The latest release of internal Twitter communications, ‘The Twitter Files Number 9’ on Christmas Eve, show the FBI was only one of several US government agencies involved in meddling with the social media giant’s "content moderation," a euphemism for censorship..The files, reviewed by independent journalist, Matt Taibbi, show agencies involved include the CIA, the US State Department, the Pentagon, as well as “mountains of insistent moderation demands” from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), but not from the Republican Party, said Taibbi..On June 29, 2020, Taibbi said the FBI’s Elvis Chan asked Twitter executives in an email to “invite an OGA” to an upcoming conference..“OGA, or ‘Other Government Agencies’ can be a euphemism for CIA, according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors,” said Taibbi..One week later, Stacia Cardille, a senior Twitter legal executive, made the link explicit..“I invited the FBI, and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille wrote to her colleague and former FBI chief counsel James Baker. “No need for you to attend.”.Baker, one of dozens of ex-FBI agents and executives employed by Twitter at the time, was fired for interfering in Elon Musk’s effort to reveal the company’s past transgressions, through the Twitter Files..Here, Taibbi makes a huge, but not very surprising revelation..“From that point on,” Taibbi writes, “regular meeting[s] of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)” were attended by Twitter and “virtually every major tech firm [including] Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others.".The meetings also included FBI personnel and one or two attendees marked ‘OGA’ and went far beyond the scope of the Hunter Biden laptop and the 2020 presidential election..“Meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an ‘OGA briefing,’ usually about foreign matters,” Taibbi writes..Twitter staff received requests through the intelligence agencies of FITF, to conduct investigations into domestic Twitter accounts alleged to have foreign connections, the documents reveal, ramping up as the 2020 presidential election approached but continuing through 2022. The files document how the platform has frequently bowed to government and political pressure, wrote Taibbi..Twitter content monitors analyzed users’ IP data, phone numbers and even weighed whether usernames were “Russian-sounding” to confirm the government’s accusations – but often failed to do so..Taibbi disclosed internal documents and a succession of intelligence reports in 2022 were designed to shape news narratives relating to Ukraine and the Russian invasion..One report, listing accounts allegedly tied to “Ukraine ‘neo-Nazi’ Propaganda,’” pushed Twitter to place sites pointing out Hunter Biden’s role on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, under a cloud of official suspicion..Another report, from August 2022, contained “long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos” that US intelligence deemed to be guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives,” said Taibbi..“Intel about the shady origin of these accounts might be true,” he wrote. “But so might at least some of the information in them – about neo-Nazis, rights abuses in Donbas, even about our own government. Should we block such material?”.In a separate thread, Taibbi documented that “Twitter did have a clear political monoculture,” which favoured Democrats..Democratic Party operatives, and one staffer in particular, barraged Twitter moderators with complaints about Republican memes and spoofs in the run-up to the 2020 election..At times, Twitter did push back, “once refusing to remove an obviously comical spoof of a “Todos Con Biden” (a pro-Biden Latino event) in which candidate Joe Biden supposedly played a pro-Trump song for a crowd of Hispanic voters.” said Taibbi..Moderators also refused to label as “deceptive” a video of Biden repeatedly coughing at a campaign event..“Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President’s speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the complaining DNC staffer, Timothy Durigan..“These rules need revision,” fumed Durigan, the lead analyst of the DNC’s Counter Disinformation Program, according to his LinkedIn account..In response, Twitter sent Durigan what Taibbi calls a “bizarre moderation flow chart” that “showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material.”.“If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcement officials are pushing on the levers,” Taibbi wrote..In a piece he wrote for Substack on Dec. 24, Taibbi offered a summary..“This last week we saw the FBI describe Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger and me as “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole aim” is to discredit the agency,” he wrote. “That statement will look ironic soon, as we spent much of this week learning about other agencies and organizations that can now also be discredited thanks to these files.”.Those organizations, wrote Taibbi, include Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia..“It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire,” he wrote. “A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those ‘Other Government Agencies’ soon.
