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Notes -
Twitter Files 6
I thought we were done with this, but it seems not. Link
TF6 is written by Taibbi and covers the relationship between Twitter and the FBI + DHS. The arguments in order:
Twitter's senior/important staff were in constant contact with the FBI (Evidence/Example: 150 emails between Yoel Roth and the FBI from Jan 2020 to Nov 2022)
The FBI had a task force centered on identifying alleged foreign interference in our elections. This was made in 2016 and grew to 80 people eventually.
The FBI and DHS had separate entry points into Twitter's reporting system compared to other people so that Twitter knew it was the federal government requesting moderation, not just some randoms.
There were a great deal of requests made, with Taibbi alleging that humorless people must have been doing the ground-level collection because many of the flagged posts were obviously jokes (or, not obviously serious). Supposedly, the requests weren't that completely partisan, with a few left-wing jokesters getting flagged by the FBI as well.
Many accounts were tiny, with some having follower counts below 10. It seems whoever was collecting all this from the government's side took no chances and combed through everyone, something even Twitter's staff noted.
State governments were also involved, with one incident involving California officials asking Twitter why no action was taken against a flagged tweet.
Taibbi closes with the following:
I've said before that not every TF release is equal, with several coming across to me as limp and very much known to both sides beforehand. This is no exception, The Intercept had thoroughly covered attempts by the DHS to remove "misinformation" from social media a few months ago. I'm genuinely unsure what Taibbi or any of the other TF reporters think was revealed here. More evidence to throw onto an argument is always good, don't get me wrong, but there's nothing here that wasn't provable prior to this.
That's not to say what was going on is acceptable, I outlined my rejection of this state of affairs here. Only that none of this was even unknown or outside the mainstream.
Contemporaneously, the defenses of 'FBI misinformation teams', not just in the last few months but even eg the Jankowicz controversies well before that often involved some combination of :
the FBI had a valid role in combating fraud or other federal crimes related to false statements, and it wasn't going far outside of that here,
the majority of stricken content involved Bad Actors, either likely foreign governments, foreign-government-inspired 'third parties', and/or domestic near-criminals, and/or
the government's requests were 'just like anyone else', in that they were not prioritized, and did not result in takedowns that were unlikely if reported by normal people.
Note even in your Intercept link -- in addition to the low trust a lot of people have with the Intercept specifically -- mentions that "the extent to which the DHS initiatives affect Americans’ daily social feeds is unclear." The lawsuit the Intercept links is impressively limited in its references to the FBI (consisting almost solely of mentioning the FBI-Zuckerberg meeting mentioned in a Rogan interview), but more generally spends little focus on blocking of specific content, almost purely limited to the CDC's use of example posts. Those are controversial enough, but they were highly limited in both scope and topic. And while part of that reflects poor competence from the lawsuit's filers, more of it reflects that simply not being known anywhere. Because it was never known if any given censorship action was driven from state actors, it has been trivial to avoid object-level claims. People still pretend the Hunter Biden laptop was organically blocked!
This seems kinda like a pretty major revelations for all three of these things!
A number of posts are clearly protected political speech, satire, or rarely even plausible (if wrong) beliefs. The accounts do not show signs of domestic terrorism, nor of "boosting" or other signs of foreign intervention. And while Twitter didn't suspend 100% of posters the FBI gave, they are clearly willing to err far further on the side of moderating anyone brought through these formats than any posts brought forward through normal reports would be.
That's entirely fair. I keep assuming that people would conclude, like me, that "the government is trying to tell private actors what to censor" to be a maximally red flag and all following evidence just icing on said flag, but I shouldn't doubt that there are people who unironically would say that there isn't anything inherently wrong with that.
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