TWITTER FILES: Twitter execs worked closely with FBI, US intelligence

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
10 Dec 2022 11:44
7 Shares

Twitter executives worked on suppressing Trump, along with US state bodies.

TWITTER FILES: Twitter execs worked closely with FBI, US intelligence

Twitter owner Elon Musk has given journalists data, giving an extension of the latest controversial scandal exposing Democrat censorship and corruption, The Twitter Files. A third extension was released by the same journalist, Matt Taibbi, on Friday, and two more are to be expected this weekend.

The latest installment, named "Part One" of the "Removal of Donald Trump," exposes internal Slack communications between high-level Twitter executives, including the former Trust and Safety Head Yoel Roth, former Trust and Policy Chief Vijaya Gadde, Deputy General Counsel and former FBI lawyer Jim Baker, and former Twitter Election & Crisis Response Lead Patrick Conlon, who previously worked in intelligence for the US Department of Defense.

The exposure shows that the aforementioned Twitter execs worked closely with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence - which supervises all US intelligence departments.

Twitter executives made decisions arbitrarily, and they were even planning to seek revenge against accounts they were unable to dig dirt on with stricter measures in the future.

Top policy execs met with FBI, DHS and DNI

Two groups were in charge of content moderation at Twitter: The Safety Operations teams, in addition to a group of policy executives that Taibbi described as "high-speed Supreme Court of moderation." According to Taibbi, the latter made decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, Google searches, even in cases involving the President.”

Top policy executives met with the FBI, DHS, and DNI on the weekly before the election, holding discussions about the suppression of the New York Post's story regarding Hunter Biden's laptop.

“We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said the opposite), then said we unblocked. And now we’re in a messy situation where our policy is in shambles, comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots, and we’re refactoring an exceedingly complex policy 18 days out from the election, in short, FML,” said Yoel Roth in one of the chat logs.

Roth, furthermore, mentioned missing a meeting with the FBI and DHS so he could convince Apple to prevent Twitter's removal from the App Store. He even joked about hiding his meetings with intelligence agencies on his calendar, and that he was running out of code names for his meetings.

“Very Boring Meeting That is Definitely Not About Trump ;)” he joked, adding: “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR.”

Executives put restrictions on a Trump tweet in such a way that no one can reply to it, share it or even like it - even though the tweet did not violate any specific rules. James Woods, a Conservative actor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it, and this infuriated Twitter executives, which could not find any policy to apply to Woods - so, they planned revenge for later.

“I’d suggest we action him for something worth the fiasco rather than this screenshot, since we don’t have a firm policy basis for action on his account,” one Twitter employee suggested.

“Yep. Are you fine letting this one lie [redacted] can hit him hard on future [violations] with firmer basis," another employee replied.

On the other end, posts by US President Joe Biden and other Democrats claiming that Trump and Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court Justice, would steal the election, were brought up in the Slack channel, and were approved by Twitter executives.

Twitter then created a "deamplification" tool - the L3 - that suppresses Tweets that had a warning label on them, and the executives wanted to use them on Trump right away. However, they had to wait a day for it to function. Twitter's chat logs that Taibbi exposed reveal that they were scurrying to suppress Trump even before the Capitol riots.

Twitter even went as far as to create bots to watch Trump and Breitbart, a conservative news website. The bots were set toward algorithms that upon detecting certain words and phrases, would take action.

Up until January 6, Twitter executives were attempting to apply rules without suppressing accounts with an “ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between humans."

But Taibbi hints that was no longer the case starting January 7: “By the next day, [Twitter execs] will contemplate a major change in approach. Watch this weekend for the play-by-play of how all that went down. … By January 8th, which will describe Sunday, Twitter will be receiving plaudits from ‘our partners’ in Washington, and the sitting US president will no longer be heard on the platform.