There is no end to Twitter drama, past or present. Today, Matt Taibbi has published part six of the Twitter Files, this one focused on the site’s close connection with the FBI. As he frames it with his headline, Twitter was acting as a subsidiary of the FBI.

2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

That’s about one email a week which seems like a lot.

6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

https://t.co/bcttGWKpFW unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Here’s the sort of thing he’s talking about. The FBI just sends Twitter a list of accounts that “may potentially” violate TOS.

14.Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8: pic.twitter.com/gwiDtPcWZv

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Here’s the joke.

Not funny but also kind of an old joke. How much are we paying to the FBI to flag jokey tweets by people with a handful of followers? That particular account didn’t get suspended and as Taibbi points out, people on both sides of the aisle were making the same joke.

16. “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

https://t.co/ZQeb9Ko06p an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”: pic.twitter.com/yILcgjFyev

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

20. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin: pic.twitter.com/zQzNGQMKmO

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Again, a lot of these accounts are people with very few followers and low engagement. So the first question is why is anyone bothering and the second is should the FBI really be handing over lists of people for Twitter to ban? Granted they’re not ordering Twitter to do anything specific but that’s partly because they don’t need to. What would happen if Twitter just said no?

22.When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Overall, various government agencies seem pretty cozy with Twitter.

https://t.co/9IfX3IPzyi a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: pic.twitter.com/oE8fDjomNP

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

28. About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Again, how many FBI man-hours were spent on this stuff?

https://t.co/v2RzNXCtZw, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on: pic.twitter.com/WfVudSRvIK

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

All the while, the government is pressing for more integration.

32.The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.” pic.twitter.com/by9cpm7YVf

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

34.While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”: pic.twitter.com/Jq4qaYK9Tm

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

36.There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI: pic.twitter.com/lNbgvsu5LV

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

But it wasn’t just the FBI.

38.State governments also flagged content.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

40.“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet: pic.twitter.com/W4DQvYwq7Z

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

42.If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS: pic.twitter.com/Klz132BZ59

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

And that’s it for this installment. Taibbi says there’s more coming from Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger soon on different topics.

Like every other one of these Twitter Files reports, how people feel about it seems to depend on where they were already standing. Is this a nothingburger or proof the FBI is defacto banning accounts?

My own take is that nothing described here sounds illegal but a lot of it seems like a complete waste of time. Also the collegial behavior between Twitter and the FBI makes it awfully close to a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. What you have here is government controlling speech albeit not directly and not by demanding specific outcomes. Still it’s clear what the FBI expects and Twitter seems to understand that and to generally go along with it.

This was one of the possibilities that was raised a few weeks ago about the Hunter Biden story after the FBI explicitly warned Twitter that there might be some disinformation involving Hunter Biden prior to the election. The government/FBI didn’t technically shut down the NY Post story, Twitter did. But it sure looks like the FBI set the conditions up such that Twitter would be eager to do what the FBI couldn’t.

Update: Fox News got a statement about this from the FBI.

In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

At the risk of repeating myself, it’s interesting the FBI is emphasizing that First Amendment spark gap I was describing above. We’re just notifying Twitter, what they do is up to them. That sounds good except everyone knows Twitter is largely going to roll with what the FBI tells them to do even if, as in the examples above, there was no foreign influence and no covert or criminal activity.

Here’s coverage from Special Report: