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Twitter Files Show How The Deep State Conquered Social Media
Matt Taibbi provides a summary of the recent revelations of Twitter manipulations in service of partisan government entities. The publication of the 'Twitter files' came in several Twitter threads from writers, left and right leaning ones, who had been given access to the files and internal Twitter communication.
Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary
There have been 12 threads so far. Some of these are of special interest:
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.”
We will later learn that it was the FBI, which had the Hunter Biden laptop material and knew it was real, which pushed Twitter to censor the story by claiming that it was 'Russian hacked' material.
Twitter censorship:
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.
The above one is of special interest to me.
Until late 2021 my Twitter account @MoonofA, which I mostly use to promote my writings here, was not allowed to grow beyond 19,500 followers. There were also signs that tweets by me were not shown to users who were following me. After my account was released from the growth prison it rapidly grew to 47,500 followers in the fall of 2022. It then again went into growth prison for no discernible reason and without me getting any notice of it. Now anytime my follower count increases by 100 or so it will automatically be slashed back to 47,450 followers. There are also again signs that tweets from my account are again 'shadowbanned'.
Yesterday @semperfidem2014 retweeted my latest:
Blue Check Brandon @semperfidem2004 – 21:27 UTC · Jan 5, 2023
Well worth reading
Moon of Alabama @MoonofA · Jan 4
New on MoA:
Ukraine – The Big Push To End The War
https://moonofalabama.org/2023/01/ukraine-the-big-push-to-end-the-war.html
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Then @New_Westphalian responded to @semperfidem2014;
New Westphalian @New_Westphalian – 21:47 UTC · Jan 5, 2023
Replying to @semperfidem2004
If you hadn’t retweeted that, I doubt I’d have seen it. I follow MoA, never see a single tweet.
Not sure the cleanup has been entirely successful yet.
Well, I do not think that Elon Musk bought Twitter to do a 'cleanup'. I believe he wants to use it for his own purposes whatever those may be. If it requires a new deal that gives government entities censoring access in exchange for whatever Musk's wants or needs he will agree to that.
Back to Matt Taibbi's summaries. Thread 3 to 5 were about Trump's removal from Twitter. His account was locked despite the fact that he had not violated any of Twitter's internal rules.
Thread 6 to 12 are about the government infiltration of Twitter from every angle, the Pentagon, the three letter agencies as well as various other entities started to censor free speech on Twitter:
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.
The big mainstream media have been quiet about the Twitter revelations. The New York Post and a few other right leaning outlets had a piece about the attempt to ban columnist Paul Sperry:
Dem Rep. Adam Schiff wanted journalist Paul Sperry’s account suspended over reporting on Trump whistleblower, Twitter Files reveals
The journalist in question was Paul Sperry, a Post columnist who in January 2020 wrote an article for RealClearInvestigations about the purported “whistleblower” behind former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, for which Schiff served as a House manager.
In the article, Sperry said then-CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella was overheard talking in the White House with Sean Misko, a holdover staffer from former President Barack Obama’s administration.
A former official who reportedly heard the conversation told Sperry, “Just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”
Misko later left the White House and joined the Intelligence Committee, which Schiff chaired, Sperry reported.
The email posted by Taibbi shows that Schiff’s office asked Twitter to take five specific steps that an unidentified company employee said were “related to alleged harassment from QAnon conspiracists.”
They included, “Remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.”
In response, another unidentified Twitter employee wrote, “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do that.”
Schiff’s office also asked for suspension of “the many accounts, including @GregRubini and @paulsperry_, which have repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies and harassed” someone whose name is blacked out.
The Twitter employee responded to that by writing, “we’ll review these accounts again but I believe [name blacked out] mentioned only one actually qualified for suspension.”
In an email Tuesday, Sperry told The Post, “I have never promoted any ‘QAnon conspiracies.’ Ever. Not on Twitter. Not anywhere.”
“Schiff was just angry I outed his impeachment whistleblower and tried to get me banned,” he said. “I challenge Schiff to produce evidence to back up his defamatory remarks to Twitter.”
The only major and good piece written about the Twitter revelations I know of is by Lee Smith in the otherwise not readable Tablet Magazine:
How the FBI Hacked Twitter
The answer begins with Russiagate
This one is well researched and well written. It shows that the whole manipulation by the FBI was and is done in partisan interest with the war-mongering parts of the Democrats being the main beneficiary. The piece is quite long but I recommend to read it in full.
You may think that the paragraph below is exaggerated. However, the evidence following it fully supports the conclusion:
In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses.
All of this was build in secret. All of it can be secretly used against any target. It is also interesting that the fake issue of 'Russiagate', like the 'Skripal affair' in Britain, was to a large part the preparatory buildup to the current war in Ukraine.
While the Twitter files have now given us some knowledge of this they will not change anything. The Republicans are too weak, too corrupt and too susceptible to blackmail to seriously get into the depth of the whole issue.
re: “disinformation”
i.e. Any information that doesn’t conform to Western propaganda
Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech
We know that when the government says they are doing something, they are actually doing the opposite. The US is dead set against stifling dissent, for example. ha-ha. So know we know what they are really doing. . .and Blinken outlined the process for it.. . .read on
Blinken in an interview–
. . .But we’re also seeing, of course, the abuse of this technology in various ways, including by repressive governments trying to control populations, to stifle dissent, to surveil and censor. We see that, of course, in the PRC with technology being used, for example, for mass surveillance, including of the Uyghurs and other minorities.
So the question is what is to be done. What do we do about it? And there are a number of things that we need to do and in fact that we are doing. One is to start by calling things out. That’s the – often the basis for everything. We have to call out the abusive technology, including digital authoritarianism.
Second, as I mentioned, we’re going to be taking on the chairmanship of the Freedom Online Coalition. We’re working to strengthen it. And this is an important vehicle to try to protect and advance internet freedom and to push back against digital authoritarianism.
Very practically speaking, there are a number of things that we – countries, NGOs, and others – are doing to, for example, get anti-censorship technology into the hands of people who need it so that they have the tools to push back against the misuse of technology in an authoritarian way. We set up a multinational fund to do that at the Summit for Democracy that we hosted last year.
comment: But then Blinken transitions to the real policy — attacking “disinformation” which belies the US dogmas. That means blaming others for what the US is actually doing. Clever, eh what? The US needs “trusted mediators” for its propaganda.
back to the Blinken interview:
And the hope, of course, was that the democratization of information would be a good thing overall. And fundamentally, I believe that’s still the case. But as a result of this, as a result of this disaggregation, you’ve lost exactly what you said, which are sort of the trusted mediators who can make sure that information, to the greatest extent possible, is actually backed up by the facts. And at the same time, that technology itself has allowed the abuse and the spreading of misinformation and disinformation in ways that we probably didn’t fully anticipate or imagine.
So we see authoritarian governments using this. We see it, for example, right now in the Russian aggression against Ukraine. We saw it in 2014 when Russia initially went at Ukraine and was using information as a weapon of war. So in that particular instance and in this instance, we’ve actually reversed this on them precisely by using information, real information, to call out what we saw them preparing and working to do. And being able to do that and to bring to the world everything that we were seeing about the planned Russian aggression and to lay out exactly the steps they were likely to take, and which unfortunately they did, I think has done a profound service to making sure that credible information is what carries the day and disinformation is undermined.
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-with-maria-ressa-on-digital-diplomacy-and-human-rights-online/
comment: “making sure that credible information is what carries the day and disinformation is undermined.” And who will do the undermining? The US and its puppets, of course, with the US disseminating the “credible information” from State for the online media via NewsGuard etc..
Stanford University, a place for learning, of all places, is helping out on the battle against disinformation “around the world:”
Blinken in Silicon Valley:
. . . So Stanford is doing remarkable work on that, and it’s one of the things that we want to make sure that we’re benefiting from, because this is a day-in, day-out battle for us, combating misinformation and disinformation around the world. We have at the State Department itself a big focus on this. We have something called the Global Engagement Center that’s working on this every single day. But that work is both inspired by work that’s being done in academia, including here at Stanford, as well as where appropriate collaborations. And one of the things we have to do is to make sure that we’re using technology itself to deal with some of the downsides of technology when it’s misused, including when it comes to misinformation and disinformation.
https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-blinken-remarks-to-the-press-3/
on the Global Engagement Center. . .
U.S. Department of State
Global Engagement Center
Mission & Vision
Mission: To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.
Special Envoy and Coordinator
James P. Rubin
https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/under-secretary-for-public-diplomacy-and-public-affairs/global-engagement-center/
Blinken, Dec 16, 2022
Today, we welcome James P. Rubin as Special Envoy and Coordinator of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC). Jamie will lead and coordinate the U.S. Government’s work to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and disinformation that threatens the security of the United States, our allies, and partners.
comment: Just foreign? nope. Some domestic media is acting as an agent for foreign propaganda.
back to Blinken
Jamie has more than 35 years of experience in foreign policy, including at the State Department, having served as a diplomat, spokesperson, policy advisor, professor, and broadcaster. He is uniquely qualified to direct GEC’s critical work on countering foreign disinformation and propaganda from foreign actors including, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, Iran, and foreign violent extremist organizations like ISIS and al-Qa’ida. He also will help build societal resilience to disinformation and propaganda overseas.
I warmly welcome Jamie back to the Department, and look forward to working with him again in this important role.
https://www.state.gov/appointment-of-james-p-rubin-as-special-envoy-and-coordinator-of-the-global-engagement-center/
comment: So the measure of disinformation is not truth but rather it’s any information that undermines or influences the policies, security, or stability of the United States, and “Jamie” knows how to attack “disinformation.”
. . .and let’s get the Western puppets to help Jamie in “internet freedom” ha-ha. . .actually it’s “the shaping of global norms through joint action.” . .And Jamie will inform us on “global norms” . . .or, the “rules-based international order.” (trademark)
from the web — “shaping global norms:”
Today, 35 governments are part of the Freedom Online Coalition:
The Chair of the Coalition rotates among member states on an annual basis. The 2022 Chair of the Coalition is Canada. The Chair is assisted by the Friends of the Chair, a group of FOC members currently comprising of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.
A key priority of the Freedom Online Coalition is the shaping of global norms through joint action. The Freedom Online Coalition offers its members an informal diplomatic space to share information and concerns about current developments that threaten to compromise Internet freedom around the world.
Through direct connections between states, members can bring worrying or positive developments to the attention of a group of likeminded governments in the Coalition.
This fast and direct information sharing allows the Coalition to react quickly to recent developments and deliberate them in an informal setting among governments who are governed by the same principles of Internet freedom.
https://freedomonlinecoalition.com/members/
comment: Katy bar the door, the US will chair the Freedom Online Coalition — i.e. “FOC” – I love it — in 2023. Here’s the outgoing US puppet Canada which has been “shaping global norms.”
from the web:
David Morrison
Deputy Foreign Minister, Global Affairs, Canada, who has been “shaping global norms through diplomatic coordination and multistakeholder engagement.”
Since assuming the role of chair of the FOC in January 2022, Canada has led the coalition’s efforts to advance digital inclusion by shaping global norms through diplomatic coordination and multistakeholder engagement through our ambitious twenty-three-commitment Program of Action. We have advanced our vision in several other ways.
First we’ve actively worked to affirm and shape global norms by strengthening and expanding diplomatic networks in Paris, Geneva, and New York to share information, coordinate positions, and advance strategies to promote internet freedom and human rights online in priority forums Whether it was calling out Russia’s state-sponsored disinformation in Ukraine or drawing attention to internet shutdowns taking place in Iran, we’ve shone light on egregious situations around the world that undermine human rights and fundamental freedoms online.
. . .Canada has been working to develop the Ottawa Agenda for Digital Inclusion this year. This was done in part by hosting consultations around the world to gather insights about challenges to internet freedom and best ways forward. If we are to counter the greatest digital threats facing democracy today, to defend internet freedom, and push back against digital authoritarianism, we are going to need a collective response—one rooted in multilateralism and multistakeholder engagement.
. . .Canada’s chairmanship may be coming to a close, but we will continue to support the FOC’s mission to protect human rights online. We look forward to working closely with the US as they assume the role of chair of the coalition in 2023. We are thrilled to see the US retaining the Digital Inclusion Framework and its commitment to continue the work of bolstering the FOC’s capacity to make it an effective, action-oriented coalition. We are delighted that our US colleagues have supported the Ottawa Agenda through its development this year and have committed to advance it through their chairmanship next year.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/transcripts/as-the-us-takes-the-helm-of-the-freedom-online-coalition-here-are-its-top-priorities/
comment:
So the State Department partner NewsGuard has been doing some of that “multistakeholder engagement” with Consortium News which has been involved in “digital authoritarianism.” . .whew
And Canada is “thrilled to see the US retaining the Digital Inclusion Framework and its commitment to continue the work of bolstering the FOC’s capacity to make it an effective, action-oriented coalition.” ha-ha . . .You can’t make this stuff up.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Jan 7 2023 13:41 utc | 63
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