The FBI and Pentagon were just two of the federal agencies that used a never-ending stream of requests to Twitter executives to stop “misinformation” on the leftist social media platform, Matt Taibbi’s latest dump of Twitter files shows. Myriad agencies joined the censorship program.
And as all those files show, Twitter’s leftist controllers — most notably hate-Trump homosexual Yoel Roth — were only too happy to comply.
Yet in dancing to the federal government’s piper, Twitter sometimes squelched true information.
The ninth dump of files, then, is in some sense not news. We already knew the FBI and Pentagon influenced — if not controlled outright — Twitter executives. Then again, we didn’t know how wide-ranging the program was, just which agencies were involved, and how many social media platforms the government secretly influenced.
In other words, the real collusion scandal of the last six years wasn’t Donald Trump’s colluding with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. The real scandal was the government’s colluding with social media to crush narratives they didn‘t like.
“Far Bigger” Operation
“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,” Taibbi reported:
The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state governments.
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.
A chief end result was that thousands of official “reports” flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.
Reappearing in the files is the omnipresent Elvis Chan of the FBI’s office in San Francisco. On June 29, 2020, he asked Twitter executives if an “other government organization” could attend a conference.
That meant the CIA, Taibbi reported, citing a retired CIA officer. Twitter also employed at least one former CIA official.
“The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi continued:
These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.
One of the most common forums was a regular meeting of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), attended by spates of executives, FBI personnel, and — nearly always — one or two attendees marked “OGA.”
The FITF meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an “OGA briefing,” usually about foreign matters (hold that thought).
In other words, “industry players” colluded among themselves and with the government to block anything the leftists didn’t want users to see. And that would have been anything that could disrupt the China Virus pandemic narrative, for instance, or claims of illegal election tampering on Joe Biden’s behalf.
Tailored Searches
Such was the number of government requests, Taibbi continued, that “Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them.” And the “FBI was clearly tailoring searches to Twitter’s policies. FBI complaints were almost always depicted somewhere as a ‘possible terms of service violation,’ even in the subject line”:
Twitter executives noticed the FBI appeared to be assigning personnel to look for Twitter violations.
“They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” remarked [Twitter attorney Stacia] Cardille.
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.
Yet the FITF wasn’t just sending reports on “foreign influence.” It was “forwarding thousands of mostly domestic reports, along with the [Department of Homeland Security], about the fringiest material”
Requests to stop “foreign influence” kept “execs under constant pressure to validate theories … and unable to find evidence for key assertions.”
Wrote Roth in one message, “No real matches using most of the info…. Some links were ‘clearly Russian,’ but another was a ‘house rental in South Carolina?’”
The former “OGA” employee at Twitter confessed, Taibbi reported, that “a technical lack of evidence” showed that “the State Department was making a wobbly public assertion of Russian influence.”
Thus did Twitter often block anything the government didn’t think users should see, and even block information that was probably true, such as claims of neo-Nazi activity in Ukraine.
When the leftist mainstream media will begin a major investigation of the government-industry collusion scandal is unknown. Any such probe would certainly show that collusion helped Joe Biden’s laughable presidential campaign.
Exhibit A: Squelching the Hunter Biden laptop story.
For more on the Twitter Files:
Twitter Helped Run Pentagon Psywar Ops, Propaganda Campaigns
FBI Paid Twitter $3.4M for Censorship Operation, Bureau Alumni Packed Payroll
Twitter a “Subsidiary” of FBI, Censored on Bureau’s Orders
Twitter Banned Trump, but Not Leaders Who Advocated Violence, Genocide
Key Twitter Exec Behind Trump Ban Was GOP, Trump-hater Roth
Twitter Files Detail Trump Suspension, Regular Meetings With FBI, DHS
Twitter Blacklist Operation Exposed in Second Dump of “Twitter Files”
Musk Fires Former FBI Attorney Who Vetted Twitter Files, Helped Suppress Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Musk: Twitter Might Have Interfered in Brazil’s Election, Too
Musk Releases “Twitter Files” That Detail Effort to Block Hunter Biden Laptop Story
