 2017, we observed him to be quite censorious, accusing the White House of being full of Nazis. He was a more moderate figure in the organization by 2020 nevertheless. I would opine. He was a trustworthy executive who was a company man, in my opinion.

But he was also receiving a lot of attention from Jim Baker, Twitter’s deputy general counsel and a former FBI counsel, said Shellenberger. When I reflect back on Roth, I believe that he was essentially a target of a disinformation operation intended to manipulate him and was utterly ignorant of this.

And I believe that today we can see that it has the FBI’s fingerprints all over it, he added.