Third 'Twitter Files' Trove Goes Live, Reveals Meetings With FBI & DHS on Trump Suppression
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A group of journalists were given a trove of data by new Twitter owner, tech-billionaire Elon Musk, now known as "The Twitter Files." A third batch was released on Friday, and two additional releases are expected to come this weekend.
Journalist Matt Taibbi released another batch of “The Twitter Files” on Friday, calling the latest installment “Part One” of “The Removal of Donald Trump.” He also promised journalists Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss would release parts two and three on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.
The Friday release includes internal Slack communications between high-level Twitter executives, including the former Trust and Safety Head Yoel Roth, former Trust and Policy Chief Vijaya Gadde, Deputy General Counsel and former FBI lawyer Jim Baker, and former Twitter Election & Crisis Response Lead Patrick Conlon, who previously worked in intelligence for the US Department of Defense.
The release shows Twitter executives working closely with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which oversees all US intelligence departments. The chat shows Twitter executives often made decisions arbitrarily, and that hey even planned to retaliate against accounts they couldn’t find violations for with stricter enforcement in the future.
Taibbi points to two groups that were in charge of content moderation at Twitter, the Safety Operations team that used a more “rule based” approach to address issues like scams and threats, and a group of policy executives that Taibbi describes as a “high-speed Supreme Court of moderation” that they made content decisions “on the fly, often in minutes and based on guesses, gut calls, even Google searches, even in cases involving the President.”
Chat logs show that top policy executives had weekly meetings with the FBI, DHS, and DNI in the weeks before the election, and spoke to them about the suppression of the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop.
20. This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI): pic.twitter.com/s5IiUjQqIY
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
The post also shows the chaos that erupted in the Twitter offices in the face of the Hunter Biden laptop story:
“We blocked the NYP story, then we unblocked it (but said the opposite), then said we unblocked. And now we’re in a messy situation where our policy is in shambles, comms is angry, reporters think we’re idiots, and we’re refactoring an exceedingly complex policy 18 days out from the election, in short, FML.”
Roth also talked about having to miss a meeting with the FBI and DHS so he could have a call with Apple to prevent Twitter from being removed from the App Store. The released chat logs did not provide clarity into what that potential removal was for or how close it came to happening.
23. Some of Roth’s later Slacks indicate his weekly confabs with federal law enforcement involved separate meetings. Here, he ghosts the FBI and DHS, respectively, to go first to an “Aspen Institute thing,” then take a call with Apple. pic.twitter.com/i771hD8aCD
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 9, 2022
Roth also joked about having to hide his meetings with intelligence agencies on his calendar, noting he was running out of generic names for the meetings.
“Very Boring Meeting That is Definitely Not About Trump ;)” he joked, adding another quip a few messages later: “DEFINITELY NOT meeting with the FBI I SWEAR.”
Another message mentions the FBI was reporting tweets from conservatives to Twitter, including one from a former Indiana Councilor and Republican who claimed mail-in ballots were being rejected for errors. Twitter executives ultimately decided that tweet did not violate the rules but it shows the FBI’s involvement in suppressing speech it deemed harmful on Twitter.
The Twitter executives also considered taking action on a joke from former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who said he was considering sending a mail-in ballot for his deceased grandparents.
Despite every executive knowing the tweet was a joke, they debated removing it before deciding it was an “edge case,” and that the joke didn’t cause any “confusion.”
Taibbi says arbitrary decision-making will be important in later decisions.
The executives also put restrictions on a Trump tweet, making it so it could not be replied to, shared, or liked, even though it did not violate any specific rules. Conservative actor James Wood would then screenshot and share the post, angering Twitter executives.
They could not find a specific rule to apply to Woods, so they instead planned for retaliation later.
“I’d suggest we action him for something worth the fiasco rather than this screenshot, since we don’t have a firm policy basis for action on his account,” a Twitter employee with a redacted name suggests.
Another redacted employee replies: “Yep. Are you fine letting this one lie [redacted] can hit him hard on future [violations] with firmer basis”
38. After Woods angrily quote-tweeted about Trump’s warning label, Twitter staff – in a preview of what ended up happening after J6 – despaired of a reason for action, but resolved to “hit him hard on future vio.” pic.twitter.com/dusFylxAXS
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 10, 2022
Another tweet by Georgia Republican congresswoman Jody Hice was also slammed with a label. The tweet stated “Say NO to Big Tech censorship!” and “Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person voting. That shouldn’t be controversial. It’s just common sense.”
Though Twitter staff agreed the comment about mail-in ballots was “more of a legitimate statement,” it still got a warning label applied to it. Roth indicated he wanted to go further but worried about a “wah wah censorship” backlash.
Meanwhile, posts by Biden and other Democrats claiming Trump and Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett would try to steal the election were brought up in the Slack channel and routinely approved by Twitter executives.
One message by US Attorney General Eric Holder stated the post office was “deliberately crippled” by the Trump administration and got hit with a generic warning label, but it was quickly removed.
Eventually, Twitter would create a new “deamplification” tool called “L3” that would automatically suppress tweets that had a warning label on them. Twitter executives immediately wanted to use it on Trump but had to wait a day for the system to come online.
Taibbi says chat logs show Twitter was working to suppress Trump long before January 6.
Twitter also used automated processes that it calls “bots” to watch both Trump and conservative news site Breitbart. The bots looked for certain words or phrases coming from certain accounts or locations and would then proceed to automatically take action. At one unspecified time, Roth looked at the Trump account and found what Taibbi described as “a slew” of duplicate bot applications for Trump’s account.
6 December 2022, 03:23 GMT
Taibbi noted that even as late as January 6, Twitter executives were still trying to apply rules when suppressing accounts, albeit with an “ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between humans,” and that they had become “infected with groupthink, coming to believe – sincerely – that it was Twitter’s responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often and with whom.”
But Taibbi hints that was no longer the case starting on January 7: “By the next day, [Twitter execs] will contemplate a major change in approach. Watch this weekend for the play-by-play of how all that went down. … By January 8th, which will describe Sunday, Twitter will be receiving plaudits from ‘our partners’ in Washington, and the sitting US president will no longer be heard on the platform.”
Taibbi also noted that while they were told that the Trump administration, and Republicans in general, also made moderation requests to Twitter, he says they have so far been unable to find them, despite looking. He also said they found tidbits on COVID-19 and foreign policy, but those reveals will have to wait while they comb through the “enormous” data sets they were given.
