The #TwitterFiles Continued – Welcome to SpookVille

Posted on by ( 2 comments already! )
        

Loading

by Brad Pearce

“The populace set upon the tyrant’s supporters and seized the informers. These were an abominable race, detested by gods and men alike, who made it their business to circulate among the citizens and report on their opinions and conversations to the tyrant.”
– Plutarch [Life of Dion, 28]
 
My last article covered what we learned from the “Twitter Files,” the internal documents released by Elon Musk to a group of journalists, through the 5th release. I was going to work on a different topic, but at around publishing time, the story changed and became vastly more interesting, illegal, and nefarious. While initially journalist Matt Taibbi hadn’t “seen” any evidence of the FBI or other government agencies directly requesting legal speech be suppressed, we learned that this was because “former” high level spook James Baker was preventing journalists from accessing key documents, in direct contravention to his then-boss Elon Musk’s orders. The initial releases mostly centered around the absurd way in which Twitter sought to control information, most notably the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which Twitter famously suppressed, going as far to entirely ban The New York Post. However, on Friday, December 16, the story took a new direction. We learned that Twitter had been what Taibbi described as an “FBI subsidiary,” and an FBI agent humorously named Elvis Chan was leading a team of 80 people who were monitoring Twitter, including asking them to take down obvious jokes from low-follower accounts. What’s more, Twitter accepted almost 3.5 million dollars from the FBI for the “cost of compliance” regarding such requests. We further learned that the Pentagon was using Twitter to run psychological operations intended to promote US foreign policy goals. A separate investigation outside of the Twitter Files determined that this goes far beyond Twitter, and that Facebook’s parent company Meta is awash with former “intelligence community” officials. Of course Google has hired them as well. Alex Jones was correct with his slogan “There’s a war on for your mind.” Now that we are beginning [I’m sure only beginning] to see the depth of spy agency infiltration into the social media space, including their running of actual psyops, it is fair to say that it is “game, set, and match” in favor of the conspiracy theorists, and that anyone who believes “experts” and the “mainstream” media has truly lost.
 


 
Twitter’s communications show that between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and then head of Twitter “Trust and Safety,” Yoel Roth. It’s tempting to think that doesn’t seem like so much over an almost two year period, it is only around 7 emails a month [it’s not entirely clear what “between” means, it could mean 75 from each party.] However, Roth was a very high level person at Twitter, which is to say, these are all issues that did not fall under Twitter’s normal policies and had to go to someone with full decision making power. It’s not clear how many people were working under Roth, but the nearest thing I can find is this: “In May, he took on a senior role “responsible for all user, content, and security policies, comprising more than 120 policymakers, threat investigators, data analysts, and operations specialists.” It sounds like those are all relatively important positions, but we live in a society where a janitor is a “sanitation specialist,” so those titles don’t necessarily reflect being in senior positions. Regardless, he was managing at least 120 people, whereas the FBI social media team had 80 people, meaning communications between Yoel Roth and Elvis Chan were only things outside of the realm of what 200 people below them were permitted to deal with.
 
The FBI’s social media team was named the “Foreign Influence Task Force” and was formed in the wake of the 2016 election, when they were working hard to sell the lie that a relatively tiny number of bizarre “Russia-linked” social media ads somehow threw an election in which billions of dollars were spent. [I need to add, I have a friend who works in the social media advertising industry, and he said that the relatively small company he works for spends far more on advertising for clients weekly than Russia is purported to have spent the entire 2016 campaign.] One notable thing, which is relevant for the rest of the releases, is that the FITF cited newspaper articles which themselves cited anonymous intelligence sources as evidence of foreign interference on Twitter. This sort of circular citation is a favored technique of the spy agencies, who did the same thing during the “Russiagate” scam, where they leaked to the press, and then used press articles as “evidence” to justify surveillance warrants.
 


 
The FBI also partnered with the Department of Homeland Security, security contractors, and “think tanks,” all with the goal of pressuring Twitter into censoring, or “moderating,” legal content. Now, there is nothing surprising about, or even inherently wrong with, the government hoovering up publicly available information on social media for any number of purposes, but it is entirely different for them to have a large task force dedicated to pressuring private companies into moderating content which the intelligence agencies dislike. Not only were they flagging obvious jokes, the FBI was routinely sending long lists of individual accounts which “may warrant additional action.”
 


 
There’s a special absurdity here that the FBI is “identifying” accounts they believe “May have violated Twitter’s terms of service.” If you were to look at this with Pollyanna-like optimism, and full surety that the FBI would do nothing wrong, this still begs the question, “Why were tax dollars used to help a private company enforce its own internal policies?” However, these policies relate to legal speech, which Twitter can choose to restrict, but which the government cannot legally pressure it to restrict.
 
This letter from Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille shows the extent to which it was increasingly the government’s entire law enforcement/intelligence apparatus taking part in suppressing speech on Twitter:
 


 
There was a special application known as “Teleporter,” the sole purpose of which was to allow federal agencies as well as state governments to “alert” Twitter about pressing threats to democracy, such as jokes about voting on Wednesday. Twitter also received reports from something called the “Partner Support Portal,” created by the “Center for Internet Security,” a partner of the Department of Homeland Security. It was the standard view of all of these Deep State agencies that social media’s “permissive” attitude towards speech allowed for Russian manipulation. It’s not clear how or why this should give the Russians any sort of “operational advantage” over anyone else trying to use social media to influence public opinion, but this is in keeping with the idea that Russians are uniquely nefarious and thus can accomplish things with propaganda impossible to anyone else. The main thing proven from information shown in Taibbi’s thread is that there is indeed a Deep State, and it is intimately involved in manipulating our access to information on the internet, with the mostly-willing participation of the over-educated woke class of pawns for the government and financial industry who used to run Twitter:
 


 
Taibbi also posted another “supplemental” thread giving us more details about the FITF. The task force is upset that Twitter is reporting a lack of malicious foreign propaganda, which of course should be a good thing. The most notable part is that the FBI wanted Twitter to begin giving them reports in writing, something which Roth was hesitant to do. This is strange both as it seems that Twitter had some awareness they were doing something wrong, whereas the FBI was absolutely brazen in its corruption. Further, the FBI seemed to be acting as a conduit to other agencies in the “intelligence community,” despite the fact that most of them are expressly prohibited from domestic action. Roth then had to emphasize that there absolutely is foreign propaganda on Twitter, but that it is in the form of official statements, which is allowed. That is to say, of course the governments of foreign countries use official Twitter pages for their messaging, but [as we will get to later] it is only the United States government running a massive covert influence operation via Twitter.
 
Part Seven of the Twitter Files takes us back to Hunter Biden’s laptop. In a way, I am sympathetic to people who think too much has been made of this, even though it does show corruption. However, this would have died down long since if not for all the flagrantly illegal things they did to suppress the story. I am reminded of some Democrat apparatchik from the ‘90s who said “The “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” is real, and Hillary Clinton created it.” His argument was that the “Whitewater Scandal,” which dogged the entire Clinton Presidency, really wasn’t that bad if they would have owned up to it and said they made a mistake with an investment and returned a relevant amount of money. Instead, because their instinct was to stonewall, it led to endless investigations that extended all the way to the otherwise unrelated Lewinsky scandal. Similarly, though “Russiagate” was absolutely nothing, the instinct to be sketchy, secretive, and defensive, allowed it to cause Trump’s team endless problems. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal is similar. The difference is that the FBI ran cover for the Biden team, and it seems unlikely that was even directed by Biden, it was just the spy agencies acting unilaterally to protect corruption and institutional interests. Regardless of if you choose to care about the shameless financial corruption, the way the FBI worked to sway political discourse is in and of itself a major scandal.
 


 
From the beginning, paperwork with Hunter Biden’s signature as well as an FBI subpoena for the laptop was available, so the claim about the veracity being unknown was always nonsense. The FBI had been in possession of the laptop since 2019, and was aware this true information would ultimately come out. The FBI spent months priming the leaders of social media companies to expect a Russian “hack-and-leak” operation involving Hunter Biden, so that they would be immediately suspicious of the laptop story when it came out. Roth testified about this in a deposition in December 2020:
 


 
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg also explained to Joe Rogan that he was approached by the FBI in the same fashion. FBI agent Elvis Chan acknowledged in November 2022 that they were not basing this on anything:
 


 
It needs to be pointed out, there is no obvious reason that a newspaper cannot use a foreign government as a source of real information. Still, Twitter does have a policy against hacked material, so this is again the FBI purporting to help Twitter follow it’s own internal policies. One would wonder why the Twitter leadership of the time would believe the FBI about something like this, but as we have seen they were all very much on one side, and further believed anything was justified to rid the country of Trump. This is especially frustrating being as the establishment liberals were obsessed with the idea that the entire Trump Administration was a series of petty grifts, but fastidiously ignore that it is well documented that Biden took in many tens of millions of dollars for do-nothing jobs from sketchy government-linked foreign companies.

Read more
 

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

comment image

There’s an old saying: Because punishment for wrongdoing is not speedy, the wicked become set in their ways to always do bad.
Seems joe picked up where obama left off, IF obama ever even left office.
Recall, he took up residence right near the WH and had “roommates” of all his closest cronies there, too.

Last edited 1 year ago by Nan G
0
Reply

One would wonder why the Twitter leadership of the time would believe the FBI about something like this, but as we have seen they were all very much on one side, and further believed anything was justified to rid the country of Trump.

I’m sure they were grateful for the excuse and cover from the FBI to smother the laptop story, protect idiot Biden and further hurt Trump’s campaign.

Oh, how the left relied on the FBI lie that Russia conducted a broad and extensive campaign of election interference through social media. I actually asked some of our resident leftists for examples and, as is the usual reaction, received almost nothing. I think one was presented where an ad featured information about Hillary’s emails, which was actually completely true. As it turned out, it was nothing but an excuse for the FBI to prop up their “Russiagate” operation and excuse their interference with free speech.

I wonder if we will ever be able to trust our government again. Regardless of who is in office and in “control”, until the deep state can be controlled, we never will.

0
Reply