Shifty Schiff always seems to be pencil-neck deep in every dirty-tricks scandal to weaponize government against Republicans. The Twitter Censorship scandal was no different.
Schiff was one of the elected Democrats who used the power of his position to bully Big Tech into censoring certain online voices.
The fact that Facebook was throwing users off their own platform en masse at the same time that Twitter was being pressured to produce evidence of evil Russian bot farms also suggests elected Democrats played a role in the infamous Facebook Purge that shut down so many right-of-center voices while kneecapping the reach of those of us who survived.
But that’s for Republican House oversight to sort out. Taibbi’s work focused on Twitter documents.
The latest Twitter Files information drop shows Democrat pressure from at least September of 2017 coming from Hillary Clinton, Adam Schiff, Mark Warner, (among others) for Twitter to dig up evidence of Russian collusion in past elections, and punish those bad actors. It wasn’t long before a combination of threats of unfriendly legislation, leaks, and salacious political headlines from friendly media sources were forcing Twitter to fall in line and ‘find’ Russian bad actors when potential bad actors had already been screened, vetted, and given the green light.
As you go through these tweets, pay particular attention to the dates, especially how quickly they went from trying to stay out of the spotlight while Facebook dealt with the mass deletion of accounts, to Hillary and Schiff alleging Russian use of Twitter, to Twitter ruling out any significant role of bad actors, to forming an anti-Russia task force, to hostile news stories by Politico, Buzzfeed, and WaPo, to magically finding all sorts of new accounts to take action against.
One tweet even gives away the store showing Twitter exec understood the magic formula being leveraged against them to bully them into compliance:
Here’s the thread:
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files
How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
3.“We did not see a big correlation.”
“No larger patterns.”
“FB may take action on hundreds of accounts, and we may take action on ~25.” pic.twitter.com/KA1nuXEtQS— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
5.“Twitter is not the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling right now – the spotlight is on FB,” wrote Public Policy VP Colin Crowell: pic.twitter.com/2nzk8pLoCZ
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
7.Receiving these meager results, a furious Senator Mark Warner of Virginia – ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee – held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.” pic.twitter.com/DAkX13igEE
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
9.“KEEP PRODUCING MATERIAL” After meeting with congressional leaders, Crowell wrote: “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” pic.twitter.com/WiEQJzxGZv
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
11. In growing anxiety over its PR problems, Twitter formed a “Russia Task Force” to proactively self-investigate. pic.twitter.com/A5u0uNuH0u
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
13. OCT 13 2017: “No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend).” pic.twitter.com/lmkVazTA5K
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
15.OCT 20 2017: “Built new version of the model that is lower precision but higher recall which allows to catch more items. We aren’t seeing substantially more suspicious accounts. We expect to find ~20 with a small amount of spend.” pic.twitter.com/22MNQwegQH
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
17.Twitter’s search finding “only 2” significant accounts, “one of which is Russia Today,” was based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines like “Russian Influence Reached 126 Million Through Facebook Alone”: pic.twitter.com/rsANvZ9GfN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
https://t.co/Oh55WOIcIr the weeks after Warner’s presser, a torrent of stories sourced to the Intel Committee poured into the news, an example being Politico’s October 13, “Twitter deleted data potentially crucial to Russia probes.” pic.twitter.com/ZQLod4BRjl
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
https://t.co/4r1EI1EhCb congress threatened costly legislation, and Twitter began was subject to more bad press fueled by the committees, the company changed its tune about the smallness of its Russia problem.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
23. In Washington weeks after the first briefing, Twitter leaders were told by Senate staff that “Sen Warner feels like tech industry was in denial for months.” Added an Intel staffer: “Big interest in Politico article about deleted accounts." pic.twitter.com/gMD6rHVNPQ
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
25.“Knowing that our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight, I wanted to share some relevant highlights of the legislation Senators Warner, Klobuchar and McCain will be introducing,” wrote Policy Director Carlos Monje soon after. pic.twitter.com/rh9Irov8vH
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
27.Reporters from all over started to call Twitter about Russia links. Buzzfeed, working with the University of Sheffield, claimed to find a “new network” on Twitter that had “close connections to… Russian-linked bot accounts.” pic.twitter.com/rHCWJULOBL
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
29. “SENATE INTEL COMMITTEE IS ASKING… POSSIBLE TO WHIP SOMETHING TOGETHER?” Still, when the Buzzfeed piece came out, the Senate asked for “a write up of what happened.” Twitter was soon apologizing for the same accounts they’d initially told the Senate were not a problem. pic.twitter.com/mIUmJtRLVc
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
31.Twitter soon settled on its future posture.
In public, it removed content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, they would “off-board” anything “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” pic.twitter.com/Jc94kEg2KR
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
33.For more on the #TwitterFiles, check out @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, @LHFang, and @davidzweig.
Watch this space shortly for another thread…
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
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