Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before congress today on the topic of the Twitter Files. Ed has a post coming up later about some of the drama that happened during the hearing as Democrats went on the attack. I wanted to focus on the purpose of Taibbi’s testimony as well as the latest installment of the Twitter files which was posted on Twitter earlier this morning. On his Substack site, Taibbi posted the text of his opening remarks. After introducing himself and how he got involved in this project, he spelled out the big picture.
The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere.
What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role…
We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation “requests” from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.”
In keeping with the focus on the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Taibbi posted a new installment of the Twitter files.
3. But Twitter was more like a partner to government.
With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police: pic.twitter.com/DgI954lge7
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
5. Many were obvious “misinformation,” like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election.
But other official “disinfo” reports had shakier reasoning. The highlighted Twitter analysis here disagrees with the FBI about accounts deemed a “proxy of Russian actors”: pic.twitter.com/9AZ7jZFfWi
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
7. In some cases, state reports didn’t even assert misinformation. Here, a list of YouTube videos is flagged for “anti-Ukraine narratives”: pic.twitter.com/dAWYp8Ht5j
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
Twitter was aware that many of these “experts” weren’t very expert.
9. Asked if Twitter’s marketing department could say the company detects “misinfo” with help of “outside experts,” a Twitter executive replied: pic.twitter.com/oYjKUqE96I
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020.
The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key: pic.twitter.com/7lLlL2tcjN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
13. NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team – or Signal group, as it were: pic.twitter.com/AIQsdavacQ
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner. pic.twitter.com/lV8coy43Hn
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
Here’s what they came up with:
17. Note Aspen recommended the power to mandate data disclosure be given to the FTC, which this committee just caught in a clear abuse of office, demanding information from Twitter about communications with (and identities of) #TwitterFiles reporters. https://t.co/IfbfYmj0ev pic.twitter.com/M9vO024AQI
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
19. The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel. pic.twitter.com/6rS6L7Lxds
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
21.While Twitter sometimes pushed back on technical analyses from NGOs about who is and isn’t a “bot,” on subject matter questions like vaccines or elections they instantly defer to sites like Politifact, funded by the same names that fund the NGOs: Koch, Newmark, Knight. pic.twitter.com/8zaTndVOJ3
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
23. Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
25. Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded Newsguard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective “risk” or “reliability” scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue. Do we want government in this role? pic.twitter.com/s9tobM9rf8
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
27. After public uproar “paused” the Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” of the DHS in early 2020, Stanford created the EIP to “fill the gaps” legally, as director Alex Stamos explains here (h/t Foundation for Freedom Online). https://t.co/G7xLxecbMk
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
29. According to the EIP’s own data, it succeeded in getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the runup to the 2020 vote. pic.twitter.com/kuA7crjD80
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
31. After the 2020 election, when EIP was renamed the Virality Project, the Stanford lab was on-boarded to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system, absorbing this government proxy into Twitter infrastructure – with a capability of taking in an incredible 50 million tweets a day. pic.twitter.com/iPxtRT0QSR
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
33. This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
Sounds a lot like the fact checks at Politifact.
35. DiResta has become the public face of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, a name promoted everywhere as an unquestioned authority on truth, fact, and Internet hygiene, even though her former firm, New Knowledge, has been embroiled in two major disinformation scandals. pic.twitter.com/nFg5JS2vkH
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
37. DiResta’s New Knowledge helped design the Hamilton 68 project exposed in the #TwitterFiles.
Although it claimed to track “Russian influence,” Hamilton really followed Americans like “Ultra Maga Dog Mom,” “Right2Liberty,” even a British rugby player named Rod Bishop: pic.twitter.com/yXoC3YTDGM
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
My post about the Hamilton 68 Twitter Files installment is here.
39. As a result of Hamilton’s efforts, all sorts of people were falsely tied in press stories to “Russian bots”: former House Intel chief Devin Nunes, #WalkAway founder @BrandonStraka, supporters of the #FireMcMaster hashtag, even people who used the term “deep state”: pic.twitter.com/YJe5TV4emq
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
This story about “Project Birmingham” is incredible.
42. Though at least one reporter for a major American paper was at a meeting in September, 2018 when New Knowledge planned the bizarre bot-and-smear campaign, the story didn’t break until December, two days after DiResta gave a report on Russian interference to the Senate.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
44. Twitter told this to reporters who asked about the story contemporaneously. Moreover, after the story broke, Twitter’s Roth wrote:
“There have been other instances in which domestic actors created fake accounts… some are fairly prominent in progressive circles.” pic.twitter.com/qMnjpKVLZl
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
46. Twitter stayed silent out of political caution. DiResta, who ludicrously claimed she thought Project Birmingham was just an experiment to “investigate to what extent they could grow audiences… using sensational news,” hinted at a broader reason. pic.twitter.com/FFcFpMK0Nd
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
48. The incident underscored the extreme danger of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Without real oversight mechanisms, there is nothing to prevent these super-empowered information vanguards from bending the truth for their own ends.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023
Democrats were clearly very worked up during the hearing today, doing their best to go on the attack and undermine these reports. As I mentioned, Ed will have more on that shortly. But I know one of the arguments that came up was whether the government was “directing” Twitter to delete accounts or just “flagging” accounts for review. There is a difference but it’s an increasingly slight one once this partnership develops its own working momentum.
Once an industry of misinformation control has been set up in the form of government funded entities and regular working groups with intelligence agencies, it really would be easy for whoever is funding/running things to subtly use these connections for their own purposes. No doubt Democrats will start to care about this the moment progressive speech appears to be targeted as disinformation. But for the moment they are claiming there’s nothing to see here.
