Over the past couple of weeks, Elon Musk has treated us to a regular exposé of what went on behind the scenes at Twitter before he took it over. Musk has relied on independent journalists tweeting the information in threads to get it out to the public.
Part six of the Twitter Files dropped on Friday afternoon, and, in this installment, Matt Taibbi revealed how closely the Twitter folks worked with the FBI and other agencies to silence “election misinformation.”
Taibbi reported that the relationship between the FBI and Twitter was cozy, even chummy. In fact, Taibbi suggested that the social media giant operated as if it were a “subsidiary” of the FBI.
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
Taibbi noted that, while some of the emails were anodyne and humdrum, most of them consisted of requests for Twitter to review and take action on information relating to what the FBI deemed “misinformation” relating to elections. And the FBI’s involvement in rooting out “misinformation” led to bureaucracy on a massive scale.
“The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds,” Taibbi tweeted, also pointing out that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) got involved alongside the FBI.
It’s no surprise that the federal government surveils citizens all the time, but Taibbi wrote that “The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.”
Taibbi compared the relationship between the FBI and Twitter to that of a dog and its owner, showing an email where the agency dictated to Twitter that it needed to look at some accounts:
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts: pic.twitter.com/LjgB6fxENo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Some of the accounts that the FBI took issue with were low-follower accounts, and many of the offending tweets were jokes. And what’s particularly fascinating is that the FBI went after accounts that shared “election misinformation” from both the left and the right.
One user in particular made some interesting observations about what Twitter was doing on the bidding of the FBI.
22.When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
But wait, there’s more. Explaining how tight the relationship between Twitter and the FBI was, Taibbi showed an email from Twitter executive Stacia Cardille to General Counsel Jim Baker talking about her “soon to be weekly” meetings with the FBI.
In the email, Cardille related that she “explicitly asked if there were ‘impediments’ to the sharing of classified information ‘with industry.’ The answer? ‘FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.’”
26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Another email detailed the actions that Twitter took on the FBI’s orders regarding several tweets, many of which repeated the same joke and had low engagement. The FBI also repeatedly sent “products” to Twitter, and those “products” consisted of “DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and ‘private sector partners.’”
Taibbi also pointed out that the 2016 Russian collusion narrative served as an incubator for government censorship.
33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state. pic.twitter.com/GSaEzM0aYo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
The FBI sent so many requests to Twitter that employees discussed on Slack how “monumental” the task of going through all the agency’s requests was.
Taibbi concluded that “what most people think of as the ‘deep state’ is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”
After his threat, Taibbi mentioned a quote from an FBI agent:
An FBI agent just reached out with a key point about the “gross” subservience of Twitter before the FBI: “A lot of companies we deal with are adversarial to us. Like T-Mobile is totally adversarial. They love leaking things we're saying if we don't get our process right.” (1/2)
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
“I feel like that’s the default position. People used to get mad about that in the Bureau, but — they’re supposed to represent their clients and their customers. Why in the hell would you expect them to make it easy on you? Do the right thing. Do it the right way.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
Taibbi also teased that there’s still more to come. What’s next?
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