The Twitter Files: Taibbi's Statement to Congress Unrolled
Plus some infuriating clips from testimony.
You can find all the Twitter Files unrolled here. Since this isn’t a numbered part of the Twitter Files, I won’t be adding it to the master post.
2. “MONITOR ALL TWEETS COMING FROM TRUMP’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT/BIDEN’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT”
When #TwitterFiles reporters were given access to Twitter internal documents last year, we first focused on the company, which at times acted like a power above government.
3. But Twitter was more like a partner to government.
With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police:
4. Emails from the FBI, DHS and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after.
5. Many were obvious “misinformation,” like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election.
But other official "disinfo" reports had shakier reasoning. The highlighted Twitter analysis here disagrees with the FBI about accounts deemed a “proxy of Russian actors":
6. Then we saw "disinfo" lists where evidence was even less clear. This list of 378 “Iranian State Linked Accounts” includes an Iraq vet once arrested for blogging about the war, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter and Truthout, a site that publishes Noam Chomsky.
7. In some cases, state reports didn’t even assert misinformation. Here, a list of YouTube videos is flagged for “anti-Ukraine narratives”:
9. Asked if Twitter’s marketing department could say the company detects “misinfo” with help of “outside experts,” a Twitter executive replied:
10. We came to think of this grouping – state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center (GEC), along with “NGOs that aren’t academic” and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media – as the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020.
The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key:
12. Twitter execs weren’t sure about Clemson’s Media Forensics Lab (“too chummy with HPSCI”), and weren’t keen on the Rand Corporation (“too close to USDOD”), but others were deemed just right.
13. NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team - or Signal group, as it were:
14. The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute - which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID - held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
16. Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area," and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
17. Note Aspen recommended the power to mandate data disclosure be given to the FTC, which this committee just caught in a clear abuse of office, demanding information from Twitter about communications with (and identities of) #TwitterFiles reporters.
judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subs…
18. Naturally Twitter’s main concern regarding the Aspen report was making sure Facebook got hit harder by any resulting regulatory changes:
19. The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel.
20. The #TwitterFiles show the principals of this incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back, claiming a special right to do what they say is bad practice for everyone else: be fact-checked only by themselves.
21.While Twitter sometimes pushed back on technical analyses from NGOs about who is and isn't a “bot,” on subject matter questions like vaccines or elections they instantly defer to sites like Politifact, funded by the same names that fund the NGOs: Koch, Newmark, Knight.
22. #TwitterFiles repeatedly show media acting as proxy for NGOs, with Twitter bracing for bad headlines if they don't nix accounts. Here, the Financial Times gives Twitter until end of day to provide a “steer” on whether RFK, Jr. and other vax offenders will be zapped.
23. Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?
24. The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other “anti-disinformation” labs are receiving huge public awards.
25. Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded Newsguard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective “risk” or “reliability” scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role?
26. Perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations is the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), whose “Election Integrity Partnership” is among the most voluminous “flaggers” in the #TwitterFiles:
27. After public uproar “paused” the Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” of the DHS in early 2020, Stanford created the EIP to “fill the gaps” legally, as director Alex Stamos explains here (h/t Foundation for Freedom Online).
28. EIP research manager Renee DiResta boasted that while filling “gaps," the EIP succeeded in getting “tech partners” Google, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter to take action on “35% of the URLS flagged” under “remove, reduce, or inform” policies.
29. According to the EIP’s own data, it succeeded in getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the runup to the 2020 vote.
30. It’s crucial to reiterate: EIP was partnered with state entities like CISA and GEC while seeking elimination of millions of tweets. In the #TwitterFiles, Twitter execs did not distinguish between organizations, using phrases like “According to CIS[A], escalated via EIP.”
31. After the 2020 election, when EIP was renamed the Virality Project, the Stanford lab was on-boarded to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, absorbing this government proxy into Twitter infrastructure – with a capability of taking in an incredible 50 million tweets a day.
Clips From Testimony
If I come across more clips worth sharing, I’ll be sure to add them to this post.
Rep. Jim Jordan took his five minutes and it's must-watch:
"The truth is, we want to focus on protecting the First Amendment..."
Chairman Jordan: “I’m responding to your ridiculous statements you made in your opening statement.”
Ranking Member Plaskett: “Okay, well let’s get on with it.”
Jordan: “Oh, NOW we want to get on with it…”
The Twitter Files hearing got off to a HEATED start this morning.
Rep. @StaceyPlaskett asks @mtaibbi to reveal his #TwitterFiles sources, then insists she's not asking for his sources
Rep. @StaceyPlaskett mocks reporting into the @FTC illegally demanding @elonmusk’s private communications: “On Tuesday, the majority released an 18 page report claiming to show that the FTC is quote ‘harassing’ Twitter. Oh my poor, Twitter.”
Taibbi fires back: "I'm not a so-called journalist. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books."
Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) accuses @mtaibbi and @ShellenbergerMD of trying to kill the people who work at Twitter that they reported on in the Twitter files.
@StaceyPlaskett @FTC @elonmusk @mtaibbi @ShellenbergerMD @RepLynch Rep. Wasserman-Schultz (@DWStweets) gets annoyed w/ Taibbi after he refuses to say he's "profiting" off the #TwitterFiles
@StaceyPlaskett @FTC @elonmusk @mtaibbi @ShellenbergerMD Democrat @RepLynch won't allow Taibbi to answer his question: "Reclaiming my time, that's how it works!"
After Rep. Stacey Plaskett claimed they are not trying to get @mtaibbi to reveal his sources, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) once again tries to get him to reveal his sources.
Rep. Daniel Goldman (who bought a congressional seat) says "you cannot find actual evidence of any direct government censorship of lawful speech."
Rep. @Jim_Jordan then pulls out an email from the White House to Twitter asking them to censor a tweet from @RobertKennedyJr.
.@mtaibbi on the anti-disinformation complex:
"They believe that ordinary people can't handle difficult truths. And so they think that they need minders to separate out things that are controversial or difficult for them."
.@ShellenbergerMD on Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya and other doctors and scientists being blacklisted/censored for Covid "disinformation":
"This is East Germany, Stasi kind of behavior."
.@RepMattGaetz:
"How did it feel when you found out that you were being expressly targeted by a government document based on your reporting?"
“The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.”
I spit my coffee out this morning when I got to that tweet.
Thanks, Brad!
I have to confess I'm kinda in shock here: the Democrats have really gone full Joe McCarthy and there is no "have you no shame, sir?" moment on the horizon, as shame is a regressive patriarchal imposition that didn't survive into this century.
(I'm also angry bc as a Gen-Xer I had to sit through maybe 1000 hrs of preachy shows about the evils of the Red Scare, when it turns out no one is immune to wanting to smother and persecute their enemies if they work themselves up into a mania and think they can get away with it.)
My feeling is that Democrats/liberals know they have seized the means of cultural production, know that they own the media minus Fox and Big Tech minus Elon, know they own academia and the demons of DEI, know they can rely on endless billions from their NGO wing and those great saviors of democracy like Soros, Chan-Zuckerbeg and the Jobs widow et al., so they've become like an army that believes it possess overwhelming force: there will be no retreat, no negotiations, no prisoners shall be taken, and no quarter given. They are going to destroy Trump. the Republicans and all political opponents, no matter what else has to get destroyed in the process.
"Dissent delenda est" is written all over their faces.