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Friday, May 24, 2024

Latest Twitter Files shows CIA, FBI have spent years meddling in content moderation

 Thanks MF:


TWITTER FILES - CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the most famous of the 18 US government agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community (IC) of the United States of America. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the law strictly prohibits CIA employees or contractors from spying upon or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil. But now, a new Twitter Files investigation reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of the CIA’s mission-driven venture capital firm and ostensibly “former” IC and CIA analysts were involved in a 2021-2022 effort to take over Twitter’s content management system. The effort also involved: — a long-time IC contractor and senior Department of Defense R&D official who spent years developing technologies to detect whistleblowers (“insider threats”) like Edward Snowden and Wikileaks’ leakers; — the proposed head of the DHS’ aborted Disinformation Governance Board, Nina Jankowicz, who aided US military and NATO “hybrid war” operations in Europe; — Jim Baker, who, as FBI General Counsel, helped start the Russiagate hoax, and, as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, urged Twitter executives to censor The New York Post story about Hunter Biden. x.com/shellenberger/ These existing or former IC employees, contractors, or intermediaries weren’t satisfied with simply controlling Twitter. They also wanted to use PayPal, Amazon Web Services, and GoDaddy in a totalizing effort to de-platform, de-monetize, and excommunicate from the Internet entirely those individuals that the IC et al. deems to be a threat. There is much that we still do not know about the effort. We do not know if officials within the CIA or any other IC organization ran the operation. It is possible that the only individuals involved in the effort were the ones we discovered. And none of the individuals involved responded to our request for information except for one. But thousands of pages of Twitter Files and documents contained therein paint a clear picture of an organized operation by existing or former IC employees and contractors, using well-established IC tradecraft, to take control of Twitter’s content moderation. Our investigation comes at a moment when governments and intelligence agencies around the world are stepping up their efforts to monitor and censor their citizens. It thus has large implications for policymakers and the public in Western nations that look to the US as a model for free speech and citizen control of the military. This is a joint Public-Racket investigation. The authors are and . As always, the only condition we agreed to in publishing this was to first publish on X. At the end of this thread, we explain why and how this investigation began. Here we go...


and from New York Post, we have:


Latest Twitter Files shows CIA, FBI have spent years meddling in content moderation


The CIA has been meddling in Twitter’s internal content moderation for years, according to the latest dispatches from Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” — which also revealed “mountains of insistent moderation demands” from the Democratic National Committee, but not from the GOP.

Two separate threads in the ongoing Elon Musk-sponsored deep dive into the social media’s internal documents were released Saturday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, documenting how the platform has frequently bowed to government and political pressure.

On June 29. 2020, Taibbi shows, the FBI’s Elvis Chan — who has played a starring role in past Twitter Files releases — asked company executives to “invite an OGA” to an upcoming conference.

“OGA, or ‘Other Government Organization,’ can be a euphemism for CIA, according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors,” Taibbi explains.

One week later, Stacia Cardille, a senior Twitter legal executive, made the link explicit.

“I invited the FBI and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille wrote to her colleague — and former FBI chief counsel — James Baker on July 8, 2020. “No need for you to attend.”

Baker, one of dozens of ex-FBI agents and executives in Twitter’s ranks at the time, was fired this month for interfering in Musk’s effort to reveal the company’s past transgressions.

From that point, Taibbi writes that “regular meeting[s] of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)” — attended by Twitter and “virtually every major tech firm [including] Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others” — had “FBI personnel, and – nearly always – one or two attendees marked ‘OGA’.”

“Meeting agendas virtually always included, at or near the beginning, an ‘OGA briefing,’ usually about foreign matters,” Taibbi writes.

Through the FITF, US intelligence tasked Twitter analysts with laborious investigations into domestic Twitter accounts alleged to have nefarious foreign connections, the documents reveal — ramping up as the 2020 presidential election approached, but continuing through 2022.

Twitter content monitors analyzed users’ IP data, phone numbers and even weighed whether user names were “Russian-sounding” to confirm the government’s accusations – but often failed to do so.

Taibbi shows how a succession of intelligence reports in 2022 strove to shape news narratives relating to Ukraine and the Russian invasion.

One such report, which lists accounts allegedly tied to “Ukraine ‘neo-Nazi’ Propaganda,’” pushed Twitter to place sites pointing out Hunter Biden’s lucrative role on the board of Busima, the Ukrainian energy company, under a cloud of official suspicion.

Other reports, including one from August 2022, comprised “long lists of newspapers, tweets or YouTube videos” that US intelligence deemed to be guilty of “anti-Ukraine narratives.”

“Intel about the shady origin of these accounts might be true,” Taibbi writes. “But so might at least some of the information in them – about neo-Nazis, rights abuses in Donbas, even about our own government. Should we block such material?”

Meanwhile, a separate thread from Taibbi documented that “Twitter did have a clear political monoculture” — one favoring Democrats.

Democratic Party operatives, and one staffer in particular, barraged Twitter moderators with complaints about Republican memes and spoofs in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In one case, Twitter refused to remove an obviously comical spoof of a “Todos Con Biden” event – in which then-candidate Joe Biden supposedly played a pro-Trump song for a crowd of Hispanic voters.

Moderators also refused to label as “deceptive” a video mashup of Biden repeatedly coughing at a campaign event.

“Because the video is an unaltered excerpt of the Vice President’s speech, our teams consider it to be out of context, but not deceptive,” Twitter told the complaining DNC staffer, Timothy Durigan.

“These rules need revision,” Durigan — the lead analyst of the DNC’s Counter Disinformation Program, according to his LinkedIn account – fumed.

What do you think? Post a comment.

In a carefully courteous response, Twitter sent Durgan what Taibbi calls a “bizarre moderation flow chart” that “showed they can still apply labels to non-deceptive material.”

“If this kind of mechanized speech control can be used one way today, it can be used in another tomorrow, especially if unseen enforcement officials are pushing on the levers,” Taibbi noted.

2 comments:

  1. Some insights from those who have been following the Twitter Files since it first dropped not long after EM acquired Twitters out right.

    ~~~~~

    https://t.me/professor_patriot_official/18048

    Michael Shellenberger just released a new Twitter Files Report regarding the CIA

    This is being referred to as “The Mother of All Twitter Files” by Ivan Raiklin himself, who had the viral video recently…

    If you read the report, it doesn’t even sound in the same context to what he was speaking about in his video. This is not a knock on Ivan, but it doesn’t sound even remotely close… so why is he attaching himself to it and giving it that title?

    I read everything, and while it is very egregious, this is definitely not even close to having the title of the MOATF’s… I bet if you read it, you would share the same sentiment

    DON’T GET ME WRONG… It’s a very long winded but EXCELLENT report, which in a nutshell shows full circle how the CIA was involved in a what appears to be a Clandestine Operation to take over Twitter’s content management system; an effort to control and limit information basically.

    One of the main focuses was the Althea Group, which full circle infiltrated Twitter… and worked with PayPal, Amazon Web Service’s, GoDaddy, etc…

    All in an effort to silence dissenting views from “Threats”… mainly QAnon lol, Covid “Misinformation” and what they deemed as “violent hate groups”, which today means White Heterosexual males or moms showing up to school board meetings… lol

    It’s such a well sourced report… and there’s so much context to summarize in this post, it’s best to read it..

    I imagine this will turn into House Committee inquiries, investigations, and possibly subpoenas… but will anyone be arrested anytime soon?

    Don’t hold your breath…

    I’m of the current mindset we’re in the gathering all evidence stage. I don’t know how or when, but this huge mountain of evidence being gathered is going to topple over at some point. It simply has to.

    But That mountain has to be high enough in the first place...

    I’m Talking RICO.

    Here is the Report.
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1793666016704356735.html

    ReTWEET

    ReplyDelete
  2. As the saying goes, Who watches the watcmen?

    ~~~~~

    https://t.me/bioclandestine/3370

    Media Matters just had a wave of layoffs today.

    This seems to be the trend for these Left-wing propaganda outlets. The demand for their services is nearly nonexistent after decades of lies and disinformation.

    Turns out truth is more powerful than deceit.

    Sucks to suck 😂

    ReplyDelete