INFOGRAPHIC: Key Revelations of the “Twitter Files”
Files show how the government forced the social media giant to censor a large number accounts
Documents leaked by Twitter’s new owner, tech billionaire Elon MuskThe social media company is intertwined in a government/private partnership. censorship apparatus.
Twitter took down or removed content about various topics, including irregularities during the 2020 elections and mail-in voting issues. There were also aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The documents show that the company was subject to government pressure to remove such content from the platform and its purveyors, but most of the time it cooperated with the requests for censorship.
INFOGRAPHIC Click on the image to enlarge
Musk took control of Twitter in October and made the company public. Musk fired approximately half the staff, and much of the senior management. He promised to change the direction of Twitter. The “#TwitterFiles” Releases are part of his promise to focus on transparency in the company.
He allowed several independent journalists to submit search queries that were then used by Twitter staff to search through the company’s internal documents, sometimes under the condition that the resulting stories would be first published on the platform itself.
The journalists responsible for the releases were journalists Matt Taibbi (a former Rolling Stone contributing editor) and Bari Weiss (a former editor at The New York Times as well as The Wall Street Journal). Both are liberals disillusioned by the more extreme currents in progressivism and Neoliberalism.
The releases were also done by Lee Fang, David Zweig, ex-New York Times reporter Alex Berenson and Michael Shellenberger, independent journalists.
Only a small portion of the documents that were reviewed by journalists has been released. They’ve also redacted the names of employees involved, other than some high-level executives.
The documents clearly show that FBI The United States has been under significant scrutiny by federal, state and local authorities. They have also tried to suppress legal speech online. That is what many conservative and traditionally liberal commentators consider a violation to the First Amendment.
Interviews with Elon Musk as he arrives at Offshore Northern Seas 2022 meeting (ONS) in Stavanger Norway, Aug. 29, 2022.CARINA JOHANSEN/NTB/AFP via Getty Images
Twitter, which is a key hub for political speech, has been censored. Many news stories have broken on Twitter in recent years and a significant portion of the nation’s political debate takes place on the platform, as it allows an efficient way for direct and public interaction between all on the platform, from the most prominent to the least.
Twitter did not censor some requests for censorship, but it was clear that the company did so out of principle. Rather, executives sometimes couldn’t find a policy they could use as a justification. The documents reveal that Jack Dorsey, the previous chief executive of Twitter, was pressured by his lieutenants into expanding the policies to allow for more rigorous censorship.
“The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that (by just reducing prevalence overall),” said Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of Trust and Safety, which governs content policy, in a 2021 internal message published by Weiss.
“We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations—especially for other policy domains.”
Many times, Twitter leaders allowed the government to silence its critics via the platform.
Many requests for censorship were received with an imperious attitude, especially from the Biden White HouseNot only that, but there were also some from Rep. Adam Schiff (D.Calif.), who was at the time the head of the powerful House Intelligence Committee.
Around November 2020, Schiff’s office sent a list of dema Twitter, even for the removal “any and all content” about the committee’s staff and suspend “many” accounts including that of Paul Sperry, a journalist with RealClearInvestigations.
Schiff’s office accused Sperry of harassment and promoting “false QAnon conspiracies.”
Sperry dismissed the allegation. He asked Schiff to provide evidence and announced that he was denying it. considering legal action.
Schiff’s demands were apparently a response to Sperry’s articles that speculated on the identity of the White House whistleblower that alleged a “quid pro quo” Between President Donald Trump & Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Sperry used anonymous sources to report that the whistleblower was most likely Eric Ciaramella, a former CIA analyst. He was heard talking in the White House alongside Sean Misko (a holdover staffer) from the Obama administration. Misko later joined Schiff’s committee.
Twitter rejected Schiff’s demands, save for reviewing “again” Sperry’s account activity. Sperry’s account was suspended months later. Taibbi said he wasn’t able to find out why.
Under Pressure
Twitter was informed that the FBI had sent numerous censorship requests to Twitter. These were simply meant to bring information to the FBI’s attention. It was up to the company what to do. The documents reveal that Twitter executives felt obliged to comply with these requests even though they were unable to justify it internally.
Many forms were used to apply pressure from the government. The FBI would follow up on its requests and if they weren’t fulfilled, Twitter had to explain itself to the bureau. If Twitter’s position on an issue differed from the one expected by the government, company executives would be questioned and made aware that the bureau, and even the broader intelligence community, wasn’t happy. The executives would then go into triage mode and rush to save the relationship it believed was essential.
Another point of pressure was corporate media. If Twitter wouldn’t do what it was told fast enough, the media would be provided with information portraying Twitter as ignoring some problem of paramount importance, such as possible foreign influence operations on its platform.
One censorship request, for instance, targeted an account allegedly run by Russian intelligence, though Twitter wasn’t given any evidence of it.
“Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,” Taibbi reports that one Twitter executive who previously worked for the CIA said this,
“Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution and reporting on it.”
The internal email suggests that Twitter, despite having no concrete evidence to back it, wouldn’t dare to disobey the request because of the media fallout of the government publicly labeling the account as run by Russian intelligence.
Congress was perhaps the heaviest sword of Damocles hanging over Twitter’s head. Lawmakers could not only spur negative media coverage, but also tie up the company in hearings and investigations, or even introduce legislation that could hurt Twitter’s bottom line.
On Jan. 21, 2017, the CIA headquarters was seen sporting the logo of the CIA. (Olivier Doulier/Pool/Getty Images)Just like Sen. Mark Warner (D. Va.), was. pushing Twitter To provide more evidence of Russian influence operations using its platform in 2017, he also teamed with Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D.Minn.) and John McCain, (R.Ariz.), proposed a bill that would have required extensive disclosures about online political advertising.
Twitter managers became convinced that lawmakers were using Twitter to leak information and create negative news stories. Twitter was also trying to placate them, taking increasingly strict measures against alleged Russia-linked accounts.
While the FBI was merely alerting Twitter to the activities of malign actors abroad, many of those censorship requests were simply lists that contained little or no evidence of foreign links. At times, Twitter tried to ask for more information, noting that it couldn’t find any evidence on its end, but often it simply complied. It was impossible for Twitter to do its due diligence on each request—there were simply too many, according to Taibbi.
One request revealed by Taibbi As claimed “the attached email accounts” They were created “possibly for use in influence operations, social media collection, or social engineering.”
“Without further explanation, Twitter would be forwarded an excel doc,” Taibbi said.
The political right was the most targeted group for censorship requests. Some researchers said that the right was much more involved in spreading misinformation, but the documents indicate that the censorship wasn’t so much a matter of a right-left dichotomy, but rather a pro- and anti-establishment one. Even left-leaning accounts could be targeted if they diverged from the official government narrative.
Moreover, the right didn’t appear too keen on demanding censorship to begin with. Taibbi couldn’t find a single censorship request from the Trump campaign, Trump White House, or even any Republican, though he was told there were some.
However, it seemed that there was no interest in targeting misinformation from the establishment.
Hunter Biden’s Laptop
Twitter’s suppression of the 2020 New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden, son of then-candidate Joe Biden, was dissected in the Twitter release in particular detail. According to reports, Roth, the head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, was regularly invited to meet with the FBI and other intelligence agencies in order to get briefings about the online activities of foreign governments. Roth was expected to receive briefings on the online activities of foreign regimes during the several months before the 2020 election. “hack-and-leak” Russian operation, possible in October and possibly Hunter Biden.
The FBI alleged there was some evidence of Russian influence operation related to Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine. But the bureau was also aware that Hunter Biden left his laptop with a trove of explosive information in a New York repair shop and that a copy of it was handed to Trump’s then-lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In December 2019, the FBI took the laptop to the repair shop and placed Giuliani under surveillance until August 2020 when Giuliani was given the copy. The FBI knew that the information on the laptop was not hacked or a part of a Russian plot.
Twitter executives had no doubt that the FBI was correct when the Post reported the story.
“This feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation,” Roth commented He acknowledged that he didn’t have evidence to support the claim in an internal email. “questionable origins” Hunter Biden apparently took the laptop to a computer repair shop and left it there.
Roth noted that the story didn’t actually violate any Twitter rules. However, it was noted “unsafe” Twitter has blocked them under its policy against hacking materials. However, there is no evidence that they were hacked.
Twitter’s then-Deputy General Counsel James Baker backed the censorship move, saying it was “reasonable” To “assume” Information about Hunter Biden was hacked.
Baker was FBI General Counsel up to May 2018. Baker joined Twitter in June 2020. Baker was closely associated with the Russia investigation scandal, where the FBI embroiled Trump’s campaign and later his administration in thorough investigations based upon fabricated and thin allegations that Trump colluded in Russia to win the 2016 election. The allegations were produced by operatives funded by the campaign of Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In fact, the FBI knew nothing of intelligence that suggested a terrorist plot. “hack-and-leak” Assisting in operation before the 2020 election testified in November 2022 by Elvis Chan, head of the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office, which was responsible for communications with Twitter and other tech companies with headquarters in its jurisdiction.
Shellenberger reported that Twitter found very few Russian activities ahead of the 2020 elections.
Shadowbanning
Twitter has long denied the practice of shadowbanning—suppressing the reach of an account without informing the user. The denial, however, specifically defined shadowbanning as making the person’s content invisible to others. What people have been complaining about is that Twitter would suppress how many people see their content without making it invisible altogether—Twitter has been doing that a lot, the internal materials show.
One Twitter engineer told Weiss: “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”
Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine and one early critics of COVID-19 lockdowns, was one of those whose accounts were secretly throttled.
Others included Dan Bongino, conservative podcaster and former Secret Service agent, and Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, the country’s largest conservative youth group.
COVID-19
Twitter has extensively suppressed all information about the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything about the origin, treatment and policies that were put in place to control its spread, including the vaccines, had to be consistent with the official position of Congress, as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Zweig said that he “found countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC guidance or differed from establishment views.”
@KelleyKga, Twitter user and self-described fact-checker, criticised a tweet that falsely claimed COVID-19 was a leading cause for death by disease among children. @KelleyKga noted that such a claim requires cherry-picking data, and back his argument with data compiled by the CDC. However, his criticism was labeled as “misleading” It was also removed. However, the tweet with the false claim wasn’t deleted.
Euzebiusz jamrozik wrote on Twitter a precise summary of studies on COVID-19 side effects. The tweet was tagged “misleading” Deleted.
Twitter may have suppressed some information at times, but many COVID-19-related requests were made from the government, and even directly from Biden White House, internal documents show.
Rob Flaherty, White House Digital Director, accused Twitter of stealing his email. “bending over backwards” It was impossible to refuse one of his censorship requests. “total Calvinball”—a game where rules are made up along the way. The email wasn’t part of the Twitter files. It was part of a ongoing lawsuit filed by Louisiana’s attorneys general against the Biden administration.
Another White House staffer requested that Twitter censor a tweet from Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is a long-standing critic of vaccination. One staffer thought about whether Twitter could be used to censor Robert Kennedy Jr’s tweet. “get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.”
“And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre that would be great,” He said this in an email dated January 23, 2021.
The administration wasn’t always trying to get such content removed. People who simply expressed their opinions “hesitancy” According to documents, vaccines’ content was supposed to be kept from reaching a significant audience.
There was much at stake for the Biden administration as the vaccine rollout is one of its most prominent and important tasks. Other stakeholders were also involved.
Scott Gottlieb was a board member of Pfizer and the head of its regulatory and compliance committee. Pfizer is the pharmaceutical giant that created the COVID-19 vaccination and has made tens and billions of dollars from the sales.
Gottlieb has sent at least three requests to Twitter. One was directed at a doctor who claimed that natural immunity to COVID-19 is better than vaccination. Twitter deleted the tweet, even though it was right.
Justin Hart, an author who had been arguing on Twitter against school closings, was also targeted by another request. Hart pointed out that COVID-19-related deaths in children are very rare. Gottlieb submitted the request shortly after Pfizer approved the use of its vaccine for children. Twitter didn’t comply with the request.
Berenson, a former NY Times reporter was also targeted in another request. Gottlieb claimed that Berenson’s criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of COVID-19 response in the Biden administration, was causing threats of physical violence toward Fauci. Twitter suspended Berenson’s account shortly after.
Gottlieb sent his request to the same Twitter official that was a contact person for White House censorship requests.
Trump’s Deplatforming
Trump was especially effective on Twitter. His soundbites were honed over decades in dealing with New York press. They earned Trump some 90,000,000 followers. Trump’s Twitter presidency, however, brewed scorn in the beltway, especially among the foreign policy crowd that was used to diplomatic subtlety.
Twitter’s removal of Trump a few days after the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and riot at the U.S. Capitol appears to be one of those instances where Twitter executives acted on their own, breaking the platform’s content policies in suppressing the voice of a sitting American president, internal documents indicate.
Twitter suspended Trump’s account on Jan. 8, 2021, after the president made two posts.
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” said one of Trump’s tweets.
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th,” Read the other.
Twitter moderators and supervisors agreed that the Tweets didn’t violate any rules.
“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” One staffer wrote it. “It’s pretty clear he’s saying the ‘American Patriots’ are the ones who voted for him and not the terrorists (we can call them that, right?) from Wednesday.”
Higher executives, under pressure from their many anti-Trump employees, wouldn’t accept that conclusion and continued to push for construing Trump’s comments as malicious.
“The biggest question is whether a tweet line the one this morning from Trump, which isn’t a rule violation on its face, is being used as coded incitement to further violence,” Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, argued In an internal message
Another Twitter moderation team quickly furnished Gadde’s argument with a narrative. Trump was a “leader of a violent extremist group who is glorifying the group and its recent actions,” According to internal messages, the team reached a conclusion.
Memo on Undermining Nunes
Devin Nunes (R.-Calif.), submitted his memo detailing FBI surveillance violations in pursuit of the Trump Russia investigation. As confirmed later by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the memo was accurate on almost all points of substance.
The corporate media dismissed the memo and referred to it as “a joke”. “joke,” But it gained significant attention on social media. The memo was then claimed by several legislators and legacy media that it was promoted online by accounts connected to Russian influence operations.
Twitter did not find any evidence of Russian influence on the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.
All claims were sourced to Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), an organization that was established in 2017 under the German Marshall Fund. It is a think tank funded and supported by the American, German and Swedish governments.
The U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments are closely connected to the ASD. Laura Rosenberger, an ex-Clinton campaign advisor who served in various positions at the State Department as well as the National Security Council, was the head of the ASD at the time. Its Advisory Council comprises John Podesta, former Clinton campaign chairman, Michael Morell, former CIA chief, and Mike Chertoff, former head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Twitter officials were unsure how the ASD reached its conclusion.
“We investigated, found that engagement was overwhelmingly organic and driven by strong VIT [Very Important Tweeters] engagement (including Wikileaks, [Donald Trump, Jr., Rep. Steve King, and others),” Trust and Safety head Roth wrote in an internal message.
In fact, the “dashboard” ASD used to make its claims had already been reverse-engineered by Twitter—a fact Roth didn’t want to disclose to the media.
Twitter tried debunking the story behind the scenes without giving out such details, but to no avail. Initially, reporters ran with the story without even reaching out to Twitter, Roth wrote.
The initial letter on the matter from Schiff and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee at the time, also came out before giving Twitter a chance to respond, internal messages say.
Twitter tried to stop Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) from piling on with his own letter, but again failed.
“Blumenthal isn’t always looking for real and nuanced solutions. He wants to get credit for pushing us further. And he may move on only when the press moves on,” commented Carlos Monje, Twitter’s then-Public Policy director, in an internal message. Formerly a Department of Transportation official, Monje returned to the department under the Biden administration.
In the end, Twitter never publicly challenged the Russia narrative.
Aiding Pentagon Psyops
In 2017, a Pentagon official asked Twitter to “whitelist” several accounts the Defense Department was using to spread its message in the Middle East. Twitter obliged, giving the accounts similar privileges it was reserving for verified accounts.
Later, however, the Pentagon removed any apparent connections between the accounts and the U.S. government, making them de facto surreptitious. Even though the accounts should have been removed under Twitter’s inauthentic activity policy, the company left them up for several years, independent journalist Fang reported.
Federal ‘Belly button’ of Investigation
The FBI served as a conduit for other government agencies to pass information to Twitter and ask for favors, according to Taibbi.
In one exchange, FBI cyber head Chan explained that the bureau would funnel to Twitter communications from the U.S. intelligence community (USIC), but other election-related communications would come from the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan said. “CISA will know what’s going on in each state.”
He then asked if Twitter would like to communicate with CISA separately or if it would prefer to “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the [U.S. government].”
Twitter executives were shocked to discover that agents from the FBI were specifically trained to search Twitter and flag content policy violations.
Twitter has hired at least 15 ex-FBI agents since 2017, furthering the agency’s integration with the platform. It is so common that there was even an internal discussion group at Twitter for ex-folk agents.
The FBI responded Twitter files disclosures within a statement that labels the reporting “misinformation” Spread by “conspiracy theorists and others … with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Department of Homeland Censorship
DHS has managed, in order to protect critical infrastructure, to include speech policing. Just before leaving the White House in January 2017, President Barack Obama declared elections to be critical infrastructure. The DHS’s CISA then made it its job not only to protect elections from hackers, but also from misinformation and disinformation.
CISA formed a partnership with several private research organizations in July 2020 to study and counter electoral threats. They called themselves the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and included the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, a social media analytics firm.
The Atlantic Council is a NATO thinktank. It maintains close relationships with the government, in particular the intelligence and foreign policy community. Its 200-member board includes seven ex-CIA heads as well as a variety of high-ranking national security officials.
In practice, EIP searched social media looking for information that could be used to threaten elections. “misleading” way. This content will be sent to social media companies to be removed or suppressed.
Alex Stamos, EIP leader, said that the group was established to “fill the gap” in countering election disinformation that the government wasn’t authorized to address.
The government isn’t allowed to interfere with the lawful speech of Americans, which is protected under the First Amendment.
The EIP claimed credit in its final report following the 2020 election for helping to remove or suppress 22 million pieces online content, and many other entire websites. “narratives.”
In general, the EIP participants were also involved in suppression of information about COVID-19 elections and 2022.
CISA tried to distance itself from the EIP’s censorship role, saying it never sent the EIP any examples of potential misinformation.
“CISA does not censor speech, period. CISA’s mission is to build resilience to disinformation and foreign malign influence activities that threaten critical infrastructure, including election infrastructure,” The Epoch Times was contacted by a spokesperson from CISA.
“We work in a non-partisan manner with state and local election officials to equip the American public with accurate information about the conduct and security of their elections. Online content platform operators, as always, make their own decisions regarding the content on their platforms.”
A CISA official told The Epoch Times that the agency doesn’t send content removal requests to social media.
This assertion seems to conflict with other publicly accessible information.
Local election officials are encouraged to report on the DHS-funded Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center. “misinformation” Oder “disinformation” EI-ISAC. CISA will then receive the information. “will submit it to the relevant social media platform(s) for review,” An online EI-ISAC document says.
The official explained that CISA was sending information identified by state election officials as possible election security-related disinformation, to social media platforms, in the 2018 and 2020 elections cycles. However, not in the 2022 election cycle.
A Shift In Priorities
Mike Benz, a former State Department employee, managed the Cyber Portfolio in Trump’s administration. He traced the government/private censorship apparatus back to the foreign policy regime-change infrastructure.
The establishment saw the growth of social networks in the 2000s as a positive thing, since it was invaluable in helping to accelerate insurgencies. The United States has a long history supporting local opposition to rogue regimes or dictators. Social media enabled such groups to organize mass protests quickly, as was demonstrated by the Arab Spring, Benz argued.
This is why the U.S. foreign-policy establishment supports free expression online.
The establishment lost faith in free speech after the 2016 Brexit and Trump election upsets. Both events were seen as undermining NATO and both were blamed on foreign influence on social media—specifically Russia. Particularly the U.S. and UK governments saw the need for identifying and eliminating Russian influence operations online, and created a government-private apparatus.
Benz observed that even though the Trump-Russia investigation proved to be a dud the establishment crowd had no choice but to recognize that the populist message was primarily driven by domestic forces.
The apparatus that was originally created to combat foreign influence seems to have shifted its focus to domestic speech.
Because the Constitution prohibits government interference in American political speech, however, the government cannot directly target lawful domestic speech.
Benz argued that despite these obstacles, the government still found indirect ways to support domestic censorship.
Benz identified one method: Grants to academic institutions for research on misinformation and development of countermeasures.
The National Science Foundation is a federal agency that finances non-medical research. It has provided nearly $40 million in funding to 42 U.S. universities. “disinformation” Oder “misinformation” Benz was discovered by the Biden administration.
A $3 million grant went to two members of the EIP, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, and the Stanford Internet Observatory.
George Washington University was awarded a grant of $300,000. This was specifically for the purpose of countering the crisis. “populist” The messaging of politicians in the United States, and many other countries.
Benz was so upset by the encroaching censorship, he started a Foundation for Freedom Online group (FFO), dedicated to restoring freedoms of expression on the internet.
It is possible that the censorship machinery was exposed to the public.
The Biden administration was forced last year to put on hold the DHS’s planned Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz has resigned as its newly-nominated head.
“Right now, the main source of support I ask is be passionate zealots for this,” Benz said during his interview on EpochTV’s “Over the Target” Lee Smith with you in December
“Tell your parents, tell your wife and the kids at the dinner table, tell your friends. If you’re taking rests in between ping pong games, play these Youtube videos for people. All of this starts at the guerilla level,” He stated.
“This stuff speaks for itself. It will be a cult classic just by virtue of the fact that it exists now. Because once you see this, I’ll guarantee you, you will see this everywhere. This stuff is like a secret decoder ring that will help you slice through the daily news items you see in the censorship space.”
According to him, the Twitter files are used as the “one hole … that is breaking this Titanic ship of censorship.”
Petr is a New York reporter. He covered topics such as politics and economics, education, law enforcement, and other national issues.
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