A Road Back to Reality
How Twitter and the US government manipulated us and what we can learn from it
I’ve been spending the days between Christmas and New Years thinking about the big tech stories of 2022 — many of which I have chronicled in my end of year episode for The Private Citizen. These deliberations always invariably have led my thoughts to revolve around The Twitter Files and what they mean for our society at large. On the day when I published the previous issue of this newsletter, 24 December, Matt Taibbi, one of the principal reporters working on this story, wrote something really important about the Twitter Files revelations and things he learned in the process of discovering them.
Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?
I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.
Something tells me the coming year is going to be a better one.
What Taibbi describes here explains why, to me, The Twitter Files are so important. Why they are the biggest tech story of 2022 and approach, in their importance and revelatory insight, the Snowden disclosures of 2012. Both of these stories pull back the wool from our eyes. They show those involved in the arcana of technological progress that their suspicious rumourings were born out by reality. And they show the ones who have just been bumbling along, using technology because they were told what it does and why they need it, that reality differs significantly from what they were led to believe it would be like. Behind the murky veil of PR speak, government propaganda and well-meaning oversimplification, a new truth takes shape: We have — once again — been surveilled, our opinions have been catalogued and we have been manipulated and lied to.
The Twitter Files show us that intelligence services like the FBI and the CIA, the US military as well as both the governments of Donald Trump and Joe Biden have made it their business to catalogue and censor people’s opinions. They show us that social media wasn’t as much of an organic exchange as we had previously believed. That opinions were suppressed, hidden and outright deleted, simply because they weren’t the opinions of those who hold the reins to our society. It started when Hilary Clinton lost the election in 2016. In every crisis since — Trump trying to get re-elected, the pandemic, the rekindled war in Ukraine — the US government and its many agencies and offices have tried to shape public opinion around its own dogmas. And they have done so by coercing social media platforms to manipulate reality as we see it though the lens of these services. In effect, the US government and these software companies have done exactly what the press — fuelled by the same propaganda dogmas — for years has been accusing regimes like Russia and China of. Thus, in being told to fight the enemy, we have become the enemy.
But, as Taibbi also points out, this news is not all bad. At least we now have definite proof that this has been happening. Proof we can point our friends and relatives at, the next time they declare us mentally unsound for suspecting that Silicon Valley has been manipulating us. Or to show them that the opinions we hold are not as isolated as they would like to believe — or rather, that these opinions are precisely that isolated because the government doesn’t want them to spread. Just like Snowden has vindicated all of the “conspiracy theorists” who believed the NSA was spying on all of us, Taibbi and his colleagues have vindicated those “conspiracy theorists” who felt like their opinions were ridiculed and suppressed with ill intent by those in power.
Trusted Partners and Their Handlers
So what have we learned since I last reported on The Twitter files in the pages of The Sleepy Fox? First of all, we have learned that the FBI is now in the business of cataloguing and censoring people’s speech. The US security state has stretched its tentacles to embrace private companies to do its bidding in this regard. The whole thing works as follows:
Twitter sells its firehose data (a collection of all public tweets, very much in real time) to companies like Dataminr, ZeroFox and Meltwater. These companies have contracts with the FBI and other intelligence services to filter that data for content the agencies find interesting. They pass the resulting tweets and accounts on to the FBI and the FBI, in turn, goes to Twitter to have accounts shut down and shadowbanned and their tweets deleted, hidden from view or discredited with fraudulent labels.
This censorship machine also includes other intelligence services as well as other internet companies. Aside from Twitter, companies like Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Yahoo, LinkedIn and much smaller companies like Reddit and Pinterest share information back and forth with the government. Even Wikipedia is mentioned as the recipient on CIA documents.
Within Twitter, these intelligence services and government agencies were referred to as “trusted partners“. The government seemed to regard their counterparts more like lapdogs. In the case of Twitter, we see the company generally doing what the FBI, the military and the government wants them to do. These agencies mostly just have to ask. But when Twitter pushes back, its executives soon realise that the government is apt to exert more pressure — up to and including leaks in the press that discredited these companies as not doing enough work to combat hate speech and foreign meddling online.
But the manipulation of intelligence services like the FBI and CIA, as well as the pentagon and the government, went much further than controlling the speech of ordinary citizens on social media platforms. Much more importantly, we learned that the FBI was holding meetings with executives of these social media companies and with high-ranking members of the press to discredit the Hunter Biden story before it broke. The FBI, being aware of the story because they had subpoenaed the original laptop, learned though a wiretap on Rudy Giuliani that the story was about to hit the news. So they went to their lapdogs and made sure they would be biased against the story. These “trusted partners” were gravely mislead:
In September 2020, Twitter's Yoel Roth participated in an Aspen Institute “tabletop exercise” on a potential "Hack-and-Dump" operation relating to Hunter Biden The goal was to shape how the media covered it — and how social media carried it. The organizer was Vivian Schiller, the former CEO of NPR, the former head of news at Twitter, the former general manager of The New York Times, and the former Chief Digital Officer of NBC News. Attendees included Facebook’s head of security policy and the top national security reporters for The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post.
After the story was released, the FBI continued its subterfuge. And it seems to have worked.
Then, on September 15, 2020, the FBI’s Laura Dehmlow, who heads up the Foreign Influence Task Force, and Chan, requested to give a classified briefing for Jim Baker (the former general counsel of the FBI and one of the most powerful men in the U.S. intelligence community), without any other Twitter staff, such as Yoel Roth, present.
On October 14, shortly after The New York Post publishes its Hunter Biden laptop story, Roth says, “it isn’t clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else," but adds, “this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation.”
In response to Roth, Baker repeatedly insists that the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked, or both, and a violation of Twitter policy. Baker does so over email, and in a Google doc, on October 14 and 15. And yet it's inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The New York Post had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019.
The Twitter Files have also shown us things about the involvement of the US military at Twitter (and presumably other social media companies). Rather than manipulating the press, the Pentagon was using some good old-fashioned propaganda aimed at the public — albeit updated for the modern world.
Twitter executives have claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform. Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.
The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.
These accounts were using some state-of-the-art technological tricks to make them harder to recognise. Including machine learning techniques to create artificial deepfake composites of people’s faces.
How Twitter Manipulated the Debates around the Pandemic
During the pandemic, both the US governments under Donald Trump and Joe Biden manipulated public opinion though Twitter and other social media platforms. The goal was to censor and discredit people who voiced opinions that differed from the hallowed dogmas of the government. If you disagreed with what the CDC, the WHO or even the nonsensically vague “accepted science” were proselytising, your opinion was apt to get deleted, hidden or slapped with derogatory labels — even if it was in fact completely correct and factual. Something that I experienced myself in the summer of 2021 on YouTube with one of my own podcast episodes.
Once upon a time, freedom of speech was not contingent upon your opinion being right. Freedom of speech is the freedom of opinion, after all, not the freedom of stating facts. Now, it seems, freedom of speech on these platforms only covers opinions that are deemed correct by the Church of Government Institutions.
Or as David Zweig puts it:
I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power — especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.
Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own. But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary.
In his research into The Twitter Files, Zweig shines a light on how the US government, in concert with its own agencies, a number of NGOs, the press and companies like Twitter enshrined its opinion of the pandemic into a halo of truth, while at the same time silencing dissenting opinions.
It did not matter if these opinions were well founded and scientifically sound. Or turned out to be true. They were suppressed because they contradicted the narrative of the powerful and the righteous.
The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.
At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods. And it wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.
When the Biden administration took over, its agenda for the American people can be summed up as: Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.
Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed that employees often debated moderation cases in great detail, and with more care for free speech than was shown by the government. But Twitter did suppress views — and not just those of journalists like Berenson. Many medical and public health professionals who expressed perspectives or even cited findings from accredited academic journals that conflicted with official positions were also targeted. As a result, legitimate findings and questions about our Covid policies and their consequences went missing.
Some accounts were suspended simply for correcting stupid mistakes or misleading statistical analyses in official doctrine. Others were slapped with disparaging labels simply because the research they quoted, peer-reviewed and published in prestigious journals, didn’t agree with the official government viewpoint. Inside Twitter, people even seriously debated if telling people to not be afraid of a disease could be interpreted as misinformation.
Let that one sink in for a moment. How much more like an Orwellian nightmare dystopia can our reality possibly become? We live in a world where government lapdogs are debating whether a world leader telling his people to have hope, to not be afraid, should be something that is forbidden, censored. This sounds like some ideological Imperial newspeak quote deep out of the background lore for Warhammer 40,000:
Hope is the first step towards heresy.
But this isn’t 40K. These are real people in the real world, deciding the fates of millions of people.
Throughout the pandemic, Twitter repeatedly propped up the official government line that prioritizing mitigation over other concerns was the best approach to the pandemic. Information that challenged that view — for example, that pointed out the low risk children faced from the virus, or that raised questions about vaccine safety or effectiveness — was subject to moderation and suppression.
This isn’t simply the story of the power of Big Tech or of the legacy press to shape our debate—though it is most certainly that. In the end it is equally the story of children across the country who were prevented from attending school, especially kids from underprivileged backgrounds who are now miles behind their more well-off peers in math and English. It’s the story of the people who died alone. It’s the story of the small businesses that shuttered. It’s even the story of the perpetually-masked 20-year-olds in the heart of San Francisco for whom there has never been a return to normal.
No Rest for the Wicked
I’ve spent much more time during these holidays on researching The Twitter Files than I had expected. Even one of my favourite video games, Escape from Tarkov, has wiped — meaning everyone is totally hyped to play it right now. But I simply haven’t had any time to devote to it, and probably won’t be able to either for the next few days. These revelations are simply too interesting — and too important — to not study them right now. And the promise of Taibbi’s road map back to reality is too enticing.
Naturally, I will stay on this topic and update you with whatever you need to know about it. Whether in regular newsletters or, it the amount of information warrants it, in special issues like this one. More surprise stories notwithstanding, I am planning to get back to more regular newsletters within the first week of the new year.
Until then, enjoy the festivities and ring in 2023 in style!