“Every Conceivable” Government Agency, Congress Included, Pushed Twitter to Censor; Schiff Targeted Top Journalist to Shut Him Up

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All of U.S. intelligence and the U.S. State Department pushed Twitter to censor accounts they deemed “disinformation,” Matt Taibbi disclosed in his latest two installments about the social media platform’s internal files.

But even worse, a U.S. congressman, hate-Trump leftist Adam Schiff of California, pushed Twitter to shut down Real Clear Investigations reporter Paul Sperry, Taibbi revealed. Also involved in possible censorship was Virginia’s Democratic Senator Mark Warner, a leftist tech tycoon.

Again, the revelations suggest that the government might have pushed Twitter to censor speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Censoring Accounts, Anti-Twitter Media Campaign

That censorship occurred partly because Warner and U.S. intelligence agencies, along with the leftist mainstream media, pushed the narrative that Twitter was a Russian disinformation platform.

“In September, 2017, after a cursory review, Twitter informed the Senate it suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with ‘possible links’ to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined,” Taibbi explained:

Receiving these meager results, a furious Senator Mark Warner of Virginia — ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee — held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.”

Warner embarked on a Twitter-bashing campaign, Twitter public policy chief Colin Crowell wrote in an internal message. “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them,” Crowell explained.

A key co-conspirator in the censorship campaign was Hillary Clinton, who OK’d the Russia Collusion Hoax that did so much damage to President Trump’s first term:

Crowell added Dems were taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who that week said: “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.”

Though Twitter formed a Russian disinformation task force, it didn’t satisfy Warner or the leftist media. So in “the weeks after Warner’s presser, a torrent of stories sourced to the Intel Committee poured into the news, an example being Politico’s October 13, ‘Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes,’” Taibbi reported:

“Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB… they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,” Johns Hopkins Professor (and Intel Committee ‘expert’) Thomas Rid told Politico.

After Congress threatened legislation that would target Twitter, the platform decided the “Russian disinformation” problem was bigger than it claimed.

State Involved, Schiff Targets Sperry

But the involvement of Warner and others who see a Russian under every bed — partly thanks to Clinton’s collusion hoax — is only the first half of Taibbi’s latest disclosure.

Also involved in censoring Twitter accounts was something called the “Global Engagement Center” (GEC) in President Trump’s State Department.

It “went to the media with a report called, ‘Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns,’” and wanted to block accounts that speculated about the origins of the China Virus. GEC targeted accounts that alleged the Asiatic pathogen leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, which turned out to be exactly what happened.

“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” Taibbi reported.

Targeted accounts were those that reported about ZeroHedge and its suspension:

State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode “led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.” ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.

Eventually, the FBI persuaded Twitter to include GEC in a “regular ‘industry call’ between companies like Twitter and Facebook and the DHS and FBI.”

But GEC aside, eventually “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,” Taibbi reported:

Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more.

“And more” would include Schiff, who led the impeachment of President Trump. Just after the presidential election in 2020, he asked Twitter to shut down Sperry.

Schiff had reason. Early that year, Sperry tied Schiff torpedo Sean Misko to Eric Ciaramella, the leftist mole who leaked the contents of President Trump’s famous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During that call, a linchpin of the Democrats’ impeachment case against Trump, he asked Zelensky to probe the Biden-Burisma influence-peddling scheme, which involved Vice President Joe Biden. In March 2016, Biden pushed Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma Holdings, the energy company that paid Hunter Biden, the president’s wayward son, a small fortune despite his complete lack of experience in energy.

Thus did Twitter receive a government warning to watch out for material about that prosecutor’s book, which accused Biden of corruption.

“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,” Taibbi explained:

Requests poured in from FBI offices all over the country, day after day, hour after hour: If Twitter didn’t act quickly, questions came: “Was action taken?” “Any movement?”