The FBI, Twitter, and Their "Partnership Support Portal" - The Latest Traunch
Some 80 FBI agents are involved with big tech to censor social media, just for starters. Can the government deputize private actors to silence disagreement and violate the Constitution?
The “Twitter Files” continue to be dropped. Journalist Matt Taibbi dumped the sixth traunch on Friday.
My biggest concern is not with the fumbling, bumbling, woke idiots at a publicly-traded company who illegally violated the firm’s “terms of service” to censor conservatives and a President of the United States. It’s the collusion between federal agencies and actors to have private entities do what the law doesn’t allow - government censorship of free speech. This includes the government health science establishment censoring medical experts and FBI agents flagging posts they assert violate Twitter’s terms of service. Such as they were.
Your tax dollars at work.
Twitter File dump six is damning. With an assist from a favorite internet service, Threadreaderapp.com, I’ve pasted below the first part of Taibbi’s 45-post Twitter thread. Why? Because you need to understand just how alarming and unconstitutional this is. As Taibbi told his paid Substack subscribers on Saturday (I am one):
This is a chance for ordinary Americans to see, from the inside, how their tax dollars have been spent building an elaborate, systematized method of censorship and opinion control, with agencies like the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the DOJ/FBI at the helm. These “enforcement” agencies are not fighting or investigating crime (or even, say, terror plots), they’re just collecting domestic intelligence on a grand scale, and seeking to distort the public’s perception of reality through mass moderation, via programs we’ve been told little to nothing about.
You may say, “so what? It’s just social media.” That would ignore how easy it would be to expand the FBI’s “Partnership Support Portal” to our increasingly digital media. Not just Facebook but NBC. The Washington Post. The Chicago Tribune. Dozens of “chain” newspapers, like Gannett, publishers of USA Today. News Nation. Even Fox News.
It probably has already happened. As blogger Jim Hoft of “The Gateway Pundit” says, “This portal was used to censor conservative content and was used extensively against conservatives and is likely criminal with the FBI preventing free speech through its use.”
Referring to censorship of medical experts by Twitter at the behest of government officials during the COVID pandemic, former White House COVID advisor Dr. Scott Atlas told The Epoch Times, “This seems to be criminal behavior, and I think it needs to be investigated in the courts.”
The absence of alternative viewpoints manipulated not only the public, but government officials as well, Atlas said.
“It created this illusion that there was a consensus among science and public health policy experts that lockdowns should be imposed; it created and perpetrated lies that if you were opposed to lockdowns, you were choosing the economy over lives, and that if you were opposed to lockdowns, you were somehow calling for letting the infection spread without any mitigation whatsoever,” he said.
“They absolutely contributed to policies that killed massive numbers of people and destroyed children and low-income people, who are the most vulnerable. That’s why it’s criminal.” (Emphasis added)
The question is, what happens now? Are there statutes of limitation on violations of the First Amendment since we will have to wait for the next GOP administration and Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute wrongdoings? Will the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), controlled by Biden-nominated chairs, hold Twitter accountable for violating their terms of service? As for the FBI, they issued an official response to Fox News:
In response to the "Twitter Files," a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, "The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them."
Be careful not to let your eyes roll too far back in your head, and note that they neither apologize, admit guilt, or retreat from their malfeasance. Upon being told the FBI’s response, US Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) responded, as reported by Brietbart:
“Mr. (FBI Director Christopher) Wray is lying. He better clear off his January. I expect Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in the Judiciary Committee and Mr. (James) Comer from Kentucky’s committee will have him filled up — his dance card will be filled up. Look, this thing goes so deep. For them to even — they’re accusing us of doing what they’re — exactly what they’re doing. … This is how they investigated President Trump, they said it was a foreign entity and then that’s how they backdoored into his campaign and that’s exactly what they’re doing with this. They’ve used this to dox people. They’ve used it to censor people. It is at the top of our Justice Department and we need to get to the bottom of it. Because this has [a] chilling effect across our entire constitutional aspects of every issue that we’re dealing with right now because of the corruption at this level and that we’ve allowed our once wonderful FBI to be infiltrated by these folks is just, to me, a scary problem.”
Think criminal prosecution here is too harsh? As recorded by a just-released Harvard Harris Poll, let’s ask the American people what they think.
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY
Authored my Matt Taibbi, via Twitter
2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.
3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
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.
6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.
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.
8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.
10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.
11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines:
12.An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.
“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:
The rest is too long for this post. Read it here. It is worth your time. Because, apparently, most of you think it deserves congressional and (don’t laugh) FBI investigation.