{"id":6951,"date":"2023-01-05T12:31:35","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T12:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/?p=6951"},"modified":"2023-01-05T12:31:41","modified_gmt":"2023-01-05T12:31:41","slug":"how-american-spies-used-false-claims-of-russian-election-interference-to-bring-the-tech-giant-to-heel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/?p=6951","title":{"rendered":"How American spies used false claims of Russian election interference to bring the tech giant to heel"},"content":{"rendered":"

How American spies used false claims of Russian election interference to bring the tech giant to heel \u2014 RT World News<\/p>\n

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Files reveal how the specter of Moscow’s supposed underhand ways was used to subjugate the platform to the US Democratic Party<\/p>\n

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In a pair of blockbuster #TwitterFiles threads, this week, journalist Matt Taibbi has blown open, even wider, the media giant’s concerning collusion with the US national security state. The former Rolling Stone writer exposed how political pressure from the US Democratic Party very effectively forced the company\u00a0to endorse the lie that its platform was extensively weaponized by Russia, with hugely significant consequences.<\/p>\n

Find the “Russian trace” at any cost<\/h2>\n

The first<\/a>, boldly titled ‘How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In’<\/em>, documents how in August 2017,\u00a0despite dubious allegations that Russian bots and trolls were responsible for the election of Donald Trump in the mainstream media reaching fever pitch, Twitter’s hierarchy knew its platform wasn\u2019t riddled with malign Kremlin-directed actors.<\/p>\n

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\"How<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In internal emails, the company\u2019s senior executives and communications professionals almost mocked the idea that it\u00a0was overrun with Russian bots. They could neither detect \u201ca big correlation\u201d<\/em> in account activity related to the November 2016 election, nor any \u201clarger patterns\u201d<\/em> at all. They forecast potentially taking action against less than 25 users. As such, it was decided to simply ignore<\/a> approaches from the media on the issue.<\/p>\n

The next month, Twitter informed the Senate it had suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with \u201cpossible links\u201d<\/em> to those accounts. Senator Mark Warner, a ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, immediately<\/a> held a high-profile press conference to denounce the social network\u2019s response as \u201cfrankly inadequate on every level.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Such pressure, combined with bitter, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declaring, \u201cIt\u2019s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare,\u201d<\/em> forced the social network to set up a dedicated \u201cRussia task force\u201d<\/em> to investigate the issue. It did\u00a0\u2013 and found nothing<\/a>. \u201cNo evidence of a coordinated approach\u201d<\/em> between accounts flagged as potentially Kremlin-run was identified, despite an \u201cexhaustive\u201d internal investigation.<\/p>\n

In all, after manually scouring through the posts of thousands of accounts flagged as \u201csuspicious\u201d by external actors, they found that just 32 were questionable, 17 of which were connected with Russia, and only two had spent any money on advertising\u00a0\u2013 one being RT, which was specifically given favorable marketing offers by Twitter before the election.<\/p>\n

Again, senior Democratic party officials were enraged by these results. What followed was a flurry of unhinged, sensationalist news stories, claiming Twitter was either covering up the Kremlin\u2019s dirty work for sinister reasons, either by lying about the issue, or actively deleting reams of incriminating data to cover its own tracks.<\/p>\n

\u201cWere Twitter a contractor for the FSB \u2026 they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform,\u201d<\/em> professor Thomas Rid, an adviser to the Intelligence Committee, remarked to Politico at the time.<\/p>\n

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\"Selling<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Surrender to\u00a0politics<\/h2>\n

None of this was true. But it provided the Democrats with ammunition to threaten regulations on Twitter\u2019s political advertising, which could\u2019ve been extremely costly to the company\u2019s revenue. This sent senior staffers into a panic, which was only intensified by the timely leak<\/a> of a database of thousands of alleged Russian bots and trolls to major media outlets by the Intelligence Committee. This resulted in a flood of aggressive queries from journalists.<\/p>\n

Realizing the pressure would only keep mounting\u00a0\u2013 as media outlets and politicians had decided this absolutely was a major scandal, irrespective of the available evidence, and were going to keep pushing until they got what they wanted\u00a0\u2013 Twitter kowtowed, and publicly declared bots and trolls were in fact a massive issue on its platform, and it would be proactive in rooting out such activity in future.<\/p>\n

Internally, Twitter executives settled<\/a> on an informal, secret policy for dealing with rogue actors on the network. Publicly, they would stick to the line content was removed and users were banned \u201cat our sole discretion,\u201d<\/em> while privately they would \u201coff-board\u201d<\/em> anything and everything \u201cidentified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations,\u201d<\/em> without argument.<\/p>\n

Twitter had actively invited US spies to run its moderation process, without anyone knowing, and on the explicit internal understanding they would not be leaving. That sinister penetration widened<\/a> substantially when Covid-19 arrived in the US, and again the bogeyman of Kremlin \u201cdisinformation\u201d was the battering ram.<\/p>\n

In February 2020, US State Department intelligence wing the Global Engagement Center published a report, \u201cRussian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.\u201d<\/em> It claimed that a vast network of bots and trolls controlled by Moscow and amplified by China and Iran was pumping endless propaganda \u201cdescribing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The report\u2019s criteria for determining if an account was a bot or troll was, unbelievably, whether the user followed \u201ctwo or more\u201d<\/em> Chinese diplomats. The 250,000-strong network included Western government officials, and media outlets, including CNN. Such a weak evidentiary foundation did not deter mainstream journalists publishing countless stories endorsing the report\u2019s findings.<\/p>\n

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\"Ex-Nazis<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Twitter staff, likely due to past experience at this point, could see what the Center was up to\u00a0\u2013 namely, attempting to \u201cinsert themselves\u201d<\/em> into the \u201ccontent moderation club\u201d<\/em> through which Google, Twitter and Facebook were controlled by the FBI, DHS, and other US government agencies. Executives at these tech giants were unanimously opposed to the Center\u2019s inclusion, not least due to its \u201cmandate for offensive\u201d<\/em> information operations to \u201cpromote American interests.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Hell under the heel<\/h2>\n

After years of bending over backwards to placate the Democratic establishment, Twitter attempted to push back. Over a series of internal emails, various executives spelled out deep concerns about allowing the Center any influence over the platform, and initially rejected an FBI request for the organization to be included in the moderation club\u2019s regular ‘industry call’. It was felt the Center\u2019s involvement would pose \u201cmajor risks \u2026 especially as the election heats up.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Eventually, the FBI offered a compromise\u00a0\u2013 the CIA, NSA, and Global Engagement Center would be able to simply listen to the industry calls, but wouldn\u2019t be active participants. Twitter relented, a decision its higher-ups seem to have quickly come to regret. Before long, the social network was being bombarded with requests to censor content and ban users from every US government body under the sun.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

This extended to US government officials asking for users to be banned because they didn\u2019t personally like an individual in question. Notorious House Intelligence Committee chief Adam Schiff, a Democrat, once asked<\/a> Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry, due to his critical reporting on the Committee\u2019s work. After initially refusing, Sperry was later suspended.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Almost every other request was granted immediately, even those from the Global Engagement Center. This included demands to ban independent media outlets falsely claimed to be \u201cGRU-controlled\u201d<\/em> and linked \u201cto the Russian government.\u201d<\/em> In one email, a former CIA staffer remarked<\/a> that Twitter would soon be unable to deny a single request. \u201cOur window on that is closing,\u201d<\/em> they said.<\/p>\n

<\/picture><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In the weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, Twitter was flooded with demands from so many officials, departments and agencies, they were confused and overworked. If action wasn\u2019t taken promptly, followup emails quickly appeared, asking if action had yet been taken, and if not, why, and when it would be.<\/p>\n

In one request, an FBI official even apologized \u201cin advance for your workload.\u201d<\/em> Once, a no doubt exhausted senior attorney at the social network complained internally, \u201cmy inbox is really f***ed up at this point.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Previous #TwitterFiles threads exposed<\/a> how the FBI paid the social network $3 million to process its requests. Based on the most recent disclosures, it\u2019s clear the company and its staff were significantly underpaid for their efforts. Future releases promise yet further bombshell revelations, but the long-hidden truths divulged so far should prompt every Twitter user to reflect how the site for many years in secret operated as an effective wing of the US intelligence\u00a0\u2013 and may well still do so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

via RT International https:\/\/www.rt.com<\/p>\n

January 5, 2023 at 06:50AM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How American spies used false claims of Russian election interference to bring the tech giant…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[278,8,225],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-6951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-am-headline","category-featured-stories","category-technocracy","tag-sbn"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=1962%2C1280&ssl=1",1962,1280,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=300%2C196&ssl=1",300,196,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=640%2C418&ssl=1",640,418,true],"large":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=640%2C418&ssl=1",640,418,true],"rpg_gallery_admin_thumb":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1",150,150,true],"rpg_gallery_thumb":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1",150,150,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=1536%2C1002&ssl=1",1536,1002,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=1962%2C1280&ssl=1",1962,1280,true],"newsphere-slider-full":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?resize=1280%2C720&ssl=1",1280,720,true],"newsphere-featured":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=1024%2C668&ssl=1",1024,668,true],"newsphere-medium":["https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?resize=720%2C380&ssl=1",720,380,true]},"author_info":{"info":["Peter Santilli"]},"category_info":"AM Headline<\/a> Featured Stories<\/a> Technocracy<\/a>","tag_info":"Technocracy","comment_count":"0","jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/petersantilli.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Screen-Shot-2023-01-05-at-6.49.51-AM.png?fit=1962%2C1280&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/plD2r-1O7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6951"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6951"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6954,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6951\/revisions\/6954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}