Twitter Files, Part Six: Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary

KABOOM 💥💥💥💥💥 https://t.co/TS3jFZ51VR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

7. 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.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines: pic.twitter.com/cm9JjEXUSm

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts: pic.twitter.com/LjgB6fxENo

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding: pic.twitter.com/uLxHayY11C

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa – were suspended.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his "Twitter folks": pic.twitter.com/eXaZnC3I7y

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter: pic.twitter.com/0S0XoqhwYD

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

23.“I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That's crazy,” said @Tiberius444.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

https://t.co/dtvy82pfce the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets: pic.twitter.com/Dwad3lGM4j

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”: pic.twitter.com/POOpYrd9q8

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state. pic.twitter.com/GSaEzM0aYo

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them: pic.twitter.com/rt5WzhfCga

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”: pic.twitter.com/5DP8DEFZiO

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

https://t.co/4zD4nEkDdW, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS): pic.twitter.com/kJfJ6gDrb1

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

The FBI and other government agencies partnered with Twitter in a coordinated election interference campaign.