Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

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https://taibbi.substack.com/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter


Racket News
Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and
a Glossary
For those who haven't been following, a compilation of one-paragraph
summaries of all the Twitter Files threads by every reporter. With
links and notes on key revelations
Matt Taibbi
Jan 4

It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been
coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may
be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up
capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files
reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the
end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve
found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing,
I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

In order, the Twitter Files threads:

    Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbi

    TWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

    Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision
to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October,
2020.

    Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its
“hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision
was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the
policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a
Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they
hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First
Amendment isn’t absolute.”

    1a. Twitter Files Supplemental, December 6, 2022, by @mtaibbi

    THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER

    A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new
addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter
Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of
Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.

    Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022

    TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

    Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was
Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it
“visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council
called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial
accounts.

    Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the
visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan
Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya,
and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as
being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels.
It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier,
@shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.

    Twitter Files, Part 3, by @mtaibbi, December 9, 2022

    THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 - January 6th, 2021

    First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the
decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to
show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display
and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and
Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the
Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively
applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the
election.

    Twitter Files Part 4, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 10, 2022

    THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 7th, 2021

    This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after
the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter
on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules
to make a Trump ban fit their policies.

    Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a
“slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global
presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot
down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt
Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter
changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s
removal.

    Twitter Files Part 5, by @BariWeiss, December 11, 2022

    THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 8th, 2021

    As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the
January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account,
saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is
incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the
trigger anyway.

    Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe
because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how
censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by
senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on
Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing
those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of
Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis
following orders.”

    Twitter Files Part 6, by @mtaibbi, December 16, 2022

    TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

    Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as
FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly
sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low
follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the
right were affected.

    Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was
adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist.
Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a
wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI
to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity
Project to state governments. The company one day received so many
moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers
at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”

    Twitter Files Part 7, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 19, 2022

    THE FBI AND HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP

    The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s
relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows
intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the
release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.

    Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10
documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through
Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,”
the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an
email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by
the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323
since October 2019!”

The ten teleporter documents referred to in Mike Shellenberger’s FBI thread.

    Twitter Files Part 8, by @lhfang, December 20, 2022

    HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN

    Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for
years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting
the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such
behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed
programs involving fake accounts.

    Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent
over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain
messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program
would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after
Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what
came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these
programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.

    Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:

    Twitter Files Part 9, by @mtaibbi, December 24th, 2022

    TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES”

    The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to
publish!) further details how the channels of communication between
the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter
directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other
Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.

    Key revelations: 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” met
regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare,
LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”

    Twitter Files Part 10, by @DavidZweig, December 28, 2022

    HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

    David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down
information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for
public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who
disagreed.”

    Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d
liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that
Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for
instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found
“countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading”
accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island
physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among
other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on
mRNA vaccines.

    and

    Twitter Files Parts 11 and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023

    HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN

    and

    TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”

    These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017,
and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the
present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from
Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of
Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter
tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State
Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send
requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of
the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key
internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and
promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.”
The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will 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.”

    The second thread shows how 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.

    Twitter Files Part #13, by @AlexBerenson, January 9, 2023

    HOW TWITTER COVERED UP COVID TRUTHS

    New addition Alex Berenson details how Twitter throttled down or
erased true information about COVID-19, with the help of a former
Pfizer lobbyist, Scott Gottlieb.

    Key Revelations: Twitter senior political liaison Todd O’Boyle
feared that onetime acting FDA commission Brett Giroir’s correct
observations about the effectiveness of natural immunity were
“corrosive” and might “go viral,” and put a misleading label on the
tweet. Gottlieb also pressured Twitter to remove Berenson himself.

    Twitter Files Part #14, by @mtaibbi, January 12th, 2023

    THE RUSSIAGATE LIES

    One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag

    Internal communications at Twitter show that Russian bots were not
in fact hyping the classified memo of Republican congressman Devin
Nunes in January of 2018.

    Key Revelations: Three key Democrats — Senators Dianne Feinstein
and Richard Blumenthal, and former House Intel Committee chief Adam
Schiff — cited a think tank called Hamilton 68 in denouncing a memo by
Nunes as aided by “Russian influence operations.” Yet all three were
told by Twitter executives there were no Russians in the picture. Said
former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, “I just reviewed the accounts
that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and… none of them
show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

    Twitter Files Supplemental, by @mtaibbi, January 13th, 2023

    MORE ADAM SCHIFF BANS, AND “DEAMPLIFICATION.”

    A brief thread of 10 tweets showing that the former head of the
House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, sent repeated requests for
bans of people critical of their office.

    Key Revelation: Schiff and the DNC both not only asked for the
takedown of an obvious satire by “Peter Douche,” but requested
takedowns of accounts that were critical of the Steele dossier and
outed the name of the supposed “whistleblower” in the Ukrainegate
case, Eric Ciaramella. Schiff staffers said that while they
“appreciate greatly” efforts by Twitter to deamplify certain accounts,
they worried such effort s “could… impede the ability of law
enforcement to search Twitter.”

    Twitter Files #15 by @mtaibbi, January 27, 2023

    MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA
FRAUD Internal communication about Hamilton 68, a project by the
Alliance for Securing Democracy purporting to track 600 account
“linked” to “Russian influence activities.” Reporters used Hamilton 68
as the basis for countless news stories, from CNN’s “Russian bots are
using #WalkAway to try to wound Dems in midterms” to “After Florida
School Shooting, Russia’s Bot Army Pounced.”

    Key Revelation: Twitter’s Yoel Roth was suspicious of Hamilton
68’s methodology and reverse-engineered their list, which he quickly
discovered to be bogus, full not of Russians but “legitimate
right-leaning accounts” who were being implicitly called Russian
assets. “Virtually any conclusion drawn from [the dashboard],” Roth
wrote, “will take conversations in conservative circles on Twitter and
accuse them of being Russian.” Roth urged Twitter to “call this out on
the bullshit it is,” but Twitter higher-ups worried about the
political consequences, choosing instead to play a “longer game.”
Neither the actors involved, nor any of the media outlets who ran
Hamilton-based stories intitally commented, though the ASD later
replied, prompting a back-and-forth (and forth) with this site.

    Twitter Files #16, by @mtaibbi, February 18, 2023

    COMIC INTERLUDE: A MEDIA EXPERIMENT

    Mainstream outlets finally cover the Twitter Files with
excitement, after House testimony elicited a claim that Donald Trump
complained, unsuccessfully, to Twitter about a tweet by Chrissy Teigen
(who in turn complained that she didn’t “know how to go on” after her
tweet about Trump being a “pussy ass bitch” was read to congress).
Irritated that this became the big censorship story after releasing
thousands of takedown requests from government agencies involving
people all over the world, I decided to do an experiment.

    Key Revelations: We released a list of 354 names Maine Senate
Angus King wanted taken down for reasons like “Rand Paul visit
excitement,” “followed by [former Republican opponent Eric] Brakey,”
and my personal favorite, “mentions immigration.” For balance we also
released a letter from a Republican official at the State Department,
Mark Lenzi, who tells Twitter about 14 real Americans “you may want to
look into and delete.” Surely, if the main objection to the Twitter
Files is that they’re “one-sided,” someone will cover a Republican
doing the bad thing? But no, more crickets. With help from @Techno_Fog

    Twitter Files #17: by @mtaibbi, March 2, 2023

    NEW KNOWLEDGE, THE GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CENTER, AND STATE-SPONSORED BLACKLISTS

    A review of the activities of the Global Engagement Center, or
GEC, what one source called “an incubator for the domestic
disinformation complex.”

    Key Revelations: A GEC-funded think tank, the DFRLab, sent Twitter
a list of 40,000 names of people suspected of supporting “Hindu
nationalism” that somehow had scads of ordinary Americans with handles
like @mad_murican and @TrumpitC on the list; GEC sent Twitter a list
of 5500 “Chinese accounts” that among other things had three CNN
contributors on it (“Not exactly Anderson’s besties, but CNN assets if
you will,” commented Twitter’s Patrick Conlon), GEC sent another list
of 499 accounts deemed Iranian disinformation, using criteria like:
used Signal and Telegram to communicate and used hashtags like
#IraniansDebateWithBiden. Other GEC reports deemed various actors part
of foreign propaganda “ecosystems” for offenses like following more
than one Chinese diplomat, retweeting an Iranian-created “FREE
PALESTINE” meme, and for retweeting material that was “anti-Macron in
nature.”

GLOSSARY OF “TWITTER FILES” TERMS

    Government Agencies and NGOs

    CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an
agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

    CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces

    ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

    FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency
comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI

    “OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA

    GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S.
State Department

    USIC: United States intelligence community

    HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through
which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts

    EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at
Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter

    DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a
similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council

    IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm”
headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin

    Twitter or Industry-specific terms

    PII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information”
is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a
warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter
personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we
interstitial that?”

    JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which
complaints rise and are decided

    PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user,
to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”

    SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES
is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with
the most high-profile, controversial rulings

    SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter
email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content
that have been reported for moderation review

    CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity

    SRT: Strategic Response Team

    GET: Global Escalation Team

    VF: Visibility Filtering

    GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a
chronological record of all actions taken on an account

    VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.

    GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence

    BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic
attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically

    BME: Bulk Media Exploitation

    EP Abuse: Episodic abuse

    PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears
as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process,
under a limited exception

    FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s
a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated.
“Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about
verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts

    IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive
IO to promote American interests.

This page will be kept open and updated as needed. If you have
questions about terms, please send them to taibbi at substack.com

179 Comments

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