Substack writer Matt Taibbi released batch 9 of the Twitter Files on Christmas Eve. This latest batch detailed the coordination between Twitter and several government agencies, including the CIA and the State Department.
After several weeks of multiple batches of internal communications confirming that Twitter executives did meet often with the FBI and worked with the FBI to silence American citizens, the FBI released a statement last week claiming that “conspiracy theorists” are spreading “misinformation” with “the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency”. But the FBI never refuted anything in what has been known as the Twitter files.
This latest batch of files confirms that the FBI did act as a doorman to a “vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA”, according to Matt Taibbi.
A previous batch of files confirmed that at least 80 FBI agents worked with big tech as a “Disinformation Task Force”. This task force worked with big tech to silence conservatives. But this goes way beyond a task force of 80 FBI agents. This task force also facilitated requests from a wide array of smaller actors – from local cops to media to state governments.
Twitter Executives worked so much with government agencies that they lost track of who they were suppose to meet on what day.
On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to a pair of Twitter executives asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming conference. According to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors, OGA, which stands for Other Government Agency, likely referred to the CIA.
One of the executives even formerly worked for the CIA.
Senior legal executive Stacia Cardille is on record claiming that “I invited the FBI and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille says to Baker, adding “No need for you to attend.” James Baker was general counsel at the FBI before getting hired at Twitter as deputy general counsel.
The files confirm that it wasn’t just Twitter that the federal government was in bed with. They were in constant contact with virtually every social media platform, including Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, Pinterest, and others.
As the 2020 election approached, the FBI and other government agencies overwhelmed Twitter with requests to silence “problem” accounts.
Twitter employees received so many requests from government agencies that they had to come up with a system to prioritize the requests.
The FBI even went out of their way to search for violations of Twitter’s policy.
Twitter executives were under constant pressure from the federal government to ban people from their platform for violating their policies when they didn’t. They were under constant pressure to validate claims of foreign influence, when there was no evidence to support those claims.
They were desperate to find some connection to Russia but couldn’t find a strong connection.
Matt Talibi concluded his tweet thread stating that “The CIA has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by third parties, so what I saw could be limited.”
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