Twitter-Files

This is an index of "The Twitter Files" releases.
Last updated 1/13/2023 with release 15

For people new to Twitter: These twitter threads are similar in concept to Facebook threads. The thread starts with a single post from a media creator. That creator then comments under their main post to form a thread. When a media creator wants to be sure others can follow a thread, they will number their comments. This is very important in the event they ever get scrambled a bit, as seems to happen oddly from time to time, but often only when they are not numbered.

Publishing Journalists in order of appearance:

Matt Tabbi - @mtaibbi
Bari Weiss - @bariweiss
Michael Shellenberberger - @shellenbergerMD
Lee Fang - @lhFang
Alex Berenson - @AlexBerenson

Other contributors referenced in the tweets:

Abigail Shrier - @abigailshrier
Nellie Bowles - @nelliebowles
Isaac Grafstein - @isaacgrafstein

1/4/2023 - We were trying to track the releases without a release guide from the publishing journalists. It got a bit confusing. There were some unnumbered supplements that were summaries that caused a little confusion. On 1/4/2023 Matt Tabbi created a substack post that helped clearly identify and link to tall the releases and one of the supplements. (view his release of twitter files directory) At that time, releases 1-12 noted on this website were modified to reflect Matt's Titles and Matt's summaries word for word.

Part 1) Twitter and the Hunter Biden Laptop Story: 12/2/2022 - 3:34pm - Matt Tabbi

Part 1a) The "Exiting" of Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker: 12/6/2022 - 1:38pm - Matt Tabbi

Part 2) Twitter's Secret Blacklists: 12/8/2022 - 4:15pm - Bari Weiss

Part 3) The Removal of Donald Trump, Oct 2020 - Jan 6, 2021: 12/9/2022 - 3:04pm - Matt Taibbi

Part 4) The Removal of Donald Trump, Jan 7, 2021: 12/10/2022 - 3:28pm - Michael Shellenberger

Part 5) The Removal of Donald Trump, Jan 8, 2021: 12/11/2022 - 10:06am - Bari Weiss

Part 6) Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary: 12/16/2022 - 1:00pm - Matt Taibbi

Part 7) The FBI and Hunter Biden's Laptop: 12/19/2022 - 9:44am - Michael Shellenberger

Part 8) How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon's cover Online PysOp Campaign(s): 12/20/2022 -12:02pm - Lee Fang

Part 9) Twitter and other Government Agencies: 12/24/2022 -9:20am - Matt Taibbi

Part 10) How Twitter rigged the COVID Debate: 12/26/2022 - 8:14am - David Zweig

Part 11) How Twitter let the Intelligence Community In: 1/3/2023 - 12:27pm - Matt Taibbi

Part 12) Twitter and the FBI "Belly Button": 1/3/2023 - 12:27pm - Matt Taibbi

Part 13) How Twitter Covered Up COVID Truths: 1/9/2023 - 11:08AM - Alex Berenson

Part 14) The Russiagate Lies : 1/12/2023 - 9:29AM - Matt Taibbi

Part 15) More Adam Schiff Ban Reqs & "Deamplification" : 1/13/2023 - 8:12AM - Matt Taibbi

Appendix 1: Glossary of Terms - (originally posted 1/4/2023 w/ guide for 1-12)

Part 1) Twitter and the Hunter Biden Laptop Story:
12/2/2022 - 3:34pm - Matt Tabbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394

Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.

Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.” (written by M Tabby

Part 1a) The "Exiting" of Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker:
12/6/2022 - 1:38pm - Matt Tabbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1600243405841666048?lang=en
A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.

Part 2) Twitter's Secret Blacklists: 12/8/2022 - 4:15pm - Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier , @shellenbergermd , @nelliebowles , @isaacgrafstein

Part 3) The Removal of Donald Trump, Oct 2020 - Jan 6, 2021: 12/9/2022 - 3:04pm - Matt Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281

First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.

Part 4) The Removal of Donald Trump, Jan 7, 2021: 12/10/2022 - 3:28pm - Michael Shellenberger

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281

This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.

Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.

Part 5) The Removal of Donald Trump, Jan 8, 2021: 12/11/2022 - 10:06am - Bari Weiss

As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.

Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”

Part 6) Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary: 12/16/2022 - 1:00pm - Matt Taibbi

Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.

Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”

6 Supplement
Matt Taibbi
12/18/2022 3:03pm

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1604613292491538432

Part 7) The FBI and Hunter Biden's Laptop: 12/19/2022 - 9:44am - Michael Shellenberger

https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1604871630613753856

The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.

Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

Part 8) How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon's cover Online PysOp Campaign(s): 12/20/2022 -12:02pm - Lee Fang

https://twitter.com/lhfang/status/1605292454261182464

Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.

Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.

Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here

Supplement ) FBI Key facts

Michael Shellenberger
12/21/2022 8:14am

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1605597633455673344

Part 9) Twitter and other Government Agencies: 12/24/2022 -9:20am - Matt Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1606701397109796866

The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.

Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”

Part 10) How Twitter rigged the COVID Debate: 12/26/2022 - 8:14am - David Zweig

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-twitter-rigged-the-covid-debate

David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”

Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.

Podcast with Musk

Michael Shellenberger
12/27/2022 12:00pm

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/elon-and-me-on-the-twitter-files

Part 11) How Twitter let the Intelligence Community In: 1/3/2023 - 12:27pm - Matt Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1610372352872783872

These two threads (11 and 12) focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

Part 12) Twitter and the FBI "Belly Button": 1/3/2023 - 12:27pm - Matt Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1610394197730725889

(description continuation from 11)
The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.

Part 13) How Twitter Covered Up COVID Truths: 1/9/2023 - 11:08AM - Alex Berenson

https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1612526697038897167

New addition Alex Berenson details how Twitter throttled down or erased true information about COVID-19, with the help of a former Pfizer lobbyist, Scott Gottlieb.

Key Revelations: Twitter senior political liaison Todd O’Boyle feared that onetime acting FDA commission Brett Giroir’s correct observations about the effectiveness of natural immunity were “corrosive” and might “go viral,” and put a misleading label on the tweet. Gottlieb also pressured Twitter to remove Berenson himself.

Part 14) The Russiagate Lies : 1/12/2023 - 9:29AM - Matt Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1613589031773769739

One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag

Internal communications at Twitter show that Russian bots were not in fact hyping the classified memo of Republican congressman Devin Nunes in January of 2018.

Key Revelations: Three key Democrats — Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal, and former House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff — cited a think tank called Hamilton 68 in denouncing a memo by Nunes as aided by “Russian influence operations.” Yet all three were told by Twitter executives there were no Russians in the picture. Said former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and… none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

Part 15) More Adam Schiff Ban Reqs & "Deamplification" : 1/13/2023 - 8:12AM - Matt Taibbi

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1613589031773769739

A brief thread of 10 tweets showing that the former head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, sent repeated requests for bans of people critical of their office.

Key Revelation: Schiff and the DNC both not only asked for the takedown of an obvious satire by “Peter Douche,” but requested takedowns of accounts that were critical of the Steele dossier and outed the name of the supposed “whistleblower” in the Ukrainegate case, Eric Ciaramella. Schiff staffers said that while they “appreciate greatly” efforts by Twitter to deamplify certain accounts, they worried such effort s “could… impede the ability of law enforcement to search Twitter.”

Appendix 1: Glossary of Terms - (originally posted 1/4/2023 w/ guide for 1-12)

view his release of terms - he indicated he would be updating as needed

Government Agencies and NGOs
CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces
ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence
FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI
“OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA
GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department
USIC: United States intelligence community
HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts
EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter
DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council
IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin
Twitter or Industry-specific terms
PII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information” is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we interstitial that?”
JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which complaints rise and are decided
PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user, to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”
SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with the most high-profile, controversial rulings
SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content that have been reported for moderation review
CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity
SRT: Strategic Response Team
GET: Global Escalation Team
VF: Visibility Filtering
GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a chronological record of all actions taken on an account
VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.
GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence
BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically
BME: Bulk Media Exploitation
EP Abuse: Episodic abuse
PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process, under a limited exception
FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated. “Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts
IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.

Jim Baker was Chielf Counsel for Twitter. Prior to that he was the Chief Counsel for the FBI. check out the concern he expressess... (from entry 10)

https://twitter.com/bryancanary70/status/1607811954235830272

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