Bans, Bucks & Bureaucracy: Twitter Files Co-Author Taibbi on Big Tech's Collusion With Feds
15:13 GMT, 7 February 2023
Journalist, author, podcaster, and Twitter Files co-author Matt Taibbi has sat down with Sputnik to discuss the bombshell Twitter Files; Big Tech's collaboration with the FBI, DHS, White House, and CIA, sophisticated censorship tools, the utility of Hamilton 68, and the mainstream press' longstanding obsession with Russiagate myths.
SputnikHaving purchased Twitter, Elon Musk provided access to an invaluable trove of the company's internal files to Matt Taibbi and a number of other stellar investigative journalists to get to the bottom of Big Tech's censorship practices and cooperation with its strange bedfellows in the federal government. The extent of the exposure prompted Musk to admit that he had acquired nothing short of a "crime scene."
"I think what we've found almost from the beginning was that there was a higher level of cooperation between these companies and government agencies than we had maybe even guessed at the beginning," journalist, author, and podcaster Matt Taibbi told Sputnik. "Within a couple of weeks of doing this, we found that there was an organized bureaucracy that they'd settled on by roughly 2019 or 2020, by which companies like Twitter - and there were a number of them, including Facebook*, Google, and even smaller companies like Pinterest and Wikimedia -
they were regularly meeting with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and they were also building a system through which mostly those two agencies were essentially funneling content moderation requests to these companies."
Taibbi highlighted that there were enormous quantities of requests on a regular basis from federal agencies to companies like Twitter. Silicon Valley giants very often acted on them, according to him.
24 December 2022, 12:41 GMT
Hunter's Laptop & FBI's 'Hack-and-Leak' Mythmaking
One glaring example was how the FBI had prepared a landing for Hunter Biden's story prior to
the New York Post's "laptop from hell" exposé, according to Taibbi. Throughout 2020, the FBI warned Twitter's then-Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth about the forthcoming Russian "hack and leak" operation "involving Hunter Biden" prior to the 2020 election. The bureau particularly referred to APT28, claiming that it was a group of Russian hackers linked to Moscow's intelligence services.
On October 13, 2020, a day before the NY Post planned to release its bombshell, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Roth through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter. On October 14, 2020, the bombshell article was published, but was very soon banned and suppressed by Silicon Valley giants.
"We hadn't really had something like this where Internet platforms had jumped in and withheld or stopped publication or blocked people from seeing a news story from a real news organization, a real exposé," Taibbi said. "This is sort of a landmark moment in the history of digital censorship. So they were taking a big step. They knew it. But as you say, the skids for this were sort of greased by these endless meetings that they had had before, where they were warned about the possibility of a coming 'hack and leak' operation."
Nonetheless, it was not a legitimate reason to ban the story, according to the journalist: "Even if the source is dubious, it's legal to publish stolen material in America," he noted. "A lot of very valuable journalism has come out that way."
What's more, the FBI knew that it wasn't a "hack-and-leak," he stressed. As American author Michael Shellenberger noted in the seventh batch of the Twitter Files, by then the bureau already had Hunter's laptop. At that time,
ex-FBI lawyer-turned-Twitter counsel James Baker played a prominent role in this by withholding the "laptop from hell story" despite having zero evidence it was "hacked," according to Taibbi.
2 February 2023, 15:53 GMT
Massive Censorship With Zero Justification
Apart from suppressing legit investigative stories, Twitter and other Big Tech companies resorted to "flagging," "shadow-banning" – which they called visibility filtering – and barring American conservatives altogether, including then-incumbent US President Donald Trump.
"One of the things we found is that government requests for content moderation were coming in all over the company," Taibbi said. "They came in informally, they came in formally, they would sometimes be done verbally, sometimes they would be done via email, sometimes it would be done through the system they had called Teleporter (...). There was also a regular Signal call that was held between major companies. And that was interesting because I'm not sure that it's legal."
According to the investigative journalist, Twitter had turned into some sort FBI "subcontractor": the bureau once even paid Twitter $3.4 million for a "processing request."
In addition to requests that at least cited some reason for flagging or banning netizens, Taibbi and his colleagues unearthed a peculiar cache of requests that had been passed directly to Twitter's senior executives from the FBI and other federal agencies.
"There were just Excel spreadsheets with thousands of account names on them," Taibbi observed. "Sometimes they would come from the FBI, sometimes they came from other agencies. Sometimes these accounts were written in ways that I wasn't led to understand or in the format of the CIA. But they often didn't even have a reason. They would just say, 'we assess these are foreign threat actors' and it's unspoken that they would want these accounts action. Then when I look them up, I find that most of them are gone. I think they're doing this on a very large scale, they were doing it on a large scale, and it became almost like a factory, mechanized operation by the end. And I doubt that that is proper."
Furthermore, there was clear pressure from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in late 2017 that twisted Big Tech's arm into carrying out more extended content moderation by threatening them with new regulations, taxes, and other things, according to Taibbi. "There was always this unspoken Sword of Damocles that was hanging over the company if they didn't go along," he noted.
25 January 2023, 18:09 GMT
Hamilton 68 & Co: Disinformation Crusaders
Other vehicles for suppressing free speech were various entities combating "disinformation," such as Hamilton 68, a group that was housed at the German Marshall Fund that had taken it upon itself to determine whose Twitter profiles should be available to the public or more easily available to the public, and whose shouldn't.
Hamilton 68, which is now defunct, included former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, former Estonian President Toomas Ilves, neocon talking head Bill Kristol, former acting CIA Director Mike Morrell, and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta.
At the core of their strategy was watching and nailing conservative and "insidious Russian linked" accounts. However, many of the picked profiles had nothing to do either with conservatism or Russia.
"What they were doing, all they did is take really, really simple, primitive trend-making technology," explained Taibbi. "And they took 644 accounts, basically dumped them in a box and just watched to see what they followed or what trended or what the most popular thing they were collectively talking about. Wow. Then they would report in that neat little graph that you've probably seen. Right. Like here's what these, you know, insidious Russian-linked accounts are talking about today. And you know, the top answer on any given day might be something like a Trump speech or Tucker Carlson or even the Parkland shooting. And then what happened was that the news media began picking up on this and they began cranking out these news stories. They kind of pioneered a new form of news story, which was 'Russian bots like X, therefore X is bad.' And the problem was the methodology was totally wrong."
12 January 2023, 18:35 GMT
Russiagate & Russian Bugaboo
Years after Special Counsel Robert Mueller found that the Russiagate story about the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with the Kremlin was a big nothingburger, the US mainstream media is continuing to stick to the tale, according to Taibbi.
He particularly cited a 26,000-word piece that was published in the Columbia Journalism Review last week by prize-winning author Jeff Gerth, who debunked the US press' hypocrisy in covering the Russiagate story. However, Gerth's bombshell was almost completely ignored by the American corporate media.
"Jeff Gerth is, you know, he's as mainstream as they come," the journalist said. "And the Columbia Journalism Review is as mainstream as they come. And they published a book-length compilation of major, major media errors. And it has not penetrated. It really hasn't even warranted a 30-second piece on CNN. There's a new omerta in the media business where nobody is breaking ranks. And it's unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it."
At the same time, there is yet another troubling trend which is seeing a completely false story being pushed with nearly zero consequences for its authors, according to Taibbi.
"I grew up in the media when if you published a fake story and put your name on it, even if it were genuinely duped, it was potentially career-ending," he said. "And so every reporter works under this fear all the time that their sources might be trying to, you know, get something passed them. And now not only does that not happen, but when there's open exposure of some kind of media fraud, the whole business just closes ranks and just keeps peddling like, you know, sometimes ducks swim into each other and they say, 'don't fight, but keep swimming.'"
Meanwhile, Russia has become Washington's new straw man, with the US mainstream media fanning irrational fear related to the country, especially given that there is no clear understanding of the Russian government, culture, and geopolitical goals in the US mediasphere.
"I think Russia has just become the new boogeyman to replace al Qaeda**," Taibbi said. "The only difference is that I think this threat is even more invented and exaggerated even than the Islamic terrorist threat was."
*Facebook is banned in Russia over extremist activities.
**Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization banned in Russia and many other countries.