What We’ve Learned from the Twitter Files | Part I

“Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.” 

—Elvis Presley

The past 24 hours have been an absolute whirlwind of information. The past week has seen massive protests against Chinese COVID lockdowns, depositions of Anthony Fauci, FBI special agents, and other high-ranking government officials. But the biggest bombshell came last night in what is now being called “The Twitter Files.”

In a 36-part expose on Twitter, Journalist Matt Taibbi revealed the contents of Twitter’s private internal documents – made publicly available by new owner CEO Elon Musk. The findings reported last night were just a sampling of what was discovered, with Taibbi and Musk promising that “Part II” will be released sometime in the coming days. No matter where you fall on the “conspiracy theorist” scale, what you’re about to read is shocking. 

Twitter Worked with Biden’s Team to Censor Free Speech

“What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter,” wrote Taibbi. “The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out [of] the control of its designer.

Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people ‘the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.’

As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’

Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However, this system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.”

Taibbi also included this link, detailing Twitter’s billions of dollars in campaign donations and lobbying efforts over the past several years, including specific recipients. In 2020, 98.47% of contributions were made to Democrats. In 2022, that increased to 99.73%. After establishing Twitter’s open communication with the Biden team and the extreme left-wing bias within the company, Taibbi turned his focus to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. 

Twitter Interfered in Elections, Censoring Important News

This story was published by the New York Post less than a month before the 2020 elections and contained damning information about the Biden Family’s ties to foreign actors, among other disturbing revelations. It also included evidence that Biden had been meeting with (and accepting money from) Ukrainian executives.  

These meetings occurred less than a year before Joe Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post. The same Ukraine to which the Biden administration has sent more than $54.43 billion since Russia’s February 24th invasion.

[Editor’s note: The U.S. government makes it nearly impossible to determine exactly how much money has been spent on the conflict in Ukraine. The Kiel Institute, a German think tank, lists and quantifies military, financial and humanitarian aid promised by governments since the war began. The figure of $54.43 billion only accounts for spending up to October 3rd of this year, though an update is expected on December 6th.]

This story would likely have swung the election results heavily in favor of then-president Trump, but the article (and anyone trying to share it) was suppressed. 

“On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/

Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be ‘unsafe.’ They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g., child pornography. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: ‘At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.’

This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:

Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s ‘hacked materials’ policy: 

Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem… 

The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role. ‘They just freelanced it,’ is how one former employee characterized the decision. ‘Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.’

You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, ‘I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe’:

By this point ‘everyone knew this was fucked,’ said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.

Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, ‘Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?’

To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because ‘caution is warranted’:

A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:

In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.

Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:

Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:

Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.”

NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it’s a “tipping point,” complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.”

Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”:

Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it’s “not absolute”:

While the content of the files so far occurred before Biden took office, it’s clear that they’ve been working with Big Tech for some time to restrict information they don’t like. While this isn’t tantamount to government suppression of the First Amendment (Twitter is a private entity and Biden was not yet in office), it was undoubtedly election tampering. 

And while Biden may not have been in office during the suppression of the laptop story in 2020, we know that he was in office when his staff colluded with big tech to have people like us removed from virtually every major media platform.

We’ll circle back to that part of the story first, but there’s an important part of this story that the Twitter Files failed to mention…

The FBI Warned Twitter About A Russian Plot Involving Hunter Biden

That’s right. We’ve been told by leaders in Big Tech that the FBI had warned them generally about potential Russian misinformation. Facebook, for example, removed The Post’s laptop story entirely from its platform. When asked why on The Joe Rogan Experience, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: 

“The background here is that the FBI came to us – some folks on our team – and was like ‘hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that’.”

He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular – only that Facebook thought it “fit that pattern”.

As part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by Attorneys General Eric Schmitt (Missouri) and Jeff Landry (Louisiana), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan was formally deposed yesterday. Both AGs confirmed the link:

During the depositions, Chan admitted that he had organized those weekly meetings with Twitter and Facebook in San Francisco for as many as seven Washington-based FBI agents in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter’s then-head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth has stated in a sworn declaration that he was told during those meetings to expect “hack-and-leak operations” by state actors involving Hunter Biden – a much different story than Zuckerberg had given.

Remember Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel – Jim Baker – encouraging Twitter to continue censoring the story? It may surprise you to know that Baker was formerly general counsel for the FBI… and a key player in the Russia collusion hoax. 

Remember: This was a hoax that Inspector General Michael Horowitz called “inexplicable,” and which was indistinguishable from an attempted coup. That these same actors continue to show up in cases of election tampering, censorship, propaganda, illegal operations against American citizens and politicians is not a coincidence. 

It may not be a coincidence that Chan’s deposition and the first leak of Twitter’s internal documents coincides with the 53rd anniversary of the FBI’s assassination of Fred Hampton. (Then again, the FBI has been conducted as a criminal agency for so long now that it would be hard to find a date NOT associated with some type of secret, illegal plot.)

But Twitter is not alone, and the censorship and collusion that occurred in 2020 hasn’t stopped. 

The Government is Working with Big Tech to Eradicate First Amendment Rights

We’ve written extensively here, here, and here about an ongoing lawsuit that has resulted in the formal deposition of some heavy-hitting government officials. The list includes:

• NIAID Director Anthony Fauci
• Former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki
• Director of White House Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty
• Surgeon General Vivek Murthy
• CISA Director Jen Easterly
• FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan

We have dedicated our lives to finding and exposing the truth. And when it comes to our First Amendment rights, we couldn’t sit idly by… we needed to join the fight. That’s why we’ve joined Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dr. Joseph Mercola to intervene in the ongoing legal battle brought by Attorneys General Schmitt and Landry.

Our motion to intervene explains that we have been censored and de-platformed by major social media platforms that are working with — and taking orders from — the federal government. 

The motion to intervene explains that these free speech advocates and their organizations have been censored and de-platformed by major social media platforms that are working with — and taking orders from — the federal government. The intervenors seek open public access to critical sworn depositions and documents already produced by the federal defendants. These materials are expected to capture top-level communications between the federal branch and social media tech executives to censor and suppress a wide swath of online COVID-19 news, criticism of the government’s vaccine mandates and lockdowns, and discussion of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin.

“The First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring its critics — full stop. This is what our democracy requires as the bedrock of all other freedoms,” said Children’s Health Defense president and general counsel Mary Holland.

“It’s neither beneficial to democracy nor public health that the audio-visual recordings of key depositions describing the secret communications between key government actors and social media executives remain hidden from the American people. Social media platforms continue to muzzle dissenters for exercising their First Amendment rights to criticize government policies while the proof of this illegal collaboration with government officials remains sealed,” said Kennedy.

“Our federal government must be transparent to maintain trust, yet officials are violating our fundamental rights behind closed doors. The biggest threat to the First Amendment comes from the government’s censorship enterprise in collusion with social media tech giants,” said Dr. Joseph Mercola.

The Mission of Truth

We were censored, shadowbanned, deplatformed for sharing stats, facts and scientific data taken from the government’s own websites about COVID-19 — the same facts the current director of the CDC, Fauci and others are now saying are true after two plus years of denying these facts. 

We were right all along.

We should never have been censored. The world needs to hear our voices in order to make informed decisions about their health. What has happened to RFK, Jr., Dr. Mercola, to us and many others should never have happened. Our government has colluded to hide the truth about COVID, and we need the truth to ensure this never happens again. Lives are on the line. Informed consent and real science will save countless lives. It is our mission to reach everyone with the truth to support life.

More information is coming. Stay tuned…