Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY... Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth... 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... 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... It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts. 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... “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... 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?” “I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That's crazy,” said @Tiberius444... 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.” 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?... 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... 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"
One liberal (who claimed that the Twitter files were "just a campaign to give right wing journalists their 15 seconds of twitter fame") first claimed that those disagreeing couldn't "produce a single tweet proving their narratives", then when I provided one to see what his cope would be, claimed that it was "all tweet, no proof". I then linked to a screenshot of an email from the FBI asking Twitter to take down content. He took a while, but his cope to that was that it was nothing new
ACLU on Twitter - "Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation"
"The First Amendment bars the government from deciding for us what is true or false, online or anywhere. Our government can’t use private pressure to get around our constitutional rights."
Damn Right Wing ACLU!
This liberal's amazing cope was that "the intercept does republican propaganda from a supposed leftist point of view". So I classified it as a Poe and decided to stop baiting the troll
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Mainstream outlets try to grind every news story into grade D partisan hamburger and Twitter Files coverage is no exception. The Washington Post even called me a “conservative journalist” for a few minutes... Twitter did have a clear political monoculture. I ran searches for both “RNC” and “DNC,” cross-referenced against senior executives. “RNC” turned up pages about Republicans suing the company. “DNC” returned mountains of insistent moderation demands. Some of the latter were quite funny and revealing. In multiple instances Twitter initially decided not to remove videos lampooning Joe Biden because they were obvious parodies “unlikely to cause offline harm or generate confusion.”... Usually Twitter was responding to complaints from one very voluble DNC staffer and still applied warning labels to such content. In one case, they refused to do either. “Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President's speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the staffer, who fumed, "These rules need revision." In the process, they sent a graph of their bizarre moderation flow chart, which among other things showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material. This seemed more interesting than the fate of a Biden coughing mashup. If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcment officials are pushing on the levers."
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats. The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.” One would think that would be good news. The agencies seemed to feel otherwise... some of the “bibliography” materials cited by the FITF are sourced to intelligence officials, who in turn cited the public sources. The FBI responded to Friday’s report by saying it “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.” That may be true, but we haven’t seen that in the documents to date. Instead, we’ve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans – and Billy Baldwin"
Thread by @ShellenbergerMD on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "TWITTER FILES: PART 7 The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop... In Twitter Files #6, we saw the FBI relentlessly seek to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data. In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published... FBI Special 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 next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans... @mtaibbi described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article. Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms. First, it's important to understand that Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China's government, for which Hunter offered no real work... And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation... They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg... Were the FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden based on *any* new intel? No, they weren't “Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016,” admitted FBI agent Elvis Chan... Indeed, Twitter executives *repeatedly* reported very little Russian activity... In fact, Twitter debunked false claims by journalists of foreign influence on its platform... After FBI asks about a WaPo story on alleged foreign influence in a pro-Trump tweet, Twitter's Roth says, "The article makes a lot of insinuations... but we saw no evidence that that was the case here (and in fact, a lot of strong evidence pointing in the other direction).” It's not the first time that Twitter's Roth has pushed back against the FBI. In January 2020, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process... Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting... Despite Twitter’s pushback, the FBI repeatedly requests information from Twitter that Twitter has already made clear it will not share outside of normal legal channels. Then, in July 2020, the FBI’s Elvis Chan arranges for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so that the FBI can share information about threats to the upcoming elections... Yoel Roth told @karaswisher that he had been primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out. When it did, Roth said, "It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells."... FBI’s Chan asks Twitter: does anyone there have top secret clearance? When someone mentions Jim Baker, Chan responds, "I don't know how I forgot him" — an odd claim, given Chan's job is to monitor Twitter, not to mention that they worked together at the FBI. Who is Jim Baker? He's former general counsel of the FBI (2014-18) & one of the most powerful men in the U.S. intel community. Baker has moved in and out of government for 30 years, serving stints at CNN, Bridgewater (a $140 billion asset management firm) and Brookings. As general counsel of the FBI, Baker played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump. Baker wasn't the only senior FBI exec. involved in the Trump investigation to go to Twitter. Dawn Burton, the former dep. chief of staff to FBI head James Comey, who initiated the investigation of Trump, joined Twitter in 2019 as director of strategy. As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — "Bu alumni" — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals... Chan & Roth had set up an encrypted messaging network so employees from FBI & Twitter could communicate. They also agree to create a “virtual war room” for “all the [Internet] industry plus FBI and ODNI” [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]... Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy... it's inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The @nypost had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019. As for the FBI, it likely would have taken a few *hours* for it to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden. Indeed, it only took a few days for journalist @peterschweizer to prove it... There is evidence that FBI agents have warned elected officials of foreign influence with the primary goal of leaking the information to the news media. This is a political dirty trick used to create the perception of impropriety. In 2020, the FBI gave a briefing to Senator Grassley and Johnson, claiming evidence of “Russian interference” into their investigation of Hunter Biden. The briefing angered the Senators, who say it was done to discredit their investigation... Notably, then-FBI General Counsel Jim Baker was investigated *twice,* in 2017 and 2019, for leaking information to the news media... In the end, the FBI's influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story. By Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time... And the pressure from the FBI on social media platforms continues In Aug 2022, Twitter execs prepared for a meeting with the FBI, whose goal was “to convince us to produce on more FBI EDRs" EDRs are an “emergency disclosure request,” a warrantless search."
Thread by @lhfang on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "TWITTER FILES PART 8. *How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign*. Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operations... Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active... many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts... The conduct with the U.S. military’s covert network stands in stark contrast with how Twitter has boasted about rapidly identifying and taking down covert accounts tied to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela, and others since 2016."
Lee Fang - Wikipedia - "Fang has been described as a "liberal" by The New York Times, and as both "liberal" and "progressive" by Salon. Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait described Fang as "left-wing" and wrote "Like many Bernie Sanders supporters, Fang often lacerates mainstream liberals both for insufficient populist zeal and, on occasion, for excessive focus on identity at the expense of class. His views on economics put him well to the left of the Democratic Party, while his views on race and gender would sit comfortably in the middle of it, and often put him at odds with fellow leftists."
I saw someone claiming the Twitter Files were all released by "conservative journalists". Remember, kids, you're only a liberal till you do something they disapprove of!
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND "OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES". 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. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.” 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? 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... 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... The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government... 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... Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish... There were so many government requests, Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them... Even ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker agreed: “Odd that they are searching for violations of our policies.” 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... The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions... “more aggressive” “government partners” had closed Twitter’s “window” of independence. “Other Government Agencies” ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia... Should the government be allowed to try to prevent Americans (and others) from seeing pro-Maduro or anti-Ukrainian accounts? Often intel reports are just long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives”"
Thread by @davidzweig on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*...
The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @TheFP showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes... In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month. Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter. In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson... Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts... Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing... Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.
Exhibit A: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter... Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines... A tweet by @KelleyKga, a self-proclaimed public health fact checker, with 18K followers, was flagged as “Misleading,” and replies and likes disabled, even though it displayed the CDC’s *own data.*... Tellingly, the tweet by @KelleyKga that was labeled “Misleading” was a reply to a tweet that contained actual misinformation. Covid has never been the leading cause of death from disease in children. Yet that tweet remains on the platform, and without a “misleading” label... This tweet was labeled “Misleading,” even though the owner of this account, @_euzebiusz_, a physician, was referring to the results of a published study. Andrew Bostom, a Rhode Island physician, was permanently suspended from Twitter after receiving multiple strikes for misinformation. One of his strikes was for a tweet referring to the results from a peer reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. A review of Twitter log files revealed that an internal audit, conducted after Bostom’s attorney contacted Twitter, found that only 1 of Bostom’s 5 violations were valid. The one Bostom tweet found to still be in violation cited data that was legitimate but inconvenient to the public health establishment’s narrative about the risks of flu versus Covid in children. That this tweet was not only flagged by a bot, but its violation manually affirmed by a staff member is telling of both the algorithmic and human bias at play. Bostom’s account was suspended for months and was finally restored on Christmas Day... In a surreal exchange, Jim Baker, at the time Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, asks why telling people to not be afraid wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy... Remember @KelleyKga with the CDC data tweet? Twitter’s response to her is clarifying: “we will prioritize review and labeling of content that could lead to increased exposure or transmission.” Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was “The Science”"
Liberals claim that the government flagging content they claim is against Twitter's terms of service and trying to pressure Twitter to take it down is not censorship (apparently the Biden team were very angry that Twitter wasn't following its terms of service - maybe that is proof of bad faith censorship, so they aren't protected by Section 230 anymore). Presumably the cope here is that taking down "misinformation" is just Twitter's rules. Too bad that means US government data is "misinformation" too.
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In... 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... 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”... 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. 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.”"
Clearly there's nothing wrong with letting the US intelligence community influence moderation, and this is not censorship
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: The Twitter Files Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button” 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... 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. 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. 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... 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.” ... 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. Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more. 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... 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... 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. 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... Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor."
When you know the power of controlling the narrative
Clearly, even though Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety said they were having "conversations" with state agencies, Facebook, Google and Twitter opposed "offensive IO [information operations] to promote American interests", many parts of government sent requests to Twitter and Twitter was even explicitly asked to ban someone, there was no outsourced censorship
Of course, there's nothing wrong with removing state-sponsored operations while exempting US state-sponsored operations
Thread by @AlexBerenson on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "how @ScottGottliebMD - a top Pfizer board member - used the same Twitter lobbyist as the White House to suppress debate on Covid vaccines, INCLUDING FROM A FELLOW HEAD OF @US_FDA!... Gottlieb told Todd O'Boyle - a senior manager in Twitter's public policy department - that a tweet from @DrGiroir claiming CORRECTLY that natural immunity was superior to vaccine immunity was "corrosive" and might "go viral." Twitter put a misleading tag on the tweet, preventing it from being shared. Gottlieb then went after a tweet about Covid's low risk to kids from @justin_hart. Pfizer would soon win the okay for its mRNA shots for children, so keeping parents scared was crucial... In October 2022, claimed on Twitter and CNBC that he was not trying to suppress debate on mRNA jabs. These files prove that Gottlieb - board member at a company that has made $70 billion on the shots - did just that."
Corruption is good when the Science tells you to do it
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: Twitter Files #14 THE RUSSIAGATE LIES One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag. 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.” Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence... 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”. The Nunes assertions would virtually all be verified in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019. Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a “joke”... Feinstein/Schiff said the Nunes memo "distorts" classified information, but note they didn't call it incorrect... 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). 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... 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... Eventually Twitter staff realize “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions” but “just wants to get credit for pushing us further.” Ultimately senior executives talked about “feeding congressional trolls” and compared their situation to the children’s book, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”... 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... Russians weren’t just blamed for #ReleaseTheMemo but #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow – to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times. Re #SchumerShutdown and #ReleaseTheMemo, the internal guidance was, “Both hashtags appear to be organically trending.” 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. The staffs of Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal also declined comment... 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."
Eli Lake on Twitter - "Why aren’t more Democrats outraged and ashamed by a member who uses his position to advocate the censorship and shadowbanning of his political opponents? It’s unAmerican. Adam Schiff disgraces his party. No one in Hollywood who believes in free speech should support this guy."
Naturally, many liberals in the replies are mocking him. They're not even trying to hide it anymore
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "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
Clearly government figures asking Twitter to censor tweets is not a problem, even when it's parody
Thread by @lhfang on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "New piece from the TWITTER FILES. How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy. The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries... The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone... In a separate push, Pfizer & Moderna's lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects, which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid "misinformation."... Many of the tweets the BIO-funded campaign focused on were truly unhinged misinfo, like claims that vaccines include microchips. But others Stronger lobbied Twitter on were more of a grey area, like vaccine passports & vaccine mandates, policies that coerce vaccination... Notably, this massive push to censor and label covid misinfo never applied to drug companies. When big pharma wildly exaggerated the risks of creating low-cost generic covid vaccines, Stronger did nothing. The rules applied only to critics of industry."
If you question Pfizer, you are denying The Science and must be deplatformed
Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: Twitter Files #15 MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD. "I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” "Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.” “Virtually any conclusion drawn from it will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and accuse them of being Russian.” 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. 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). 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. 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. 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... 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. 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... 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. 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... there were internal concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy... 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. “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.” “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.” “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.”... 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. 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… 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. Incredibly, and ironically, these stories were also frequently used as evidence of the spread of “fake news” on sites like Twitter. 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... 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.” 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. 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... This was an academic scandal as well, as Harvard, Princeton, Temple, NYU, GWU, and other universities promoted Hamilton 68 as a source. 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. 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."
Thread by @robbysoave on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "THREAD: THE FACEBOOK FILES. Twitter is not the only social media site to face pressure to censor content. I obtained emails showing that the CDC had significant influence over covid moderation at Facebook and Instagram... CDC officials began routinely vetting claims about COVID-19 vaccines that had appeared on Facebook. The platform left it up to the federal government to determine which assertions were accurate... By July 2021, the CDC wasn't just evaluating which claims it thought were false, but whether they could "cause harm."... The CDC was not the only arm of the federal government engaged in this work, of course: White House staffers castigated Meta for not deplatforming alleged misinformation fast enough. President Joe Biden himself accused Facebook of "killing people" in July 2021." "What's at stake is the future of free speech in the technological age," @JeninYounesEsq, an attorney for @NCLAlegal, tells me. "We've never had a situation where the federal government at very high levels is coordinating or coercing social media to do its bidding..." The New Civil Liberties Alliance is helping the state of Missouri sue the government over its campaign to pressure social media companies to silence dissent... There is a word for government officials using the threat of punishment to extort desired behaviors from private actors. That word is: jawboning"
One cope about the Twitter FIles was that the government flagging items for Twitter to review was not censorship. Presumably Facebook asking the CDC to approve content is not censorship either
