re: The Twitter Files: TRUMP edition and Part 4 (Part 5 tonight)

Update on Twitter files..

Later today, an annotated version of last night’s “Twitter Files” thread on the removal of Donald Trump, along with new commentary on what’s been published so far, will appear here on TK. After a crazy week, during which I’ve been in the unnatural position of feeling a need to keep quiet, I can get back to writing as usual on this site.

More importantly, I can now explain some things to TK subscribers, not only about the events of the last week, but about where the Twitter project stands and where it may be going. But first, a few words about what’s happened to date:

LINK

direct LINK. Thanks. Reading now.

James Baker going into Twitter to cleanup should be a MASSIVE NEWS STORY!!!

What’s happened at Twitter is currently happening at every big tech social media platform and at all traditional media platforms.

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James Baker going into Twitter to cleanup should be a MASSIVE NEWS STORY!!!

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Its only a story if someone reports it. Ignore it and the normies are none the wiser.

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like vio. Tf is vio in this context?

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Violation

Here is part of a subsequent email from Matt:

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I’ve just published the “Twitter Files, Part 3” thread from Friday night here on TK. Because it exceeds size limits, I couldn’t email it to subscribers, but the document does live on the site now. Click here to access the material.

Remember that the next tranche of “Twitter Files” material is coming out soon at @ShellenbergerMD, and another one tomorrow is dropping @BariWeiss. Please check out their contributions.

In the meantime, I wanted to draw up a quick summary of the main revelations in these documents. I keep seeing colleagues talking about how it’s a “nothingburger” or “just shows a bunch of normal people doing the best they can,” which I guess is an opinion one could have. I obviously disagree. There’s a lot in this tranche, but the key takeaways, as I see them.

FBI/DHS/DNI coordination. We entered this project conscious of reports that federal law enforcement agencies might be in contact with platforms like Twitter about content moderation. After not seeing it in the first batch, the Slack entries in “Part 3” contain multiple, clear displays of cooperation between Twitter and federal law enforcement and/or intelligence, including:

a) Senior executives like Trust and Security chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but on at least one occasion liaised with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). This was not known previously.

b) Twitter executives didn’t just meet with agencies like the FBI, and didn’t just get general guidance about trends or warnings. We now have concrete examples of the FBI sending over reports about individual tweets, after which Twitter staff apply warning labels and other actions. This is direct evidence that federal law enforcement is in the business of identifying speech for regulation. How anyone can see that as a non-story is difficult for me to understand.

c) Continuing the theme of learning more about how Twitter works with its “trusted partners” in federal law enforcement, one of the most interesting exchanges was one of the least-noticed. In this Slack, Roth asks Twitter employees if they have a “debunk moment” about “the SCYTL/Smartmantic” vote counting conspiracies. He then says contacts at the DHS told him that these tales were an amalgam of “about 47 conspiracy theories.” He regrets DHS did not make this comment publicly.

This exchange both speaks in Twitter’s favor and serves as further proof of government meddling. The exchange seems to suggest Roth needs something he can hang his hat on to formally bounce a tweet, like a ruling from Politifact or an NPR article (the level of evidence they use to censor tweets reminds me of magazine fact-checking, and not in a good way). We seem to have seen multiple methods: either an agency like the FBI sends over evidence against this or that tweet, or it simply makes an ask informally, after which someone like Roth goes looking for a real-world excuse to ban. Again, it speaks in Twitter’s favor that they even had that much of a process, but it’s clear again that federal agencies are intensely involved with regulating speech at the most micro level.

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The Twitter Files: Part 4 - thread unroller

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Michael Shellenberger
@ShellenbergerMD

The *only* serious concern we found expressed within Twitter over the implications for free speech and democracy of banning Trump came from a junior person in the organization. It was tucked away in a lower-level Slack channel known as “site-integrity-auto."

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