In late November 2022, billionaire Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk announced he would be releasing “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression.” He allowed six independent journalists, many of them with left-leaning backgrounds, access to internal Twitter documents and communications covering a period beginning in 2016 when Twitter began enacting controversial restrictions on user content. Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists selected, wrote that all the Twitter Files reporters had full “editorial control” over what they wrote, and were free to criticize anyone, including Musk. ^{1 2 3}

The past conduct of Twitter employees became a secondary focus, according to Taibbi, when he and his fellow researchers discovered from the Twitter Files that the Federal government had been playing a “leading role” in “a sweeping effort to . . . use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control.” He identified “Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies” as being part of a “formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.” “If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter,” wrote journalist and former military intelligence officer Jacob Siegel, “many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.” ^{4  5}

“For every government agency scanning Twitter,” said Taibbi, “there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” ⁶

“It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley of such allegations. “If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.” ⁷

The Twitter Files showed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. intelligence community, and federal politicians had exerted a growing influence over Twitter content moderation after 2017. ⁸ Examples included the suppression of an October 2020 New York Post story involving the contents of a computer allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, ⁹ a request from the Biden administration to suspend the account of journalist Alex Berenson, ¹⁰ and a request from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to suspend the account of journalist Paul Sperry. ¹¹

Additional topics covered in Twitter Files releases included  Twitter’s manipulation and suppression of posts challenging COVID-19 policies; ¹² and how the since-discredited Hamilton 68 tracking list developed by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy became a media and political tool to malign right-of-center American Twitter users as Russian influencers. ¹³

Background

In late October 2022, billionaire Elon Musk, then estimated to be the wealthiest person in the world, purchased and became the CEO of the social media firm Twitter. Twitter reverted to a privately held company as part of the $44 billion deal, having traded as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange from 2013 until 2022. ^{14 15}

Initial Project Focus on Twitter’s Behavior

During the six years prior to the purchase, Twitter engaged in multiple controversial content restrictions. Some incidents were as severe as suspensions of popular accounts belonging to users such as the New York Post, the Babylon Bee, and former President Donald Trump. Musk was a popular and prolific user of Twitter before 2022 and became a strong critic of the restrictions. One of his stated goals in purchasing the social media firm was to restore its commitment to “free speech.” ^{16 17}

In a Twitter post on November 28, 2022, Musk wrote: “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened …” ¹⁸

He would subsequently grant six independent journalists access to the firm’s internal documents and communications coving the years of the controversial content suppression. Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists selected, said that in an early meeting Musk said he hoped that a “full confessional restores faith in the company.” ¹⁹

Judging Musk’s statement in early December 2022, after the first releases from the Twitter Files, Taibbi concluded “everything I’ve seen since seems to confirm he’s sincere about his desire for full open-kimono transparency.” According to Taibbi, each of the reporters had “editorial control” over what they wrote and that he was personally “told flat-out I could write anything I wanted, including anything about the current company and its new chief, Elon Musk.” ²⁰

The only restriction identified by any of the journalists was a requirement that all stories sourced to the Twitter Files had to first appear as threaded posts on the Twitter platform. ²¹

Expansion to Allegations of Federal Censorship

In his March 2023 essay for Tablet, titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” journalist and former military intelligence officer Jacob Siegel referred to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a “lucky fluke” that helped pry important information from the “security state.” ²²

“If Elon Musk had not decided to purchase Twitter,” wrote Siegel, “many of the crucial details in the history of American politics in the Trump era would have remained secret, possibly forever.” ²³

After beginning an initial examination of Twitter’s internal speech suppression policies, the Twitter Files reporters uncovered evidence of federal agencies and federally funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) suggesting content restrictions on Twitter, Facebook and most other online platforms. In many instances, the targeted information was factual or the accounts targeted were falsely identified. Examples included suppression efforts against Americans relaying truthful information about the COVID-19 pandemic, and the maligning as Russian bots Twitter accounts run by real individual Americans expressing genuinely held opinions. ²⁴

“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to . . . use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control,” said Matt Taibbi to a U.S. House committee in March 2023. “Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.” ²⁵

He continued: ²⁶

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.”

A focus of this growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation. The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”

Plain and simple, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.

Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.

As someone who grew up a traditional ACLU liberal, this sinister mechanism for punishment without due process is horrifying. ²⁷

In his March 2023 testimony to Congress, Michael Shellenberger referred to the social media speech suppression apparatus as the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” ²⁸

“The Twitter Files, state attorneys general lawsuits, and investigative reporters,” said Shellenberger, “have revealed a large and growing network of government agencies, academic institutions, and nongovernmental organizations that are actively censoring American citizens, often without their knowledge, on a range of issues, including on the origins of COVID, COVID vaccines, emails relating to Hunter Biden’s business dealings, climate change, renewable energy, fossil fuels, and many other issues.” ²⁹

In October 2022, before the Twitter Files reports exposed specific examples of federal participation in speech suppression, Lee Fang co-wrote a report for the The Intercept revealing that the Department of Homeland Security was “quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous” and had “expanded far beyond its original purview on foreign threats to encompass disinformation originating domestically.” The report profiled the broad outlines of the work being done by the Department of State’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and speculated that “the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS [Department of Homeland Security] officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.” ³⁰

The distinction between government directly violating the First Amendment, as opposed to indirectly suggesting speech suppression to non-governmental actors and social media platforms, was explored by several lawyers quoted by The Intercept. ³¹

“There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by surrogate,” wrote George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. “It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.” ³²

“When the government suggests things, it’s not too hard to pull off the velvet glove, and you get the mail fist,” said Michigan State University law professor Adam Candeub. “And I would consider such actions, especially when it’s bureaucratized, as essentially state action and government collusion with the platforms.” ³³

Researchers and Reporters

The group Elon Musk chose to research and report Twitter Files stories were all independent journalists, some with previous experience at conventional corporate media firms. Several were left leaning in ideological orientation. Most of them had moved their professional content to Substack, a subscriber-based media platform that allows journalists to profit directly from their choice of stories while remaining independent from corporate media.

Matt Taibbi

The largest number of Twitter Files reports were filed by Matt Taibbi, creator of Racket News, his Substack-based investigative journalism enterprise. A former political reporter for Rolling Stone, the left-leaning journalist had been praised by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as “one of the few journalists in America who speaks truth to power.” ³⁴

Among other work, Taibbi was the author of Insane Clown President, a 2017 book sharply critical of the election of President Donald Trump. For Rolling Stone and later for his Substack page, Taibbi authored several reports that debunked the claims in the Steele dossier and other matters related to the unfounded conspiracy theory that Trump and his campaign aides won the presidency due to their collusion with the Russian government. ^{35 36 37}

Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss was an opinion writer and editor on the New York Times op-ed page from 2017 until 2020. After leaving the Times she founded The Free Press, a Substack-based, subscriber supported platform for herself and several other independent journalists. ³⁸

Michael Shellenberger

Journalist and climate policy activist Michael Shellenberger was named a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” and was involved in the founding of the Breakthrough Institute and Environmental Progress, a pair of climate and energy policy nonprofits. He also created Public, a Substack-based platform for his independent journalism. ³⁹

Lee Fang

Journalist Lee Fang was a writer for The Intercept, a left-leaning investigative news website. He was also professionally affiliated with several other left-leaning news journals and outlets, including The Nation, ThinkProgress, TruthOut and Salon at various points in his career. ⁴⁰

Alex Berenson

Journalist and novelist Alex Berenson was a New York Times reporter from 1999 to 2010, and during this period was a war correspondent in Iraq. ⁴¹

David Zweig

David Zweig was an independent author and novelist, with multiple features published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired and New York Magazine. ⁴²

Susan Schmidt

Susan Schmidt is a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. She joined Matt Taibbi’s Racket News in March 2023 and began working on the Twitter Files investigation. ⁴³

Leighton Woodhouse

Leighton Woodhouse is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker who began working with Public, Michael Shellenberger’s Substack-based independent journalism enterprise. ⁴⁴

Mike Benz

Mike Benz is a former diplomat with the U.S. Department of State who specialized in agreements regarding international communications and information technology. He is the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), a think tank that acts as a watchdog against internet censorship. In the summer of 2022, prior to Twitter Files reports, Benz through the FFO began reporting on domestic social media content suppression being implemented by the Department of Homeland Security and its Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). ^{45 46}

Jacob Siegel

Jacob Siegel is a senior editor at Tablet magazine and a former Army intelligence officer. He has written about national security, censorship and other topics for Tablet, American Affairs Journal, the New York Times, Politico, Vice and other publications. In March 2023, for Tablet, he wrote “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation.” The book-length essay analyzed the recent history of using federal disinformation programs as engines of censorship. The influential essay was widely shared and praised by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and other Twitter Files journalists. ^{47 48 49}

Persons Discussed in Twitter Files Reporting

Jim Baker

Jim Baker was the Twitter deputy general counsel in June 2020 and held the position until his firing shortly after release of the first Twitter Files report. ^{50 51} From 2014 until 2017, Baker had served as the general counsel of the FBI. ^{52 53}

Baker appears to have been the most senior of several former FBI staffers working at Twitter. According to Michael Shellenberger’s Twitter Files report: “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’— working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” ⁵⁴

At the FBI, Baker was involved in the Bureau’s controversial investigation into alleged links between the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the Russian government. He worked on a FISA application against Trump campaign aide Carter Page. ⁵⁵ In a May 2019 interview, Baker defended the FBI’s investigation and said he felt compelled to speak out to counter conspiracy theories perpetrated by President Trump and his allies that the investigation was politically motivated or instigated by the discredited Steele dossier. ⁵⁶

In July 2017, Baker was investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for possibly leaking classified national security information to the media. ⁵⁷ The Washington Post called the investigation “a strange interagency dispute” between the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA). Despite the investigation ending with no charges, Baker was reassigned in December along with many other top FBI officials by Christopher Wray, then-President Trump’s newly appointed director. Baker left the FBI shortly afterward. ⁵⁸

In a December 6, 2023, Twitter Files report, Matt Taibbi announced that Baker had been fired from Twitter. ⁵⁹ “Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired,” wrote Taibbi. “Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of ‘Twitter Files’ – without knowledge of new management.” ⁶⁰

The first Twitter Files report, produced by Taibbi days earlier, addressed the FBI’s role in persuading Twitter to suppress a New York Post report in October 2020 regarding the contents of a laptop allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. Subsequent Twitter Files reporting on the incident by Michael Shellenberger revealed Baker was involved in Twitter’s internal decision to suppress the story. ^{61 62}

In his report on the Baker firing, Taibbi wrote that fellow journalist Bari Weiss discovered Baker’s involvement when researching her own first report for the Twitter Files. ⁶³

“Baker is a controversial figure,” wrote Taibbi, before briefly summarizing the former FBI figure’s career. “The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved, to say the least. New Twitter chief Elon Musk acted quickly to ‘exit’ Baker Tuesday.” ⁶⁴

“My jaw hit the floor,” said Weiss, according to Taibbi, explaining her reaction upon the discovery that Baker was vetting information before releasing it to her and the other Twitter Files reporters. ⁶⁵

“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” wrote Twitter CEO Elon Musk, in a Twitter post that same day. ⁶⁶

Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey is the co-founder of Twitter and was the company’s CEO until November 2021. Dorsey was initially supportive of Elon Musk’s purchase of the firm. An October 2022 report covering the terms of Musk’s purchase stated that Dorsey had retained a 2.4 percent ownership stake in the firm but held no leadership or management role. ^{67 68 69}

After resigning as CEO, Dorsey stated he and Twitter staff were wrong for their part in controversies such as removing President Donald Trump from the platform in January 2021 and suppressing the October 2020 New York Post report regarding the contents of a computer allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. ^{70 71 72}

Parag Agrawal

Parag Agrawal was Twitter’s chief technology officer who became CEO in November 2021 following Jack Dorsey’s departure. Agrawal was fired as Twitter CEO in October 2022, immediately after Elon Musk assumed control of the firm. According to a Reuters report, Agrawal was one of three senior officials Musk believed had been “misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform.” ^{73 74}

Yoel Roth

Yoel Roth was the head of trust and safety at Twitter and a major figure in content moderation during the period covered in the Twitter Files reports. Roth resigned from Twitter in November 2022, two weeks after Elon Musk became CEO. ⁷⁵

Following the 2016 presidential election, Roth used his personal Twitter account to refer to Donald Trump as a “racist tangerine” and to claim that the White House had been taken over by “ACTUAL NAZIS.” Days after taking control of Twitter, Musk defended Roth. ⁷⁶

“We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” said Musk, in an October 30, 2022, Twitter post. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” ⁷⁷

Vijaya Gadde

Vijaya Gadde was the head of legal affairs and policy at Twitter until her abrupt firing in October 2022 when Elon Musk assumed control of the company. She was one of the key figures in Twitter Files reports regarding content suppression on the platform. According to a Reuters report covering her dismissal, Gadde was one of three senior officials Musk believed had been “misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform.” ⁷⁸

An April 2022 report in Politico stated that Gadde cried at a staff meeting while discussing with coworkers what a Musk takeover could mean for Twitter’s controls over user content. The alleged incident occurred in April 2022, shortly after Twitter had accepted Musk’s purchase terms but six months before he took control of the firm. After the April 2022 story appeared, Musk responded on Twitter with a reference to Gadde’s role in suppressing the New York Post story about the contents of the computer allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden. ⁷⁹

“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” wrote Musk. ⁸⁰

Stacia Cardille

Attorney Stacia Cardille was Twitter’s senior legal executive during many of the events covered in the Twitter Files. Matt Taibbi wrote that her “alertness stood out among Twitter leaders.” According LegiStorm, a database that tracks Congressional staff and lobbying, Cardille left Twitter in October 2021 to become the director of global legislative oversight for Google. LegiStorm showed Cardille had worked for the Obama administration and multiple Democratic members of Congress for 11 years prior to accepting a position at Twitter in 2018. ^{81 82}

Nick Pickles

Prior to the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk, Nick Pickles was the firm’s head of public policy. In January 2023, Pickles was promoted to become Twitter’s head of global government affairs. Before working at Twitter, Pickles was the director of Big Brother Watch, a UK-based privacy advocacy group. ^{83 84}

Alex Stamos

Alex Stamos was the founder and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and a senior official with the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and then the Virality Project (VP), according to Michael Shellenberger’s March 2023 U.S. House of Representatives testimony regarding the Twitter Files and allegations of  government censorship. ⁸⁵

Stamos was the chief information security officer at Facebook until March 2018, when he left the firm due to what a New York Times report characterized as a disagreement over “how proactive the social network should be in policing its own platform,” with Stamos allegedly favoring more aggressive intervention than other executives. ^{86 87}

Stamos was the chief information security officer at Yahoo! until June 2015. An October 2016 Reuters report sourced to “people familiar with the matter” claimed that in 2015 Yahoo! had “secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials.” Citing anonymous sources, Reuters reported that Stamos allegedly told coworkers he was resigning because “he had been left out of a decision that hurt users’ security.” Stamos declined to comment to Reuters and had not expressed a public disagreement as the reason when he left Yahoo! for employment at Facebook. ⁸⁸

Renee DiResta

Renee DiResta is the research director of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). ⁸⁹  In testimony submitted to Congress in March 2023, Michael Shellenberger identified her as “the most articulate public advocate for state-sponsored censorship.” ⁹⁰ Explaining the birth of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) at the 4^th Annual National Cybersecurity Summit hosted by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in 2021, DiResta said EIP was created as a public-private partnership to fill a “gap” in the capability of governments to respond to disinformation. One “gap” she cited was “unclear legal authorities, including very clear first amendment questions.” ⁹¹

In a 2019 introduction of his SIO team, Alex Stamos told an audience that DiResta had previously “gone out and worked for the CIA” and was known for “such reports as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on Russian interference.” At least as late as 2018 she was director of research for the cyber security firm New Knowledge. In this role she was the lead researcher on The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency, a December 2018 report for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The New Knowledge report alleged interference by the Russian cyber firm during the 2016 U.S. election. ^{92 93 94}

In late 2017 New Knowledge conducted media operations during the special U.S. Senate election in Alabama. According to a report made by the firm, later obtained by the New York Times, New Knowledge bragged that it had “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation” creating the impression that Republican candidate Roy Moore’s campaign was being “amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.” ⁹⁵

According to the newspaper, New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan “reached out at the time to Renée DiResta” regarding the project. ⁹⁶

In her response to the newspaper, DiResta implied she was not aware of how her advice would be used. ⁹⁷

“I know there were people who believed the Democrats needed to fight fire with fire,” Ms. DiResta said, adding that she disagreed. “It was absolutely chatter going around the party.” ⁹⁸

But she said Mr. Morgan simply asked her for suggestions of online tactics worth testing. “My understanding was that they were going to investigate to what extent they could grow audiences for Facebook pages using sensational news,” she said. ⁹⁹

Jen Easterly

Jen Easterly became the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in July 2021. She is a former Deputy for Counterterrorism at the National Security Agency and military intelligence officer. ¹⁰⁰

Speech Suppression Groups

Reports based on the Twitter Files showed multiple public and private groups involved in the effort to control and suppress content on Twitter, Facebook and other online platforms. Most received taxpayer assistance, either directly as government agencies, or indirectly as recipients of assistance and funding from government agencies. In his March 2023 testimony regarding the Twitter Files and online censorship, Michael Shellenberger referred to these groups collectively as “The Censorship-Industrial Complex.” ¹⁰¹

“Another troubling aspect is the role of the press, which should be the people’s last line of defense in such cases,” said Matt Taibbi, in his March 2023 testimony to the U.S. House. “But instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.” ¹⁰²

Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)

In the fall of 2017, the FBI created a Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) under the supervision of the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Division. Michael Shellenberger characterized it as a “cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence].” In 2021, the FBI director informed Congress that the purpose of the FITF was to “identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States.” FBI agent Laura Dehmlow was the head of the FITF. ^{103 104 105}

Reporting on his access to the Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi wrote that the FITF “swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.” ¹⁰⁶

“The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA,” wrote Taibbi. This included “requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state governments.” ¹⁰⁷

“A chief end result,” according to the documents Taibbi reviewed, “was that thousands of official ‘reports’ flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.” ¹⁰⁸

The FBI sent some of the most sensitive information to Twitter via Teleporter, described by Taibbi as “a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish.” ¹⁰⁹

The Twitter Files contain a 2020 report from Yoel Roth, in which Roth said he participated in a weekly “sync with FBI/DHS/DNI.” ¹¹⁰

In a September 2022 email reported by Taibbi, Twitter senior legal executive Stacia Cardille revealed she had been attending monthly meetings with the same three intelligence agencies. ¹¹¹ In what appeared to be a regular report to Jim Baker, Cardille wrote that the FBI was “adamant” that no impediments existed to sharing classified information with Twitter and other social media firms. ¹¹²

“This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI,” observed Taibbi of the Cardille report. “With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to ‘no impediments’ to classified information?” ¹¹³  

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was created in late 2018 as an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.

A November 2018 DHS news release reported that the mission of CISA would be to “help better secure the nation’s critical infrastructure and cyber platforms” and become “the Federal leader for cyber and physical infrastructure security.” ¹¹⁴

“The directorate will be renamed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and will operate with independence akin to the Secret Service,” reported a November 2018 CNN analysis. “The goal of the new independence and autonomy of the office is to speed up the department’s efforts to protect the nation’s energy grid and critical infrastructure.” ¹¹⁵

• Shift to domestic content moderation

In January 2017, according to a report from Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online, “outgoing Obama Administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated ‘election infrastructure’ as being ‘critical infrastructure’ under the purview of DHS protection.” ¹¹⁶

“This designation,” wrote Benz, “born out of unsubstantiated claims that Russia had just stolen, hacked or otherwise materially interfered with the 2016 election, tasked DHS with protecting election-related structure, such as polling places, voting machines and computer systems.” ¹¹⁷

This changed in 2019, according to Benz: “The entire ‘countering Russian disinformation on social media’ apparatus that had been constructed before July 2019 to censor, throttle and identify ‘foreign disinformation’ was quietly, but entirely, pivoted to focus inward on ‘domestic disinformation.’” ¹¹⁸

“This meant that, henceforth, any US citizen posting what DHS considered ‘misinformation’ online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure,” wrote Benz. “That was the legal framework under which DHS – and CISA particularly – drew their jurisdiction.” ¹¹⁹

An October 2022 report co-written by Lee Fang and posted in The Intercept found that CISA began monitoring social media “from the outset.” ¹²⁰

Similarly, an August 2022 report from the DHS Office of the Inspector General stated the following: ¹²¹

According to CISA’s website and an internal document, in 2018, CISA also started notifying social media platforms or appropriate law enforcement officials when voting-related disinformation appeared in social media. Once CISA notified a social media platform of disinformation, the social media platform could independently decide whether to remove or modify the post. ¹²²

Citing meeting notes involving DHS officials and Twitter, The Intercept report described the process for removing social media posts: “In practice, this often meant state election officials sent examples of potential forms of disinformation to CISA, which would then forward them on to social media companies for a response.” The social media firms were also, according to the meeting notes, encouraged to “process reports and provide timely responses, to include the removal of reported misinformation from the platform where possible.” ¹²³

• Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation (MDM) team

Beginning in 2020, according to the DHS Office of Inspector General report, CISA expanded its coverage area to include social media content regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and public policy actions taken in response to it. ¹²⁴

“CISA’s original material focused on election-related disinformation and tactics used by those spreading mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM) generally,” reported the DHS Inspector General, “and subsequently expanded to include other areas related to COVID-19 and vaccines.” ¹²⁵

According to the CISA website, the “MDM” categories were defined as follows: ¹²⁶

Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.

Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.

Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate. ¹²⁷

“The MDM team is also committed to collaboration with partners and stakeholders,” reported the CISA website. “In addition to civil society groups, researchers, and state and local government officials, the MDM team works in close collaboration with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other agencies across the federal government.” ¹²⁸

After the 2020 election, according to The Intercept, CISA expanded its MDM focus. ¹²⁹

Under President Joe Biden, the shifting focus on disinformation has continued. In January 2021, CISA replaced the Countering Foreign Influence Task force with the “Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation” team, which was created “to promote more flexibility to focus on general MDM.” By now, the scope of the effort had expanded beyond disinformation produced by foreign governments to include domestic versions. The MDM team, according to one CISA official quoted in the IG report, “counters all types of disinformation, to be responsive to current events.”

Jen Easterly, Biden’s appointed director of CISA, swiftly made it clear that she would continue to shift resources in the agency to combat the spread of dangerous forms of information on social media. “One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” said Easterly, speaking at a conference in November 2021. ¹³⁰

“The MDM subcommittee had actually once been called the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF),” wrote Matt Taibbi and Susan Schmidt. “Throughout the period of the 2020 Election, Twitter received large quantities of flags about tweets from the CFITF, notices which appear in abundance in the #TwitterFiles. These letters often originated from a regional American agency, like the Secretary of State’s office in Colorado or Connecticut.” ¹³¹

As of March 2023 the MDM subcommittee had been disbanded. ¹³²

Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO)

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), according to Michael Shellenberger’s report to Congress, was “one of four government funded censorship organizations” that co-created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). According to a June 2019 news release, SIO was created as part of the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center to address the “abuse of today’s information technologies, with a particular focus on social media” and the “spread of disinformation, cybersecurity breaches, and terrorist propaganda.” ^{133 134}

“SIO monitors social media and promotes Internet censorship,” wrote Michael Shellenberger.¹³⁵

The founding program director of SIO was Alex Stamos, previously the chief security officer for Facebook. ¹³⁶

“There are many potential uses for machine learning to keep people safe online, but this is something that is often missing from the conversation,” said Stamos, in the news release announcing SIO’s creation. “You hear that a company took down 500 accounts belonging to a certain group that spreads disinformation, but don’t hear what we can learn from their operations so that we can do better in the future. Our research platform and courses at Stanford intend to bridge that gap.” ¹³⁷

Craig Newmark, the left-leaning billionaire founder of Craig’s List, provided $5 million in start-up funding for SIO through the Craig Newmark Foundation. ¹³⁸

U.S. taxpayers, through the National Science Foundation, funded SIO with at least one grant of $748,437, to be disbursed from October 2021 through September 2026. The grant title was “Rapid-Response Frameworks for Mitigating Online Disinformation.” The three components comprising the purpose of the grant were as follows: “1) developing models and theories of how disinformation is seeded, cultivated, and spread that take into account the sociotechnical nature of the problem; 2) developing and applying innovative, rapid-analysis frameworks for responding to disinformation quickly; and 3) implementing and evaluating the impact of multi-stakeholder collaborations to address disinformation in real-time during real-world events.” ¹³⁹

As of March 2023, the SIO claimed the National Science Foundation was its “sole source of government funding,” and that the purpose of the $748,437 NSF grant was “to support research into the spread of misinformation on the internet during real-time events.” ¹⁴⁰

Additional known funders of SIO include the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Hewlett Foundation, Cognizant Corporation, the Charles Koch Foundation, Omidyar Network Fund, Gates Ventures, and Theodore Schlein. ¹⁴¹

Global Engagement Center (GEC)

The Global Engagement Center (GEC) at the U.S. Department of State, according to the GEC web page, is “a data-driven body leading U.S. interagency efforts in proactively addressing foreign adversaries’ attempts to undermine U.S. interests using disinformation and propaganda.” ¹⁴²

Twitter Files reports showed that Twitter employees and others concluded GEC was often trying to blacklist the social media accounts of genuine independent individuals who were expressing honestly held opinions. ¹⁴³

In his March 2023 report to Congress, Michael Shellenberger identified GEC as a “division of the U.S. State Department which systematically launders domestic censorship by working through ‘counter-disinformation’ NGOs and foreign firms.” ¹⁴⁴

Matt Taibbi wrote that the Global Engagement Center is “an interagency group” operating within the Department of state, “whose initial partners included FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others.” Total federal funding for GEC in 2018 was $98.7 million. ^{145 146}

In Taibbi’s analysis, GEC tried disingenuously to portray itself as similar to the former United States Information Agency (USIA), a Cold-War-era U.S. government service designed to counteract Soviet and other communist-bloc propaganda by providing reputable and reliable sources of facts about the United States and the world. ¹⁴⁷

“GEC could have avoided controversy by focusing on exposing/answering ‘disinformation’ with research and a more public approach, as USIA did,” he wrote. “Instead, it funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious – and idiotic – new form of blacklisting.” ¹⁴⁸

An April 2020 examination of GEC by the State Department Office of Inspector General shows that the Global Engagement Center routed millions of dollars to 39 different groups and subcontractors. But the report redacts and keeps secret the names. ^{149 150}

“Why is this list secret?” Taibbi asked, in one Twitter Files report. ¹⁵¹

“It’s an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex,” said a former intelligence source, according to Taibbi. “All the shit we pulled in other countries since the Cold War, some morons decided to bring home.” ¹⁵²

“GEC passed some good information to Twitter, but mostly not,” wrote Taibbi. ¹⁵³

The Twitter Files reports revealed messages between Twitter staffers showing they did not trust the reliability of GEC’s work. Twitter officials were particularly critical of the “ecosystem” theory of guilt laid out in a 2020 Global Engagement Center report titled “Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem.” ¹⁵⁴

“Their methodology ‘If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked,’ does not exactly resonate as a sound research approach,” concluded one Twitter official of GEC’s ecosystem standard for identifying supposed Russian propaganda.

“GEC has doubled their budget by aggressively overstating threats through unverified accusations that can’t be replicated either by external academics or by Twitter,” wrote  another Twitter staffer. “So they aren’t operating with the greatest of credibility when they make pronouncements about accounts/widespread disinfo.” ¹⁵⁵

“Twitter staffers had professionalism,” concluded Taibbi. “They tended to look at least once before declaring a thing foreign disinformation. This made them a tough crowd for GEC.”  ¹⁵⁶

Taibbi wrote that the news media was an “easier mark” for GEC’s accusations. ¹⁵⁷

“GEC’s game,” wrote Taibbi, was to “create an alarmist report, send it to the slower animals in journalism’s herd, and wait as reporters bang on Twitter’s door, demanding to know why this or that ‘ecosystem’ isn’t obliterated.” ¹⁵⁸

Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab)

The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR Lab) is one of four government-funded co-founders and partners in the Election Integrity Partnership (later the Virality Project). ^{159 160}

The DFR Lab is a project of the Atlantic Council. According to a four-page profile in the Atlantic Council’s 2018/2019 annual report, the DFR Lab was created as “a start-up housed at the Atlantic Council that aims to create a world where disinformation is analyzed and repudiated rapidly and effectively by accurate, publicly sourced reports, thereby enabling citizens and policy makers to make informed decisions” ¹⁶¹

In his March 2023 report to Congress, titled “The Censorship Industrial Complex,” journalist Michael Shellenberger identified the DFR Lab as “one of the most established and influential full-time censorship institutions in the world.” ¹⁶²

“In 2018, Facebook named Atlantic Council, an official partner in ‘countering disinformation’ worldwide,” wrote Shellenberger. “US taxpayer funding to the Atlantic Council comes from the Defense Department, the US Marines, the US Air Force, the US Navy, the State Department, USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as energy companies and weapons manufacturers.” ¹⁶³

For 2021 the Atlantic Council credited four different federal entities with giving donations with an aggregate value of between $1.5 million and $3 million. The Department of Defense and Department of State were each listed as giving more than $500,000, but less than $1 million. The Department of Energy and US Agency for International Development were each listed as donating more than $250,000, but less than $500,000. ¹⁶⁴ The Department of State, host of the Global Engagement Center, also sent the Atlantic Council donations of $500,000, but less than $1 million, for 2020, 2018 and 2017. ^{165 166 167} For 2019 the Atlantic Council reported a donation of $250,000, but less than $500,000, from the Department of State. ¹⁶⁸

“DFRLab is funded by the U.S. Government, specifically the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” wrote Matt Taibbi in a Twitter Files report. ¹⁶⁹

The director of the DFR Lab told Taibbi the Atlantic Council project had “an exclusively international focus” and was not targeting Americans with U.S. tax dollars. Taibbi found and interviewed Americans who were found on the lists the DFR Lab submitted to Twitter for “inauthentic behavior.” He also reported internal communications in which the social media firm’s employees questioned the legitimacy of the DFR Lab’s list. ¹⁷⁰

University of Washington Center for an Informed Public

The University of Washington Center for an Informed Public is one of four government-funded co-founders and partners in the Election Integrity Partnership (later the Virality Project). ^{171 172}

According to the University of Washington, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public was created in 2019 to be “a multidisciplinary research center with a mission to study mis- and disinformation, promote an informed society and support democratic discourse.” The left-leaning Knight Foundation provided $5 million for the initial funding of the Center. The University of Washington is a public university, owned and supported by the state’s taxpayers, and its 2019 fiscal year budget report showed $811 million in funding from federal taxpayers. ^{173 174 175 176}

In his March 2023 report to the U.S. House, Michael Shellenberger wrote that Kate Starbird, co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, “has for years been funded primarily by U.S. government agencies to do social media narrative analytics of political groups, or insurgency movements, of interest or concern to U.S. military intelligence or diplomatic equities.” He also identified the Center for an Informed Public as a collaborator with the Department of Homeland Security to “censor information on social media platforms during the 2020 election.” ¹⁷⁷ In an November 2022 report for the Foundation for Freedom Online, prior to release of the Twitter Files reports, researcher Mike Benz identified Starbird as a “longtime social media censorship proponent.” ¹⁷⁸

Starbird is an associate professor at the University of Washington. From 2017 through 2020 she was awarded more than $1 million in federal grants from the National Science Foundation. ^{179 180}

In August 2021 the University of Washington announced that the Center for an Informed Public would receive a $2.25 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) “to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation.” This was part of a $3 million total NSF collaborative grant to both the University of Washington and the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). A news release stipulated that one of the objectives of the $3 million spend would be to “develop and apply rapid-response frameworks for responding to disinformation quickly.” This grant brought total NSF grant awards to either Starbird or the Center for an Informed Public to more than $3.25 million over the 2017-2021 period. ^{181 182}

In addition to the start-up grant of $5 million from the Knight Foundation in 2019, through 2022 the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public also received private grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts ($2 million), William and Flora Hewlett Foundation ($1.2 million), Craig Newmark Philanthropies ($1,000,000), Microsoft ($250,000), and the Omidyar Foundation ($68,000) – likely a donor fund within the Omidyar Nexus. ¹⁸³

Graphika

Graphika, described by Michael Shellenberger as a “private network analysis firm,” is one of four government-funded co-founders and partners in the Election Integrity Partnership (later the Virality Project). ^{184 185}

In August 2020, according to USASpending, Graphika received a $996,072 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. The online grant description read as follows: “COVID-19 DIB BY COMBINING ANONYMIZED SOCIAL MOBILITY DATA FROM GOOGLE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA SIGNALS, PREDICT COVID-19 PREVALENCE ACROSS THE US AND EUROPE.” Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online identified nearly $5 million more in Department of Defense grants for Graphika in 2021. ^{186 187}

Global Disinformation Index

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is a British nonprofit that has received funding from the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC). The Global Disinformation Index promotes as its “core output” the Dynamic Exclusion List (DEL), a ranking of “global news publications rated high risk for disinformation.” GDI encourages online advertising firms to “license GDI data to defund and downrank these worst offenders, thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model.” ^{188 189}

In April 2020, the Global Disinformation Index issued a report claiming the possibility of a laboratory leak origin of the COVID-19 virus was a “conspiracy theory” and criticizing firms who advertised on news platforms that discussed it. ¹⁹⁰

“Fox News bought into the conspiracy,” reported GDI in April 2020. “In conjunction with Fox’s coverage, President Trump announced a US government investigation into the theory that the virus started in a Wuhan laboratory.” ¹⁹¹

Afterward, both the U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI concluded that the cause of the worldwide pandemic was most likely a virus that escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. ¹⁹²

A February 2023 investigative series on GDI by the Washington Examiner revealed that the ten “riskiest” and “worst” disinformation news sources were The American Spectator, Newsmax, The Federalist, The American Conservative, One America News, The Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post. ¹⁹³

The news sources ranked “least risky” by GDI were the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, ProPublica, the Associated Press, Insider, the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, Buzzfeed News, and the Huffington Post. ¹⁹⁴

In the analysis, the Washington Examiner reported that GDI’s “least risky” list included mostly left-leaning corporate news outlets, and that the list was biased against right-leaning news sources. ¹⁹⁵

After 2016, many of the left-leaning corporate news outlets (including the Washington Post, the New York Times and Buzzfeed News) reported on rumors from the Steele dossier and the baseless conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump was a Russian intelligence asset. Additionally, the Washington Examiner reported that many on the GDI’s trusted list “published numerous stories boosting the falsehood that a New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s infamous abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.’” The Russian disinformation assertion was later debunked when CBS News confirmed the contents of the laptop, its ownership by Biden, and the veracity of the New York Post’s journalism. ^{196 197}

The Washington Examiner reported that Xandr, a digital advertising firm owned by Microsoft, was one user of GDI’s Dynamic Exclusion List and had used it to flag “dozens of conservative websites as ‘false/misleading,’ ‘hate speech,’ or ‘reprehensible/offensive.’” ¹⁹⁸

“The Washington Examiner has also been labeled as ‘inflammatory,’ according to emails and an ad-buying source close to the matter,” wrote Washington Examiner investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky. “Because of this, the outlet has run into ad problems with Comcast, Facebook, and Google, among others, emails show.” ¹⁹⁹

In a follow up story on February 13, 2023, Kaminsky reported that Microsoft/Xandr had removed the derogatory flags on the news websites and appeared to be “taking steps to distance itself from” the Global Disinformation Index. ²⁰⁰

“We try to take a principled approach to accuracy and fighting foreign propaganda,” said a Microsoft spokesperson to the Kaminsky. “We’re working quickly to fix the issue, and Xandr has stopped using GDI’s services while we are doing a larger review.” ²⁰¹

In a separate analysis for his investigative series on the Global Disinformation Index, Kaminsky reported that GDI had received a $230,000 grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 2020 and another $100,000 from the Global Engagement Center (GEC) in September 2021. The NED is mostly funded by U.S. tax dollars through congressional appropriations. The GEC is an affiliate of the U.S. State Department. ²⁰²

“If the Department of State, or any other government agency, is giving taxpayer money to shadowy organizations who are putting their thumbs on the scale of who gets heard and who doesn’t, it is a significant First Amendment violation,” said David Warrington, an attorney interviewed by Kaminsky. “The government is not supposed to be picking winners and losers in the free speech arena, regardless of whether they do it directly or by proxy, as appears to be the case here.” ²⁰³

On February 20, 2023, after the initial Washington Examiner stories appeared, the National Endowment for Democracy announced that it was severing its financial support for the GDI. ²⁰⁴

“Recently, we became aware that one of our grantees, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), was engaged in an initiative, funded by a different donor, that focused on specific U.S. media outlets,” said the NED in a statement. “We recognize the important work GDI has done with NED support in other countries to help preserve the integrity of the information space and counter authoritarian influence. However, given our commitment to avoid the perception that NED is engaged in any work domestically, directly or indirectly, we will no longer provide financial support to GDI.” ²⁰⁵

Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was a collaboration between the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Graphika, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFR-Lab). Michael Shellenberger referred to EIP as a “partnership between four government-funded censorship organizations” that served as the “deputized disinformation flagger” for the U.S. State Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). In a November 2022 report for the Foundation for Freedom Online, Mike Benz described EIP as being “made up of four of the most powerful and politically well-connected social media monitoring and mass-reporting groups in the world” whose “respective directors were all early industry pioneers in the rise of the censorship industry after the 2016 election.” ^{206 207}

In a video explaining how EIP behaved, Alex Stamos of the SIO said EIP members placed “a lot of pressure” on social media firms, beginning in August 2020, to create “specific policies that you can hold them accountable for.” With those policies pressured into place, Stamos explained the next step was for the EIP groups to find supposedly objectionable content and “report” it to the social media firms, along with an explanation for how the content was “violating those written policies.” ²⁰⁸

An EIP internal analysis of its work during the 2020 election claims that the group was responsible for deploying 120 analysts who searched the content shared from 859 million Twitter posts between August 15 to December 12 of 2020 wherein the U.S. election was being discussed. From that batch, nearly 22 million posts were identified with one of 639 instances of election related “misinformation” EIP was tracking and reporting to social media firms for action. ²⁰⁹

The EIP post-election analysis concluded that in 35 percent of the instances the social media firms took some action against the ticketed events sent to them. Enforcement actions included attaching a warning label to the post (21 percent of total ticketed events), removing it entirely (13 percent), or otherwise blocking/restricting it (1 percent). ²¹⁰

“Other groups that reported tickets,” according to the EIP report, included “the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, MITRE, Common Cause, the DNC, the Defending Digital Democracy Project, and the NAACP.” EIP also named “the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF), a subcomponent of CISA,” for aiding in the “reporting process and in implementing resilience efforts to counter election misinformation.” ²¹¹

A history of the EIP in the post-election analysis stated the partnership was created “in consultation with” the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “and other stakeholders” that included state and local governments. Both CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center are listed in the report as stakeholders.  A July 9, 2020, entry on the EIP timeline of events reads: “Meeting with CISA to present EIP concept.” ²¹²

Explaining the justification for creating the EIP, the post-election report acknowledged that “no government agency in the United States has the explicit mandate to monitor and correct election mis- and disinformation” that “originates from within the United States, which would likely be excluded from law enforcement action under the First Amendment and not appropriate for study by intelligence agencies restricted from operating inside the United States.” In the paragraph following this explanation, the report concluded that that EIP was designed as “a coalition of research entities who would focus on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms.” ²¹³

“We have reached out and we have had two-way conversations with all of the major platforms,” said Stamos, in an August 2020 video explaining the EIP. “Right, so we’ve had really good conversations with all of the major platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit… so that’s been good. So, I think our goal is that if we’re able to find disinformation, we’ll be able to report it quickly, and then collaborate with them on taking it down.” ²¹⁴

• Allegations of Censorship

In his March 2023 testimony to the U.S. House, Michael Shellenberger credited Alex Stamos of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) with creating a 2020 proposal to “centralize government censorship” within what became the EIP. Referring specifically to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in a video preserved by the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), Stamos explained that the EIP was created between CISA, the SIO and other partners to “try to fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves” because CISA “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do the work. ^{215 216}

“’Lack of legal authorizations’ is a nice way of saying ‘illegal,’” wrote Mike Benz of FFO. “At best, legally dubious. So right there, you have Stamos directly saying the government couldn’t do it, so the government deputized Stamos’s politically like-minded outside network to do the dirty work.” ²¹⁷

Explaining the birth of the Election Integrity Partnership at the 4th Annual National Cybersecurity Summit hosted by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in 2021, Renee DiResta, research director at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said EIP was created as a public-private partnership to fill a “gap” in the capability of governments to respond to disinformation. One “gap” she cited was “unclear legal authorities, including very clear first amendment questions.” ²¹⁸

“Time and again,” wrote Shellenberger in his report to Congress, “DiResta and her colleagues emphasize the importance of government agencies outsourcing censorship to private entities, but working closely together.” ²¹⁹

• The Virality Project

In December 2020, the four EIP partners and two new participants began working on the Virality Project (VP). Beginning in 2021, the VP applied the EIP’s reporting system to social media discussions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines. The two additional partners were the  National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC)’s Algorithmic Transparency Institute and New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP). VP used the EIP’s system for monitoring and reporting potential terms of service violations to the social media firms. ²²⁰

A progress report on the Virality Project also claimed coverage of “emerging and alternative platforms such as Gab, Parler, Telegram, and Gettr,” and a multi-lingual capacity to read messages posted in English, Chinese and Spanish. ²²¹

Matt Taibbi wrote that the VP “worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan” that reviewed COVID-19 content “on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest.” Revealing weekly updates sent by the Virality Project to Twitter and other social media firms, he concluded that VP had “knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion, while often being factually wrong itself.” In one example, Taibbi shared a May 2021 Virality Project report about a “recurring anti-vax influencer” whose widely shared Twitter post had suggested the “coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.” (Though once widely discredited by the Washington Post fact checker and in many corporate media reports, the possibility of a lab leak origin for the COVID-19 pandemic was subsequently embraced by the FBI and U.S. Department of Energy.) ^{222 223}

Prior to the Virality Project, according to Taibbi, “Twitter’s internal guidance on Covid-19 required a story be ‘demonstrably false’ or contain an ‘assertion of fact’ to be actioned.” ²²⁴

From the Twitter Files archive, he revealed a message from the Virality Project to Twitter that added a new standard for suppressing discussions: “True content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” This new “bucket” of concerns, according to the Virality Project message, was meant to include “posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” and “often true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.” ²²⁵

Taibbi reproduced a June 2021 briefing on “social media narratives and misinformation” addressed from the Virality Project to the “Twitter Team” that warned against “an increasingly popular narrative around ‘natural immunity.’” ²²⁶

Taibbi titled his Virality Project report “The Great COVID-19 Lie Machine” and wrote that the “VP was repeatedly, extravagantly wrong” on the facts. ²²⁷

“This story is important for two reasons,” he concluded. “One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging. Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.” ²²⁸

Dispute Over Foreign Influence

Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger found repeated instances in the Twitter Files of conflicts between Twitter and U.S. government officials regarding the existence of foreign government propaganda—particularly Russian government influence—on the social media platform.

“Time and again, FBI asks Twitter for evidence of foreign influence & Twitter responds that they aren’t finding anything worth reporting,” wrote Shellenberger of the period leading up to the 2020 election. ²²⁹

“Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference supposedly occurring on their platform and others,” wrote Taibbi. ²³⁰

Taibbi also showed examples of dead-end searches for state-sponsored propaganda on the platform: “The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions.” ²³¹

In July 2020, intelligence community officials on the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) sent a letter to Yoel Roth, Twitter head of trust and safety, through FBI agent Elvis Chan, challenging a presentation Roth gave to them at a June 2020 briefing. A copy of the FITF letter to Twitter was reported in the Twitter Files. ²³²

“I believe FITF would like a response ahead of our meeting the week of August 10^th,” wrote Chan to Roth, in a cover note forwarding the FITF letter. “I think you can tell from the nature of the questions, that there was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC [United States Intelligence Community] to get clarifications from your company.” ²³³

During the June 2020 briefing, according to the FITF letter, Roth informed the group that Twitter “had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors.” ²³⁴

Explaining the perspective of the intelligence community membership of the FITF, the letter further stated, “other sources we are aware of (including those referenced below) indicate state media actors are prolific users of social media, which seems in contrast to your own analysis.” ²³⁵

The letter included five references to media and other public reports claiming Russian or “state backed” propaganda efforts were being deployed on social media. ²³⁶

In his analysis, Matt Taibbi reported there was a circular logic in the sources the FITF selected. ²³⁷

“This exchange is odd among other things because some of the “bibliography” materials cited by the FITF are sourced to intelligence officials, who in turn cited the public sources,” wrote Taibbi. ²³⁸

There is an internal memo in the Twitter Files from Roth to Twitter staff regarding the FITF letter. Roth wrote that he was “not particularly comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC [intelligence community]) demanding written answers.” Roth compared the tone of the FITF letter to “more like something we’d get from a congressional committee.” ²³⁹

“The idea of the FBI acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community is interesting, given that many agencies are barred from domestic operations,” observed Taibbi. ²⁴⁰

In another follow up message from Roth to staff, Roth challenges the “entire premise” of the FITF’s characterization of the June 2020 briefing. ²⁴¹

“I re-reviewed my notes from that briefing,” wrote Roth, “and there’s a specific item calling out official propaganda outlets as a major factor.” ²⁴²

Blacklisting and Content Restriction Processes

Twitter Files investigations by journalists Bari Weiss, David Zweig, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger revealed a system of content restriction and blacklisting of accounts that occurred prior to the late 2022 purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. ²⁴³

Weiss wrote that these restrictions occurred “all in secret, without informing users” and compromised Twitter’s original mission: “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” ²⁴⁴

Visibility Filtering

“What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees called “Visibility Filtering” or “VF,”” wrote Weiss. “Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.” ²⁴⁵

Weiss reported that a senior Twitter employee told her: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” ²⁴⁶

“We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” said a Twitter engineer to Weiss, a statement she said was confirmed by two other Twitter employees. ²⁴⁷  

Weiss further explained that visibility filtering was used “to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.” ²⁴⁸

Outsourced and Automated Filtering

According to David Zweig’s analysis of the Twitter response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some content moderation was done by outsourced contractors from nations such as the Philippines, and by non-human artificial intelligence (AI) programs. ²⁴⁹

The AI machines proved “too crude for such nuanced work,” he wrote. And though the contractors were given “decision trees” to assist their judgment, Zweig found that “tasking non experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate.” ²⁵⁰

Twitter staff, according to Zweig, decided what went into the AI software and the decision trees used by the contractors. Twitter made the subjective decisions regarding when to escalate cases and suspend accounts. Together, these added up to what Zweig judged were “serious problems” with the policy. ²⁵¹

“As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias,” he concluded. “With Covid, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas. Inevitably, dissident yet legitimate content was labeled as misinformation, and the accounts of doctors and others were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.” ²⁵²

Content Enforcement Teams

At the most basic level, according to Weiss, visibility filtering was handled by Twitter’s “Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET.” She reported that this group fielded as many as 200 requests per day. ²⁵³

But above them, Weiss reported there was a “secret group” that consisted top executives such as Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal. “This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made,” she wrote. This, according to Twitter Files data she reported, was the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support” group, or “SIP-PES.” ²⁵⁴

During the 2020 election, according to a Twitter Files report from Matt Taibbi, this group became “a high-speed Supreme Court of moderation, issuing content rulings on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.” ²⁵⁵   

By the end of 2020, wrote Taibbi, they had erected an “inherently insane/impossible project” where the assumption was “that it was Twitter’s responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom.” ²⁵⁶  

Twitter Denials

“Twitter denied that it does such things,” reported Weiss, regarding allegations of so-called shadow banning. As an example, she referenced a July 2018 entry on Twitter’s corporate blog co-authored by Vijaya Gadde, the firm’s former head of legal, policy and trust. ^{257 258}  

Titled “Setting the record straight on shadow banning,” the corporate statement defined “shadow banning” as “deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.” ²⁵⁹

“We do not shadow ban,” wrote Gadde and her co-author. “You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow . . . And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” ²⁶⁰  

Evidence of Political Bias

In early October 2020, according to Matt Taibbi, Twitter executives opened an internal Slack channel to “be home for discussions about election-related removals, especially ones that involved “high-profile” accounts (often called “VITs” or “Very Important Tweeters”).” ²⁶¹

Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger each reported that the political views of Twitter staff skewed overwhelmingly toward Democrats. Taibbi posted a summary of federal political donations from Twitter staff. It revealed a low end of 96.4 percent of donations going to Democratic committees in 2018 (with 3.6 percent to Republicans), and a high-end of 99.7 percent to Democrats in 2022. ²⁶²

Of the election monitoring during the 2020 election, Taibbi concluded: “This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.” ²⁶³   

In the first installment of the Twitter Files Taibbi wrote that “requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine.” As an example, he provided an October 24, 2020, email exchange in which one Twitter official sent to another the names of several accounts, under the heading “More to review from the Biden team.” In response, the recipient told the sender the request had been “handled.” ²⁶⁴

Shellenberger revealed a January 22, 2017, public statement from the Twitter account of Yoel Roth in which Roth claimed there were “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE.” January 22 was two days after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. ²⁶⁵

“Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally,” wrote Taibbi. “We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.” ²⁶⁶

Beginning of Federal Influence over Twitter

After the 2016 election and throughout 2017, according to a Twitter Files reports from Matt Taibbi, Twitter came under increasing pressure from Congress, the media, and others to find and remove alleged foreign propaganda accounts from the platform. Allegations of Russian propaganda on social media interfering with the 2016 election was a major factor driving this pressure. ^{267 268}

“The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated,” concluded Taibbi. “It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.” ²⁶⁹

According to Twitter’s internal documents reported by Taibbi, the government’s pressure campaign led to a new and not publicly disclosed policy whereby Twitter agreed to remove accounts and content “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as foreign propaganda efforts to influence elections. The same document showed Twitter publicly denied that it would suspend accounts because of security agency requests, and instead maintained that suspensions were at Twitter’s “sole discretion.” ²⁷⁰

Evidence for Russian Interference on Twitter

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian firm described in media accounts as a “troll farm,” was identified by U.S. government intelligence services in 2017 as the major source of attempts to manipulate U.S. social media during the 2016 election. In February 2018 a federal grand jury indicted the IRA and 12 persons affiliated with it, but in March 2020 the U.S. Department of Justice dropped the charges against the IRA due to what federal prosecutors said was a “change in the balance of the government’s proof due to a classification determination.” ^{271 272}

In January 2023, the academic journal Nature Communications published a research paper assessing the political influence of IRA-identified Twitter accounts during the 2016 election. The authors were affiliated with the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics. ²⁷³

The research revealed that 70 percent of the IRA’s 2016 election content was absorbed by just one percent of Twitter’s American users, that consumption of the IRA content was “heavily concentrated” among voters already strongly inclined to vote for Republican candidates, and that effectiveness of the IRA’s work was “eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians.” ²⁷⁴ The researchers concluded there was “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” ²⁷⁵

“My personal sense coming out of this is that this got way overhyped,” said one of the researchers in an interview with the Washington Post. ²⁷⁶ The research did not analyze the impact of the IRA on Facebook or other social media platforms.

Criticism of Twitter’s Russia Response

In August 2017, according to the Twitter Files, the firm’s leadership “were sure they didn’t have a Russia problem.” ²⁷⁷ In response to then-ongoing Congressional investigations into alleged Russian manipulation of social media during the 2016 election, Facebook informed the U.S. Senate that it had suspended 300 accounts it suspected were affiliated with Russian propaganda. ²⁷⁸

Twitter officials, according to Matt Taibbi, performed a “cursory review” and found no evidence of Russian influence on Twitter to rival what Facebook had discovered. The discussions from this period released in the Twitter Files show Twitter staff implementing a communications strategy to keep the Senate scrutiny focused on Facebook’s problem. ²⁷⁹

Taibbi wrote that in September 2017, Twitter told the Senate that it had “suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with ‘possible links’ to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined” by a Twitter security team. ²⁸⁰  

The response to this, according to the Twitter Files report Taibbi wrote, was that “a furious Senator Mark Warner of Virginia – ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee” convened a news conference to ridicule Twitter’s effort as “frankly inadequate on every level.” ²⁸¹ The Twitter Files reports revealed sustained pressure from Warner and other political figures, aided by leaks to the media, portraying Twitter as insufficiently concerned with the Russian threat. ²⁸²

“In the weeks after Warner’s presser, a torrent of stories sourced to the Intel Committee poured into the news,” wrote Taibbi. ²⁸³  One example he provided was an October 2017 headline from Politico: “Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes.” ²⁸⁴  

Hillary Clinton, the defeated 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, joined in public criticism of Twitter. During an early October 2017 Silicon Valley speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she said “it’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyberwarfare.” ^{285 286}

The Twitter Files showed an assessment from a Twitter staffer stating that Congressional Democrats were “taking cues from Hillary Clinton” regarding the firm’s behavior. ^{287 288}   

Twitter’s “Russia task force”

According to the Twitter Files, a “Russia task force” was created in early October 2017. It embarked on a search for accounts that had spent advertising money on Twitter to spread Russian propaganda during the election. ²⁸⁹

By late October, according to task force emails, the group had performed an “exhaustive analysis” of 2500 suspect accounts. After a “manual review” of each, the task force found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” ²⁹⁰  

Of the 17 Russian-connected accounts, the group reported only two had spent a significant amount (defined as more than $10,000) on Twitter advertising during the election. One of the two was Russia Today (RT), a state-funded multi-media firm that openly admitted its relationship to the Russian government. The RT website stated that RT “is publicly financed from the budget of the Russian Federation.” ^{291 292}  

“The failure of the ‘Russia task force’ to produce ‘material’ worsened the company’s PR crisis,” wrote Taibbi. ²⁹³

Twitter Capitulates to Congress

Twitter “changed its tune about the smallness of its Russia problem,” according to Matt Taibbi, as Congress “threatened costly legislation” and the social media firm faced more hostile news stories that it suspected were fueled by leaks from Congress. ²⁹⁴   

In a November 2017 email, a Twitter staffer reported that congressional committees “appear to have leaked the account names.” According to Taibbi, this was a reference to the 2700 accounts Twitter had “manually examined” in September 2017. Twitter initially judged (and suspended) only 22 of the 2700 as “possible” Russian accounts, and another 179 for “possible links” to the first group. This was the process deemed “frankly inadequate on every level” by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). ²⁹⁵

In late November 2017, after examining the 2700 leaked account names, Buzzfeed News and independent researchers claimed to find 45 additional accounts guilty of spreading Russian propaganda, most of them, according to Buzzfeed, “tweeted predominantly in German, and were primarily focused on jumping on German hashtag games and other trending topics.” ²⁹⁶ The report was critical of Twitter’s methodology in the original search: “The relative ease of discovery raises serious questions as to just how many Russian-linked bots may still be active on Twitter, how the company identifies and removes such accounts, and whether its process for identifying accounts for its evidence was inadequate.” ²⁹⁷

Twitter suspended each of the accounts identified by Buzzfeed. An internal announcement of the policy posted in the Twitter Files conceded that Twitter staffers “could expect more investigation of accounts” and the process would repeat itself. “Reporters now know this is a model that works,” concluded the author of the message. ²⁹⁸

Afterward, according to Taibbi, “Twitter soon settled on its future posture” of suspending every account that had been “identified by the U.S. intelligence community.” ²⁹⁹ “Twitter let the ‘USIC’ into its moderation process,” concluded Taibbi. “It would not leave.” ³⁰⁰

FBI-Twitter Connections

Many document releases from the Twitter Files covered the close working relationship that developed between the FBI and Twitter staff after 2017, particularly the period from January 2020 through the purchase of the firm by Elon Musk in late 2022.

“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” wrote Matt Taibbi. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.” ³⁰¹

“As of 2020,” according to Michael Shellenberger’s analysis of Twitter Files, “there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” ³⁰²

Taibbi wrote that by January 2021, internal messages showed “Twitter executives getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies.” ³⁰³

Providing one example, Taibbi wrote: “Here’s Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth, lamenting a lack of ‘generic enough’ calendar descriptions to concealing his ‘very interesting’ meeting partners.” ³⁰⁴  

The image showed the discussion, with Roth ending with sarcasm regarding a meeting he supposedly should not have been talking about: “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR.” ³⁰⁵  

Shellenberger reported the contents of an August 2022 memo in which Twitter staffers were preparing for a September 2022 meeting with the FBI to discuss the Bureau’s desire to “convince us to produce more FBI EDRs.” ³⁰⁶

Shellenberger explained: “EDRs are an “emergency disclosure request,” a warrantless search.” ³⁰⁷   

One Twitter Files report revealed a January 2021 email to Jim Baker, Twitter’s deputy general counsel and a former FBI lawyer. The subject line read: “Run the business – we made money!” Noting that Twitter had created “a reimbursement program for our legal process response from the FBI,” the Twitter employee told Baker the firm had “collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” ³⁰⁸  

FBI coordination with CIA and DHS

“Despite its official remit being ‘Foreign Influence,’ the FITF [Foreign Influence Task Force] and the SF FBI office became [a] conduit for mountains of domestic fringiest material,” wrote Taibbi in a Twitter Files analysis. “It seemed to strike no one as strange that a ‘Foreign Influence’ task force was forwarding thousands of mostly domestic reports, along with the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] . . .” ³⁰⁹

According to the “Mission” page on its website, the Department of Homeland Security is tasked with counterterrorism, border security, cyberspace and critical infrastructure security, disaster preparedness, and securing national transportation and trade. Taibbi reported that an election-related component was added to the cybersecurity mission through a partnership between DHS and the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a nonprofit funded mostly with government grants. ^{310 311}

In addition to CIS, Taibbi also identified the Electoral Integrity Partnership, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy as part of “a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content” on social media. ³¹²

Taibbi reported that CIS created a Partner Support Portal for DHS to forward concerns about accounts to social media firms. As an example of how it worked, he reported the contents of an October 2020 internal Twitter discussion regarding how to address a complaint sent from the California Secretary of State (SOS) through the CIS portal. ³¹³

The California officials had earlier complained about a Twitter post from President Donald Trump. According to the Twitter employee handling the follow up contact, the California SOS office wanted to know “why Twitter didn’t take any action” against the Trump post. ³¹⁴

“The government,” in one form or another, wrote Taibbi, “was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm” including “Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others.” ³¹⁵  

Typical meetings of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, according to Taibbi, also “nearly always” included “one or two attendees” identified as “OGA,” for “Other Governmental Agency.” Taibbi interviewed former Central Intelligence Agency officers and contractors who confirmed “OGA” is used as a euphemistic cover for “CIA.” ³¹⁶

An “OGA briefing” about foreign concerns, was “almost always” on the meeting agenda of the Foreign Influence Task Force, wrote Taibbi. ³¹⁷ (The CIA is mostly prohibited from operating legally within the United States. ³¹⁸ )  Taibbi also noted the OGAs “ended up sharing intelligence through the FBI and FITF not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Clouldfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.” ³¹⁹

In September 2020, according to the Twitter Files, FBI agent Elvis Chan and Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, discussed the creation of an “Election Communication Platform.” The one-way communication portal for the U.S. intelligence community to send messages to Twitter and other social media firms was to be managed by the FBI’s FITF. Roth wrote that the “easy ones” (i.e.: obvious government agencies) to include on the platform would be the FBI, DHS, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Others expressing interest in participating, according to Roth, were the U.S. Department of State, the National Security Agency, and the CIA. ³²⁰

Influence over Account Suspensions

“Especially as the election approached in 2020, the FITF/FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending lists of hundreds of problem accounts,” wrote Matt Taibbi, of his examination of the Twitter Files data. “Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury [Department of Treasury], the NSA [National Security Agency], virtually every state,  the HHS [Department of Health and Human Services], from the FBI and DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and more.” ³²¹

Reporting on a November 2022 email, Taibbi wrote that it demonstrated a “master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter.” ³²²

“Hello Twitter contacts,” began the email from the FBI’s San Francisco office. “FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.” ³²³  

“Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts,” wrote Taibbi. He reported that the content of one of the four was filled with obvious humor, such as one post on Election Day “reminding” Republicans to vote the next day. ³²⁴

An October 27, 2020, email from an FBI official to a Twitter staffer asked: “Do you guys have a list of those 132 accounts action was taken against on 09/29/2020? We wanted to get process served on those accounts.” The Twitter Files messages show that within two minutes the request was forwarded to Yoel Roth for his attention. ³²⁵

“Requests poured in from FBI offices all over the country, day after day, hour after hour,” wrote Taibbi, in his analysis of the exchange about the 132 accounts. “If Twitter didn’t act quickly, questions came: ‘Was action taken?’ ‘Any movement?’” ³²⁶  

Taibbi also reported the Bureau “was clearly tailoring searches to Twitter’s policies” and that its “complaints were almost always depicted somewhere as a ‘possible terms of service violation.’” ³²⁷

He provided internal communications showing Twitter’s executives noticed this behavior. In November 2020, Stacia Cardille, the firm’s senior legal executive, complained to Jim Baker that she’d received ten requests in five days in which it appeared the FBI was just “doing keyword searches for violations.” Baker, a former FBI lawyer, responded that it was “odd they are searching for violations of our policies.”

Suppression of Satire

According to Twitter Files communications reported by Matt Taibbi, FBI/FITF requests for suppression of Twitter accounts included instances where the commentary being reported by the FBI as election interference was instead obvious satire. ³²⁸

In one example, Taibbi examined six accounts flagged as violations of Twitter’s terms of service in two November 2022 emails sent from the FBI’s San Francisco field office. ³²⁹

In one case, an Election Day 2022 post from the account “@byrum_wade” was flagged by the FBI, with this note sent to Twitter: “… display name ‘ULTRA MAGA’, stating the following: ‘Americans, Vote today. Democrats you vote Wednesday 9^th.’” ³³⁰

A nearly identical satirical statement, but from the opposite partisan perspective, was flagged for the account of Twitter user “@FromMA”: “I want to remind republicans to vote tomorrow, Wednesday November 9.” ³³¹

And in a third example, a post from the account “@ClairFosterPHD” warned “I’m a ballot counter in my state. If you’re not wearing a mask, I am not counting your vote. #safetyfirst.” ³³²

She added in a follow up: “For every negative comment on this post I am adding another vote for the democrats.” ³³³

Taibbi reported that “@FromMA” and “@ClairFosterPHD” were the only two of from the batch of six accounts flagged by the FBI that did not get suspended by Twitter. ³³⁴

When asked about her inclusion on the FBI’s list, the user behind “@ClairFosterPHD” told Taibbi: “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds.” ³³⁵

Taibbi also examined another email from the FBI to Twitter that flagged 25 accounts. Sent during the same final week of the 2022 election, this group was flagged by the Bureau for “disseminating false information about the time, place or manner of the upcoming elections.” ³³⁶

In this note, FBI agent Elvis Chan added: “Let us know if you decide to take any actions against these accounts based on our tipper to you.” The Twitter Files showed a follow up note back to the FBI in which Twitter reported taking some action (either blocking some content from, or outright suspending) 16 of the 25 on the list. ³³⁷

Taibbi reported that many of the 25 were also satirical or “low engagement.” One of the high engagement accounts reported by the FBI, but not acted against by Twitter, was that of actor Billy Baldwin. ³³⁸

The twitter handle “@Tiberius444” was another account that did not receive any known sanctions from Twitter, despite being one of the 25 reported by the Bureau. ³³⁹

“I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter,” responded the user behind “@Tiberius444,” when contacted by Taibbi. “That’s crazy.” ³⁴⁰

Congressional Pressure

The Twitter Files reports also show the firm was under pressure from Congress to cooperate with the FBI. In January 2020, one Twitter executive sent a note concerning this point to Yoel Roth. “We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies,” said the executive to Roth. “They are probing & pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to congressional staff).” ³⁴¹

Similarly, in September 2020, according to a Twitter Files report from Matt Taibbi, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) “seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction.” ³⁴²

Taibbi reported internal Twitter communications from September 1, 2020, beginning with an early afternoon message in which the SSCI was informed that Twitter was “suspending five Twitter accounts for platform manipulation that we can reliably attribute to Russian state actors.” The note assessed that the five accounts “achieved little impact,” were “low quality and spammy,” and that “most Tweets from these accounts received few, if any, Likes or Retweets.” ³⁴³  

The note concluded by informing SSCI that Twitter had “worked closely with the FBI Foreign Influence Task Force” to identify the five accounts. An SSCI staffer responded, asking for clarification regarding how close the cooperation had been and whether the FBI had provided the suggestion to investigate the accounts. ³⁴⁴  

In response, Stacia Cardille asked Yoel Roth if it was okay to tell the SSCI that the FBI had provided the tips. Roth responded that he would “actually encourage it” and that Twitter should “give the FBI kudos where they’ve clearly earned them.” ³⁴⁵  

Suppression of Hunter Biden Story

On October 14, 2020, during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post reported a story based on the contents of a laptop computer that had allegedly been used by Hunter Biden, son of then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Emails on the device appeared to reveal controversial contacts and potential business dealings with foreign governments involving the Bidens and other figures. ^{346 347 348}

More than two years after the October 2020 controversy, in November 2022, an independent review commissioned by CBS News verified what the New York Post had reported. The laptop’s contents had been genuine, had belonged to Hunter Biden, and had not been tampered with. ³⁴⁹

Russia Allegations

On October 19, 2020, less than a week after the New York Post story was published, dozens of former U.S. intelligence community officials released an open letter to the media that implied the contents of the laptop had been fabricated or otherwise compromised by Russian intelligence. The authors wrote that the story had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” but stated “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Among others, the letter was cosigned by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and three former CIA directors: John Brennan, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta. ³⁵⁰

In sworn testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in April 2023, former acting CIA Director Mike Morell, a co-signer of the letter, said he had organized the letter after being contacted by Antony Blinken, then a senior advisor to the Biden presidential campaign and a former Deputy U.S. Secretary of State under President Barack Obama. Following Biden’s election, Blinken was appointed U.S. Secretary of State. ³⁵¹

Morell testified that Blinken called him on October 17, 2020, three days after the New York Post story regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, to obtain his reaction to the story. Asked if this call “triggered” his decision to organize the letter, Morell answered “Yes, absolutely.” ³⁵²

That same day, Blinken emailed Morell a USA Today story containing speculation that the FBI was investigating the laptop leak as part of a “disinformation campaign.” The bottom of the email contained the signature block of the rapid response director of the Biden presidential campaign. ³⁵³

Morell also testified that he did not have an intent to write the letter prior to the discussion with Blinken, and that the chairman of the Biden campaign called to thank him after Biden referenced the letter in the October 22 presidential debate. ³⁵⁴

Challenged about the Hunter Biden story during the October 22 debate, Joe Biden referenced the “50 former national intelligence folks” and “five former heads of the CIA, both parties” who said it was “a Russian plan” and a “bunch of garbage.” ³⁵⁵

Asked in April 2023 why he organized the letter, Morell said it was to “share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue” and to “help Vice President Biden.” Asked to clarify the second point, Morell responded: “Because I wanted him to win the election.” ³⁵⁶

“The only person who signed the letter and was known to be in contact with the Biden campaign was Michael Morell,” said Mark Zaid, an attorney representing more than six of the signers of the letter. “It is true that when the draft was sent out to people to sign, the cover email made clear that it was an effort to help the Biden campaign. The overwhelming majority of people who signed the letter were apolitical career intelligence officials whose intent was to make it known that the Russians appeared to be using this issue, among many others, to influence the 2020 US election.” ³⁵⁷

“Break the Pentagon Papers Principle”

In March 2020, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) produced a report encouraging journalists to suppress authentic and newsworthy stolen information if they had reason to suspect the leaker had bad motives. After the New York Post revealed the contents of the Hunter Biden computer, the authors of the SIO report reiterated that their “break the Pentagon Papers principle” advice should be applied to the Hunter Biden story.

“The New York Post’s publication of a story about alleged emails belonging to Hunter Biden, supplied to the tabloid by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has all the hallmarks of a Russian influence operation,” wrote Janine Zacharia and Andrew J. Grotto in an October 21, 2020, essay for the Lawfare blog. ³⁵⁸

Zacharia and Grotto were also co-authors of “How to Report Responsibly on Hacks and Disinformation: 10 Guidelines and a Template for Every Newsroom,” a March 2020 media advisory from the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, host of the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). The report encouraged reporters to “Break the Pentagon Papers Principle,” and refrain from reporting accurate information that had been leaked. ³⁵⁹

The pair repeated the advice in their Lawfare blog regarding the Hunter Biden computer revelations. ³⁶⁰

“Since Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak of the Pentagon Papers, journalists have generally operated under a single rule: Once information is authenticated, if it is newsworthy, publish it,” wrote Zacharia and Grotto. “How it was obtained is of secondary concern to the information itself. In this new era, journalists must abandon this principle in favor of updated norms. News organizations won’t—and shouldn’t—ignore stolen information if it is newsworthy. But they need to make the provenance of the material an essential part of the story, so that readers understand why and who hacked it. Otherwise, American journalists will be unwitting accomplices of foreign propaganda operations.” ³⁶¹

In the “acknowledgements” section of their March 2020 Stanford Cyber Policy Center report arguing that news agencies should “Break the Pentagon Papers Principle,” Zacharia and Grotto thanked several news reporters and editors for helping with “revisions to this document.” The list included: “John Daniszewski and Karen Mahabir at the Associated Press; Rebecca Blumenstein, Philip Corbett and Erin McCann at the New York Times; Marian Porges and Christopher Scholl at NBC News; Tracy Grant, David Cho and Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post; and Terence Samuel and roughly 20 other editors and reporters at National Public Radio.” ³⁶²

The Lawfare blog is a joint project of the Lawfare Institute and the Brookings Institution. In July 2016, during the previous presidential election, Benjamin Wittes, co-founder of Lawfare, co-authored a so-called “legal analysis” of whether then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump was a “Russian agent.” The final, presumably “legal analysis,” was that Trump was probably just a “useful idiot” of the Russians. Days after the 2016 election, Wittes wrote another Lawfare essay arguing the President-elect was a threat to national security. ^{363 364}

A May 2020 essay co-authored by Wittes was posted by The Atlantic. Taking into account the revelations from the Department of Justice Inspector General that had exposed serious flaws in the FBI’s investigation of Trump campaign officials, Wittes and his Lawfare co-author argued it was President Trump and Republicans who had become “obsessed” with the Russia investigation. ³⁶⁵

Aspen Institute “Pre-bunking” exercise

Also in the Twitter Files was the agenda for a June 2020 crisis response exercise, sponsored by the Aspen Institute, in which attendees role-played the “Burisma leak”—a hypothetical scenario in which media responds to a potentially manipulated report accusing Hunter and Joe Biden of controversial foreign financial misdeeds. In his March 2023 report to the U.S. House, Michael Shellenberger referred to this event as a “prebunking” of the New York Post story before it was published, because the federal government was already aware of the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop and its controversial contents. Shellenberger wrote that this was the “greatest episode of the censorship industrial complex’s discrediting of factual information” and “strong evidence of an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.” ^{366 367}

Shellenberger revealed the guest list from the event showing that Janine Zacharia and Andy Grotto were participants in the exercise. The pair were the co-authors of the March 2020 Stanford University Cyber Policy Center report advising journalists to “Break the Pentagon Papers Principle” when confronted with accurate but leaked information. ^{368  369 370}

Other participants listed for the event included Yoel Roth of Twitter; three security officials from Facebook; one attendee each from Google, Reddit and the Wikimedia Foundation; one reporter and a lawyer from the New York Times; the national security reporter for the Washington Post, one security official and a reporter from CNN; an investigative reporter from NPR; an executive from the Poynter Institute; an executive editor from Lawfare; and reporters or editors from NBC News, The Dispatch, the Daily Beast, First Draft News and the New Yorker. ^{371 372}

FBI “Primed” Twitter’s Response

Michael Shellenberger wrote that “during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth [then Twitter’s head of site integrity] to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.” ³⁷³

Shellenberger noted that the FBI was aware of and in possession of the laptop one year before the New York Post controversy occurred. The FBI had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019, after the Bureau was alerted to the computer’s existence by the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop. The repairman claimed the damaged device was dropped off by Hunter Biden in April 2019, with a request for recovery of the information on the hard drive. The repairman recovered and copied the information, but said Biden never responded to requests to claim the computer and pay for the service. ^{374 375}

Growing concerned over what the information on the device revealed, the repairman alerted the FBI, and the Bureau seized the computer in December 2019 on the authority of a federal grand jury subpoena. The repairman’s duplicate digital file was later given to the New York Post. ^{376 377}

In December 2020, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, gave testimony to the Federal Election Commission regarding his contact with the FBI during the year prior to the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. The Twitter Files quoted from Roth’s testimony. ³⁷⁸

“Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security,” Roth wrote to the FEC. “During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” ³⁷⁹  

A similar FBI campaign mentioning “Russian propaganda” occurred with Facebook, according to a statement made by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg during an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in August 2022. ^{380 381}

Michael Shellenberger’s Twitter Files report summarized Zuckerberg’s statement to Rogan: “The FBI basically came to us [and] was like, ‘Hey… you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016 election. There’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that.’” ^{382 383}

Shellenberger reported that in August 2020, FBI agent Elvis Chan provided Yoel Roth with a briefing on “APT28,” purportedly a Russian hacking group. Shellenberger wrote that before the Hunter Biden story broke, Roth “had been primed to think about” APT28 by these briefings. In support of this point, Shellenberger provided a video interview in which Roth conceded that the New York Post story “set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells.” ³⁸⁴  

Shellenberger also showed an internal email from September 2020 in which FBI agents Laura Dehmlow and Elvis Chan asked to give a “classified briefing” to Twitter’s Jim Baker, the former FBI general counsel who was presumed to have retained his federal security clearance. ³⁸⁵

Twitter Response

Twitter initially responded by locking the account of the newspaper and blocking access to the story, citing it as a violation of the firm’s “hacked materials” policy. The Twitter account of then-Trump White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was also locked, after she made reference to the Post report. Facebook implemented a similar but less restrictive policy, limiting the spread of the story on the platform. ^{386 387 388}

Twitter informed the newspaper that the account would not be unlocked until the Post removed its original references to the Hunter Biden report. The newspaper did not comply, and the account remained locked for two weeks. ³⁸⁹

“Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe,’” reported Matt Taibbi. “They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.” ³⁹⁰

Based on internal communications from the Twitter Files, Taibbi wrote that the decision to block the story and the New York Post Twitter account was “was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.” ³⁹¹

Testifying in Congress in mid-November 2020, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the decision to block the accounts and restrict access to the story was “a mistake that we made, both in terms of the intention of the policy and also the enforcement action of not allowing people to share it publicly or privately.” ³⁹²

Media Reaction

In the days and weeks following the Hunter Biden computer story, coverage in corporate media was limited and frequently amplified the claim that the New York Post reporting was an example of Russian disinformation.

On October 14, 2020, the day the New York Post released the story, a Washington Post report claimed it was “reminiscent of the 2016 race — when Russian intelligence operatives hacked and released hundreds of emails from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager through WikiLeaks.” The newspaper also quoted “intelligence experts” who were “skeptical of the report — and the stated origins of the hard drive purported to belong to Biden’s son — saying that it had the characteristics of a carefully planned information operation designed to affect an American election.” ³⁹³

The next day, a New York Times analysis of the Hunter Biden story began with a claim that “intelligence agencies warned the White House late last year that Russian intelligence officers were using President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential run, according to four current and former American officials.” Further quoting the unnamed “intelligence officials,” the newspaper said they had “asserted that Russia favors Mr. Trump’s re-election, and the Kremlin has allies among Ukraine’s own oligarchs, who believe Mr. Biden will fight corruption there more aggressively than the Trump administration has.” ³⁹⁴

A report from The New Republic on the day the story broke accused the New York Post of attempting to “manufacture a vintage October surprise for the 2020 election.” Two days later another analysis in The New Republic repeated the New York Times allegations from the unnamed intelligence sources regarding Russian disinformation, and concluded of the New York Post that “everything about the story was fishy.” ^{395 396}

An October 19, 2020, report from Politico was headlined “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” It began by quoting the letter from “50 former senior intelligence officials” who wrote that the New York Post report “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” and were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” ³⁹⁷

“Last week, the New York Post published a dubious story about Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden,” began a CNN report on October 18, 2020. The network’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, denounced the report as “a classic example of the right-wing media machine,” and a “manufactured scandal.” CNN reports also featured a Harvard Law School professor who referred to the New York Post report as coming from a “propaganda pipeline” and observed that “major professional media – doesn’t seem to be falling for it.” ³⁹⁸

“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” responded Terence Samuels, the managing editor of National Public Radio. NPR reporters and staff also referred to the New York Post account as “speculative partisan advocacy” and noted that it could be sourced to Russian disinformation efforts. ³⁹⁹

FBI Influences Suppression of New York Post

According to emails revealed by the Twitter Files, FBI agent Elvis Chan sent a packet of ten documents to Twitter’s Yoel Roth on the evening before the New York Post story appeared. Chan’s email was titled “Information Sharing.” The documents were sent through the secure Teleporter channel between the Bureau and Twitter. Chan asked for and received confirmation from Roth that the documents were received. ⁴⁰⁰  

The Twitter Files show that shortly after the New York Post story appeared on the morning of October 14, 2020, Yoel Roth was not immediately inclined to believe it was in violation of Twitter’s policy. ⁴⁰¹  

“At this time, given the alleged provenance of the materials (a laptop mysteriously dropped off at repair shop in Delaware), it isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else,” wrote Roth in an email that morning. ⁴⁰²  

Continuing, Roth also wrote that “my personal view on this, unsubstantiated by any hard evidence, is that this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation,” and that his team would be “developing a recommendation for what, if anything, we want to do over the course of the day today.” ⁴⁰³  

“In response to Roth, Baker—the former FBI lawyer—repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy,” reported Shellenberger. “Baker does so over email, and in a Google doc, on October 14 and 15.” ⁴⁰⁴  

In an email on the morning of October 14, the day the story appeared, Baker argued that “reliable cybersecurity folks” had judged that the formatting of the emails used by the New York Post “looks like they could be complete fabrications.” ⁴⁰⁵  

Baker received pushback regarding whether the story rose to the level of a violation of Twitter policy, and he responded: “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.” ⁴⁰⁶  

Before the end of the first morning, according to Shellenberger, “Twitter execs had bought into a wild hack-and-dump story.” Supporting this point, Shellenberger reported the content of an email from Roth, marked 10:17 am on October 14, wherein Roth had come around to the hack theory. ⁴⁰⁷

“The suggestion from experts – which rings true – is there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware,” wrote Roth. ⁴⁰⁸  

“In the end, the FBI’s influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story,” concluded Shellenberger. “By Dec. 2020, Baker and his colleagues even sent a note of thanks to the FBI for its work.” ⁴⁰⁹  

The Twitter Files includes an email chain of the discussion over which FBI agents deserved the notes of appreciation for their role in the policy decision. ⁴¹⁰

“Also, we should be mindful that the letters could leak and will be subject to FOIA, so we should prepare them with that expectation in mind,” wrote former FBI lawyer Jim Baker, to his Twitter colleagues. ⁴¹¹  

Ro Khanna Concern Over Free Expression

On the evening of October 14, 2020, after Twitter blocked access to the New York Post story, U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) sent an email to Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal, policy and trust. ⁴¹²

Matt Taibbi reproduced these emails and wrote that the “humorous exchange” demonstrated the “fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders.” ⁴¹³  

In his initial email, Khanna warned Gadde the suppression of the New York Post report had produced a “huge backlash on hill re speech” and offered to chat with her about it. Taibbi wrote that Khanna was the only Democrat he could find in the Twitter Files who raised the free expression concern with Twitter. ⁴¹⁴

In her reply, according to Taibbi, Gadde went “into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights.” Taibbi wrote that this led Khanna “to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the [Twitter] files.” ⁴¹⁵

“Hope you’re well, Vijaya!” replied Khanna, in the response. “But this seems a violation of the 1^st Amendment principles.” ⁴¹⁶

Censorship Requests from U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff

The Twitter Files reveal multiple requests from the office of U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) asking Twitter to remove content and users. Matt Taibbi reported that Schiff’s staff “wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down.” ⁴¹⁷

Suspension of Paul Sperry

In November 2020, according to a Twitter Files email produced by Taibbi, Schiff’s staff asked Twitter to suspend Real Clear Investigations reporter Paul Sperry. The request also asked Twitter to “Remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.” ⁴¹⁸

“Mr. Misko” referred to Sean Misko, a staffer on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee when it was chaired by Schiff. In his reporting, Sperry had identified a whistleblower whose testimony had helped fuel the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump. Sperry also revealed Misko was a close acquaintance of the whistleblower. ⁴¹⁹

Schiff was one of the House managers of the impeachment proceeding. ⁴²⁰

“Schiff was just angry I outed his impeachment whistleblower and tried to get me banned,” replied Sperry, when informed of the Twitter Files revelations. ⁴²¹  

A Twitter employee initially reacted negatively to the request that the firm banish all references to Misko and Schiff staffers. According to the Twitter Files messages produced by Taibbi, her response was “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do that.” ⁴²²  

Sperry was suspended from Twitter in August 2022, nearly two years after the request from Schiff’s office. ⁴²³  

“They kicked me off the day after Trump’s home was raided, and I was in the middle of tweeting more about the raid and I got a message popping up saying I was permanently suspended,” said Sperry in August 2022. “No reasons were given.” ⁴²⁴  

The suspension of Sperry’s account was lifted after Elon Musk’s purchase of the firm. ⁴²⁵

Request to Remove Joe Biden Parody

In April 2020, Schiff’s staff and the Democratic National Committee both asked Twitter to remove a parody GIF video that mocked then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The clearly doctored GIF showed Biden with his tongue sticking out and a delusional look on his face. The parody account that posted the GIF used the Twitter handle “@SilERabbit” and the username “Nate’s Liver – Commentary.” ^{426 427}

Matt Taibbi reported on the internal discussion within Twitter, in which the firm denied the request. ⁴²⁸  

“This is pretty clearly edited GIF created with humorous intent,” replied Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity. “Any reasonable observer could identify that it’s doctored. And there’s no nexus to harm anyone involved. It’s not a violation of our rules.” ⁴²⁹  

The GIF remained on Twitter, but not without further objections from the Schiff office. ⁴³⁰  

“We’re prepared to accept that it doesn’t fall under the policy given, but there’s a slippery slope concern here, and I think it bears further explanation from Twitter why that is the case,” responded a Schiff staffer, in an email reported in the Twitter Files. ⁴³¹

U.S. Sen. Angus King’s “Suspected Accounts” List

For one Twitter Files report Matt Taibbi reproduced an email dated October 1, 2018, that was addressed to Yoel Roth and the Twitter Site Integrity team. The email’s subject line was “Suspicious Accounts from Senator Angus King.” ⁴³²

“I spoke with the Campaign Director for Sen. Angus King this morning, who provided a very large target list (attached) of 354 suspicious Twitter accounts they have identified,” wrote the Twitter staffer to the group. ⁴³³

When Twitter received this spreadsheet, U.S. Sen. Angus King, an independent representing Maine, was in the final five weeks of his reelection campaign against Republican state Sen. Eric Brakey and Democrat Zak Ringelstein. The King spreadsheet included lists labeled “suspected accounts” for both Facebook and Twitter. The majority of notations in the “Why flagged” column on the lists referred to inteactions with the social media profiles of King, or one of his two rivals, or posting of social media messages referencing one of the three candidates. ⁴³⁴

“If Dick Nixon sniffed glue,” wrote Taibbi, “this is what his enemies list might have looked like.” ⁴³⁵

“I’m a Maine lobsterman who got put on @SenAngusKing‘s enemy list because according to his staff I didnt tweet enough good things about him! This is wicked frigged up,” responded the @Maine_dads account, after the Twitter Files report in February 2023. “Should a senator do this to his own constituents ??? I want answers Angus.” ⁴³⁶

King’s spreadsheet shows the politician flagged @Maine_dads to Twitter due to the user being “Anti-King” and identified @Maine_dads as a “Possible Troll, but occasionally expresses positive sentiment about ASK.” ⁴³⁷

Angus Stanley King’s initials are ASK. More than 100 of the 354 spreadsheet entries for Twitter accounts on the King list referenced opinions regarding or opposition to “ASK.” There are four entries flagged “anti-ASK” and five others as “anti-King.” The “troll” definition is applied to 64 of the 354 flagged accounts. ^{438 439}

“That’s what you’ve got to do in these situations,” King said, when asked by a local news reporter about his list. “The problem with attacks on social media is it’s very hard to respond. It’s very hard to know who’s reading a particular post. I think campaigns all over the country are looking at this problem.” ⁴⁴⁰

As of March 2023, the Twitter Files reports had not clarified how many of the accounts Twitter took action against.

Chapo Trap House Podcast

The Twitter handle for Matt Christman (@cushbomb) was one of the so-called “suspected accounts.” Christman is one of the founders of Chapo Trap House (Chapo) a popular left-wing socialist podcast. In October 2018, when his name appeared in the spreadsheet, Chapo was ranked as the top show on the Patreon podcast hosting website and was grossing more than $100,000 per month. The left-leaning Matt Taibbi has been a frequent guest on the show, which has identified him as “Our old pal and first mega-guest.” ^{441 442 443}

The spreadsheet shows King’s political campaign flagged Christman to Twitter because of an “ASK mention.” This notation appeared 54 times on the spreadsheet. ⁴⁴⁴ [/note]

The spreadsheet also identified Christman as a “troll.” ⁴⁴⁵

“Angus King is a mediocre senator but I always have a good meal at one of his chain of mid-range steakhouses,” wrote Christman on June8, 2017, in one of at least two satirical posts made prior to King flagging the account to Twitter. ⁴⁴⁶

Christman returned to the theme at least one more time, on October 3, 2017, one year before King reported him to Twitter. ⁴⁴⁷

“Senators who are also steakhouses: Angus King (ME-I),” he wrote. “End of list.” ⁴⁴⁸

“Senator Angus King thinks I’m a troll,” replied Christman in a February 2023 post, after the Twitter Files report was posted. “That’s okay, I’ll keep eating his delicious rib-eyes, succulent sirloins, and mouthwatering filets, all served in a relaxed, family-friendly atmosphere. I will also continue to enjoy his inventive appetizers and craft cocktails.” ⁴⁴⁹

Zero Hedge Financial Page

The Twitter handle for the financial advice website Zero Hedge (@ZeroHedge) was identified by King’s campaign as a “bot.” The “bot” identifier was used for 220 of the 354 accounts on the spreadsheet. ⁴⁵⁰

“One of the funniest things about the @SenAngusKing suspicious accounts list is that they seemed to think @zerohedge is a bot,” wrote Taibbi. ⁴⁵¹

According to the spreadsheet, Zero Hedge was flagged because the account had been “followed by Brakey,” presumably meaning that King’s republican opponent—or the Republican’s campaign Twitter account—had become a follower of the Zero Hedge account. There were 14 other accounts similarly flagged as “followed by Brakey” or “followed by Ringelstein.” ⁴⁵²

“Yes, the Maine Senator demanded @ZeroHedge (and 100s more) Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts (and Facebook Groups) be instantly removed for being ‘suspicious,’” wrote one Tyler Durden, a pen name of the financial writers from Zero Hedge. “As one wit on Twitter responded via DM when we remarked on Senator King’s actions: ‘the f**king balls on these people!!’ We could not have said it better.” ⁴⁵³

User @DarleneHBrook

The Twitter account for @DarleneHBrook was identified as a “bot” by King’s spreadsheet and flagged for these reasons: “Anti-ASK, tweet at Maine Dads, 8/2 gun debate #ME politics, abortion, pro Brakey, 9/25 Wind post.” ⁴⁵⁴

As of March 2023, the @DarleneHBrook page had 9,715 followers, identified “Maine, USA” as the location of the user, and had been reliably posting a variety of Biblical verses and right-of-center political opinions. ⁴⁵⁵

In the weeks preceding the 2018 election @DarleneHBrook regularly criticized King on policy issues and made favorable statements about his Republican opponent. ⁴⁵⁶

“Senator Angus King compares the #September11th attacks to Russian hackers,” wrote @DarleneHBrook on September 11, 2018. The post linked to a video showing King making the comparison: “… they used airplanes into towers, now people can use the click of a computer key in St. Petersburg, Russia…” ⁴⁵⁷

Eric Brakey, King’s Republican opponent in the race, made a campaign issue of King’s position on and alleged benefit from the wind energy industry. ⁴⁵⁸

“We have a problem in our country…#CronyCaptitalism…#WindPower…Angus King has made a career & made millions of dollars off from the backs of Maine people by exploiting provisions in our tax codes…in order to make money,” wrote @DarleneHBrook in a September 2018 post. ⁴⁵⁹

In an October 2018 post, @DarleneHBock retweeted an Eric Brakey post of a meme accusing King of getting “rich off of the American tax payer using crony capitalism and his buddy Obama.” The meme also included a quote from a December 2013 Real Clear Policy report, which stated King had “founded a wind-energy company” and then “received a $407,000 ‘success’ fee” when the firm secured a $102 million federal loan guarantee. ^{460 461}

Hamilton 68

In August 2017, the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy launched Hamilton 68, a digital dashboard the group promoted as an effort to “help ordinary people, journalists, and other analysts identify Russian messaging themes and detect active disinformation or attack campaigns as soon as they begin.” Explaining its methodology, ASD claimed, “our analysis has linked 600 Twitter accounts to Russian influence online.” ^{462 463}

“Some of these accounts are directly controlled by Russia, others are users who on their own initiative reliably repeat and amplify Russian themes,” said an ASD description of the Twitter users it was tracking. ⁴⁶⁴

“It was a scam,” wrote Matt Taibbi in January 2023. “Instead of tracking how ‘Russia’ influenced American attitudes, Hamilton 68 simply collected a handful of mostly real, mostly American accounts, and described their organic conversations as Russian scheming.” ⁴⁶⁵ His conclusion was based on his review of emails that took place between Twitter employees, beginning in October 2017, shortly after the launch of Hamilton 68. ⁴⁶⁶

Twitter’s Internal Analysis

“Twitter executives were in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s list, reverse-engineering it from the site’s requests for Twitter data,” wrote Taibbi. “Concerned about the deluge of Hamilton-based news stories, they did so – and what they found shocked them.” ⁴⁶⁷

Taibbi displayed images of the emails from Yoel Roth, at the time Twitter’s trust and security chief, beginning with one dated October 3, 2017, shortly after Hamilton 68 was launched. ⁴⁶⁸

“At long last I’ve been able to reverse-engineer the list of accounts behind the Hamilton 68 dashboard,” wrote Roth to his coworkers. “The Securing Democracy people have never been willing to release the list to anyone.” ⁴⁶⁹

“The selection of accounts is … bizarre, and seemingly quite arbitrary,” Roth continued. “They appear to strongly preference pro-Trump accounts (which they use to assert that Russia is expressing a preference for Trump… even though there’s not good evidence that any of the accounts they selected are or are not actually Russian).” ⁴⁷⁰

“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is,” concluded Roth. ⁴⁷¹

Continuing to examine Hamilton 68 in January 2018, Roth told his coworkers there was “no evidence to support the statement that the dashboard is a finger on the pulse of Russian information ops.” ⁴⁷²

In February 2018, Roth wrote that “these accounts are neither strongly Russian, nor strongly bots; they’re just generally right-leaning users.” ⁴⁷³

“Hamilton 68 barely had any Russians,” summarized Taibbi. “In fact, apart from a few RT [Russia Today] accounts, it’s mostly full of ordinary Americans, Canadians, and British.” ⁴⁷⁴

“I’m increasingly of the opinion that this dashboard is actively damaging and promotes polarization and distrust through its shoddy methodology,” said Roth, in a January 2018 email. “Real people need to know they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse. It’s a major problem.” ⁴⁷⁵

The late 2017 and early 2018 concerns of the Twitter staff regarding the veracity of the Hamilton 68 tracking list were not publicly revealed until the Twitter Files report posted in late January 2023. Taibbi wrote that Twitter decided against informing the users that they had been listed on the ASD database due to “concerns about taking on the politically connected Alliance for Securing Democracy.” ⁴⁷⁶

Examples of Tracked Accounts

For his Twitter Files report, Taibbi interviewed some of the people on the Hamilton 68 tracking list. He revealed that some were journalists, conventional political activists, and entertainment figures. ⁴⁷⁷

The list included well-known right-leaning author and political commentator David Horowitz, whose Twitter account had more than 82,000 followers as of January 2023; right-leaning media figure and activist Dennis Michael Lynch, an account with more than 36,000 followers in early 2023; and left-leaning journalist Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, an account with more than 12,000 followers in early 2023. ^{478 479}

Dave Shestokas, a lawyer and sometime political candidate, had an account with more than 92,000 followers in January 2023. “I’ve written a book about the U.S. Constitution. How I made a list like this is incredible to me,” said Shestokas, after told by Taibbi that he was on the Hamilton 68 tracking list. ⁴⁸⁰

“Old Holborn,” a popular satire account, had 78,000 Twitter followers in January 2023. Among them was Nick Pickles, Twitter’s chief of policy when the Hamilton 68 data was first examined by the social media firm’s staff. ⁴⁸¹

The Twitter Files reveal Pickles’ incredulous reaction to finding Old Holborn on the propaganda tracking list. ⁴⁸² “A pretty odd list,” wrote Pickles, in an October 2017 email to Yoel Roth and other Twitter employees. “One of them is a UK guy who is well known as basically a wind-up merchant (oldholborn) and I follow him and wouldn’t say he’s pro-Russian – I can’t even remember him tweeting about Russia.” ⁴⁸³

Pickles was also skeptical of the smaller accounts on the Hamilton 68 list: “The idea that accounts with 5/8/12 followers are somehow propaganda gurus seems odd too.” ⁴⁸⁴

A non-famous Twitter user on the list had lived through the civil war in Lebanon. “I’m shocked,” she replied, when contacted by Taibbi. “Supposedly in a free world, we are being watched at many levels, by what we say online.” ⁴⁸⁵

“I’m listed as a foreign bot?” said another person interviewed by Taibbi. “As a proud taxpaying citizen, charitable family man, and honest son of a US Marine w/a Purple Heart, I’m hurt. I deserve better. We all do!” ⁴⁸⁶

Media Citations

Taibbi estimated the content from Hamilton 68 had become the source for “hundreds if not thousands of mainstream print and TV news stories” during the Trump presidency. ⁴⁸⁷

“If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history,” wrote Taibbi. “Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s ‘research.’ Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source.” ⁴⁸⁸

In one example shown in the Twitter Files, a September 2018 Observer headline read: “Russian Propagandists Seize Kavanaugh Controversy to Sow Division Online.” ⁴⁸⁹

“Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, Kavanaugh’s name was a trending topic among 600 Twitter accounts disseminating pro-Kremlin narratives, according to the Hamilton 68 dashboard,” claimed the report. ⁴⁹⁰

As another example, Taibbi showed a September 2017 report from the myth-busting website Snopes.com. Citing Hamilton 68 data, Snopes claimed online criticism of the Committee to Investigate Russia was being promoted by Russian “social media bots, paid trolls, and ‘useful idiots.’” ^{491 492}

The Committee to Investigate Russia (CIR) was a left-leaning advocacy non-profit founded in 2017 by actor, film producer, and longtime left-wing activist Rob Reiner. It promoted the conspiracy theory that former president Donald Trump or his associates collaborated with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election. CIR’s reports included promotion of media stories linked to the debunked “Steele dossier.” CIR disbanded in March 2019, shortly after release of the special counsel investigation, colloquially known as the “Mueller Report,” which did not find evidence to support the conspiracy theory. ^{493 494 495}

An April 2018 Washington Post story cited Hamilton 68 data to report that “Russian-linked Twitter accounts” were artificially inflating online support for Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham and promotion of the hashtag #IStandWithLaura. Ingraham was then at the center of a controversy for criticizing anti-firearms activist David Hogg and receiving organic Twitter support from right-of-center individuals. ⁴⁹⁶

#ReleaseTheMemo

Also see: Trump-Russia Collusion Claims

On January 18, 2018, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), then under control of Republicans, voted to allow the entire House of Representatives to review the so-called “Nunes Memo.” Written at the behest of then-U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), then the chair of the HPSCI, the classified memo was titled “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” It purported to provide evidence that the FBI had engaged in abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in its investigation of Carter Page during the 2016 presidential election. A former advisor to Donald Trump during the campaign, Page was never formally accused or charged with any wrongdoing. ⁴⁹⁷

Five days after the memo was circulated to HPSCI members, it was denounced by U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), an HPSCI committee member, and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as “a misleading talking points ‘memo’ authored by Republican staff that selectively references and distorts highly classified information.” ⁴⁹⁸

Among the major allegations, the Nunes memo stated the FBI had relied upon the so-called Steele dossier to obtain permission to conduct secret surveillance of Page. Though initially promoted as legitimate by Schiff and others, the dossier was ultimately debunked as a collection of unsubstantiated claims created by a contractor being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. ^{499 500 501}

Almost two years later, in December 2019, numerous Nunes memo allegations were subsequently verified by a report from the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG), which found 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” with the information the Bureau submitted to obtain the FISA warrants. The IG debunked the claims made in the Steele dossier and reported “many basic and fundamental errors” and “extensive compliance failures” committed by the FBI during its investigation of Page. ⁵⁰²

Though initially a classified document when circulated to the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 18, 2018, rumors of the Nunes memo’s general assertions about the Page investigation leaked to the public within hours, and a “#ReleaseTheMemo” hashtag campaign began trending on Twitter. ⁵⁰³

On January 23, Congressional Democrats issued open letters to Twitter in which they alleged Russian government propaganda, rather than organic public support from Americans, was driving the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign. ⁵⁰⁴

“Several Twitter hashtags, including #ReleaseTheMemo, calling for release of these talking points attacking the Mueller investigation were born in the hours after the Committee vote,” wrote Schiff and Feinstein. “According to the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, this effort gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations. By Friday, January 19, 2018, the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was ‘the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts believed to be operated by Kremlin-linked groups.’” ⁵⁰⁵

“If these reports are accurate,” they warned, “we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors directly acting to intervene and influence our democratic process.” ⁵⁰⁶

Later that day, in their separate open letter, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) alleged that the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was “creating a false impression of grassroots support for partisan efforts to disrupt the Russia investigation and shut down the federal government.” ⁵⁰⁷

“We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans,” wrote Whitehouse and Blumenthal. ⁵⁰⁸

Most corporate media reports conformed to the same narrative. Showing several examples from the Washington Post and other sources, Taibbi wrote that the “national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a ‘joke.’” ⁵⁰⁹

During the last two weeks of January 2018 the Washington Post ran at least six news stories where the Hamilton 68 data and #ReleaseTheMemo were both mentioned. ⁵¹⁰

The Twitter Files show the social media firm’s staff found no evidence of Russian influence over the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and had attempted to warn Blumenthal staffers and other Democrats away from Hamilton 68 rumors. ⁵¹¹

Matt Taibbi reported that Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, “couldn’t find any Russian connection to #ReleaseTheMemo – at all.” ⁵¹²

A Twitter report revealed by Taibbi summarized the firm’s investigation of #ReleaseTheMemo. It concluded that “engagement was overwhelmingly organic and driven by strong VIT [very important tweeter] engagement.” Among the supportive VIT’s identified by the Twitter investigation were those of Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr., and then-U.S. Rep Steve King (R-IA). ⁵¹³

The Twitter Files also show that on January 23, before the Blumenthal and Whitehouse open letter was released, a Blumenthal staffer contacted Twitter for information. ⁵¹⁴

“I tried to warn him off this particular storyline because we don’t believe these are bots,” wrote Carlos Monje, then Twitter’s director of policy, in an internal update to other staffers. ⁵¹⁵

Another Twitter employee advised that because there was “little reason to believe it’s a big Russian propaganda movement” that they should warn the Blumenthal staffer that “it could come back to make him look silly.” ⁵¹⁶

“Blumenthal isn’t always looking for real and nuanced solutions,” Monje warned. “He wants to get credit for pushing us further. And he may move on only when the press moves on.” ⁵¹⁷

And as a result, Taibbi concluded that “reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence.” ⁵¹⁸

Manipulation of Covid-19 Content

Twitter Files researchers Lee Fang, Alex Berenson, Matt Taibbi, and David Zweig reported internal, governmental and private sector pressure on Twitter to suppress and alter information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. “The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19,” wrote Zweig. He reported that “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content.” ⁵¹⁹

In “TWITTER FILES #19: The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine: Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of ‘True Stories,’” Matt Taibbi wrote that in 2021 the Virality Project “worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content.” The Virality Project was a continuation of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) used during the 2020 election to suppress social media content. Taibbi reported that the Virality Project used the same ticketing system of the EIP to daily send “millions of items for review” to social media and internet platforms. ⁵²⁰

Through the first eight months of 2021, the Virality Project produced a “Weekly Briefing” that it promoted as an effort to “summarize key narratives of online anti-vaccine misinformation” for social media firms to be aware of. The Virality Project also warned social media firms of potentially actionable content through a series of “Rapid Response” reports. ^{521 522}

A July 2021 rapid response report, titled “Content moderation avoidance strategies,” provided advice on how to spot and take action against social media users who were engaging in, yet trying to conceal, discussions about COVID-19 and vaccines that ran against the content suppression policies used by social media firms. In one advisory, the Virality Project report noted that users may try to evade suppression of vaccine discussions by sharing screenshots of the controversial content, rather than hyperlinks. One of the examples provided was a legitimate Reuters news story from June 2021 about discovery made by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The headline read: “Heart inflammation in young men higher than expected after Pfizer, Moderna vaccines -U.S. CDC.” The Virality Project report asserted that the user had provided a screenshot of the headline and a quote from the story to prevent Facebook from noticing and then suppressing the content. ^{523 526}

Suppression of Natural Immunity Information

The Virality Project (VP) consistently advised social media and corporate media firms that discussions of natural immunity (the post-infection production of resistance to COVID-19 in an unvaccinated person) were a threat to public acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine. The Virality Project’s efforts to suppress natural immunity discussions occurred both before and after medical evidence showed the effectiveness of natural immunity. ^{527 528 529}

A June 2021 medical study produced by the Cleveland Clinic, later published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that natural immunity to the COVID-19 virus rivaled the effectiveness of vaccine-acquired immunity. The conclusion of the abstract stated the following: “Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination, and vaccines can be safely prioritized to those who have not been infected before.” ⁵³⁰

The June 15, 2021, edition of the Virality Project Weekly Briefing warned recipients about the study. ⁵³¹

“More and more often,” wrote the Virality Project authors, “we are seeing ‘natural immunity’ narratives be backed up by legitimate scientific findings that can be easily twisted to sow mistrust in American public health institutions and divert the general public from getting the vaccine.” (Emphasis in original.) ⁵³²

The VP advisory additionally warned that the “study is circulating on right-leaning media. Much of the online sharing centers on previous comments by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) that he would not be vaccinated because he had already been infected with COVID-19” and that Paul had “Tweeted numerous times about the study, amassing over 35K engagements.” (Emphasis in original.) ⁵³³

“For people in the anti-vaccine community, this story vindicates Senator Rand Paul’s controversial comments,” warned the Virality Project. “Senator Paul’s adamant stance on this issue has run counter to various recommendations from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the larger public health community, which for months have recommended that even previously-infected individuals get the vaccine.” (Emphasis in original.) ⁵³⁴

In a May 2021 report advocating expansion of vaccines to children, the Virality Project stated that natural immunity was an “unfounded narrative,” particularly as it applied to healthy children, who were at low risk for serious COVID-19 illness: ⁵³⁵

Unfounded Narrative: The risk of COVID-19 in children is small enough to make a vaccine unnecessary and harmful. Posts in this category claim that because children tend to be less susceptible and have less severe reactions to COVID-19, the perceived risks of vaccination may outweigh its benefits. Some narratives hold that children contracting COVID-19 would gain longer-lasting natural immunity than that which is possible through vaccination, and that this natural immunity would contribute equally to herd immunity. ⁵³⁶

A “rapid response” report from the Virality Project was titled “How Debunked Science Spreads.” It had a release date of August 2021, after the Cleveland Clinic study downplaying vaccine necessity for those with natural immunity. This VP report claimed the following: “Studies and scientific articles have been used to falsely claim that mRNA vaccines will permanently alter the recipient’s DNA, that natural immunity is just as or more protective than vaccine immunity, that vaccines are ineffective, and to exaggerate the severity of COVID-19 vaccine side effects.” (Emphasis added.) ⁵³⁷

Suppression of COVID-19 “Lab Leak” hypothesis on Wikipedia

By February 2023, both the U.S. Department of Energy and the FBI had concluded the COVID-19 virus had most likely infected humans after first escaping from the virology research facility in Wuhan, China. The Virality Project repeatedly advised social media firms that the so-called “lab leak” theory was an unfounded conspiracy theory that was endangering public health. ^{538 539 540}

A June 2021 Virality Project report warned that “far right members of Congress” were demanding a “full investigation into Fauci’s involvement in the unproven Wuhan bioweapon lab leak conspiracy.” ⁵⁴¹

An August 2021 Virality Project report, co-written by Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, recounted the results of a “majoritarian decision process” used by Wikipedia editors to address—and ultimately to suppress discussion of—the lab leak hypothesis. This was explained as part of the Wikipedia model promoted by the Virality Project report as “a way forward for public health communicators”: ⁵⁴²

For example, as the disagreement on the origins of COVID-19 persisted, voluntary editor Roberto Fortich filed a “request for comment” on whether to include the lab leak theory in the Wikipedia article. As is customary in those cases, Wiki voluntary editors were called to present their arguments and vote. 13 out of 19 editors opposed the inclusion of the theory. As a result, a public note was made that the theory will not be mentioned in Wikipedia articles about COVID-19. ⁵⁴³

As of April 2023, the main Wikipedia entry for the COVID-19 pandemic did not discuss the FBI and U.S. Department of Energy opinions regarding the likelihood of a lab leak and mentioned only that the “scientific consensus is that the virus is most likely of a zoonotic origin, from bats or another closely-related mammal.” In defense of this assertion, the Wikipedia entry did not produce a citation more recent than 2021. ⁵⁴⁴

Suppression of discussion of “breakthrough” infections

During February 2022, according to ABC News, 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths occurred among those who had been vaccinated against the virus. The television network also reported in June 2022 that an “analysis of data collected by the CDC found that the share of breakthrough COVID-19 cases has reached its highest point since the vaccines were introduced, with more cases occurring among the vaccinated in March and April 2022, than among the unvaccinated, partially because of the significant number of people who are now vaccinated.” ^{545 546}

The Virality Project repeatedly advised suppression of discussions of so-called “breakthrough” infections, people who tested positive for COVID-19 after receiving an immunization against the disease. ^{547 548 549}

In an April 2021 Weekly Briefing, the Virality Project characterized breakthrough infections as “extremely rare events,” following a CDC report that “5,800 fully-vaccinated people have gotten infected with COVID-19 in the US” and that 74 had died. The briefing criticized “medical freedom Facebook groups and anti-vax activists” for using the report “to suggest the vaccines are ineffective.” ⁵⁵⁰

In a May 2021 Weekly Briefing, the Virality Project reported that the CDC had altered its “methodology for counting COVID-19 cases among vaccinated people” and would only count “breakthrough cases” that required “hospitalization or result in death.” The Virality Project briefing criticized “anti-vaccine activists” for using this new CDC standard to accuse the CDC of “hypocrisy” and trying to “exaggerate vaccine efficacy by deflating case numbers.” ⁵⁵¹

“Breakthrough cases are happening, and they are of serious concern,” conceded the Virality Project in a “Key Takeaway” from the August 3, 2021, Weekly Briefing. The briefing also cited “anti-vaccine activists” for using the term, “breakthrough cases,” to claim that “the vaccine is ineffective and that major public health institutions are deceiving the public about it.” ⁵⁵²

As of April 2023, the August 3, 2021, Weekly Briefing was the last one listed on the Virality Project’s website. ⁵⁵³

Trump Administration

Early in the pandemic, according to Zweig’s report, the Trump administration was concerned about “panic buying.” ⁵⁵⁴

Quoting from Twitter Files documents, Zweig wrote that Twitter and other social media firms cooperated with the Trump administration’s requests to “combat misinformation” regarding “runs on grocery stores.” The documents Zweig reported also showed the Trump White House asking for help combatting conspiracies regarding 5G cell towers. ⁵⁵⁵

In his Twitter Files analysis, Zweig reported that then-President Trump was targeted by senior Twitter staff for his statements regarding the pandemic. According to Zweig, many “Trump tweets led to extensive internal debates.” ⁵⁵⁶

An optimistic post from Trump in October 2020 led to what Zweig characterized as a “surreal exchange” between Twitter deputy counsel Jim Baker, senior legal executive Stacia Cardille, and head of trust and safety Yoel Roth. ⁵⁵⁷

Leaving the hospital after his October 2020 Covid-19 infection, Trump posted praise for the hospital on Twitter, and encouragement for anyone battling the illness. ⁵⁵⁸

“Don’t be afraid of Covid,” said Trump. “Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” ⁵⁵⁹

“Why isn’t this POTUS tweet a violation of our COVID-19 policy (especially the “Don’t be afraid of Covid” statement)?” responded Baker, the former FBI counsel, in a message to Roth and Cardille. ⁵⁶⁰

“In short, this tweet is a broad, optimistic statement,” responded Roth. “It doesn’t incite people to do something harmful, nor does it recommend against taking precautions or following mask directives (or other guidelines).” ⁵⁶¹

“Curious whether you have a different read on it, though,” Roth concluded his note to Baker. ⁵⁶²

In his Twitter Files analysis, Zweig characterized Baker’s reaction as an “example of human bias run amok.” ⁵⁶³

Alex Berenson Removal

According to Zweig, one of the “first meeting requests from the Biden White House” to Twitter was to address “COVID misinformation” and the Biden administration’s desire to have independent journalist Alex Berenson removed from Twitter because of Berenson’s vocal skepticism of the efficacy of COVID vaccines. ⁵⁶⁴

“In the summer of 2021,” wrote Zweig, “Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.” ⁵⁶⁵

“Berenson sued (and then settled with) Twitter,” reported Zweig. “In the legal process Twitter was compelled to release certain internal communications, which showed direct White House pressure on the company to take action on Berenson.” ⁵⁶⁶

In one of the messages reproduced by Zweig, a Twitter staffer reported on the outcome of an April 2021 meeting with the White House, and noted that “they had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off the platform. . .” ⁵⁶⁷

Berenson’s Twitter account was reinstated in August 2022, as an outcome of the settlement of his lawsuit against the social media firm. ⁵⁶⁸

Other Biden Administration Removal Requests

In his report, titled “How Twitter rigged the Covid debate,” David Zweig wrote that the Biden administration “repeatedly attempted to directly influence” the accounts and COVID information presented on Twitter. ⁵⁶⁹

Zweig reproduced a December 2022 note in which Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s head of public policy, summarized the firm’s interactions with the White House. ⁵⁷⁰

“The Biden team was not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more to de-platform several accounts,” Culbertson reported back to her coworkers. “Because of this dissatisfaction, we were asked to join several other calls. They were very angry in nature.” ⁵⁷¹

Twitter responded by suppressing views, according to Zweig, including “many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House.” ⁵⁷²

Zweig reported he found “countless instances of tweets labeled as ‘misleading’ or taken down entirely, sometimes triggering account suspensions, simply because they veered from CDC [Centers for Disease Control] guidance or differed from establishment views.” ⁵⁷³

“Information that challenged that view, such as showing harms of vaccines, or that could be perceived as downplaying the risks of Covid, especially to children, was subject to moderation, and even suppression,” Zweig concluded. “No matter whether such views were correct or adopted abroad.” ⁵⁷⁴

Suppression of Martin Kulldorff

In March 2021, Twitter content moderators placed a “Misleading” label on a post from Martin Kulldorff, at the time an epidemiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and attached a note showing visibility of the post had been restricted: “This Tweet can’t be replied to, shared or liked.” ⁵⁷⁵

Kuldorff was the co-author of “An Overview Of Vaccine Development, Approval, And Regulation, with Implications For COVID-19,” a medical research paper published in November 2020 by the Journal of Health Affairs. ^{576 577}

Another Twitter user had asked Kuldorff whether it as advisable for all young people to be vaccinated. ⁵⁷⁸ “No,” replied Kulldorff, in the subsequently restricted post. “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.” ⁵⁷⁹

“Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries,” observed Zweig. “Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines.” ⁵⁸⁰

Zweig reproduced an internal email wherein a Twitter content moderator announced the plan to suppress the epidemiologist’s health policy opinion. ⁵⁸¹

“Sending a heads up that we will take action on @MartinKulldorff (a professor or Harvard Medical School) for violating our COVID-19 misinformation policy, specifically by sharing false information regarding the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines, which goes against CDC guidelines.” ⁵⁸²

The Kulldorff suppression was one of five such examples Zweig showed in the Twitter Files. In another, he reported that the Twitter account of a Rhode Island physician was permanently suspended because the doctor had committed multiple “misinformation” violations, such as sharing the results from a peer-reviewed research paper examining mRNA vaccines. ⁵⁸³

Bari Weiss also reported that a “trends blacklist” was used against Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University School of Medicine medical doctor and researcher, because he “argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children.” ⁵⁸⁴  

Twitter PsyOps Assistance for Defense Department

In a Twitter Files report, left-leaning journalist Lee Fang revealed that Twitter helped the U.S Department of Defense conduct psychological influence operations (called “psyops”) on the platform. ⁵⁸⁵

“Twitter has claimed for years that they make concerted efforts to detect & thwart [government] backed platform manipulation,” wrote Fang, in December 2022. “But behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active.” ⁵⁸⁶  

Fang also noted: “The conduct with the U.S. military’s covert network stands in stark contrast with how Twitter has boasted about rapidly identifying and taking down covert accounts tied to state-backed influence operations, including Thailand, Russia, Venezuela, and others since 2016.” ⁵⁸⁷

Anti-Propaganda Policy

Fang provided congressional testimony from June 2020 in which Twitter claimed to have a strong policy against government-sponsored propaganda. ⁵⁸⁸

“Combatting attempts to interfere in conversations on Twitter remains a top priority for the company, and we continue to invest heavily in our detection, disruption, and transparency efforts related to state-backed information operations,” said Twitter policy director Nick Pickles to Congress. “Our goal is to remove bad faith actors and to advance public understanding of these critical topics.” ^{589 590}  

“Twitter defines state-backed information operations as coordinated platform manipulation efforts that can be attributed with a high degree of confidence to state-affiliated actors,” Pickles continued. “State-backed information operations are typically associated with misleading, deceptive, and spammy behavior. These behaviors differentiate coordinated manipulative behavior from legitimate speech on behalf of individuals and political parties.” ^{591 592}

PsyOps Assistance

In July 2017, according to Twitter emails revealed by Fang, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the Defense Department’s command headquarters for the Middle East, sent a list of 52 Arab-language Twitter accounts it had created and asked for them to receive “whitelisted” status. The email stated the accounts were “accounts we use to amplify certain messages.” ⁵⁹³

Before requesting the changes, the CENTCOM email author began with this observation: “. . . sure is tough to do web ops when you can’t Tweet!” ⁵⁹⁴

The CENTCOM request was granted by Twitter, according to emails Fang examined. The enhanced status, according to Fang, is how Twitter “essentially provides verification status to the accounts,” makes them “exempt from spam/abuse flags” and “more visible/likely to trend on hashtags.” ⁵⁹⁵  

CENTCOM flagged six of the 52 addresses as “priority accounts” and asked for these to receive Twitter’s blue check mark, at the time the firm’s verification that an account was under the control of the real person or group it is claiming to be. ⁵⁹⁶

According to Fang: “The CENTCOM accounts on the list tweeted frequently about U.S. military priorities in the Middle East, including promoting anti-Iran messages, promotion of the Saudi Arabia-U.S. backed war in Yemen, and ‘accurate’ U.S. drone strikes that claimed to only hit terrorists.” ⁵⁹⁷   

Fang wrote that CENTCOM later changed the bios in many accounts to make them appear to be “seemingly organic profiles,” with names such as “Euphrates Pulse” and manipulated photos to enhance the perception of authenticity. ⁵⁹⁸

“The U.S. propaganda network relentlessly pushed narratives against Russia, China, and other foreign countries,” observed Fang. “They accused Iran of ‘threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,’ and of harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.” ⁵⁹⁹  

Cover-up and Exposure

In August 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory released a report revealing “an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia.” ⁶⁰⁰

Twitter responded to the report by removing the accounts that had been identified and, according to Fang, in doing so was “cast as an unbiased hero” in the media for “evenly applying its policies” and being “proactive in suspending” the Defense Department accounts. ⁶⁰¹

“The reality is much more murky,” concluded Fang. He wrote that, “many emails from throughout 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of DoD’s vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda and did not suspend the accounts.” ⁶⁰²

As one of several examples, Fang reported the contents of a July 2020 email from Twitter’s deputy general counsel Jim Baker. Baker revealed he knew the Defense Department was looking for ways to prevent exposure of the Twitter accounts “linked to each other or to DoD or the USG [U.S. government].” Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI, also used the email to criticize the Defense Department for using “poor tradecraft” in the effort to conceal its involvement. ⁶⁰³

Removal of Trump from Twitter

On January 8, 2021, during the final two weeks of the Trump administration, Twitter blocked and permanently removed the account used by then-President Donald Trump. The account was reinstated in November 2022, following new guidelines put in place after the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. Facebook had blocked Trump’s account on January 7, 2021, the morning after the U.S. Capitol riot. ^{604 605}

The initial removal of Trump’s Twitter account was taken in direct response to then-president’s conduct during and immediately after the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol. A Twitter Files report quotes one of the firm’s executives writing that the suspension was also due to “the narrative that Trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly last 4+ years. . .” ^{606 607}

Previous Policy Regarding World Leaders

A January 2018 policy statement showed Twitter intended to protect “controversial” statements made by political figures: “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.” ⁶⁰⁸

In an October 2019 Twitter issued additional guidance which stated that “the accounts of world leaders are not above our policies entirely.” The statement cited examples of behavior that would lead to “enforcement action for any account on our service,” such as promoting terrorism and “clear and direct threats of violence against an individual.” ⁶⁰⁹

The October 2019 guidance also clarified that threats of violence made within the context of “direct interactions with fellow public figures and/or commentary on political and foreign policy issues would likely not result in enforcement.” The general rule was to “err on the side of leaving the content up if there is a clear public interest in doing so.” ⁶¹⁰

In a Twitter Files report, Bari Weiss provided examples of controversial statements that were not penalized by permanent suspension. ⁶¹¹

In June 2018, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wrote: “#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.” ⁶¹²  

“Twitter neither deleted the tweet nor banned the Ayatollah,” reported Weiss. ⁶¹³

“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” said then-Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in an October 2020 Twitter statement.

According to Weiss, “Twitter deleted his tweet for “glorifying violence,” but he remains on the platform.” ⁶¹⁴  

Similarly, Weiss wrote that “Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria, incited violence against pro-Biafra groups. . . Twitter deleted the tweet but didn’t ban Buhari.” ⁶¹⁵  

Pressure to Remove Trump

According to Michael Shellenberger, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey faced “internal and external pressure” to ban President Trump from the platform “after the events of Jan. 6.” Twitter Files reports from Shellenberger and Bari Weiss described the pressure. ^{616 617}

Matt Taibbi wrote that Trump’s account was temporarily “bounced” (suspended) for 12 hours during the day on January 6. ⁶¹⁸  

Weiss reported that after January 6, 2021, Twitter staff “organized to demand their employer ban Trump.” She provided screenshots of internal discussions among staff in which they expressed their disappointment that the account was still active. “We have to do the right thing here and ban this account,” wrote one employee on January 8. ⁶¹⁹

“In the early afternoon of January 8,” wrote Weiss, “The Washington Post published an open letter signed by over 300 Twitter employees to CEO Jack Dorsey demanding Trump’s ban.”

In addition to the demand for a permanent ban, the letter also blamed Twitter for abetting Trump’s behavior. ⁶²⁰

“Third, we request an independent investigation into Twitter’s role in these events,” wrote the Twitter employees. “Despite our efforts to serve the public conversation, as Trump’s megaphone, we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th. We request an investigation into how our public policy decisions led to the amplification of serious anti-democratic threats. We must learn from our mistakes in order to avoid causing future harm.” ⁶²¹   

As one examples of external pressure, Shellenberger cited an official statement from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on the afternoon of January 6, in which ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said that “social media companies should suspend his accounts ASAP as they would do for anyone else advocating disinformation and promoting violence. It’s time.” ^{622 623}

Similarly, on the afternoon of January 7, former First Lady Michelle Obama issued a statement asking, “Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior—and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms.” ^{624 625}

Internal Resistance to Banning Trump

Twitter Files internal messages show some employees reluctant to ban Trump. Bari Weiss wrote that such voices “appear to have been a distinct minority within the company,” and that “Across Slack channels, many Twitter employees were upset that Trump hadn’t been banned earlier.” ⁶²⁶  

In a one example from a January 7 message, a Twitter employee observed: “Maybe because I am from China I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” ⁶²⁷  

“This might be an unpopular opinion but one off ad hoc decisions like this that don’t appear rooted in policy are imho a slippery slope…,” wrote another Twitter employee of the possibility of banning Trump. “This now appears to be a fiat by an online platform CEO with a global presence that can gatekeep speech for the entire world.” ⁶²⁸  

Lack of Policy Grounds for Removal

Weiss wrote that Twitter’s top content gatekeepers could not find clear violations of Twitter policy to justify removing then-President Trump’s account. ⁶²⁹

The moderators looked specifically at a Twitter statement Trump issued on the morning of January 8 – the day that would end with the removal of his account. ⁶³⁰ “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future,” Trump wrote. “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” ⁶³¹

The Twitter staff discussed whether this statement was inciting violence—a possible violation of the firm’s exceptions to removing world leaders. “I don’t see the incitement of fear,” wrote one employee. Additional comments shown in the thread included “I think we’d have a hard time saying this was incitement,” and “Don’t see the incitement angle here.” ⁶³²

“I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet,” responded Twitter policy official Anika Navaroli to the discussion. ⁶³³

Navaroli presented this finding to the Twitter elections team: “as an fyi, Safety has assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.” ⁶³⁴   

According to Weiss, Navaroli later claimed the following when she testified to a U.S. House committee investigating the January 6 riot: “For months I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that if nothing—if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die.” ⁶³⁵   

Manufacturing Pretext for Removal

“Less than 90 minutes after Twitter employees had determined that Trump’s tweets were not in violation of Twitter policy,” wrote Weiss, “Vijaya Gadde—Twitter’s Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust—asked whether it could, in fact, be ‘coded incitement to further violence.’” ⁶³⁶  

“A few minutes later,” wrote Weiss, “Twitter employees on the ‘scaled enforcement team’ suggested that Trump’s tweet may have violated Twitter’s Glorification of Violence policy—if you interpreted the phrase ‘American Patriots’ to refer to the rioters.” ⁶³⁷  

The scaled enforcement team, according to an internal discussion, decided then-President Trump was comparable to the “leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.” ⁶³⁸  

Later that day Trump’s Twitter account was permanently removed. ⁶³⁹

Aftermath

“Many at Twitter were ecstatic” following the removal of then-President Trump, wrote Weiss. She provided screenshots of internal discussions wherein employees congratulated one another for “extraordinary acts of awesomeness” and “impactful work.” ⁶⁴⁰

“By the next day,” wrote Weiss, the “employees expressed eagerness to tackle ‘medical misinformation’ as soon as possible.” ⁶⁴¹

“Very excited to see us handling more categories of misinformation,” wrote one employee, in a January 11, 2021, internal communication. “For the longest time, Twitter’s stance was that we aren’t the arbiter of truth, which I respected but never gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.” ⁶⁴²   

Weiss also wrote that the heads of government in Germany, France, Mexico, and other nations reacted negatively to or condemned the decision to remove Trump from the platform. ⁶⁴³

Other Controversial Incidents

Using several screenshots of account management tools, Bari Weiss reported that a “search blacklist” was applied to right-of-center talk show host Dan Bongino, and a “do not amplify” tag was used on right-leaning activist Charlie Kirk. ⁶⁴⁴

Twitter’s internal policies after 2016, along with the influence of the FBI and other government agencies over the platform, led to other notable and controversial incidents of blacklists and content restrictions.

Bias Favoring Joe Biden in 2020

Matt Taibbi provided examples of Twitter staff in 2020 using visibility filtering tools against supporters of then-President Donald Trump’s reelection raising concerns about election irregularities. Conversely, Taibbi reported finding “multiple instances” where tweets warning that Trump “may try to steal the election,” were discovered but “approved by senior executives.” ⁶⁴⁵

As an example, Taibbi cited a pre-election Twitter post wherein former President Trump asserted there would be “Big problems” with mail-in ballots. Twitter shut down comments on the post, denied users the ability to share it with others, and bracketed it with warnings that the content “might be misleading.” ⁶⁴⁶

Showing Slack messages between Yoel Roth and his team, Taibbi reported that they “didn’t appear to have a particular violation, but still worked fast to make sure Trump’s tweet couldn’t be “replied to, shared, or liked.”” ⁶⁴⁷  

Taibbi reported that two weeks later a different standard was used on a Twitter post from Eric Holder, former U.S. Attorney General under President Barack Obama. In this example, Holder claimed that voting by mail-in ballots had become too risky due to a “deliberately crippled Postal Service” and urged “everyone to now vote in person; early vote or use drop boxes.” ⁶⁴⁸

Twitter’s content moderators initially applied a warning label to the post because it questioned the security of mail-in balloting. But the internal Twitter discussion showed the label didn’t stay there. ⁶⁴⁹   

“Hey folks – can we reverse the label on this tweet,” wrote Yoel Roth, referencing the Holder comment. “Everything in it is factually accurate.” The Twitter Files show that the warning label was removed ten minutes later. ⁶⁵⁰  

Screenshots of Twitter Slack discussions showed at least two other incidents regarding Twitter users claimed Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court would steal the election. In both cases a lower-level Twitter enforcement staffer was inclined to attach a warning label or other visibility filtering. But in each case this instinct was overruled by senior officials. ⁶⁵¹

Roth responds directly in one example: “Not seeing a violation here?” ⁶⁵²

Mike Huckabee Joke

In a late October 2020 pre-election post on Twitter, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) joked that he had filled out a “stack of mail-in ballots and then voted the ballots of my deceased parents and grandparents.” ⁶⁵³   

Twitter’s top content enforcement team reacted with an internal debate regarding whether Huckabee had made a “misleading claim” about the election—a violation of Twitter policy. Analyzing the internal discussion, Matt Taibbi concluded that it “reads like a parody” as the “humor averse group” debated what to do. ⁶⁵⁴  

“Agree it’s a joke … but he’s also literally admitting in a tweet to a crime,” argued Twitter’s Yoel Roth. ⁶⁵⁵

“A quick glance indicates that people aren’t confused, but I have concerns,” replies another member of the enforcement team. “Under the policy we don’t make exceptions for jokes or satire. So while I doubt that Huck was really this stupid and is joking, I’m inclined to say that it should come down.” ⁶⁵⁶

The enforcement group concluded it would not sanction or remove the post. ⁶⁵⁷]

Conduct Towards Actor James Woods

On October 24, 2020, according to data revealed in the Twitter Files, the Twitter content enforcement teams received a request from the Democratic National Committee regarding the account used by actor James Woods. Woods holds right-of-center political views and often expresses them on Twitter. ⁶⁵⁸

“Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party,” wrote Matt Taibbi, above a screenshot of the email regarding Woods.

The Twitter Files reporters, according to Taibbi, had started to joke among themselves about the “ubiquitous presence” of Woods’s name “in argued-over Twitter data sets” they were reviewing for their reports. ^{659 660}

Two days after the October 24, 2020, DNC email regarding Woods, Twitter placed warning labels on a post from former President Donald Trump, in which Trump stated there may be “Big problems” with mail-in ballots. Woods responded by taking a screenshot of the Trump post, complete with the warnings, and making a new post of his own. ⁶⁶¹

“Twitter is suppressing this Tweet by the President,” wrote Woods. “Here’s a screen grab.” ⁶⁶²  

According to internal discussions reported by Taibbi, the Twitter enforcement staff “despaired of a reason for action” against Woods. ⁶⁶³  

One staffer suggested “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.” Another asked if it would be better to hold off and then “hit him hard on future vio [violation] with firmer basis.” ⁶⁶⁴

Libs of TikTok Suspensions

“Libs of TikTok,” a right-leaning Twitter account with more than 1.4 million followers as of late 2022 was suspended six times during 2022, according to Twitter Files reports from Bari Weiss. Chaya Raichik, who started the account in November 2020, used it to repost controversial public video content created by left-wing activists. Raichik told Weiss that some of the suspensions were for as long as a week. ⁶⁶⁵

Weiss provided a screenshot of the Libs of TikTok account, as viewed internally at Twitter. It showed the account had a “Trends Blacklist” label attached to it. A warning notification across the top read: “DO NOT TAKE ACTION ON USER WITHOUT CONSULTING WITH SIP-PES.” ⁶⁶⁶ Twitter’s Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support (SIP-PES) group was the firm’s highest level of content policing. ⁶⁶⁷

“Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against ‘hateful conduct,’” wrote Weiss. ⁶⁶⁸

But Weiss revealed an October 2022 SIP-PES group memo that said Libs of TikTok had “not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy.” Instead, the memo stated the account was repeatedly shut down because of what a Twitter staffer alleged was a “continued pattern of indirectly violating Twitter’s Hateful Conduct Policy by tweeting content that either leads to or intends to incite harassment against individuals and institutions that support LGBTQA communities.” ⁶⁶⁹  

According to Weiss, SIP-PES “justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of ‘hospitals and medical providers’ by insinuating ‘that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.’” ⁶⁷⁰

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485.  “THREAD: Twitter Files #15. MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD.” Twitter. Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi). Twitter thread from January 27, 2023, beginning at 12:49pm timestamp. Accessed January 27, 2023. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105
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