by Cristina Laila at thegatewaypundit.com
Journalist Matt Taibbi on Thursday released another “Twitter Files” before his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before Congress on Thursday.
Matt Taibbi: Statement to Congress: THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
2. “MONITOR ALL TWEETS COMING FROM TRUMP’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT/BIDEN’S PERSONAL ACCOUNT”
When #TwitterFiles reporters were given access to Twitter internal documents last year, we first focused on the company, which at times acted like a power above government.
3. But Twitter was more like a partner to government.
With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police:
4. Emails from the FBI, DHS and other agencies often came with spreadsheets of hundreds or thousands of account names for review. Often, these would be deleted soon after.
5. Many were obvious “misinformation,” like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election.
But other official “disinfo” reports had shakier reasoning. The highlighted Twitter analysis here disagrees with the FBI about accounts deemed a “proxy of Russian actors”:
6. Then we saw “disinfo” lists where evidence was even less clear. This list of 378 “Iranian State Linked Accounts” includes an Iraq vet once arrested for blogging about the war, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter and Truthout, a site that publishes Noam Chomsky.
7. In some cases, state reports didn’t even assert misinformation. Here, a list of YouTube videos is flagged for “anti-Ukraine narratives”:
8. But the bulk of censorship requests didn’t come from government directly.