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theculturedmarxist · 2 years ago

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In Costa Rica and Latvia today, the Atlantic Council is hosting its 360/OS Summit at RightsCon Costa Rica and NATO’s Riga StratCom. Among other things, the influential think tank will be previewing its “Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web” report, which they hope will “lay the groundwork for stronger cross-sectoral ideation and action” and “facilitate collaboration now between the expanding community dedicated to understanding and protecting trust and safety.”

In human terms, conference attendees are discussing how best to stay on-brand by presenting the Censorship-Industrial Complex as a human rights initiative, and as #TwitterFiles documents show, they have the juice to pull it off.

EngageMedia (which I co-founded and was the long-time Executive Director) co-organized RightsCon in Manila in 2015, and I personally oversaw a lot of the preparations. That looks like a big mistake. I now believe RightsCon represents everything that has gone wrong in the digital rights field. Specifically, it represents the capture of a once-vibrant movement by corporate and government interests, and a broader shift towards anti-liberal and authoritarian solutions to online challenges. I left EngageMedia on good terms, but now have no formal relationship.

In honor of this week’s RightsCon and 360/OS Summit, we dug into the #TwitterFiles to revisit the integration of the Atlantic Council’s anti-disinformation arm, the Digital Forensic Research Labs (DFRLab), while also highlighting its relationship with weapons manufacturers, Big Oil, Big Tech, and others who fund the NATO-aligned think tank.

The Atlantic Council is unique among “non-governmental” organizations thanks to its lavish support from governments and the energy, finance, and weapons sectors. It’s been a key player in the development of the “anti-disinformation” sector from the beginning. It wasn’t an accident when its DFRLab was chosen in 2018 to help Facebook “monitor for misinformation and foreign interference,” after the platform came under intense congressional scrutiny as a supposed unwitting participant in a Russian influence campaign. Press uniformly described DFRLab as an independent actor that would merely “improve security,” and it was left to media watchdog FAIR to point out that the Council was and is “dead center in what former President Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes called ‘the blob.’”

What’s “the blob”? FAIR described it as “Washington’s bipartisan foreign-policy consensus,” but thanks to the Twitter Files, we can give a more comprehensive portrait. In the runup to the 360/OS event in that same year, 2018, Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council boasted to Twitter executives that the attendees would include the crème de la crème of international influence, people he explained resided at the “no-kidding decision-maker level”:

Similar correspondence to and from DFRLab and Twitter outlined early efforts to bring together as partners groups that traditionally served as watchdogs of one another. Perhaps more even than the World Economic Forum meetings at Davos or gatherings of the Aspen Institute in the US, the Atlantic Council 360/OS confabs are as expansive a portrait of the Censorship-Industrial Complex as we’ve found collected in one place.

In October 2018, DFRLab was instrumental in helping Facebook identify accounts for what became known as “the purge,” a first set of deletions of sites accused of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Facebook in its announcement of these removals said it was taking steps against accounts created to “stir up political debate,” and the October 2018 “purge” indeed included the likes of Punk Rock Libertarians, Cop Block, and Right Wing News, among others. Even the progressive Reverb Press, founded by a relatively mainstream progressive named James Reader, found his site zapped after years of pouring thousands of dollars a month into Facebook marketing tools. “That’s what sticks in my craw. We tried to do everything they suggested,” Reader said then. “But now, everything I worked for all those years is dead.”

In the years since, DFRLab has become the central coordination node in the Censorship Industrial Complex as well as a key protagonist in the Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project. Its high-profile role at RightsCon, the biggest civil society digital rights event on the calendar, should concern human rights and free expression activists.

According to their London 2019 event “360/OS brings together journalists, activists, innovators, and leaders from around the world as part of our grassroots digital solidarity movement fighting for objective truth as a foundation of democracy.” Their Digital Sherlocks program aims to “identify, expose, and explain disinformation.” But DRFLabs are more Inspector Gadget (or double agents) than Sherlock Holmes. The Twitter Files reveal DFRLab labeled as “disinformation” content that often turned out to be correct, that they participated in disinformation campaigns and the suppression of “true” information, and that they lead the coordination of a host of actors who do the same.

Twitter Files #17 showed how DFRLab sent Twitter more than 40,000 names of alleged BJP (India’s ruling nationalist party) accounts that they suggested be taken down. DFRLab said it suspected these were “paid employees or possibly volunteers.” However as Racket’s Matt Taibbi noted, “the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.” Twitter recognized there was little illegitimate about them, resulting in DFRLab pulling the project and cutting ties with the researcher.

Twitter Files #19 further revealed DFRLab was a core partner in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which “came together in June of 2020 at the encouragement of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA” in order to “fill the gaps legally” that government couldn’t. As a result, there are serious questions as to whether the EIP violated the US First Amendment.

DFRLab was also a core partner on the Virality Project, which pushed its seven Big Tech partners to censor “stories of true vaccine side-effects.” The Stanford Internet Observatory, which led the project, is now being sued by the New Civil Liberties Alliance for its censorship of “online support groups catering to those injured by Covid vaccines.” Debate as to the frequency of serious adverse events is ongoing, however. The German health minister put it at 1 in 10,000, while others claim it is higher.

The Virality Project sought to suppress any public safety signals at all. The Stanford Internet Observatory is also at the moment reportedly resisting a House Judiciary Committee subpoena into its activities.

TwitterFiles #20 revealed some of the Digital Forensic Lab’s 2018 360/0S events, which brought together military leaders, human rights organizations, the Huffington Post, Facebook and Twitter, Edelman (the world’s biggest PR firm), the head of the Munich Security Conference, the head of the World Economic Forum (Borge Brende) a former President, Prime Minister and CIA head, intel front BellingCat and future Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, all to combat “disinformation.” We can now reveal more.

Introducing the Atlantic Council

The Atlantic Council is a NATO-aligned think tank established in 1961. Its board of directors and advisory board are a Who’s Who of corporate, intelligence and military power, including:

James Clapper – former Director of National Intelligence whose tenure included overseeing the NSA during the time of the Snowden leaks. Asked whether intelligence officials collect data on Americans Clapper responded “No, sir,” and, “Not wittingly.” Clapper also coordinated intelligence community activity through the early stages of Russiagate, and his office authored a key January 2017 report concluding that Russians interfered in 2016 to help Donald Trump. Clapper has been a 360/OS attendee.

Stephen Hadley, United States National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009 (also a 360/OS attendee)

Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State who oversaw the carpet bombing of Vietnam, among other crimes against humanity

Pfizer CEO Anthony Bourla

Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder, The Blackstone Group

Meta’s President for Global Affairs, Nick Clegg

Richard Edelman, CEO of the world’s largest PR firm (and 360/OS attendee)

The Rt. Hon. Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, Former Secretary General of NATO

Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, Former President of the World Bank

Leon Panetta, former US Secretary of Defense & CIA Director. Panetta oversaw the US’s massive growth in drone strikes.

John F. W. Rogers. Goldman Sachs Secretary of the Board

Chuck Hagel, chairman of the Council, sits on the board of Chevron and is also a former US Secretary of Defence.

The Atlantic Council raised $70 million in 2022, $25 million of which came from corporate interests. Among the biggest donors were: the US Departments of Defense State, Goldman Sachs, the Rockefeller Foundation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Google, Crescent Petroleum, Chevron, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, Meta, Blackstone, Apple, BP, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, Raytheon, ExxonMobil, Shell, Twitter, and many more. Ukraine’s scandal-ridden energy company, Burisma, whose links to Hunter Biden were suppressed by the August 2020 table-top exercise coordinated by the Aspen Institute, also made a contribution. You can view the full 2022 “honor roll” by clicking here.

The Atlantic Council is the Establishment, though many suffer from the delusion that in putting on a “Digital Sherlock” cape, they’re somehow with the rebel alliance. The opposite is true. The Atlantic Council and DFRLab don’t hide their militarist affiliations. This week’s OS/360 event at RightsCon Costa Rica runs together with a 360/OS at NATO’s Riga StratCom Dialogue, which DFRLab note they have “worked closely with” “since 2016.”

The Birth of the Digital Forensic Research Lab

DFRLab was founded in 2016, and has been a major catalyst in expanding the “anti-disinformation” industry. Among non-governmental entities, perhaps only the Aspen Institute comes close to matching the scope, scale and funding power of DFRLab. DFRLab claims to chart “the evolution of disinformation and other online and technological harms, especially as they relate to the DFRLab’s leadership role in establishing shared definitions, frameworks, and mitigation practices.”

Almost $7 million of the Atlantic Council’s $61 million spent last year went to the DRFLabs, according to their 2022 annual financial report. Through its fellowship program, it has incubated leading figures in the “disinformation” field. Richard Stengel, the first director of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was a fellow. GEC is an interagency group “within” the State Department (also a funder of the Atlantic Council), whose initial partners included the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and others. GEC is now a major funder of DFRLab and a frequent partner:

In this video, Stengel says, “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t think it’s that awful.”

Stengel was true to his word, and apart from DFRLab, the GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index, which set out to demonetize conservative media outlets it claimed were “disinformation.” (See 37. in the censorship list) He thought the now-disgraced Hamilton68 was “fantastic.” In total, GEC funded 39 organizations in 2017. Despite Freedom of Information requests, only 3 have been made public to date. Roughly $78 million of GEC’s initial $100 million budget outlay for fiscal year 2017 came from the Pentagon, though the budgetary burden has shifted more toward the State Department in the years since.

The Global Engagement Center was established in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, via a combination of an executive order and a bipartisan congressional appropriation, led by Ohio Republican Rob Portman and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy. The GEC was and remains virtually unknown, but reporting in the Twitter Files and by outlets like the Washington Examiner have revealed it to be a significant financial and logistical supporter of “anti-disinformation” causes.

Though tasked by Obama with countering “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests,” its money has repeatedly worked its way back in the direction of policing domestic content, with Gabe Kaminsky’s Examiner reports on the GDI providing the most graphic example.

GEC frequently sent lists of “disinformation agents to Twitter.” Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety referred to one list as a “total crock.” Roth is now a member of DFRLab’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. Let’s hope he brings more trust than Stengel. You can read more on GEC’s funding here.

Other DFRLab luminaries include Simon Clark, Chairman of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (a UK “anti-disinformation” outfit that aggressively deplatforms dissidents), Ben Nimmo (previously a NATO press officer, then of Graphika (EIP and the Virality Project partners) and now Facebook’s Global Threat Intelligence Lead), and Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. Bellingcat has an ominous reputation, which it’s earned in numerous ways, including its funding by the National Endowment for Democracy (see Glenn Greenwald’s recent report and Aaron Maté’s here). Most recently, Bellingcat assisted in the arrest of the 21-year-old Pentagon leaker, further speeding up the abandonment of the Pentagon Papers Principal where the media protected, rather than persecuted, leakers. Bellingcat was part of 360/OS backroom meetings with former intel chiefs, the head of Davos and the Munich security conference among many others, as we will see soon.

As noted in the introduction, DFRLab itself has made several wrong calls on “disinformation.” In one report they highlighted “outright false narratives,” which focused mainly on the notion that Covid was an engineered bioweapon, but lumped in the “unverified” claim Covid was the “result of a lab accident.” A lab accident is now the preferred hypothesis of the US Department of Energy, the FBI, and many others. To the DFRLab it was “disinformation” and a “conspiracy theory.”

The Election Integrity Partnership and the Virality Project

DFRLab were core partners on two of the most influential “anti-disinformation” initiatives of recent times.

The Virality Project built on the EIP and had partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Google, TikTok and more to combat vaccine “misinformation.” Stanford and DFRLab partnered with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Center for Social Media and Politics, and the National Congress on Citizenship. Through a shared Jira ticketing system they connected these Big Tech platforms together, with Graphika using sophisticated AI to surveil the online conversation at scale in order to catch “misinformation” troublemakers.

VP went far beyond any kind of misinformation remit, most infamously recommending to their Big Tech partners that they consider “true stories of vaccine side effects” as “standard misinformation on your platform.”

A Virality Project partner called the Algorithmic Transparency Initiative (a project of the National Congress on Citizenship) went further. Their Junkipedia initiative sought to address “problematic content” via the “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps,” and by building a Stasi-like “civic listening corps,” which in recent years has taken on a truly sinister-sounding mission. The current incarnation might as well be called “SnitchCorps,” as “volunteers have an opportunity to join a guided monitoring shift to actively participate in monitoring topics that disrupt communities”:

Garret Graff, who oversaw the Aspen Hunter Biden table-top exercise, was chairman of that same National Congress on Citizenship when they collaborated on the Virality Project. Both EIP and VP were led by Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a former CIA fellow who engineered the now disgraced New Knowledge initiative, which developed fake Russian bots to discredit a 2016 Alabama senate race candidate, as acknowledged by the Washington Post. You can read Racket’s previous work on the Virality Project here.

DFRLab are the elite of the “anti-disinformation” elite. They work closely with a wide range of actors who have participated in actual disinformation initiatives. Here they’re invited to an elite Twitter group set up by Nick Pickles of “anti-disinformation” luminaries First Draft, also participants in the Hunter Biden laptop tabletop, and the Alliance for Security Democracy, part of the RussiaGate Hamilton68 disinformation operation.

360/OS

The 360/OS event marries this tarnished record with the financial, political, military, NGO, academic and intelligence elite. Some of this is visible through publicly available materials. Twitter Files however reveal the behind the scenes, including closed door, off-the-record meetings.

“I’ve just arrived in Kyiv” Brookie notes in 2017, as he seeks to line up a meeting with Public Policy Director Nick Pickles as they discuss Twitter providing a USD $150K contribution to OS/360 (seemingly secured), and to garner high level Twitter participation.

Pickles is visiting DC and Brookie suggests he also meet with the GEC and former FBI agent Clint Watts of Hamilton 68 renown. “Happy to make those connections,” he chimes.

360/OS events are elite and expensive — $1 million according to Brookie — so closer collaboration with Twitter, especially in the form of funding, is a high priority.

Twitter offers $150,000:

When Brookie mentions the attendees at the “no-kidding decision maker level” he isn’t kidding. Parallel to the 360/OS public program is the much more important off-the-record meeting of “decision makers ranging from the C-Suite to the Situation Room.” Here, he is explicit about a convening of military and financial power. Vanguard 25 is presented as a way to “create a discreet and honest way to close the information gap on challenges like disinformation between key decision makers from government, tech, and media.”

The document boasts of its high-level participants:

More are revealed in email exchanges, including Madeleine Albright and the head of the WEF:

They go on to list a bizarre mishmash of media leaders, intelligence officials, and current or former heads of state:

It appears Germany’s Angela Merkel was out of reach in the end, but many of the others attended this behind the scenes meeting on “disinformation.” Who are they?

Matthias Dopfner – CEO and 22% owner of German media empire Axel Springer SE, the biggest media publishing firm in Europe

Borge Brende – head of the World Economic Forum and former Norwegian foreign minister

Toomas Hendrick Ilves – former President of Estonia who co-chairs the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Blockchain Technology. Hendrick is also a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (where the Stanford Internet Observatory is housed) and is on the advisory council of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, of Hamilton 68 renown.

Chris Sacca – billionaire venture capitalist

Mounir Mahjoubi – previously Digital Manager for President Macron’s presidential campaign, and former Chairman of the French Digital Council

Reid Hoffman – billionaire and Linkedin co-founder

Ev Williams – Former CEO of Twitter and on the Twitter board at the time

Kara Swisher – New York Times opinion writer, who founded Vox Media Recode

Wolfgang Ischinger - Head of the Munich Security Conference

Aleksander Kwasniewski – Former President of Poland. Led Poland into NATO and the EU.

Richard Edelman – CEO of the largest PR company in the world

Elliot Shrage – previously Vice-President of Public Policy at Facebook (DFRLab had election integrity projects with Facebook)

Lydia Polgreen – Huffington Post Editor in Chief

Jim Clapper – former US Director of National Intelligence

Maria Ressa – co-founder of Rappler and soon to be winner of the Nobel Peace Prize

JK Rowling was also invited to give an award, though appears she didn’t make it in the end:

Why would such a group all gather specifically around the question of “disinformation”? Is disinformation truly at such a level that it requires bringing together the world’s most popular author with military and intelligence leaders, the world’s biggest PR company, journalists, billionaires, Big Tech and more? Or is this work to build the case that there is a disinformation crisis, to then justify the creation of a massive infrastructure for censorship? A glimpse of the agenda offers clues:

Here the head of the most important military and intelligence conference in the world (Munich) sits down in a closed door meeting with a former Secretary of State and the Executive Vice-Chair of the Atlantic Council.

Which is followed by a closed door session with the Editor-in Chief of the now-defunct Huffington Post and peace-maker Maria Ressa who presented to the same group of military, intelligence, corporate and other elites. Is the role of a journalist and Nobel laureate to work behind closed doors with militarists and billionaires, or to hold them to account?

At 2022’s OS/360 at RightsCon Ressa conducted a softball interview on disinformation with current US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. In testimony last April 2023, former CIA deputy director Michael Morrell stated that Blinken “set in motion the events that led to the issuance of the public statement” by more than 50 former intelligence officials that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russia information operation.”

The Twitter Files also revealed that in August 2020 the Aspen Institute organized a table-top exercise to practice how best to respond to a “hack and leak” of a Hunter Biden laptop. The laptop only came to light however two months later. In attendance was First Draft (now the Information Futures Lab), the New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, CNN, Yahoo! News, Facebook, Twitter and more. Here, DFRLab head Graham Brookie speaks with the Aspen Institute’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the Hunter Biden tabletop exercise.

After it turned out the Hunter Biden laptop was real, and the disinformation operation was more appropriately described as having been led by the likes of Blinken and the Aspen Institute. The appropriate response is apparently for RightsCon, DFRLab, Blinken and Ressa to put on a nice forum to promote these figures as “anti-disinformation” leaders.

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Former DFRLab fellow and intel front Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins is also invited to the closed door sessions with a former head of the CIA, a former Prime Minister and a President. How do you keep power accountable when you are in the same cozy club? This theme runs throughout. Bellingcat is featured heavily at the public sessions also:

Higgins has a unique way of expressing himself online, given the DFRLab emphasis on striking out against divisiveness:

Would this pass RightsCon’s code of conduct? If not, he appears to be good enough for DFRLab to promote.

On the public side, we see Amnesty International participating to further collapse the distinction between those who are meant to hold power to account, and the powerful themselves. The Iraq war gave us embedded journalists, and the “anti-disinformation” field gives us embedded digital rights activists.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Chris Krebs also joined the closed door session. Krebs was Co-Chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder. Other members included Prince Harry, the Virality Project’s Alex Stamos (Stanford Internet Observatory) and Kate Starbird (University of Washington and previous 360/OS participant), Katie Couric, and more. Craig Newmark attended as an observer.

Meanwhile Renee DiResta, former CIA fellow and Stanford Internet Observatory Research Director, presented with the former Prime Minister of Sweden. This was years before she would launch the Virality Project, and take on the bugbear of “true stories of vaccine side effects.”

The President of the Atlantic Council participated in an “off-the-record, “ behind closed doors conversation on “trust” with the CEO of the world’s biggest PR firm, Edelman.

“Public relations” and “trust” may well be opposites, and trust is being destroyed not by the disinformation street crime that these groups claim to target, but by the disinformation corporate crime protected by, or in some cases created by these same people. Disinformation is real, but its biggest purveyors are governments and powerful corporate interests.

DFRLab and RightsCon show just how far the capture of civil society by elite interests has come. Again, I made a mistake helping to co-organize RightsCon in 2015. The jumping in bed with the government and Big Tech was arguably there in 2015, though to a much lesser degree. It now partners with militarists in the form of the Atlantic Council and is an enabler of the “disinformation” grift that is so deeply impacting freedom of speech and expression.

The air-gaps that should separate civil society, media, military, billionaires, intelligence and government have collapsed, and many of these actors have formed a new alliance to advance their shared interests. If weapons manufacturers funding human rights is considered legitimate then where is the red line? Effectively, there is none.

This collapse however has also been pushed by funders, who have been proactive in asking NGOs to collaborate more with Big Tech and government - something I successfully resisted for my almost 18 years at EngageMedia, critically RightsCon was the only time I let my guard down.

The RightsCon sponsor matrix wouldn’t be out of place at NASCAR:

This is the equivalent of hosting a Climate Change conference sponsored by Shell, BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil. How do you keep power accountable when Big Tech pays your wage? The “let’s all work together” approach has failed. The weakest partner, civil society, got captured and we lost. Many more lost their way and have acquiesced to and often enabled much of the new censorship regime.

A renewed and much more independent digital rights movement, with a strong commitment to freedom of expression, is well overdue.

Note: A previous version of this article mistook Blackstone for Blackwater. This has been corrected.

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tipco613 · 2 years ago

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New Post has been published on http://cryptonewsuniverse.com/the-big-reveal-of-the-twitter-files-msm-ignores-time-to-be-awakened/

The Big Reveal Of The Twitter Files MSM Ignores Time To Be Awakened

The Big Reveal Of The Twitter Files MSM Ignores. Time To Be Awakened

A particular comment by stalwart Elon Musk went viral after he orchestrated the first Twitter files release in December 2022. “Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.” Since that time, 19 more Twitter Files have been released. They've revealed a concerning relationship between the government and big tech, which will likely evolve as online censorship laws come into force.

This article outlines the Twitter Files, including why they're being released, who's been publishing them, what they say, and how the powers that be will push back. As many will know, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk finalized his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. In the months preceding the acquisition, Elon promised to bring more transparency to the social media platform to increase trust. In November, he delivered. He tweeted,

Image source: Twitter

In December 2022, American author and journalist Matt Taibbi released the first set of Twitter files in a thread. Naturally, the first set of Twitter Files explained what they are precisely and discussed the now infamous suppression of a story about President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden leading up to the 2020 election.

What Are The Twitter Files?

So, what are the Twitter Files, and why are they significant? In short, the Twitter Files are a collection of internal documents that prove that the US government was working closely with the social media platform to censor certain information. It’s significant because free speech is protected under the First Amendment in the United States.

To be clear, Twitter is a private company, meaning it is not obligated to abide by the First Amendment. However, the US government is obliged to comply with the First Amendment. According to some constitutional experts, its use of Twitter to suppress free speech could therefore be illegal.

Another reason the Twitter files are significant is that they suggest the US government could be censoring other social media platforms. This article explains the collaboration of 3 letter agencies with legacy social media and evidence to support this hypothesis; the Twitter Files add to the pile.

As previously mentioned, there have been 19 sets of Twitter files so far, and they've been posted as lengthy threads by multiple renowned journalists. Besides Matt Taibbi, the list includes Michael Shellenburger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, and Alex Berenson, all well respected. But of course, they've all since become substantive enemies of the state for being involved in this.

Image source: The Epoch Times

It's important to point out that the Twitter files aren't just sitting there waiting to be reported. In an interview with Kim Iverson, David Zweig revealed that even though they have unrestricted access to Twitter data, thanks to Elon, it's been challenging to dig up the information they're looking for.

This is partly because Twitter systems weren't designed to be searched. In other words, it’s like they have access to the entire internet but no search engine to search through it. The difficulty is also due to the obstruction and sabotage that the journalists faced from Twitter employees, most of whom have since been fired.

The silver lining is that it's been easy for them to know when they found something. Matt Taibbi gave an amusing example in an interview with Joe Rogan: A document containing phone numbers for a secret social media censorship group chat for big tech companies was simply and openly titled ‘Secret Phone Numbers.’ So with that information in mind, we’ll look at what they found.

Incidentally, both political parties were involved in social media censorship. As was almost every single branch of the US government, particularly the intelligence agencies. The difference is that Republican-affiliated entities sought to suppress the discussion of specific subjects, namely panic buying at grocery stores at the start of the pandemic. By contrast, Democrat-affiliated entities demanded the suppression of particular people, specific tweets, and retweets.

Image source: Running List of All Twitter Files Releases – Jordan Sather

Part One Of The Twitter Files

The first set of Twitter Files discussed the suppression of a story about Hunter Biden. The short story about Hunter Biden is that he left a laptop at a computer repair shop containing information that suggested that his dad, “the big guy,” was doing shady stuff.

The New York Post published the story in October 2020, shortly before the November 2020 election. Twitter and other social media outlets suppressed the story at the request of Democrat interests. Given the testimony of former Twitter executives, many Republicans have since argued that the 2020 election outcome would have been different were it not for the censorship of the story.

Part Two Of The Twitter Files

The second set of Twitter Files was published a few days later. The topic was Twitter's secret blacklisting policy, also known as Shadow Banning. For context, Twitter executives had denied that the platform shadowbanned users for years and would never do so for political purposes.

However, the second set of Twitter Files confirmed that Twitter had a shadowbanning system designed to limit the reach of specified users. This suppression was almost always political. It also went into overdrive during the pandemic, with users skeptical of pandemic restrictions being targeted.

Parts 3, 4, and 5 Of The Twitter Files

The third set of Twitter Files was published the same day as the second. The topic was the controversial removal of the then-US President, Donald Trump, from the platform. This was also the topic for the fourth and fifth sets of Twitter files, all outlined here for the sake of simplicity.

To begin with, Twitter's top staff worked tirelessly to suppress Trump's reach on Twitter. Following the contentious events of January 6th, 2020, Twitter's team devised a new content policy to justify banning Trump. The files seemed to imply that they were pushed to do this by Democrat interests.

This undertaking involved axing Twitter's Public Interest policy, which stated that information should remain on the platform, no matter how controversial, so long as it's not illegal. The Public Interest policy was replaced by a new approach called the ‘Glorification of Violence' policy, with Trump as the first offender.

As explained by Matt in the interview with Joe Rogan, mentioned above, the glorification of violence policy includes an assessment of who follows a person on Twitter to determine whether that person incited violence. So, if even a single account that’s “deemed violent” follows Trump, it means that person was violating the policy.

Some may think the new policy is justified, but if you take a moment to consider that almost every account on Twitter probably has at least one follower that Twitter could consider to be violent. In other words, the policy could be applied to whichever accounts Twitter wants to eliminate, which is brutal.

Part Six Of The Twitter Files

The sixth set of Twitter Files is even more formidable. They revealed that Twitter was in such frequent contact with the FBI that the social media company could be considered a subsidiary of the intelligence agency.

The FBI provided hundreds of takedown requests, and Twitter always complied. Also, the number of former FBI agents working at Twitter was so large that they'd created their own Slack channel. For reference, Slack is a platform used to coordinate workplace communications.

Much of the sensitive info in the Twitter files came from these Slack discussions. These files also revealed that Twitter complied with censorship requests from NGOs. Matt concluded, “What most people think of as the Deep State is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”

Part Seven Of The Twitter Files

The seventh set of Twitter Files returns to the topic of the suppressed Hunter Biden story. This is because the independent journalist discovered that both Twitter and the FBI were aware that the contents of the laptop were likely genuine but insisted that it was Russian disinformation.

Part Eight Of The Twitter Files

The eighth set of Twitter Files was about another formidable subject, and that's how Twitter aided and abetted the US military to execute propaganda operations overseas. They shape narratives about foreign conflicts that put the US in a positive light and even use fake accounts with AI-generated deep fakes to this end.

In August 2022, a Stanford Internet Observatory report.pdf exposed a U.S. military covert propaganda network on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter & other apps using fake news portals and deep fake images and memes against U.S. foreign adversaries. The U.S. propaganda network relentlessly pushed narratives against Russia, China, and other foreign countries. They accused Iran of "threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth" and of harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.

Part 9 Of The Twitter Files

The ninth set of Twitter Files was about Twitter's relationship with all the other US government agencies. This set of Twitter Files seems to have responded to the FBI's response to the previous set of files which the feds predictably claimed were all a “conspiracy theory to discredit the agency.”

Funnily enough, the Twitter Files found that the FBI acted as a concierge between Twitter and other US government agencies, allowing them all to submit content takedown requests. This included censorship of discussions about atrocities related to the war in Ukraine.

The long list of US Government agencies included local police departments, which had the power to search and censor users and posts. These privileges were granted by all the big tech companies involved in online censorship meetings, including Facebook, Microsoft, and even Reddit.

Part Ten Of The Twitter Files

The 10th set of Twitter Files is about the very contentious topic of the pandemic. These Twitter files found that accurate information was suppressed and censored if it went against the official pandemic narrative. The instructions for this suppression came directly from the White House, both under former President Trump and current President Biden. Whereas the Trump White House was concerned about panic-buying, the Biden White House asked Twitter to censor specific people and posts.

That list of people included former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. The posts included those that cited official government statistics or statements about the pandemic, which discredited the official narrative, what they call ‘the science.’

Part 11 Of The Twitter Files

The 11th set of Twitter Files explains the history of the social media platform’s partnership with intelligence agencies. This set of files suggests this collusion only began in 2017 when Democrat interests insisted that Trump had won the 2016 election due to Russian interference.

According to the Twitter files, there appears to be no evidence of significant Russian interference in the 2016 election. On the contrary, Russian interference was used by US government agencies as an excuse to infiltrate big tech companies further and dictate how information is shared online.

Part 12 Of The Twitter Files

This ties into the 12th set of Twitter Files, suggesting that Twitter was coerced into complying with the US government. Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of so-called suspicious accounts. They would have politicians push for anti-big tech legislation and leak information to the press whenever Twitter refused to comply with their censorship requests.

This combination of private and public pressure intensified when the pandemic began. US government agencies pressured Twitter to suppress information about the pandemic's origins. The US government has since pulled a complete 180° with the FBI confirming original suspicions were indeed correct.

Part 13 Of The Twitter Files

The 13th set of Twitter Files conducted by Alex Berenson discusses how Twitter suppressed the debate about treatments for Covid, particularly the tweet from Dr. Brett Giroir claiming that natural immunity was superior to vaccine immunity was "corrosive" and might "go viral." After being pressured by a top Pfizer board member, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, Twitter censored content challenging the narrative, saying it might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines which his company directly benefits from.

He also went after another tweet about Covid’s low risk to children. Pfizer would soon win the okay for its mRNA shots for children, so keeping parents scared was crucial. Gottlieb claimed on Twitter and CNBC that he was not trying to suppress debate on mRNA jabs. These files prove that Gottlieb, a board member at a company that has made $70 billion on the shots, did just that.

Part 14 Of The Twitter Files

The 14th set of Twitter Files was released in mid-January. They reveal how trending hashtags on Twitter that went against popular narratives were attributed to Russian bots and suppressed despite Twitter having zero internal evidence of Russian involvement. Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian but were roundly ignored.

You may remember that Russian bots were blamed for almost everything a few years ago. These Twitter Files recount how this baseless claim became overblown to the point that mainstream media alleged Russian bots controlled both sides of the narrative.

The Russians were also blamed for #ReleaseThe Memo, #Schumer Shutdown, #Parkland Shooting, and even #Gun Control Now to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times. The Russiagate scandal was built on the cowardly dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines for years.

Part 15 & 16 Of The Twitter Files

This relates to the 15th set of Twitter Files, which reveals that intelligence agencies started alleging Russian bots were running large republican-leaning accounts. These allegations were so extreme that even Twitter's censorship policy teams pushed back against suppression requests.

In mid-February, Matt Taibbi published the 16th set of Twitter Files and provided an excellent summary of the previous 15 files.

“The Twitter files have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the US intelligence community.”

Matt also laments that there's been next to no mainstream media coverage of the Twitter Files except that Donald Trump had requested Twitter take down a spiteful tweet. Matt then highlighted a few more egregious cases of such requests to see if the media would cover them. All he got was crickets.

Part 17 Of The Twitter Files

The 17th set of Twitter files was published in early February 2023 and is relative to a US Government agency, The Global Engagement Center (GEC), created in Obama’s last year of presidency. The GEC is an interagency group whose initial partners include the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, and Special Operations Command (SOCOM), et al.

They reveal that it used Twitter for geo-political purposes, with agencies instructing the social media platform to suppress and censor posts and accounts assumed to be affiliated with foreign intelligence. Similarly to the obsession with Russian bots, hundreds, if not thousands, of Twitter accounts were incorrectly labeled as associated with Indian or Chinese intelligence.

The Twitter Files thread reveals that the bombshell reports have managed to attract the attention of US politicians, who summoned two journalists, Matt Taibi and Michael Shellenburger, to a hearing on March 9th, 2023.

Part 18 Of The Twitter Files

The 18th set of Twitter Files relates to the Censorship Industrial Complex, which demonstrates that Twitter was a partner to the government. Along with other tech firms, it held a regular “industry meeting” with the FBI and DHS. It developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, and even local police.

At its essence, the Censorship-Industrial Complex is a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth to serve broader narrative objectives. It’s the opposite of what a free press does. The Twitter Files show the principles of this incestuous self-appointed truth squad. It’s moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back, claiming a special right to do what they say is bad practice for everyone else: be fact-checked only by themselves.

Part 19 Of The Twitter Files

Since then, new information released on the Twitter Files on March 17th, 2022, revealed that the US government and major social media companies worked hand-in-hand with Stanford University to censor or limit accurate information about COVID-19.

Independent Journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted,

"The Virality Project in 2021 worked with government to launch a pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content. At least six major Internet platforms were 'onboarded' … daily sending millions of items for review."

For reference, the Virality Project is a ‘coalition of research entities focused on supporting real-time information exchange between the research community, public health officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, and social media platforms,’ per their website.

The goal of the project, created by Stanford University, was to identify people on social media who said things about COVID-19 that the government did not want them to say. Perhaps the most glaring issue Matt Taibbi highlighted in the Twitter Files drop was that the Virality Project was “repeatedly, extravagantly wrong.”

Autocrats Push Back

How will the ‘powers that be’ push back against the Twitter Files? The thing is, they’ve been pushing back Elon Musk for the entire time. One of the main ways they've been doing this is by going after Elon's other enterprises. Tesla has been hit with a barrage of baseless lawsuits and regulatory threats.

Twitter has also been the target of a relentless propaganda campaign, claiming its fresh free-speech approach is destroying the world in every possible way. Many would say that’s unfair, considering that Twitter and other mainstream social media platforms had made the world a nastier place long before Elon got involved.

Most of this propaganda came from the European Union, which will begin enforcing its online censorship laws mid-year. Conceivably, the pressure on Elon and Twitter will only increase as we get closer to the 2024 election in the United States. It's clear that Twitter significantly influences political discourse in the USA. What's said on the platform could affect the next election's outcome, which gives Elon lots of power.

Considering that he voted Republican for the first time last year, it's likely that he will be promoting whichever conservative candidate is selected to run. Bearing in mind that most US agencies seem to be aligned with the Democrats, it's likely they will do everything they can to prevent a Republican victory.

This begs the question of how exactly they will take down Twitter. After all, Elon is a formidable foe; he's one of the wealthiest men in the world, has many connections, and has a massive loyal following. He can access advanced technologies thanks to all the companies he owns and operates. And therein lies the answer; cutting-edge technologies.

Putting on the ‘tin foil hat’ for a moment, it's plausible that US Agencies could attempt to take down Twitter by flooding it with deep fakes or images related to elections. This could give them the perfect excuse to return to Twitter, saying they're not taking content moderation seriously. US Agencies already have a history of doing this. (recall the eighth set of Twitter files above.)

Luckily Elon is a smart guy and probably saw this coming from a million miles away, and arguably one of the reasons why the paid verification badges were introduced. It makes it easy to identify which accounts are malicious. A digital forensics technique can also identify deep fakes, providing it stays vigilant of fast-paced emerging technology. This will make it easy for Twitter to scrub most, if not all, deep fake content before the 2024 election. The caveat is that it could simultaneously require everyone using Twitter to complete KYC to use the platform.

At that point, the US government agencies would need to find a way to remove Elon from Twitter and install someone who will use this information for their own agenda. This takeover could happen to all legacy social media.

In politics, deepfakes are the inevitable next step in the attack on truth. In addition, deepfakes weaponize information to maximize the dynamics of a social media ecosystem that prizes traffic above nearly all else.

The Panacea For This Coup d'etat

The only solution to this takeover is decentralized alternatives. Many platforms are popping up to combat government agencies' perverse centralization and infiltration. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has backed the development of an alternative micro-blogging platform like Twitter called Bluesky. Dorsey described it as “an open decentralized standard for social media.”

Markethive has gone one step further by incorporating an inbound marketing, social network, and content broadcasting platform for entrepreneurs. The ecosystem is a conceptual cottage industry, including a merchant accounting system and cryptocurrency. It has adopted the necessary measures to thwart any power plays by autocrats and heading toward total decentralization. CEO of Markethive, Tom Prendergast, says,

"Now more than ever, we rely on Web3 technology, so the safest and most logical way to go to achieve financial freedom, peace of mind, and self-sovereignty is online with a Blockchain-driven Market Network that is divinely inspired and will withstand and survive the perils, the world is now facing. We are in a time of biblical proportions Markethive is building the proverbial ark."

The transition from centralization to decentralization would be highly bullish for the cryptocurrency blockchains that support decentralized social media platforms. Given the calamity of the geopolitical corruptness and failing monetary system, an alternative crypto economy is making more sense than ever.

Editor and Chief Markethive: Deb Williams. (Australia) I thrive on progress and champion freedom of speech. I embrace "Change" with a passion, and my purpose in life is to enlighten people to accept and move forward with enthusiasm. Find me at my Markethive Profile Page | My Twitter Account | and my LinkedIn Profile.

#cryptocurrency #markethive #TwitterFiles

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