1. TWITTER FILES:
Statement to Congress
THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX pic.twitter.com/JLryjnINXS— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
3. But Twitter was more like a partner to government.
With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police: pic.twitter.com/DgI954lge7
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
5. Many were obvious “misinformation,” like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election.
But other official “disinfo” reports had shakier reasoning. The highlighted Twitter analysis here disagrees with the FBI about accounts deemed a “proxy of Russian actors”: pic.twitter.com/9AZ7jZFfWi
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
7. In some cases, state reports didn’t even assert misinformation. Here, a list of YouTube videos is flagged for “anti-Ukraine narratives”: pic.twitter.com/dAWYp8Ht5j
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
9. Asked if Twitter’s marketing department could say the company detects “misinfo” with help of “outside experts,” a Twitter executive replied: pic.twitter.com/oYjKUqE96I
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020.
The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key: pic.twitter.com/7lLlL2tcjN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
13. NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team – or Signal group, as it were: pic.twitter.com/AIQsdavacQ
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner. pic.twitter.com/lV8coy43Hn
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
17. Note Aspen recommended the power to mandate data disclosure be given to the FTC, which this committee just caught in a clear abuse of office, demanding information from Twitter about communications with (and identities of) #TwitterFiles reporters. https://t.co/IfbfYmj0ev pic.twitter.com/M9vO024AQI
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
19. The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel. pic.twitter.com/6rS6L7Lxds
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
21.While Twitter sometimes pushed back on technical analyses from NGOs about who is and isn’t a “bot,” on subject matter questions like vaccines or elections they instantly defer to sites like Politifact, funded by the same names that fund the NGOs: Koch, Newmark, Knight. pic.twitter.com/8zaTndVOJ3
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
23. Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
25. Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded Newsguard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective “risk” or “reliability” scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role? pic.twitter.com/s9tobM9rf8
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
27. After public uproar “paused” the Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” of the DHS in early 2020, Stanford created the EIP to “fill the gaps” legally, as director Alex Stamos explains here (h/t Foundation for Freedom Online). https://t.co/G7xLxecbMk
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
29. According to the EIP’s own data, it succeeded in getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the runup to the 2020 vote. pic.twitter.com/kuA7crjD80
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
31. After the 2020 election, when EIP was renamed the Virality Project, the Stanford lab was on-boarded to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, absorbing this government proxy into Twitter infrastructure – with a capability of taking in an incredible 50 million tweets a day. pic.twitter.com/iPxtRT0QSR
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
33. This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
35. DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals. pic.twitter.com/nFg5JS2vkH
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
37. DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the #TwitterFiles.
Although it claimed to track “Russian influence,” Hamilton really followed Americans like “Ultra Maga Dog Mom,” “Right2Liberty,” even a British rugby player named Rod Bishop: pic.twitter.com/yXoC3YTDGM
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
39. As a result of Hamilton’s efforts, all sorts of people were falsely tied in press stories to “Russian bots”: former House Intel chief Devin Nunes, #WalkAway founder @BrandonStraka, supporters of the #FireMcMaster hashtag, even people who used the term “deep state”: pic.twitter.com/YJe5TV4emq
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
41. The far worse scandal was “Project Birmingham,” in which thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts were created to follow Alabama Republican Roy Moore in his 2017 race for US Senate.
Newspapers reported Russia seemed to take an interest in the race, favoring Moore. pic.twitter.com/n46IDLlNFN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
43. Internally, Twitter correctly assessed the Moore story as far back as fall of 2017, saying it had no way if knowing if the Moore campaign purchased the bots, or if “an adversary purchased them… in an attempt to discredit them.” pic.twitter.com/o7hvAAssmd
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
45. Roth added, “We shouldn’t comment.” Repeatedly in the #TwitterFiles, when Twitter learned the truth about scandals like Project Birmingham, they said nothing, like banks that were silent about mortgage fraud.
Reporters also kept quiet, protecting fellow “stakeholders.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
47. “I know there were people who believed the Democrats needed to fight fire with fire,” she told the New York Times.
“It was absolutely chatter going around the party.” pic.twitter.com/QMxNUX5wNC
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
49. By way of proof, no major press organization has re-examined the bold claims DiResta/New Knowledge made to the Senate – e.g. that Russian ads “reached 126 million people” in 2016 – while covering up the Hamilton and Alabama frauds. If the CIC deems it, lies stay hidden.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
51. Thanks to @ShellenbergerMD and reporters/researchers @Techno_Fog, @neffects, @bergerbell, @SchmidtSue1, @tw6384, and others for help in preparing this testimony. The Twitter Files searches are performed by a third party, so material may have been left out.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023