This week has seen a number of developments, including the release of four new Twitter Files, several of great significance.

• Twitter Files 13 — Twitter and Covid
  Alex Berenson, January 9, 2023

• Twitter Files 14 — Russian Bots and #ReleasetheMemo Hashtag
  Matt Taibbi, January 12, 2023

• Twitter Files 14a — Supplemental — More Adam Schiff Ban Requests,
  and "Deamplification"
  Matt Taibbi, January 13, 2023

• Twitter Files 15 — How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy (Intercept version: “Covid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic Vaccine)
  Lee Fang, January 16, 2023

(Additional brief comments here.)

The final file, by Lee Fang, is especially troubling. It documents how Pfizer and BioNTech attempted to use Twitter to protect its profit from the activist campaign to get them to make their vaccines available free or at low cost to developing nations, especially in the Global South.

From his Intercept write-up:

The campaign they were concerned about was the launch of an international push to force the drug industry to share the intellectual property and patents associated with coronavirus vaccine development. Making the patents available, in turn, would allow countries across the world to swiftly manufacture generic vaccines and other low-cost therapeutics to deal with the ongoing pandemic. [emphasis added]

That’s evil in its purest form — choosing profits over people whose lives are at risk — with Big Pharma caught choosing its profits and consigning many brown-skinned others to death.

Thanks to the Twitter Files, we now have proof of this, not just suspicions. And only thanks to the Twitter Files, I hasten to add.

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Unfortunately, this week I’m in transition. Next week I’ll send several posts covering these developments.

In the meantime, I have updated this file (“Twitter File Links, Aggregated”) with links to the above Twitter Files (along with a few comments), and will continue do so whenever a new file is released. It will always be up to date, so feel free to bookmark it.

Finally, Google may be getting into the content-flagging act. As you know, I’ve been covering the Twitter Files pretty extensively. If you search on my name, “thomas neuburger”, and narrow the search to include only “Previous week”, you see this flag ahead of the results:

Changing the filter to “Past month” removes the flag. Is this meaningful? I don’t know. But asking if I’m “trusted on this topic” is worrying.

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I’ll have my own Twitter tale to tell, perhaps, if I can find data to support my suspicion. But for now, if you get the same result from a Google search, please let me know, either in the comments or by email.

Thanks again to you all. More soon.

“When the government watches you twenty-four hours a day, you cannot use the word ‘liberty.’ That is the relationship between a master and a slave.”
—Chris Hedges, “America’s Theater of the Absurd”

Two more Twitter Files have dropped, both by Matt Taibbi. They should be considered together, as a set.

In addition to my summary, this piece contains links to the releases, brief descriptions, and two supplementary interviews Taibbi has given explaining them. These interviews add new information, so I suggest listening if this interests you.

‘Industry’ and the State: Partners in Crime

If you read these files through, and I hope you do, pay attention to how often the word “partner” is used.

The FBI refers to its “industry partners” in their communication to Twitter — meaning, I believe, social media companies in general. And Twitter executives frequently refer to “our partners at the FBI.”

So where does the state end and “industry” begin? I'm not sure I can tell you. I can tell you that a surveillance state is not a friendly operation. Consider the Chris Hedges quote at the top. To be constantly watched is to be constantly controlled. We’ve seen the watching, been watching it for years. Now we see one of the mechanisms of control.

There is, in fact, a word for when a government entangles itself with the activities of corporations. Consider Benito Mussolini in 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers (quoted here; emphasis mine):

The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu[l] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. (pp. 135-136)

Corporate “production” in the modern world includes digital and online products.

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Links to Twitter Files 11 & 12

To jump immediately to these files, click the links below. Discussions of previously released Twitter Files can be found here, here and here.

• Twitter Files 11 — How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
Matt Taibbi, January 3, 2023
A differently titled version is also published at Taibbi’s Substack site.

30. “REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS”
This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.

• Twitter Files 12 — Twitter and the FBI ‘Belly Button’
Matt Taibbi, January 3, 2023
A version is also published at Taibbi’s Substack site.

23. "BELLY BUTTON"
“We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan explained, but the DHS agency CISA “will know what’s going on in each state.” He went on to ask if industry could “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the USG [U.S. government]."

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Links to Earlier Twitter Files

Links to all Twitter files can be found in the articles listed in the pulldown tab at the top of the God’s Spies main page:

There’s also a simple summary file here.

Twitter Files 11

Twitter Files 11 was titled “How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In” when published on Twitter, and “Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In” when republished in essay form on Taibbi’s Substack site.

As Taibbi summarizes it, this set recaps “a furious fall of 2017 for Twitter, which began with threats of legislation and ended with the company surrendering control over content moderation.”

What’s notable is how the elements of the Democratic Party ecosystem seems to coordinate and amplify the attack by Sen. Warner (D-VA), who, as one Twitter executive writes, is “taking cues from Hillary Clinton.”

For example, here’s Politico:

And here’s a supposedly academic think tank at Johns Hopkins:

To all of which pressure, Twitter caved:

The above, to my eye, is damning. It represents complete surrender to the security state.

Twitter Files 12

Twitter Files 12, “Twitter and the FBI ‘Belly Button’”, picks up exactly where TF 11 leaves off:

The Global Engagement Center, as Taibbi says in his interviews (see below), is a Hillary Clinton-era creation within the State Department to give them their own presence in the foreign intelligence arena:

4. The GEC flagged accounts as “Russian personas and proxies” based on criteria like, “Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,” blaming “research conducted at the Wuhan institute,” and “attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.” [link to image in full tweet]

There’s also a reference to “Blaming Bill Gates” in the lists of sins that the GEC thinks should get a Twitter user banned. Is there any question the government is a domestic propaganda operation at this point? The floodgates to capricious “moderation” have been opened wide.

The highlighted comment in this document from Yoel Roth is telling. Note that the attack he's responding to comes from another academic think tank, this time at Clemson.

Asking if there’s any information they could provide to “help us make those links” seems uncomfortably close to looking for non-existent votes in Georgia, but maybe that’s just me.

One further note about the State Department’s GEC — at this point in its life, it’s being led by the Trump administration.

By October, the number of requests from all over the place — “Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS” — was overwhelming. The value of the requests ranged from help with help with what were described as foreign ransomware actors, to requests to ban a journalist at the request of Adam Schiff, Democratic Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Note that the Committee wanted to ban searches related to its staff members as well.

Though Twitter declined these requests, it honored almost all of the others.

The rest of the thread details the overwhelming amount of work that Twitter was asked to do, and from every direction. It’s a stunning (and not difficult) read. A “master-canine” relationship indeed.

Taibbi ends by noting that even though Twitter was paid almost $3.5 million for what was essentially contract labor, “they were underpaid.”

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Supplemental — Interviews Discussing Twitter Files 11 & 12

Taibbi has been making the rounds since these two releases. Here he discusses TF 11 and TF 12 with Ryan Grim, Washington bureau chief at the Intercept, and Emily Jashinsky, co-hosts of Counterpoints.

Note Grim's questions. Also note that Taibbi says more here than he wrote in the Files themselves.

The Lee Fang story that Grim refers to is here.

And here’s a recent interview with Taibbi on Richard Eskow’s Zero Hour program. Again, good questions and answer that go beyond what’s said in the Files themselves.

Updated February 7, 2023. The latest Twitter Files addition, on Hamilton 68, starts here.

This will be an ongoing, constantly updated post that lists links to the Twitter Files in order of their publications, until either the project is completed or the manager that replaces Elon Musk finally knuckles under and kicks reporters as far out of the building as he can boot them.

These are the Twitter Files in the order of their release. They are discussed in more detail here:

• Twitter and the State (Twitter Files 1–5)

• Twitter and the State, Part 2 (Twitter Files 6–7)

• Twitter and the CIA (Twitter Files 8–10)

• ‘Industry’ and the State (Twitter Files 11-12)

All links below lead to unrolled threads hosted at the Thread Reader App website. Scroll down for the latest files. It’s below the Share button.

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Thread: Twitter Files 1
Matt Taibbi, December 2, 2022

The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out [of] the control of its designer.

Twitter Files 1a — Supplemental
Matt Taibbi, December 6, 2022

On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay. We can now tell you part of the reason why.

Twitter Files 2 — Twitter's Secret Blacklists
Bari Weiss, December 9, 2022

A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.

Twitter Files 3 — The Removal of Donald Trump: October 2020-January 6th
Matt Taibbi, December 9, 2022

The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th. We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed.

Twitter Files 4 — The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7
Michael Schellenberger, December 10, 2022

For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump. “Blocking a world leader from Twitter,” it wrote in 2018, “would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”

Twitter Files 5 — The Removal of Trump from Twitter
Bari Weiss, December 12, 2022

On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice.

Twitter Files 6 — Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary
Matt Taibbi, December 16, 2022

Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

Twitter Files 6a — Supplemental (Version at Taibbi’s Substack here)
Matt Taibbi, December 18, 2022

The [Foreign Influence Task Force] seem[ed] displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.”

Twitter Files 7 — The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
Michael Shellenberger, December 19, 2022

Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting.

Twitter Files 8 — How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign
Lee Fang, December 20, 2022

An expanded version was published at The Intercept.

Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operation.

Twitter Files 9 — Twitter and “Other Government Agencies”
Matt Taibbi, December 24, 2022

Also published as “Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter” at his Substack site.

The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

Twitter Files 10 — How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
David Zwieg, December 26, 2022

Both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.

Twitter Files 11 — How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
Matt Taibbi, January 3, 2023
A differently titled version was also published at Taibbi’s Substack site.

30. “REPORTERS NOW KNOW THIS IS A MODEL THAT WORKS”
This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.

Twitter Files 12 — Twitter and the FBI ‘Belly Button’ (Version at Taibbi’s Substack here)
Matt Taibbi, January 3, 2023

23. "BELLY BUTTON"
“We can give you everything we’re seeing from the FBI and USIC agencies,” Chan explained, but the DHS agency CISA “will know what’s going on in each state.” He went on to ask if industry could “rely on the FBI to be the belly button of the USG."

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Twitter Files 13 — Twitter and Covid
Alex Berenson, January 9, 2023

1. … On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb - a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers - saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines. …

2. The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates. …

5. @Pfizer depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021 and paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.

6. Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House. …

This Twitter File may be difficult for some people as it comes from Alex Berenson, a man with a strong, right-wing, anti-vax reputation. But follow the money. The tread is about Twitter and Pharma, not vaccine effectiveness.

Twitter Files 14 — Russian Bots and #ReleasetheMemo Hashtag
Matt Taibbi, January 12, 2023

30. Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record.

Another Twitter File that may be difficult for some people. If it’s an article of faith for you that Russia materially affected the election of Donald Trump, that without Russian interference he might not have been President, this will challenge that belief, at least from Twitter’s standpoint. It may also unchain a now-quiet beast, your feelings about Devin Nunes.

I merely suggest that, whatever your feelings, you follow the facts. If the wrong clock is right, should that clock’s reading be ignored?

Twitter Files 14a — Supplemental — More Adam Schiff Ban Requests,
and "Deamplification"
Matt Taibbi, January 13, 2023

6. … Schiff’s office repeatedly complained about “QAnon related activity” that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine “whistleblower” or the Steele dossier.

Twitter Files 15 — How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy (Intercept version: “Covid-19 Drugmakers Pressured Twitter to Censor Activists Pushing for Generic Vaccine)
Lee Fang, January 16, 2023

The campaign they were concerned about was the launch of an international push to force the drug industry to share the intellectual property and patents associated with coronavirus vaccine development. Making the patents available, in turn, would allow countries across the world to swiftly manufacture generic vaccines and other low-cost therapeutics to deal with the ongoing pandemic. [Intercept version, emphasis added]

Update from January 27

Twitter Files 16 — Move Over, Jayson Blair: Twitter Files Expose Next Great Media Fraud [Taibbi lists this release as “Twitter Files 15”]
Matt Taibbi, January 27, 2023

This, by Chris Hedges, seems a fair description of the content and importance (slightly edited for readability). You can decide for yourself if Hedges is fair and the content important.

Matt Taibbi has published an investigation about a vast propaganda campaign called “Hamilton 68, launched a year after Donald Trump won the presidency, to smear critics of the Democratic Party, from the left and the right, as Russian assets.

Hamilton 68 claimed it used complex data analysis and relied on so-called disinformation experts to ferret out information on social media that emanated from the Kremlin. Hamilton 68, a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation,” was run by Democratic operatives, including John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, and figures from intelligence agencies such as the CIA, the FBI and Homeland Security, as well as neoconservatives and establishment Republicans, such as Bill Kristol, who do not support Trump and have been warmly embraced by the Democratic Party.

Mainstream news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, as well as Mother Jones – which ran 14 stories based on the group’s “research” – cited Hamilton 68 as an authoritative source, even as the site refused to disclose the data or methods it used to make its assessments.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of media headlines were flagged as Russian bot infiltrations in online discussions about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings; Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign; the Parkland shooting; U.S. missile strikes in Syria and the Bernie Sander’s campaign and many, many other stories. Fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes also relied on Hamilton 68.

Taibbi, given access to Twitter’s internal memos and emails by Elon Musk, who bought Twitter, was able to expose not only the fraudulent claims of Hamilton 68, but the failure of the press, which was a full partner in one of the worst forms of censorship since the red baiting of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, one that targeted people with dissident or unconventional opinions and accused them of Un-American activities.

There’s a follow-on titled “Hamilton 68: Brief Addendum” posted here. It appears only on his Substack site.

Here’s a discussion between Hedges and Taibbi on this topic:

The Chris Hedges Report

The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Matt Taibbi about Russiagate and the most pernicious campaign of censorship since the red baiting of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.

Listen now (31 min) | Matt Taibbi has published an investigation about a vast propaganda campaign called “Hamilton 68, launched a year after Donald Trump won the presidency, to smear critics of the Democratic Party, from the left and the right, as Russian assets. Hamilton 68 claimed it used complex data analysis and relied on so-called disinformation experts to ferret out in…

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3 years ago · 100 likes · 17 comments · Chris Hedges

This piece will be updated with links as new Twitter Files are released.

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Update: For aggregated links to all Twitter files to date, click here.

“Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track.”
—Matt Taibbi

The fact of a holiday weekend has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Twitter Files team, which now includes:

• Matt Taibbi (TF 1, 1a, 3, 6, 6a, 9)

• Bari Weiss (TF 2, 5)

• Michael Shellenberger (TF 4, 7)

• Lee Fang (TF 8)

• David Zweig (TF 10)

The releases have been coming fast as the team furiously reads the thousands of documents made available.

My personal worry: Changes at Twitter and a potential ouster or resignation of Elon Musk, desirable perhaps for many other reasons, will close the door to these disclosures, and close it fast. If the team isn’t racing against the clock to leverage the access they have, they ought to be.

Because those revelations are getting more and more interesting. Taibbi especially has been pulling the thread that connects Twitter — and many other social media companies — with not just domestic surveillance agencies, but the CIA.

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Twitter Files 8, by Lee Fang, one of my favorite investigative journalists, looks at the way that Twitter and its executives decries state-backed information operations, which it says are “associated with misleading [and] deceptive behavior”…

…while they simultaneous enable U.S. state-sponsored operations of the same type. This happened so frequently that it almost looks like one of Taibbi’s “master-canine” relationships.

Twitter Files 9, by Matt Taibbi, is an important one. Here, the hand of the CIA is revealed. It seems that the FBI was only fronting for a whole assembly of other government security agencies, and even some local police departments, in requesting that tweets be deleted, accounts deprecated and the like.

Twitter Files 10, by another new Twitter Files researcher, David Zweig, looks at the relationship between Twitter and the Trump and Biden administrations regarding the Covid pandemic. Whatever you think of the everyone-must-be-vaccinated policy of the U.S. government — I suspect most readers agree with that policy — it’s instructive nonetheless to see the extent to which Twitter and other social media operations were aggressively roped into the messaging, censorship of doubt, and discussion of alternatives.

Yes, there was a clamping down of the yahoo-ism and thoughtless rebellion against this (or perhaps any) anti-Covid regime. But it’s still not clear that vaccine-only was the best way to go. Would vaccine-plus-contact tracing, for example, have saved more lives? We’ll never know, and the discussion was never had, at least in public.

Ask yourself, if it weren’t this administration and this message, would you approve these methods? If the government changed hands to your opponents, would you want to grant them the same intrusive power?

The fact is, by approving this level of intrusion into the public discourse now, we have already granted our opponents that same power. If you build a gun, anyone can use it, especially if its use is widely cheered.

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Links to Earlier Twitter Files

The following section provides links to Twitter Files 8, 9 and 10. Links to earlier Twitter files can be found in the articles available from the pulldown tab at the top of the God’s Spies main page:

Twitter Files 8, 9 & 10

These are the latest Twitter Files since the first two sets were released. They extend the list collected here and here. (Emphasis added below.)

Twitter Files 8 — How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign
Lee Fang, December 20, 2022

An expanded version was published at The Intercept.

Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operation. […]

Twitter Files 9 — Twitter and “Other Government Agencies”
Matt Taibbi, December 24, 2022

Also published as “Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter” at his Substack site.

The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

2. The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors - from local cops to media to state governments.

3. Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying. […]

Twitter Files 10 — How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
David Zwieg, December 26, 2022

2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.

3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. […]

5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @TheFP showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes. […]

As I’ve said many times about these reports, if you build a gun, anyone can use it. Especially if its use is widely cheered. This is how we repealed the Fourth Amendment — by both parties approving and participating in its violation.

The next Republican president will use every power bequeathed by the last two Democrats. And when out-of-power Democrats complain, as they rightly should, much of the public will say “So the shoe’s on the other foot.”

The public will be wrong in that. But only because no party should have these powers, not because one of them should.

Update: For aggregated links to all Twitter files to date, click here.

In a previous piece — “Twitter and the Security State” — I provided a unified list of links to all Twitter Files published to that time, releases 1 through 5. You can read or review them there if you like.

I also wrote that when there are new Twitter Files, I’d extend the list. Since then, three more have dropped. Scroll down for the links.

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Twitter Files 6, by Matt Taibbi, contains a preliminary overview of the extent of connection between the FBI and Twitter.

As Taibbi has said in various interviews since (example here), they’re just scratching the surface in these connections. He’s said that quite a few other agencies are similarly involved, including DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and ODNI (the Office of the Director of National Intelligence), plus others that have not been named as yet.

A supplement, Twitter Files 6a, also by Taibbi, cites a federal interagency task force (FITC) grilling of Twitter about why it “had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors” when other sources apparently had. (The list of those sources, provided by the agency, is thin.)

TF6 is discussed by the team at Breaking Points here.

Twitter Files 7, by Michael Shellenberger, looks at the Hunter Biden Laptop story in detail. It’s quite long, but one of the gems of the piece occurs near the middle, where he provides background about the FBI’s prepping Twitter to “be very afraid” of foreign interference in the 2020 election while, as later court affidavits show, they knew they had no information at all that 2016 was going to be repeated. This occurred before the laptop story, and shows the general operation of the relationship, what Taibbi has called its "master-canine quality."

My recommendation is to read TF7 for that especially, since my focus here is not on interference in 2020 — by Russians or our own Spook State — but on the entanglement between the aforementioned State and social media platforms.

After all, if you want to influence a nation, you go where the ears are assembled. And I’m convinced, as are many of you, that the Spook State is heavily involved in “guiding” the country, has been for decades, with the best of intentions, of course.

As David Swanson wrote in “The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies”:

Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda.

More on that subject here.

I think it’s naive to think the Pentagon doesn’t propagandize at home, both directly and indirectly. For starters, consider the yearly half-trillion dollars at risk if the public fails to support the Pentagon budget.

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The Twitter Files, Round 2

These are the latest Twitter Files since the first five were released. They extend the list collected here. (Emphasis added below.)

Twitter Files 6 — Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary
Matt Taibbi, December 16, 2022

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts. […]

Twitter Files 6a — Supplemental (Version at Taibbi’s Substack here)
Matt Taibbi, December 18, 2022

2. In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats.

3. The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.”

4. One would think that would be good news. The agencies seemed to feel otherwise. […]

Twitter Files 7 — The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
Michael Shellenberger, December 19, 2022

18. It's not the first time that Twitter's Roth has pushed back against the FBI. In January 2020, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process.

19. Pressure had been growing:

“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies. They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).”

20. Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting.

“[W]e haven’t yet identified activity that we’d typically refer to you (or even flag as interesting in the foreign influence context).” […]

Why Assemble These Lists?

As I’ve said many times, my interest is not to defend either Musk or Trump against whatever their sins may be.

My interest is in the facts — in particular, the facts of the entanglement (a careful word) between our so-called security establishment and its American targets, by which I mean the public.

I also worry, as do a great many others, about a coup in the United States. I’m just looking where others aren’t.

Update: For aggregated links to all Twitter files to date, click here.

“It is hard to know where Twitter ends and the intelligence agencies begin.”
—Matt Taibbi

I want to wade into the Twitter Files a bit — their contents, not the controversy. But I want to do it carefully since (trigger warning), discussion is triggering people.

I also want to create a collection that lists all of the Twitter File stories in a single place. To my knowledge, this is missing, even from Wikipedia.

This piece, therefore, assembles all of them as of this writing.

Why Read The Twitter Files?

Elon Musk may be a “far-right activist,” as the Atlantic recently claimed. And the Republican Party may on Hitler's road to a permanent one-party state, one in which it will never lose an election, and the worst of their people, like the new-minted Handmaid Justice, write all the rules.

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But the intersection between the American security state — agencies like DHS and the FBI, allied private firms like Dataminr — and global monopoly platforms like Twitter and Facebook should nevertheless be examined.

You might be glad, for example, that the FBI polices speech (not yet a crime, except in very clear cases), and that someone like Donald Trump is thus deplatformed. You might applaud. You might also be right on the merits.

But imagine all that aggregated power — the state, the agencies, the firms, the monopolies — in less friendly hands. If you build a gun, anyone can use it. Anyone at all.

The following image, for example, was taken from an internal Twitter Slack channel. In it, a top executive admits to regular meetings with the FBI and DHS.

Does this give you pause? It does me.

The Twitter Files To Date

With that preamble, I want to link to The Twitter Files to date. There are five in all, plus a supplemental comment. Each is archived at the Thread Reader App website as a single page.

Feel free to read or ignore. But whatever you believe, or come to believe, at least you can access the source.

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Thread: Twitter Files 1
Matt Taibbi, December 2, 2022

What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer. [...]

Twitter Files 1a — Supplemental
Matt Taibbi, December 6, 2022

On Friday, the first installment of the Twitter files was published here. We expected to publish more over the weekend. Many wondered why there was a delay.

We can now tell you part of the reason why. [...]

Twitter Files 2 — Twitter's Secret Blacklists
Bari Weiss, December 9, 2022

A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users. [...]

Personal note: This one was fascinating, way too short, and focused on rightwing figures only. Too bad. If she’d gone broader, it would have been better.

Twitter Files 3 — The Removal of Donald Trump: October 2020-January 6th
Matt Taibbi, December 9, 2022

The world knows much of the story of what happened between riots at the Capitol on January 6th, and the removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter on January 8th...

We’ll show you what hasn’t been revealed: the erosion of standards within the company in months before J6, decisions by high-ranking executives to violate their own policies, and more, against the backdrop of ongoing, documented interaction with federal agencies.

This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @ShellenbergerMD will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @bariweiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.

Whatever your opinion on the decision to remove Trump that day, the internal communications at Twitter between January 6th-January 8th have clear historical import. Even Twitter’s employees understood in the moment it was a landmark moment in the annals of speech. [...]

Twitter Files 4 — The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7
Michael Schellenberger, December 10, 2022

For years, Twitter had resisted calls to ban Trump. “Blocking a world leader from Twitter,” it wrote in 2018, “would hide important info... [and] hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.” [...]

Twitter Files 5 — The Removal of Trump from Twitter
Bari Weiss, December 12, 2022

On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump, with one remaining strike before being at risk of permanent suspension from Twitter, tweets twice. [...]

There will be more released. When they accumulate, I'll extend this list.

Additional Resources

I want to offer three more resources, both for context and to provide new information.

• The first is a free segment from a longer talk between Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, where Kirn interviews Taibbi about the meaning of the files. Some of what’s not been released is discussed here.

You can find the subscriber-only segment by clicking here.

• The second is a discussion on Breaking Points in which the hosts consider both the political and security state implications of these releases.

• Finally, here’s a discussion between David Sirota, Matt Taibbi and listeners in which Taibbi addresses criticism of his own involvement in the leaks. Taibbi covers quite a bit of ground. It’s well worth a listen.

As Taibbi said in the discussion linked above (48:20), “It is hard to know where Twitter ends and the intelligence agencies begin.”

I think that’s worth learning about.