Real Clear Politics By Tim Hains 2/13/2023
Matt Taibbi: "Twitter Files" Reveal The Structure Of The Relationship Between Social Media Companies And FBI Requests For Censorship
"Racket News" and "Twitter Files" journalist Matt Taibbi discusses what he's learned about the relationship between Twitter and the FBI, how Twitter handled the suspension of former President Trump after January 6, and what they found about Russiagate, with Joe Rogan:
JOE ROGAN: Has anything been surprising to you?
MATT TAIBBI: Going into it, I thought that the relationship between these security agencies like the FBI and DHS, and companies like Twitter and Facebook was a little less formal. I thought maybe they had an advisory role. What we find is that it is very formalized.
They have a really intense structure that they've worked out over a period of years, where they have regular meetings, they have a system where the DHS handles censorship requests that come up from the states and the FBI handles the international ones, and they all flood all these companies. It is a big bureaucracy. I don't think we expected to see that.
JOE ROGAN: It is very bizarre to me that they would openly call for censorship in emails. Private transmissions -- but ones that are easily duplicated, you can send them to other people, it can easily get out. They're so comfortable with the idea that the government should be involved in this censorship of what turns out to be true information, especially in the case of the Hunter Biden laptop... that they would send it in emails.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, I think that shows you the mentality. They really, genuinely felt that they were impregnable and they don't have anyone to answer to. A normal person doesn't put incriminating things in emails because we all have the expectation that someday it might come out. These folks didn't act that way.
I was especially shocked by an email from a staffer for Adam Schiff, the [Democratic] California Congressman, where they are just outright saying, "We would like you to suspend the accounts of this journalist and anybody who retweets information about this committee." This is a member of Congress, right?
None of these people have legal backgrounds, but they've got lawyers in the office for sure. This is the House Intelligence Committee. You would think that they would have better operational security.
Another moment that was shocking to me was an email from an FBI agent named Elvis Chan in San Francisco to Twitter, and they're setting up this Signal group which is going to include all the top, sort of, censorship executives at all the big companies, and it is a word document that has all the phone numbers of all these important executives. And the subject line reads, "Phone numbers" and the Word document is just called "secret phone numbers." And I'm just thinking, this is how they taught you to do it at Quantico?
More:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/02/13/matt_taibbi_twitter_files_reveals_the_structure_of_the_relationship_between_social_media_companies_and_fbi_requests_for_censorship.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWQGYpSoiYU
