In the sixth batch of Twitter Files revelations, hitherto confidential internal files released by the new owner Elon Musk to selected independent journalists, reporter Matt Taibbi focused on the social network’s relationship with the FBI, an important US government intelligence agency. The condition for exclusive coverage is that journalists first publish the information on Twitter itself. Taibbi tried to show this time that the contact between the website and the agency “was constant and pervasiveas if he were a subsidiary”.
In the last three years, the former security chief of the social network Yoel Roth exchanged more than 150 emails with the FBI, revealed the journalist. Earlier, it was revealed that there were periodic meetings involving the two parties and other bodies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, created after the 2001 attack to combat terrorism). Documents obtained by The Intercept international website revealed in early November that these US government agencies held monthly meetings with companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Microsoft, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Wikipedia to define the control of “disinformation” online.
In the case of the FBI, there were biweekly calls to which Twitter was invited. The files show that a large number of FBI and DHS contacts dealt with requests for the social network to deal with election misinformation, even if they were jokes made by accounts with few followers. There was a task force at the FBI devoted specifically to this. It was created in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president, and had 80 agents. One of the group’s raison d’êtres was to combat alleged foreign influence in elections, as well as misinformation.
Jokes were taken seriously as “disinformation” by the FBI
A recent email from an agent, dated Nov. 10, reads “Hello Twitter contacts, San Francisco FBI notifies you of the accounts below,” providing a list of four usernames. One of the accounts, “@fromMA”, appears to be owned by an elderly person who mostly posts only jokes. He was treated in the messages as a potential producer of “civic disinformation”. The tweet that seems to have caught the agents’ attention read “I want to remind Republicans to vote tomorrow, Wednesday, November 9th.” The joke is on the date, as voting day in the midterm elections this year was the 8th. Another almost identical joke, but saying the same to Democrats, caught the attention of agents in another message asking for action from Twitter .
Another account that mostly publishes jokes, “@ClaireFosterPHD”, claimed that she was an official vote counter and that “if you are not wearing a mask, I will not count your vote”. When told that her joke had come to the FBI’s attention, she said that “anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place in decision-making for others or working for federal agents.”
A message calling for action against 25 other accounts was forwarded by an FBI agent named Elvis M. Chan. Once again, the motivation was comments or jokes that “disseminate false information about the time, place or procedure in the forthcoming elections”. Elvis signs the email with, among other information, “Pronouns: he/his”. Another email from him reveals that there were special tools in place, such as a so-called “Teleporter” through which the FBI sent reports.
In response to the email, Twitter employee Patrick Conlon reports that he punished seven of the accounts with permanent suspension, one with temporary suspension, and that nine were forced to delete their tweets with “civic misinformation” in order to be able to come back. None of the accounts impersonated a public body. Many were satirical, nearly all had low engagement from other users. One of the accounts, “@Tiberius444”, which has less than 1500 followers, commented “I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. This is crazy”. There were so many requests from government agents for moderation interference that an official describes, in an internal conversation, that the service was a “monumental effort”.
The documents also reveal that there were plans to escalate Twitter meetings with the DHS and the FBI, in addition to the Department of Justice, to a weekly frequency. In this regard, an employee of the social network asked the agents if there would be impediments to sharing confidential information “with the industry”. “The FBI has been emphatic that there are no impediments to this sharing,” they responded. The message was addressed to Jim Baker, a former FBI attorney who worked for Twitter. When the Twitter files began to be published, Baker was fired by Elon Musk on charges of trying to interfere with the release.
“Deep State” until local
The partnership was not just with the federal government. One state government that seemed to have privileged access was California. A “partner support portal” used by state officials is mentioned in the archives. They called for censorship, for example, of a tweet by Donald Trump in which he claimed that the state hired a politically biased firm to count “and harvest” votes. Local governments contracted companies for mass monitoring of publications, in addition to think tanks and even a Center for Informed Politics at the University of Washington. “What most consider ‘Deep State’ [deep state] it is actually an intertwined collaboration of state agencies, third parties and NGOs that are sometimes financed by the state”, comments Matt Taibbi. “Boundaries get so blurred that they no longer make sense.”
In a separate tweet from the series of revelations, Taibbi provided an opinionated summary of what he found: “Instead of chasing after child sex abusers or terrorists, the FBI has agents — many of them — reviewing and reporting social media posts en masse. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as an ongoing operation, as an end in itself. People shouldn’t allow that.”
He thinks that the allegation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, repeated for more than two years by the American progressive press until it was revealed to be almost completely false, was a major motivator for the arrangement of the censorship structure in partnership with social networks. “It is analogous to how the 9/11 attack [de 2001] inspired the expansion of the security state”, he compares.
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