FASCISM Twitter Files Master List

jward

passin' thru

Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary​


Matt Taibbi​



It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.
In order, the Twitter Files threads:
  1. Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbi
    TWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY
    Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.
    Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”
    1a. Twitter Files Supplemental, December 6, 2022, by @mtaibbi
    THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER
    A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.
  2. Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022
    TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS
    Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.
    Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.
  1. Twitter Files, Part 3, by @mtaibbi, December 9, 2022
    THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 - January 6th, 2021
    First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.
  1. Twitter Files Part 4, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 10, 2022
    THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 7th, 2021
    This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.
    Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.
  2. Twitter Files Part 5, by @BariWeiss, December 11, 2022
    THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 8th, 2021
    As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.
    Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”
  1. Twitter Files Part 6, by @mtaibbi, December 16, 2022
    TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY
    Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.
    Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”
  1. Twitter Files Part 7, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 19, 2022
    THE FBI AND HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP
    The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.
    Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

The ten teleporter documents referred to in Mike Shellenberger’s FBI thread.
  1. Twitter Files Part 8, by @lhfang, December 20, 2022
    HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN
    Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.
    Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.
    Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:
  2. Twitter Files Part 9, by @mtaibbi, December 24th, 2022
    TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES”
    The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.
    Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”
  1. Twitter Files Part 10, by @DavidZweig, December 28, 2022
    HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
    David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”
    Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.
  1. and
  2. Twitter Files Parts 11 and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023
    HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN
    and
    TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”
    These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”
    The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.
  1. Government Agencies and NGOs
    CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
    CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces
    ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence
    FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI
    “OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA
    GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department
    USIC: United States intelligence community
    HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts
    EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter
    DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council
    IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin
  2. Twitter or Industry-specific terms
    PII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information” is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we interstitial that?”
    JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which complaints rise and are decided
    PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user, to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”
    SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with the most high-profile, controversial rulings
    SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content that have been reported for moderation review
    CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity
    SRT: Strategic Response Team
    GET: Global Escalation Team
    VF: Visibility Filtering
    GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a chronological record of all actions taken on an account
    VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.
    GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence
    BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically
    BME: Bulk Media Exploitation
    EP Abuse: Episodic abuse
    PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process, under a limited exception
    FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated. “Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts
    IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.
 

jward

passin' thru

What progressive people should know about the “Twitter Files”​


Chris Garaffa​


Photo: Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Credit — Matthew Keys
Internal Twitter documents released to select journalists have once again shown the deep connection that exists between the U.S. government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies and U.S.-based social media companies. The “Twitter Files” are a set of internal communications including emails between company executives as well as with politicians, the FBI, Pentagon and other agencies.

The close cooperation of social media companies and other online platforms with the state has been well-documented. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple and many more partner with the NSA’s PRISM program, giving the agency nearly unlimited access to online communications and account information. They comply with over-broad geofence warrants designed to get around the protections from unreasonable search and seizure outlined in the Fourth Amendment and upheld in the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling. Moderation teams make sure that news outlets from targeted countries like Russia, Iran and Venezuela, as well as individual accounts exposing the crimes of the U.S. state and its allies at home and abroad, are labeled “disinformation” and limited or shut down entirely.

Twitter, along with others, also allows companies like Dataminr and ZeroFox to access a “firehose” of Tweets, a feed of every post coming through the service. Dataminr has been used by law enforcement to track protests, including the uprising in the summer of 2020 against racism in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. These companies rely on access to social media feeds to collect and analyze information, which they then sell as trend data to corporate and government customers. After collaboration between Dataminr and police was exposed in 2020, the company stopped offering contracts to government agencies, prompting the federal government to move to the similar ZeroFox service instead at the end of the year. In further corporate-government collaboration, Dataminr counted among its investors both Twitter and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA.

Part Six of the Twitter Files, posted by journalist Matt Taibbi, details how the FBI and Twitter maintained a close relationship – as he calls it, the company worked as a “subsidiary” of the FBI. In one email from November 2022, an FBI agent opens with a friendly “Hello Twitter contacts” and suggests accounts “which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.” A Twitter employee responds, “I’ve reviewed this already… and suspended three of the accounts.”
Another email from the same time lists 25 Twitter accounts, of which 7 were permanently suspended, one was temporarily suspended, and 8 “had Tweets bounced,” or flagged for removal. The FBI explicitly requests that Twitter preserve information about the account owners and content to assist with possible legal proceedings, and that Twitter “voluntarily provide” “location information associated with the accounts.”

Part Eight of the Twitter Files, published in The Intercept by Lee Fang, exposes the partnership between Twitter and the Pentagon. In just one example, an official at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) requested verification or whitelisting of a number of Arabic-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.” The cagey language obscures the purposes of those accounts: to explicitly push U.S. propaganda around the Saudi war in Yemen, “promoting U.S.-supported militias in Syria and anti-Iran messages in Iraq.” Other accounts tweeted in Russian. The accounts were supposed to be explicitly labeled as being associated with the U.S. government, but in many cases were not.

The level of hypocrisy here cannot be overstated. While the U.S. government and social media companies have railed against countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia for allegedly running fake accounts to promote misinformation, it is doing that exact thing with legal cover and with the willing partnership of the social media companies themselves. Even the definition of “misinformation” is guided by the goals and needs of imperialism.

Elon Musk is no hero of free speech
In some ways, the information itself revealed in the Twitter Files has been overshadowed by the man who released it – Elon Musk. Since his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk has been heralded by the right as a fighter for free speech and reinstated a number of far-right personalities. By releasing these internal Twitter emails, Musk is pursuing his own political agenda and a bogus right-wing narrative about “censorship”.
That Musk is an odious right winger does not mean that the public cannot learn valuable information from the communications he releases as part of his battle with other ruling class factions. Likewise, Musk’s actions do not make him a friend to the movements against war and mass surveillance.

The application of “free speech” rights on Twitter is not even across the board. There was not a general amnesty for suspended accounts. Instead, the reinstatements are coming relatively slowly, indicating deliberate decision-making by Twitter’s new executives. In addition, a number of antifascist organizations and individuals have been targeted and suspended, as have those critical of Musk and his companies. While Twitter has always had problems with bigotry and was not a haven for oppressed people before the Musk purchase, rabid antisemitism, transphobia, misogyny and racism have been more prominent on the platform.

Musk and his supporters have framed the Twitter Files as opening a new period for the company. But it will be impossible for the billionaire and the multi-billion dollar company to avoid close collaboration with the U.S. government. In particular, another of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, holds billions of dollars of contracts with NASA, the Department of Defense, and USAID. It has recently launched its Starlink satellites to provide internet access in Ukraine as well as in Iran at moments where doing so was politically advantageous for Washington.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms have become the primary way that billions across the world get their information. They should not be controlled by private companies beholden to capital and acting at the behest of the US government to push propaganda. Instead, they should be operated as public utilities, democratically controlled by the workers who make them run and the people who use them with. This will allow transparent and open governance and rules processes to finally be implemented. Opening these platforms in a way that working-class people who run and use them have control over them can guarantee that they serve the needs of the people.
 

jward

passin' thru

Twitter Files: Company Shocked by False 'Russian Bot' Allegations from Deep State Linked Hamilton 68​


Allum Bokhari​



The latest batch of the Twitter Files shows that senior officials at the company, including the much-maligned Yoel Roth, were shocked at false allegations that American and British users of the platform were part of Russian influence operations.
The allegations came from Hamilton 68, a “dashboard” claiming to identify Russia-linked accounts on Twitter that was funded by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 30: Clint Watts, senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute Program on National Security, testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee March 30, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The project was led by Clint Watts, a former counterintelligence official at the FBI. The ASD advisory board at the time included former NSA chief Michael Chertoff, who was tapped to review the Biden Administration’s “disinformation governance board” last year, former Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, and arch-neoconservative Bill Kristol.

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. pic.twitter.com/Nug3CpF6iK
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
Senior Twitter employees were shocked at the inaccuracy of Hamilton 68, which they found did nothing but falsely label legitimate conservative discourse as “Russian influence.”
Despite his well-documented leftist sympathies, Twitter trust & safety official Yoel Roth took a principled stance, calling Hamilton 68’s findings “bullshit,” going so far as to suggest that Twitter push back publicly against it.
Hamilton 68, wrote Roth, “falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”
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“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian,” continued Roth.

4.“Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” pic.twitter.com/g7Ozzj4ST8
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
In another email, Roth even argued that the company should warn targeted users that they had been falsely accused of being Russian assets.
“Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse,” wrote Roth.

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.” pic.twitter.com/LMrgWVKe7k
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
Twitter executives concurred with Roth.
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.”
However, some voices in the company, notably Carlos Monje and Emily Horne, warned of the potential political blowback if they pushed back against ASD.

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. pic.twitter.com/JvfSkyUlfL
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly,” said Horne.
“I also have been very frustrated in not calling out Hamilton 68 more publicly, but understand we have to play a longer game here,” said Monje.
Both Horne and Monje now work for the Biden Administration. Monje is a senior advisor to transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Horne is a spokeswoman for the White House and the National Security Council.
 

jward

passin' thru
It's a rather odd system- we have this as the overview of the files thread, then go along and do each of the file drops in a thread of it's own, with specific tags and structure to the threads titles, is the way Dennis explained he wanted it. . . but it doesn't hurt to have things dropped in this thread too. imho.
 

jward

passin' thru
New 'Twitter Files' Reveals Massive Conspiracy To Censor Accurate Pandemic Information
Dylan Housman

3–4 minutes

A new batch of “Twitter Files” from journalist Matt Taibbi reveals a mass conspiracy by elements of the government, academia and Big Tech to censor certain narratives about COVID-19.

The Virality Project, a coalition of academic institutions led by Stanford University, pushed harsher censorship standards on Twitter and collaborated with government agencies to classify accurate statements as “misinformation,” according to new emails published by Taibbi. The Virality Project worked with the government to launch a system that flagged millions of posts per day as misinformation for review, according to emails.

In addition to Twitter, the Virality Project flagged content for Facebook, Google, Medium, Tiktok and Pinterest, and subsidiaries of those companies like Instagram and YouTube. Twitter agreed to join the project and first began receiving weekly “anti-vax disinformation” reports in February of 2021, according to Taibbi.

As of July 2020, Twitter’s guidance for COVID-19 content required posts to be “demonstrably false” or contain an “assertion of fact” to be censored. The Virality Project pushed Twitter towards a harsher stance, telling the company that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy” should also be actionable.

One example of content that was flagged despite not being false was concerns over vaccine passport programs. Opposition to those policies “have driven a larger anti-vaccination narrative about the loss of rights and freedoms,” Virality Project said, flagging it as a “misinformation event.”

Virality Project also flagged true stories of vaccine side effects as misinformation, including from corporate outlets like the New York Times that reported on blood clots in vaccine recipients. “Increased doubts in one manufacturer’s vaccine may lead to hesitancy about vaccination overall,” the group said.

The coalition also claimed that individuals who were “just asking questions” about vaccines or vaccine policies were engaging in a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.”

Several government agencies, including the CDC, the State Department and the Pentagon partners with the Virality Project either directly or through intermediary groups. (RELATED: Jim Jordan Spars With Dem Rep Over Censorship Of ‘Lawful Speech’ On Twitter)

Twitter was seemingly open to the cooperation with the project. Later in February 2021, after the company began receiving the weekly disinformation reports, several top executives were invited to join the project’s reporting system.

Previous Twitter Files reporting showed that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center was flagging factual posts for Twitter as “foreign disinformation.”
 

jward

passin' thru
Michael Shellenberger
@ShellenbergerMD

Whistleblower tells me that the Censorship Industrial Complex is preparing “a full court press against the Twitter Files reporters….The press will be targeting each of you, your histories, and your personal and business connections.”
To which I say: Bring it on, fascists.


4:11 PM · Apr 6, 2023
 

Dennis Olson

Chief Curmudgeon
_______________
Actually, I’m not sure that belongs on this thread of actions against Twitter and those publicizing the efforts to keep the government collusion under wraps. It really doesn’t go on this thread.
 
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