The Pentagon, CIA and other US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies became increasingly \u201cmore aggressive\u201d with takedown requests, the latest trove of Twitter files has revealed. The documents suggest the agencies were effectively pushing the platform to censor foreign-policy stories that ran against the Washington-approved narrative.
\n\u201cThe files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government \u2013 from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA,\u201d journalist Matt Taibbi wrote in the Christmas Eve edition of the Twitter Files, released with the blessing of the social media platform’s owner, Elon Musk.
\nThousands of censorship requests flowed to Twitter from what were termed OGA” in the documents, or \u201cOther Government Organizations,” through the FBI\u2019s Foreign Influence Task Force.
\nTwitter executives often struggled to validate government claims, but were under constant pressure to find evidence to blame any foreign actor, Russia in particular.
\n\u201cFound no links to Russia,\u201d an unnamed analyst said in one of the emails, later suggesting he could \u201cbrainstorm\u201d to \u201cfind a stronger connection.\u201d Former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth admitted in another instance that he’d found \u201cno real matches using the info.\u201d
\nInternal communications show that Twitter had been getting so many requests that its executives had to improvise a system for prioritizing them. The feds had dedicated personnel tasked with tailoring takedown requests to Twitter\u2019s policies for faster processing, which the execs acknowledged as \u201codd,\u201d but even then the company often struggled to justify censorship.
\n\u201cMany people wonder if Internet platforms receive direction from intelligence agencies about moderation of foreign policy news stories. It appears Twitter did, in some cases by way of the FITF\/FBI,\u201d Taibbi wrote. At least some of these directives originated at the CIA, according to former agent and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who said he \u201crecognized the formatting.\u201d
\nThe feds sometimes sent massive batches of over 1,000 accounts lined up for \u201cdigital execution,\u201d with only a brief explanation of the alleged problems. On multiple occasions they accused \u201cRussian agents\u201d of directing accounts that highlighted \u201cpredominantly anti-Ukraine narratives\u201d or documented \u201cpurported rights abuses committed by Ukrainians.\u201d
\nAnother intelligence assessment sent to Twitter claimed that accounts spreading information about \u201cneo-Nazis\u201d in Ukraine were part of a Kremlin-controlled propaganda campaign and must be banned.
\nIn what Taibbi called a \u201cdamning admission,\u201d an unnamed former CIA-turned-Twitter executive once noted that the \u201cgovernment partners\u201d were getting increasingly \u201caggressive\u201d with their takedown requests.
\n\u201cDue to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,\u201d he said about the InfoBRICS account. He further argued that since \u201cBRICS is an inherently Russia-dominated economic organization\u201d it was \u201calways likely…directed by the Kremlin.\u201d
\n\u201cOur window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution and reporting on it\u2026I’m going to go ahead with suspension and marking the domain UNSAFE.\u201d
\nSpearheaded by Taibbi in cooperation with fellow reporters Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and others, the Twitter Files have shed light on several controversial decisions made by the company, including material surrounding the suspension of ex-President Donald Trump, the practice of shadow banning, as well as a site-wide ban on a New York Post report about the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden.
\nThe files also explained how the US intelligence community worked hand-in-glove with the platform to flag speech for suspension that the US government deemed \u201cmisinformation,\u201d and showed how the FBI and Twitter locked horns over the agency\u2019s claims of increased activity by \u2018propaganda\u2019 bots, of which Twitter said it found no evidence.<\/p>\n
Rt<\/p>\n
Tags:Twitter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Pentagon, CIA and other US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies became increasingly \u201cmore aggressive\u201d with takedown requests, the latest trove of Twitter files has revealed. The documents suggest the agencies were effectively pushing the platform to censor foreign-policy stories that ran against the Washington-approved narrative. \u201cThe files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[1241,1211],"class_list":["post-6532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-censor","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6534,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6532\/revisions\/6534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}