Who was running Twitter?
Was it Twitter officials or was it the FBI?
The more I see in these Twitter file drops, the more it seems apparent the FBI was, at the very least, heavily influencing decisions made by Twitter at the time.
The Drop
The latest drop shows almost constant communications between Twitter and the FBI for almost two full years.
Between 2020 and 2022, there was a steady flow of communications and meetings taking place regarding content moderation…
https://t.co/mz7AFoolHV 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. pic.twitter.com/V4zNYnF81W
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022
There also seems to have been some pushback by some Twitter officials as well as some of the agents assigned to the Twitter task force…
7.Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.” pic.twitter.com/SrLrdZLREa
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022
Some of the survey questions were, “In what ways and by what measures do you see official propaganda actors as less active than other groups on your platform?”; “What groups are you comparing to official propaganda actors?” and “What quantitative metrics do you use to judge volume of activity on your platform? On what scale? Can you provide these metrics?”
The report also found that there were roughly 80 FBI agents assigned to this case.
The FBI responded to the report…
13.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.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 18, 2022
Taibbi added, “If one didn’t know any better, one would conclude from this passage that the foreign-influence assertion at least in this case was being daisy-chained into existence: public sources cite anonymous official sources, then official sources cite the public sources in their communications with platforms like Twitter. An information loop, pooh-poohing any implication that foreign influence is not a threat, or at least a recent threat.”
Taibbi is one of three journalists, along with Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, who have been analyzing and fact-checking the documents and reporting them after they have had the opportunity to review and provide commentary on them.
