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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Twitter Files 9

Wake up babe, time for your 3 a.m. Twitter Files dump: Link

Matt Taibbi wrote this one, arguing the following.

  1. The FBI has finally made a statement about their activities, denouncing the leaks and implying people like Taibbi and others are conspiracy theorists trying to make them look bad. Taibbi responds to this by saying he's got no problem going after other agencies as well.

  2. Turns out that other US government orgs were involved in discussing misinformation with Twitter. The DOD and OGAs (other governmental agencies) were frequently in touch and in meetings with the same set of tech companies we think of: Microsoft, Verizon, Facebook, etc.

  3. Of note was the role played by the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a task force about fighting the interventions of others into US politics and discourse. There were countless people from other agencies in these meetings as well.

  4. These people, through the FITF and FBI, were sending hundreds of reports of problematic accounts. Requests were always framed around the idea that the account had violated Twitter's policies. Twitter was aware the FBI had people literally trawling the site for policy violations. They were very thorough - it didn't matter how impactful a piece of media or a post might be, it would be reported no matter what.

  5. Twitter felt a bit overwhelmed by how many requests they got, with one employee complaining about the backlog they had of these requests.

  6. Given the sheer scale of requests, there were some number (not clear how many) of requests where Twitter internally said "there's no proof on this".

  7. There's quite a few accounts seemingly forwarded to Twitter on the basis of being pro-Russia, pro-Maduro, pro-Cuba.

This release seems to confirm something that I had feared from the get-go, namely that the government could apply pressure on Twitter to be more responsive if it demanded certain accounts get taken down. It was not my initial concern upon reading the Intercept article about the DHS, as I felt we were a few steps removed from this point, but it seems I was mistaken in a bad way.

Anyways, I'm honestly just getting annoyed now, because I want to write a full post on the Twitter Files and what they do or don't say, but I can't as long as they keep publishing new pieces. The end of this one suggests we're going to get more. Engagement with these on Twitter is way down, suggesting people are getting burned out or just fading away as they assign the Twitter Files a place in their mind and move on with their lives.

If I was in twitter's position I would ignore all email requests by the FBI unless it's life or death , like terrorism. Twitter needs to make it clear that they are only a social network, and that twitter's staff has no responsibility beyond that. If it's important enough they, the feds, will notify via registered mail or some other means. Someone posting misinformation about an election? not our problem.

Taibbi does argue in the release that Twitter execs were nervous about getting dragged in front of Congress again over alleged foreign interference and their lack of action. The implication is that they feared getting hit with new regulation or fine or whatever.

With the Feds attempts to censor I wander if they have a decent case to challenge any attempted government fine. If a speech company faces regulatory or fines they would not have a fairly decent argument that any fine violates the first amendment - since it can be construed as punishment for not participating in censorship.

It does seem like an outright requirement to censor would not be feasible, I agree. But there are other ways the gov might retaliate for failure to obey that might be next to impossible to prove are motivated by politics.