I’m not going to rehash the Taibbi revelations, because you should read them in their entirety on your own. They make interesting reading, especially if you are not convinced that the government has engaged in what amounts to a major disinformation campaign aimed at you. They have conducted information warfare against the American people, promoting false narratives and suppressing dissent.

These Clemson professors apparently think that is fine, and in my opinion, simply gloss over the most important revelations, and promote a “we did it for your own good” defense.

Before they get into defending themselves, they reveal their own dishonesty by quickly referring to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship without for a moment acknowledging that the suppression was based upon disinformation disseminated by the FBI. Rather, throughout the piece, they refer to themselves, the FBI, and the Intelligence Community as a whole as disinterested public servants simply trying to defend Americans from disinformation.

Sure thing.

The files have explored a range of issues Twitter executives needed to wrestle with, mostly related to content and account moderation. The first release in early December addressed the decision-making around the Hunter Biden laptop story—and since then, the files have gone on to explore topics ranging from Twitter’s decision to suspend Donald Trump’s account to how Twitter may have aided the Pentagon in a “covert online psyop campaign.”

A January installment of the Twitter Files, written by Taibbi, explored the relationship between Twitter and the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. We were surprised to find that we at Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub—a small research lab at a mid-sized, land-grant university in the Southeast and not a part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus—were one of Taibbi’s central talking points in this thread. Taibbi presented us as another force, like the FBI, pushing Twitter to make attributions of Russian disinformation. It’s true that we have engaged with Twitter periodically over the past several years regarding foreign influence operations on the platform. Our appearance in the files, however, was only one side of one piece of a years-long dialogue. We learned a great deal about platform moderation from these exchanges, far more than is presented in the Twitter Files.

Of course they learned a great deal about platform moderation–they participated directly in a pressure campaign that at one point had the government attempt to get Twitter to ban 250,000 Twitter users. You bet they learned a lot because they became integral to the platforms culling information not helpful to the Narrative™ from appearing there.

The files, and how they are being interpreted, tell us much about how society views the platforms as well as how the platforms view their own role in civil society and in relationship with the government. Based on the online response to this recent thread, many readers of the files were apparently shocked that U.S. intelligence (and others) would provide social media platforms with information and attempt to have a voice in moderation decisions. Tucker Carlson has called what was revealed in Taibbi’s release about Twitter’s relationship with the intelligence community “prima facie illegal … the government cannot censor political speech.” Ben Shapiro has suggested it is evidence that Twitter was being “manipulated from the outside by the government and by the media.” But while U.S. intelligence may have overstepped in some cases (such as possibly seeking support for their own operations abroad), much of what the files show in this case is simply mechanisms by which light is being cast on possible foreign information operations. Far from illegal, working with U.S. platforms to stop foreign information operations in this way is exactly what we should expect from the government.

“Far from illegal, working with U.S. platforms to stop foreign information operations in this way is exactly what we should expect from the government.”

Yeah, no. The US government and its partners worked diligently to suppress information it didn’t like. That is hardly the same thing. And, as even this sentence admits, it pressured Twitter to spread disinformation on its behalf.

The Hunter Biden laptop case is a superb example. By now the entire world knows that the laptop and its contents are as real as claimed. Even Hunter himself pretty much admitted it by demanding criminal probes against people using the information from the laptop. Yet the FBI planted the seeds, despite knowing the laptop was real, which led to suppressing the story. And, likely though unproven, provided talking points to other media outlets that this was disinformation.

We do know that 51 former intelligence officials asserted it, and it beggars belief that they did this without the knowledge of and cooperation with people still in the agencies.

This likely changed the course of a presidential election. Yet the authors characterize it as stopping “foreign information operations.”

I call BS. As with all the other BS that they defend.

Engaging with experts from outside the organization to assist with the moderation process offers a variety of benefits. Outside groups come with skills and information the platforms may lack. The government may, for instance, have classified intelligence. Many nongovernmental organizations that work with the platforms offer linguistic and regional expertise, including Venezuela’s Cazadores de Fake News or Georgia’s Myth Detector. Academic research teams, like ourselves, offer technical insight and alternative approaches to analysis.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the platforms are significantly more knowledgeable and well-resourced than they are. In reality, platforms’ trust and safety teams are often too small and too overworked. Team members are more likely to have gotten their job because they have above-average technical skills rather than, for instance, in-depth knowledge of the politics and culture of Myanmar. To best fight modern information operations takes a broader toolkit than the platforms have alone, a toolkit that may include anything from extremely specific political and cultural knowledge to on-the-ground intelligence. Foreign nations, including China, Russia, and Iran, are waging an ongoing information war on the West. The platforms cannot and should not be left to fight it alone.

Yeah, whatever. First of all, one thing we have learned beyond doubt is that foreign disinformation operations present less of a threat than US disinformation operations, and the Twitter Files show that these “experts” are PR flacks for the Left. Nothing more.

If there is disinformation being spread, the government should counter it, not suppress it. It is quite obvious that the government’s definition of disinformation boils down to “anything that inconveniences us.” And of course, it does. Give anybody the power and they will eventually misuse it. Give politicians the power and they will crush their enemies because politics is about power and control.

Trust and Safety should be about suppressing illegal content, not ideas. If rooting out falsehoods were its mission then the first victims of censorship would be the MSM, the government, and every politician. Don’t forget, The Washington Post and The New York Times got Pulitzer Prizes for pushing the utterly discredited Steele Dossier.

Which, by the way, was written based on the information provided by Russians. Literal Russian/Clinton misinformation washed through a British spy and a firm run by former MSM reporters.

Start there.

You can read their whole argument, but it boils down to this: it is BS. Not even convincing BS.

They could have done better, but why try? Only conservatives will call them out, they will retain their grants and influence, and the MSM will still push their lies.