I for one am excited to start the year with a new round of Twitter files! Two new rounds were released on Tuesday by journalist Matt Taibbi and they are just as insidious as the rest.
So what do they say? One round of documents show how the U.S. Government worked with Twitter to promote Covid concerns as Russian/Chinese/Iranian disinformation. The government has multiple agencies prodding into Twitter and Facebook but the main agency remains the FBI. In a disturbing email, FBI agent Elvis Chan requested that the FBI be the “belly button of the USG.”
Twitter was happy to latch on to this belly button in 2020, taking requests to ban accounts that asked critical questions about Covid origins. At one point the government requested that Twitter suspend over 250,000 accounts including Canadian officials and a CNN reporter.
The government continued these requests after the war in Ukraine began in order to control the narrative about U.S. corruption in Ukraine. More on this is clearly warranted and hopefully forthcoming!
How did Twitter get to this place of working so hard for the government? That was revealed in this set of documents. They show that Twitter and Facebook both were blamed for the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and Democratic politicians put pressure on Twitter to prove that the election was influenced by coordinated Russian actors. Twitter did not find that to be true so politicians turned up the heat and the mainstream media did the same. After this pressure, Twitter acknowledged internally, things would never be the same.
