Files reveal how the specter of Moscow’s supposed underhand ways was used to subjugate the platform to the US Democratic Party
In a pair of blockbuster #TwitterFiles threads, this week, journalist Matt Taibbi has blown open, even wider, the media giant’s concerning collusion with the US national security state. The former Rolling Stone writer exposed how political pressure from the US Democratic Party very effectively forced the company to endorse the lie that its platform was extensively weaponized by Russia, with hugely significant consequences.
Find the “Russian trace” at any cost
The first, boldly titled ‘How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In’, documents how in August 2017, despite dubious allegations that Russian bots and trolls were responsible for the election of Donald Trump in the mainstream media reaching fever pitch, Twitter’s hierarchy knew its platform wasn’t riddled with malign Kremlin-directed actors.
In internal emails, the company’s senior executives and communications professionals almost mocked the idea that it was overrun with Russian bots. They could neither detect “a big correlation” in account activity related to the November 2016 election, nor any “larger patterns” at all. They forecast potentially taking action against less than 25 users. As such, it was decided to simply ignore approaches from the media on the issue.
The next month, Twitter informed the Senate it had suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts. Senator Mark Warner, a ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, immediately held a high-profile press conference to denounce the social network’s response as “frankly inadequate on every level.”
Such pressure, combined with bitter, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declaring, “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare,” forced the social network to set up a dedicated “Russia task force” to investigate the issue. It did – and found nothing. “No evidence of a coordinated approach” between accounts flagged as potentially Kremlin-run was identified, despite an “exhaustive” internal investigation.

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