AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
Over the last several weeks, Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk has granted a number of journalists access to internal Twitter documents and communications, revealing a shocking pattern of censorship and collusion between Twitter employees, Democrat politicians, and career bureaucrats at federal government agencies like the FBI. Known collectively as the “Twitter Files,” the series of bombshells, released in the format of extensive tweet threads, has confirmed long-held suspicions about the extent to which Twitter – and likely other social media companies as well – work to silence conservatives and censor stories that may be damaging to the left, from the Hunter Biden laptop scandal to the origins of COVID-19.
Here’s what we’ve learned so far, and why it’s important.
The Twitter Files Part One – The Birth of a Censorship Regime
In the first installment of the Twitter Files on December 2, Matt Taibbi outlined the origins of Twitter’s censorship operation, detailing how “content moderation” tools evolved into a way for Twitter’s politically left-wing employees to silence disfavored content – often without the knowledge of executives like CEO Jack Dorsey.
The Hunter Biden laptop story represented an inflection point for Twitter’s censorship regime. Rather than an individual tweet or account, Twitter staff worked to scrub an entire narrative from the platform – all without any reason to believe that the story was actually false. Multiple Twitter employees and even a Democratic congressman, Ro Khanna, raised concerns about the move, only to be rebuffed by Twitter executives like former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth and former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, who used to be the General Counsel of the FBI.
The clear implication is that Twitter executives used baseless concerns about “hacked materials” to censor the story because it might have been fatal to Joe Biden’s election chances.
The Twitter Files Part Two – Twitter’s Secret Blacklists
On December 8, Bari Weiss released Part Two of the Twitter Files, which details how “teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”
After years of Twitter executives denying the practice of so-called “shadow banning,” or secretly suppressing certain accounts and posts, Weiss’s reporting confirmed that the practice was even more organized and widespread than previously thought. Internal documents show that many accounts like “libsoftiktok” and conservative personalities like Charlie Kirk were blacklisted without even violating any specific Twitter policies. In another instance, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a “trends blacklist” for tweeting that COVID lockdowns would harm children.
The Twitter Files Parts Three and Four – Censoring “Election Denial”
Parts three and four of the Twitter Files – released on December 9 and 10 by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, respectively – detail the build-up to the watershed moment of President Trump’s banishment from the platform.
In Part Three, Taibbi provides the first evidence of direct coordination on censorship actions between Twitter employees and career bureaucrats at government agencies like the FBI. In one screenshotted communication, Yoel Roth alludes to having weekly meetings with the FBI, DHS, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), specifically referencing conversations about the Hunter Biden laptop story. With the support of the intelligence community, Twitter employees laid the groundwork to censor that story and any other perceived “threats” to the legitimacy of the 2020 election – including posts by President Trump himself.
In Part Four, Shellenberger details how, following January 6th, Twitter changed its entire user agreement policy to justify permanently banning President Trump. In one communication to a sales executive, Yoel Roth says explicitly that “we’re changing our public interest approach for his [Trump’s] account.” As Twitter moved to ban Trump, other employees engaged in a pattern of seemingly haphazard and ad hoc decisions to suspend accounts for content that moderators merely found objectionable, but did not violate any specific Twitter policy.
The Twitter Files Part Five – Deplatforming a Sitting President
Part Five of the Twitter Files, released on December 12 by Bari Weiss, provides a play-by-play of the decision to permanently ban President Trump on January 8, 2021. As internal Slack communications show, Twitter’s rank-and-file employees had talked among one another about their desire to permanently ban Trump for months leading up to the 2020 election. In one instance, Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” collectively referred to Trump as “the leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable to the Christchurch shooter or Hitler.” Following January 6, employees began heavily lobbying executives like Yoel Roth and Twitter General Counsel Vijaya Gadde directly to lock Trump’s account.
But there was a problem – Trump had not violated any Twitter policy. In Slack communications, multiple employees who reviewed Trump’s tweets the morning of January 8 found “no violations.”
However, less than 90 minutes after that determination, Gadde posted in a Slack channel that a Trump tweet which read “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form,” could be interpreted as “coded incitement to further violence.” Less than three hours later, Trump had been permanently banned “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Importantly, as Weiss points out, Twitter has allowed other world leaders like Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called Israel “a malignant cancerous tumor,” and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who called on citizens to take up arms against the Tigray region, to remain on the platform. Further, Twitter refused to even remove the posts in question, merely putting a notice on them that while the tweet violated Twitter Rules, it “may be in the public’s interest” for the post to remain accessible.
As Weiss aptly puts it, “the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.”
The Twitter Files Part Six – FBI Collusion
In Part Six of the Twitter Files, released on December 16, Matt Taibbi recounts how “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.”
“Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth,” Taibbi writes. “The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.” In a clear sign of just how closely the FBI worked with Twitter’s censorship team, one communication from an FBI source to a Twitter executive explicitly said that Twitter employees should be allowed to view classified information.
At the behest of bureaucrats at the FBI, DHS, and other government agencies, Twitter “content moderators” often scoured “flagged” accounts to look for any reason to ban them. In many cases, obscure users with almost no followers were banned for spreading supposed “election misinformation,” mainly accounts that were clearly satirical in nature and were posting what were obviously jokes.
Notably, it was the thoroughly debunked 2016 “Russian collusion” narrative which served as the basis for this unholy alliance between career government bureaucrats and Big Tech.
In many cases, the FBI and DHS also farmed out the work of identifying posts and accounts to censor to left-wing think tanks and other private-sector contractors – in effect funneling massive amounts of taxpayer dollars to shadowy entities to censor conservative voices online.
The Twitter Files Part Seven – Memory-Holing the Hunter Biden Laptop
On December 19, Michael Shellenberger released Part Seven of the Twitter Files, detailing “how the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.”
The night before the bombshell Post story dropped, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent a series of documents to Yoel Roth suggesting that the story was part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation. In fact, FBI officials had been “priming” Roth and other Twitter executives for months to dismiss any negative information about Hunter Biden or the Biden family’s business dealings as a Russian intelligence operation.
Notably, Roth admitted in an internal communication that the Post story “isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else.” But Jim Baker – Twitter’s General Counsel, who happened to play a central role in making the case to investigate Donald Trump while he was at the FBI, and has himself been investigated for leaking information to the media – insisted that the laptop materials were “either faked, hacked, or both.”
As Shellenberger writes, “it’s inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked.” But Twitter’s executives fully bought into Baker’s story, despite admittedly discovering no unusual Russian activity on the app, and the FBI producing exactly zero evidence that the story was indeed the result of a Russian “hack and leak” scheme.
“In the end,” Shellenberger says, “the FBI’s influence campaign aimed at executives at news media, Twitter, & other social media companies worked: they censored & discredited the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
The Twitter Files Part Eight – The Pentagon’s Secret PsyOp Campaign
Part Eight of the Twitter Files, released on December 20 by Lee Fang, lays out how Twitter directly assisted the U.S. military’s online influence operations “despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks.”
The story here is how downright deceitful Twitter was about its involvement with government-backed manipulation of online narratives. In testimony to Congress, Twitter executives claimed that they were committed to identifying and shutting down “covert information operations and deceptive propaganda.” But as Fang writes, “behind the scenes, Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops.”
When the operation was finally exposed in August 2022 by a Stanford Internet Observatory report, Twitter worked overtime behind the scenes to cover up their involvement in it. They made a major public spectacle of banning the Pentagon accounts in the interest of “neutrality” and adhering to their own policies. Until the release of the Twitter Files, the public had no knowledge that Twitter executives actually had known about the accounts for years and had provided them immunity from the platform’s standards on false information.
The Twitter Files Part Nine – More Federal Agencies Caught in Collusion Scandal
Matt Taibbi treated readers to an early Christmas present on December 24 with the release of Part Nine of the Twitter Files. After detailing the FBI’s involvement with Twitter’s censorship operation in Part Six, Taibbi outlines how the FBI often acted “as 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.”
Many top Twitter employees were former members of the intelligence community. In addition to Twitter General Counsel Jim Baker, nearly a half-dozen other executives also had ties to the FBI. Another top executive came from the CIA.
These executives appear to have maintained close ties to their former agencies. So much so, in fact, that in the lead up to the 2020 election, officials at the FBI, CIA, and other agencies were sending Twitter hundreds of posts and accounts per day to ban.
Despite the censorship operation ostensibly being focused on foreign election interference, many of these posts were from domestic accounts. Government agencies pressured Twitter employees to find links between U.S.-based accounts and Russia or other U.S. adversaries, even when none existed.
After the 2020 election, the intelligence community continued requesting that Twitter delete certain posts and ban certain accounts, for everything from supporting the Maduro regime in Venezuela to anti-Ukraine posts following Russia’s invasion.
Part Nine of the Twitter Files also unearths communications showing that Twitter wasn’t alone in cooperating with government agencies – Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others appear to have similar relationships with the intelligence community.
The Twitter Files Part Ten – How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate
On December 26, David Zweig outlined in Part Ten of the Twitter Files how Twitter discredited doctors and other health experts, suppressed ordinary users, and worked hand-in-glove with the government to promote an “accepted” narrative on COVID-19.
According to Zweig, government bureaucrats during both the Trump and Biden administrations “pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.”
Of specific concern for the Biden administration were so-called “anti-vaxxer” accounts, or users who questioned the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. When Twitter refused to ban some of the accounts as requested, Biden administration officials became “very angry” and “aggressive.” Ironically, it was the censors at Twitter who showed more concern for free speech rights than Biden administration officials constitutionally sworn to uphold them.
By and large, however, Twitter caved to government demands, and began censoring content that dissented from the established narrative on COVID-19. In many cases, the accounts of doctors “were suspended both for tweeting opinions and demonstrably true information.”
In one case, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted his expert opinion that everyone did not have to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity from COVID-19. But the post was slapped with a “misleading” label and replies to it were shut off, effectively silencing Kulldorff.
In another case from before the 2020 election, following a bout with COVID-19, former President Trump tweeted “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” In an email to Yoel Roth and senior legal executive Stacia Cardille, Jim Baker asks why the tweet isn’t a violation of Twitter’s “COVID misinformation” policy. In a hilarious if deeply alarming reply, Yoel Roth has to explain to Baker why a “broad, optimistic statement” isn’t misinformation.
What’s worth considering in the aftermath of COVID is how public policy and pandemic response might have differed if an actual open debate had been allowed to take place online – the only place people were still conversing once the pandemic set in. Might there have been more concern about the effects of school closures on children? Might parents have been more set at ease about the relatively low risks of COVID to the young? Working in coordination with government officials, Twitter and other social media networks silenced all those conversations.
There appears to be much more still to come from the Twitter Files. As Matt Taibbi noted, the trove of documents and communications is like a massive haystack that Musk’s chosen band of journalists are still digging through.
But one pattern we’ve seen so far is that as time has gone on, the revelations have only gotten more damning for those involved. While the first edition of the Twitter Files was panned by many on the left and the right for failing to produce a “smoking gun,” subsequent releases have provided a litany of shocking evidence exposing the complex web of coordination between Big Tech, Democrat politicians, and bureaucrats across the federal government.
We are still a long way from connecting all the threads revealed by the Twitter Files. The slow burn nature of the reporting has also blunted some of the “splashy” effect that would have otherwise propelled such revelations into the mainstream. But nonetheless, the Twitter Files represent the first real insights into how the left’s censorship machine works, and may just lay the groundwork for how to dismantle it.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @Shane_Harris_.
NO 1 is immune from Govt censorship, planned, rigged to deny IA
What they REALLY should stand for:
FBI: Former Bolsheviks Intervene
CIA: Communists In Action
DOJ: Dumbbells Overwhelming Justice
Thank God we still have a few real journalists still operating in the U.S. that aren’t afraid to speak the truth: but, is anybody interested in the truth?
Democrats talk about protecting our democracy but they are part of the most extensive collusion of media and government and private agencies to destroy our democracy and constitutional rights.
A disgrace! These criminals need to go to prison.
Truth? That word has been changed to lies.
And who exactly would be “dismantling it”? The corrupt MSM and even more corrupt law enforcement agencies? Or how about our politicians who set the bar high for dishonestly and corruption themselves?
I pray ALL three letter agencies (health, security & financial) are held accountable (starting at the top) for the crimes against the citizens of the USA. I’d feel better if they were dismantled. Maybe, some could be salvaged if they chopped off the top few layers of leadership. (if you’re wondering where that would leave us security-wise, better than/no worse than where we are now) There’s a word for conspiring against your own citizens.
Insidious.
Excellent article.
This is Excellent to why WE MUST QUESTION EVERYTHING the government does and the CORRUPTION and SPYING WITH IT. ESPECIALLY, WHEN THEY ATTACK AMERICANS AND OUR U.S. CONSTITUTIONAL
RIGHTS.
WE PAY THEIR SALARIES WITH OUR TAX DOLLARS AND THEY WORK FOR US.
WE DON’T WORK FOR THEM.
When do the Congressional investigations begin into how many children and adults were lost to suicide due to Government agencies refusal to allow other expert opinions be presented? Who will go to jail? The DOJ is NOT a reliable investigatory agency for any of this! So sad! “Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was placed on a “trends blacklist” for tweeting that COVID lockdowns would harm children”
somehow we are stuck on step one. stating the facts and repeating what we already know Who will dare to move to step two?
Lets just summarize things. We learned that Twitter, as well as likely both Facebook and Google, had been effectively weaponized by what we now have proof of a badly corrupt federal government. There is no reason to believe the same sort of actions were NOT done with respect the MSM, as they all parroted the same lines on a nightly basis. All with the express purpose to both influenence and manipulate the public, as well as shutdown any sort of information / dialog that the left considered a potential threat to their ideological agenda, their desired political outcome and those already in power favoring that agenda.
I expect we’ll continue to get additional releases from Twitter documenting additional proof of these and other actions over the coming weeks. At least for as long as Elon Musk is personnally in charge of day-to-day operations of Twitter and ensures former Twitter employees, like Jim Baker and others, aren’t withholding or deleting such files in an attempt to bury the truth. After that, who knows. Elon Musk has the power of his enormous wealth and public visibility to shield him somewhat from the full weight of a vindictive left. Anyone he hires to be CEO is likely NOT going to be a multi-billionaire and thus potentially less willing to out everything on the line in the same manner.
Now the real question is “What is going to actually done to ensure this sort of corrupt action ceases and at least some of those responsible are held to some level of accountability?” We cannot rely on either the DOJ or the FBI as they are both implicated already in these past actions. That would be like asking the arsonist to investigate the building he burnt down. The federal courts have have no investigative or prosecutorial powers. Those powers are vested solely to the Executive Branch in the form of the DOJ and the FBI. There is reasonable evidence to suggest this level of wide-spread corruption was across more than just the DOJ and the FBI.
Sure Congress can hold hearings and read the same information on TV, that has already been made public now. But then what? Congress has NO ability to arrest and prosecute anyone. All they can do is refer what they believe to be criminal or corruption matters to either the DOJ or the FBI for follow-up. See the problem that none of the authors is addressing? We are still left with how, under a now badly corrupted Executive Branch, do we resolve this matter within the framework of a system now badly broken? I don’t forsee the current occupant of the White House ordering a complete house cleaning of the senior management levels of the DOJ, the FBI and any other 3 letter federal agency involved in all this. After all, he is one of the chief beneficiaries of a number of these actions.
I fully expect that nothing in the way of justice will be applied to the scalawags that committed the described acts because the justice system has been hijacked by the leftist Democrats. In fact, all government agencies, departments and even the military have been infiltrated by the leftists. Don’t expect justice to prevail, and you won’t be disappointed.
“…the Twitter Files represent the first real insights into how the left’s censorship machine works, and may just lay the groundwork for how to dismantle it.” Does anyone really think that is going to happen? It would require dismantling all of government at the national, state, county and city level and start over! There are just too many Democrats and RiNOs who have cheated their way into power. I don’t see honest and fair elections returning to the U.S.A.
Call me a pessimist if you like, but of one thing I am sure, the far left would not be as bold as they are unless they were fully confident in their ability to hold on to their position and make their agenda the only choice.
Just shows you what we already know how corrupt the Democratic party is and how they control the justice system (communism). How do you think they steal elections and get away with it!!!
As all this corruption gets exposed, will those that voted for these Democrats wake up to the unconstitutional activity of the left and NOT vote for these Marxists? None of this will make a difference to this country if the people of America don’t care about corruption and still believe the Democrats are “good” guys!
What have we learned? We have learned the Deep State is not a conspiracy theory.
When will the corrupt election be thrown out? Government collusion should be enough evidence to rerun the fraudulent election. Slo joe did NOT win a fair election.
Clearly, when the gov’t colludes with private industry to prohibit speech, it is a violation of the First Amendment. But more than that; gov’t working with private industry to achieve a political outcome is the very definition of fascism.
People are now dead because of censoring the truth about the phony vax(actually gene therapy). If they would have known the truth, they wouldn’t have taken it. Many more people have died and or been maimed by this wickedness being forced on us by our government, media, big pharma, big tech.
The key point here is that Twitter employed previous FBI and govt employees in order to
establish immediate connection with the fed. Much blah-blah will be made about this in the
Jan-Feb house sessions but once again until someone is fired or jailed, it means nothing.
I believe the exposure of the psyops is a major factor in these files. It shows the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon have been working for years at mind control of the American people. And in many, many cases if has worked effectively! In the end, that may have been why the internet was invented! If not, the spies sure hooked onto it ASAP!
These bureuas need to be competely revamped and dismantled if necessary to protect the American citizens. I cannot believe that after 9-11 the changes that were made were allowed by both parties.They do not care about the populace. They just want to spy on everyone, especially American citizens that can expose them for their wrongdoing!
GOOD
The GOP nominates terrible candidates, loses and then cries election fraud when there is none there. How about the GOP nominates better candidates and drops the MAGA conspiracy theory garbage? I’m lifelong GOP but will be voting democrat and libertarian until the GOP gets rid of MAGA crap.
I find it disturbing this article makes numerous iterations as to the involvement of government agencies without data supporting the declarations.”theFBI had been priming Roth”-no evidence; “Twitter wasn’t alone in cooperating with government agency’s”- no evidence; “the FBI’s influence campaign”- no evidence and on and on. Just maybe, there is nothing on Hunter Biden’s laptop that is incriminating and would only serve to embarrass him in a personal way and that is why they are sitting on it. Christopher Wray is a stand up guy who goes by the book and his record shows he would not tolerate random censorship by his agency.
The folks in Government involved in this censoring of Americans need to spend a long time in prison.
a lot of text to say absolutely nothing
Facebook, Twitter, and Google are the anti-White thought police that censor the truth about White Genocide.
If anti-White ideas are so good, why do pro-White truths have to be censored?
Pro-White truths would slow the genocidal program that anti-Whites are carrying out by mass third-world immigration and FORCED assimilation i.e diversity in EVERY White country and ONLY White countries.
Anti-racist is just a code word for Anti-White.
So what is going ro be done about it ?
No prison time they should all be stand up arrange to a post and shot by firing squad for treason just that simple
No surprise that CNN and MSNBC didn’t cover this.
Jack Dorsey should be sued for the exact amount of profit he made on the sale of Twitter. The government is a vile, putrid, sulfuric rotten egg that needs to be smashed. Punishment should include public hanging and a firing squad. Period.
WARNING! GOP Establ is a troll. Ignore him.
I’m sure left wingers still think all this evidence is fake! But most have never heard of or remember the Watergate Files
Great job Shane!!!
All of this comes as no surprise to me
Elon Musk just verified what I ALREADY knew! . . . But then again, the majority of the people are like sheep with the politicians as their handlers! WAKE UP PEOPLE and realize that politicians are power hungry and believe that they are better at knowing and proving they can determine what’s best for We the People!
Great summary of an absolute travesty that the legacy media has colluded in covering up. Thanks, Shane.
We must work together to either change legacy media or take steps to purge them from the Public Airways so the facts and Truth are known.
Thank you AMAC for the fine work you are doing to report the Facts and The Truth.
All this is no secret! Its always been an open fact (STILL) being ignored by the “mainstream media” who are less journalism than government information bureaus.
so glad I don’t use twitter or any other platform for that matter. Someone should tell them that when you do the government (which has been exposed by the twitter files), you ARE violating people’s free speech rights which are guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. constitution.
I’ve been attacked online for just using the term “Deep State.” There are undoubtedly Leftist operators whose sole job is to discredit opinions that they don’t like, and even more so those postings that contain hard facts & evidence that run contrary to their objectives.
If those involved in this activity aren’t severely punished and such operations permanently shut-down, then get ready for a true installation of a fascist state.
Isn’t there something we can do to all these folks in on this besides have them fired from their jobs? Asking for a friend.
I use no twitter, no facebook, no tik-tok, no instagram I feel fine . Life is great
Seriously considering cancelling any tv media that isn’t free.
Everyone’s new year resolution should be to get rid of their social media addiction.
So now that the proof is provided what will be done with it ? The Dims know that we will
do nothing. Trump and Musk have shoved the nations noses into the excrement and the
nation is saying “oh, that’s ok”. We like it
Remember folks when Lindsay Graham said for weeks that he was going to expose the
travesty of Bengahsi ? What happened ? Nothing. Just a bunch of talk. And that’s what
we’re about to hear in Jan-Feb. All talk, no action.
And the million dollar question, who is getting prosecuted and when?
Add to that, it appears that voters either don’t know (Alphabet soup suppression) or don’t care (Most Democrats, Independents (?) and under 30 crowd), which means it will all be pooh poohed down the same hole as all the rest (Mueller trial, invalid impeachments, Jan 6 debacle, Mar-a-Lago, etc)
My fear is that we are preaching to the choir, just like the midterms, and no one is listening.
For example, the under 30 crowd basically got Fetterman and Warnock elected, irregardless of all the arguing about McCollum and RNC money. They want abortion and free stuff, end of story. They DO NOT care about anything else. I’ll say that Charlie Kirk is on the right track, but I fear it may be too late.
Thanks to Elon Musk; everything I imagined it got confirmed. Unfortunately, we do not have strong leadership in Congress to represent the people who were affected negatively by Twitter.