The Twitter Files, which usually make the top of the news when a new edition is released, was pushed to the bottom of the news today as the drama surrounding potential House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.battle )’s to secure votes dominated headlines.
Nonetheless, the most recent edition, released on Tuesday afternoon by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, maybe the most scandalous yet.
In previous editions, Taibbi and other journalists highlighted Twitter’s cozy relationship with government actors such as the FBI and the Pentagon.
Taibbi shows how the relationship began in the most recent batch.
Following the Russiagate scandal, prominent Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees began pressuring social media behemoths like Facebook and Twitter to take Russian influence on their platforms more seriously.
When Democrats investigated the matter and discovered that Russian influence on their platforms was minimal, they were dissatisfied and launched a public pressure campaign with the help of media allies to get the platforms to take the issue more seriously.
The end result was a complete surrender by Twitter and Facebook, which began censoring on behalf of the intelligence community.
Teslarati reported:
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files
Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button” pic.twitter.com/nfOGQGlvUM— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
“Screenshots of emails from Twitter’s former Vice President, Global Public Policy & Philanthropy, Colin Crowell, and Twitter’s former legal head, Vijaya Gadde, confirm that Twitter had been in contact with Facebook and agreed that the best public relations strategy was to say nothing on record and to issue a statement bringing them “closer to Facebook, their vulnerabilities on this issue, and the follow-up stories on Russia.”
Following that, Twitter suspended 22 possible Russian accounts and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts out of a larger set of 2,700 suspects that were manually examined. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wasn’t too happy with Twitter. He held a press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.”
“Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at the top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.”