While it’s good that all this is now out in the open and Twitter itself has been drastically cleaned up, the reality is that all of these other organisations remain untouched and uncleansed.

** Republished in 2024 with further summary updates.

There are four main topics, arising out of thirteen of the nineteen Twitter Files, covered in this post:

  1. Hunter Biden and the FBI.
  2. OGA’s (Other Government Agencies).
  3. Rigging the Covid-19 debate.
  4. Russiagate.

After Musk engaged journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss to investigate Twitter, which he had just bought, they produced a series of detailed reports in late 2022 and early 2023 which proved that a group of US government agencies, Leftist NGO’s and private sector Social Media corporations had all worked together over the last few years to push US government misinformation – aka lies – on to the public while at the same time silencing any voices that tried to speak up against this.

There’s no doubt that similar efforts were also underway involving Facebook, Google and other such corporations, as Facebook CEO Zuckerberg recently admitted.

It’s a massive and likely ongoing breach of the 1st Amendment by the US government and it seems to have been led less by the politicians than bureaucracies that report to the President: the CDC, NIAID, NIH being the primary malefactors in the C-19 area, with the FBI the main one on the 2020 elections (especially with Hunter Biden) and the the January 6 Capitol riots, but the CIA is there as well.

The subjects on which this combination of censorship and propaganda have opearated have ranged from C-19 lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates, to Hunter Biden’s laptop and the 2020 US elections.

Racket News have set up an website that indexes all of the Twitter files produced to date and updates them constantly (there are 19 in total) and also provides a summary of each one. I’ve added it to the Sidebar here under the Reference / News label.

The originals were all published first on Twitter, undoubtedly because Musk wants the traffic. But Twitter is of course not a good forum for long-firm articles, which is why the others have steadily transferred them to better formats. Unfortunately the index goes only to the original Twitter threads.

TF 3 showed the Twitter censorship team joking with each other about all these dealings with the Federal agencies, which was especially “funny” because TF 2 revealed that Jeff Carlton, the head of the company’s Strategic Response Team (SRT), designated to run the platform’s shadow banning operations, was a former analyst with the FBI and CIA.

To me the most important ones of the nineteen are as follows:

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TF 1, 6 (Taibbi) & TF 7 (Shellenberger) – Hunter Biden, the FBI and Twitter

Twitter Files 1 (TF 1) and TF 7 deal mainly with the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 election, which included blocking the Twitter account of the New York Post itself. The FBI had gamed this out for months beforehand with Twitter people, using an “imaginary” exercise where the Russians create false information about the Bidens.

Given that the FBI had access to the laptop and its emails and other material for over a year and knew it was the real thing, this effort was hardly “imaginary” but it was the perfect trigger to pull when the Post published. The FBI even supplied Twitter executives with access to its own secret comms system – called Teleporter – to enable this and paid Twitter $3,415,323 for “processing requests” by the FBI.

It didn’t stop there: not long after Musk gave access, Taibbi found that a former FBI agent working as Twitter’s Deputy Counsel, Jim Baker, was censoring the release of old files to Taibbi. Musk fired Baker.

TF 6 deals with the FBI’s interference on smaller matters, but even so Platform Was Like FBI’s ‘Subsidiary’, which is a good summary of Taibbi’s twitter posts on the subject:
– “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
–  “requests for action” were frequently in regards to “low-follower” Twitter accounts that had limited reach on grounds that they were spreading “election misinformation.”
– the post-2016 election FBI “social media-focused task force,” which Taibbi says “swelled to 80 agents…
– DHS partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content
– agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation, including accounts that contained what were obviously jokes. In each case the sleazy suggestion of the FBI was that these breached Twitter’s Terms of Service, which was the excuse made by outside, supposedly “private sector” apologists about all this censorship.

There was actually some pushback from Twitter as the requests continued and both sides grew irritated:

In July 2020, FBI agent Elvis Chan told former Twitter cybersecurity head Yoel Roth (later fired by Musk) to “expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)” and those questions asked how Twitter differentiated “official propaganda actors” from ordinary people and how Twitter determined the scope of their search (see this link for the detail). This actually got Roth’s back up:

Roth also indicated that he was “not comfortable” with the FBI demanding this information…. it did not appear that the FBI was focused on criminal or foreign threats. Instead, it looked more like it was intent on targeting American accounts that expressed viewpoints of which the agency did not approve.

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TF 9, 11, 12 (Taibbi) – Twitter and OGA’s (Other Government Agencies)

CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” also pulled in the State Department and the Pentagon and the group met regularly not just with Twitter, but also with Facebook, Reddit, Verizon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia and Pinterest. Big Brother was watching you through social media, via your online interactions, and generally just spying on what you were and weren’t doing.

At the close of 2017, Twitter made a key internal decision that while to the outside world the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion”, internally they would remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations”

Which sounds reasonable until you see TF 12 showing that Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc, – and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.

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TF 10 (Zweig), TF 13 (Berenson) & TF 19 (Taibbi) – Rigging the Covid-19 debate

This happened under both the Trump and Biden administration, but for different reasons: Trump wanted to prevent the public from “panic buying” and engaging in conspiracy theories involving 5G cell towers; Biden wanted to silence people who questioned mask efficacy, vaccines, or anything put forth by the CDC. Twitter personnel had to liaise directly with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not de-platformed more accounts.

One irony is that other private groups got pulled in to help with the censorship. For example Stanford University worked with four think-tanks (several the recipients of state awards) and multiple government agencies to create a cross-platform JIRA ticketing system called the Virality Project (VP) for seven major Internet platforms, including Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Medium… “seeding doubt and uncertainty in authoritative voices” like Facui’s “leads to a society that finds it too challenging to identify what’s true or false.” Therefore, people need to be shielded from difficult truths. 

There were “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labelling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. Some are covered here in a Free Press article, Twitter’s Secret Blacklists, in broad strokes:

One user was Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an M.D., an economist, and a professor of health policy at Stanford. In 2020, he and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then a professor of medicine at Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford, warned in an open letter of the dangerous impact of lockdowns, especially on children, the working class, and the poor. They argued for “focused protection” for the most medically vulnerable, and a return to normal life for the rest of society. 

This made the three scientists targets of Washington’s public health bureaucracy. 

Another Free Press article by reporter David Zweig goes into more detail on the specifics of some of these bans:

There was even a silly fight that occurred over a tweet from President Trump after he’d recovered from COVID, telling people that the current medications were great and saying “don’t be afraid of COVID.” Incredibly Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, Jim Baker (ex FBI lawyer) argued that this was a violation of their Covid-19 misinformation policy. For once he was overruled.

There were big problems with the entire Twitter process of detecting and acting on “misinformation”:

  1. Much of the content moderation on Covid was conducted by bots trained on machine learning and AI.
  2. Contractors operating in places like the Philippines were also moderating content (aided by decision trees).
  3. Most importantly, the buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter. They chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees and determined the suspensions, with individual and collective bias in action.

As Zweig ends his article:

If Twitter had allowed the kind of open forum for debate that it claimed to believe in, could any of this have turned out differently?

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TF 14, 15, 17 & 18 (Taibbi) – Russiagate and The Censorship Industrial Complex.

TF 14 and TF 15 deal with the connections between Democrat Senators Blumenthal and the late Feinstein, plus House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff with a shadowy outfit called Hamilton 68. This group, led by one Clint Watts, a former FBI counter-intelligence agent (and now MSNBC contributor), was a project run by an outfit called “Alliance for Securing Democracy” that claimed to track hundreds of Twitter accounts “linked Russian influence activities.” The good news is that Twitter rapidly realised how shit these were. The bad news is that MSM reporters used Hamilton 68 as the basis for countless news stories (see below).

It was all a lie from the start. Even Twitter knew it was a lie — and considered going public to call Hamilton68 and Bill Kristol and Michael McFaul and all the shrieking “RUSSIAN AGENT!” smear merchants liars in public. But they were cowards, and instead tried leaking it to the press. Who didn’t seem very interested in the story.

Yeah! You can see why in the following graphic showing the power of the Hamilton 68 group – and thus the sheer uselessness of modern MSM reporters who don’t question what they’re handed as long as it supports the narrative of the day.

Twitter knew it was a lie because of the following:

Twitter had reverse-engineered how Hamilton 68 supposedly tracked online Russian influence and determined the methodology relied on a list of some 644 accounts. Twitter executives then ordered a forensic analysis of those accounts and determined that only 36 were registered in Russia, many of which were connected to Russia Today, the government “news” service. According to Taibbi, “the accounts Hamilton 68 claimed were linked to ‘Russian influence activities online’ were not only overwhelmingly English-language (86%), but mostly ‘legitimate people,’ largely in the U.S., Canada, and Britain.” 
…
As Twitter executive Yoel Roth synthesized: “I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.”

However, Roth and other Twitter executives did not go public with this, merely trying to push back against MSM reporting via private channels. In any case, as noted above, none of this mattered to the MSM:

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway recognized in real time what was happening, dissecting the media’s unreasonable reliance on Hamilton 68’s information. Even after Twitter publicly refuted Hamilton 68’s claims, the press “uncritically accept[ed] and promote[d] a secretive group’s unverified claim of a Russian conspiracy,” Hemingway stressed. 

TF 17 looks at another such outfit, the “Global Engagement Center” (GEC) and “thinktanks” it funded to pull the same shite about thousands of Twitter accounts (“Hindu Nationalism”, “Anti-Macron”, etc)

TF18 deals with yet another such group,  Stanford University, the Election Integrity Partnership, and the state funding of a slew of think-tanks, NGOs, and for-profit firms connected to the “anti-disinformation” movement. One of those, New Knowledge, was caught faking a Russian influence campaign in an Alabama Senate race, pushing on reporters the false idea that Republican Roy Moore was being followed by a slate of Russian bots.

While it’s good that all this is now out in the open and Twitter itself has been drastically cleaned up, the reality is that all of these other organisations remain untouched and uncleansed.