Independent Journalist Matt Taibi recently released Part 15 of what has been dubbed as the “Twitter Files”.
Part 14 of the Twitter Files was released, showing that Representative Adam Schiff was part of the group that put pressure on Twitter to find a coordinated Russian bot campaign to influence the 2016 election when Twitter executives were saying that they didn’t have any evidence for it. Part 15 provides more evidence for Adam Schiff’s role in pressuring Twitter to censor certain tweets that he didn’t agree with.
This latest batch of files shows that Adam Schiff wrote to Twitter often, requesting that certain Tweets be taken down. This even included parody tweets such as a “Peter Douche” parody photo of Joe Biden. The request to remove this post also came from the DNC as well.
Twitter refused to remove this tweet because Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth knew that it was obviously meant to be humorus and that “any reasonable observer” could see that it was a doctored photo.
Despite the Tweet clearly being satire, Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein wasn’t happy and claimed that it was a “slippery slope”. Twitter also refused to remove posts about Schiff and his staffers.
Schiff’s office resorted to the usual tactic of calling everything QANON whenever something doesn’t fit the narrative. Twitter’s policy at the time wasn’t to ban QANON but to “deamplify” those accounts which they did. Twitter executives responded to Schiff by claiming that “We can internally confirm that a number of the accounts flagged are already included in this deamplification.”
What else
On Sunday, in an interview with Fox News, Taibi pointed out the public-private censorship in these files.
We repeatedly see government officials and agencies pressuring social media companies to censor content that they don’t like. And it wasn’t just a few requests but they were being overwhelmed by the amount of “requests” coming from these government agencies and elected officials, like Adam Schiff and others, when Twitter executives were repeatedly telling them that there was no Russian bot campaign.
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For more on the Twitter Files, check out my articles below.
