Elon Musk�s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent
reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss,
and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most
important news stories of our time. The Twitter Files story
encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political
scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an
unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to
throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through
censorship and propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should
also prod us to action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair
elections, and indeed our country.

After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of
useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation
policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered
(and still borders) on parody. In the process, Musk coordinated with
Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on
internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political
events going back years: the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter�s
secret policy of shadow banning, President Trump�s suspension from
Twitter after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot, the co-opting of Twitter
by the FBI to suppress �election disinformation� ahead of the 2020
election, Twitter�s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign,
its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative, its
complicity in the Russiagate hoax, and its gradual capitulation to the
direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community�with the FBI as a
go-between�in content moderation.

As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files �show the FBI acting as
doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship,
encompassing agencies across the federal government�from the State
Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.�

The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let
us consider just three installments and their related implications: the
suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump,
and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories
reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an
out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly
hostile to the First Amendment.

Hunter Biden�s Laptop
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published its first major expos�
based on the contents of Hunter Biden�s laptop, which had been dropped
off at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never picked
up. It was the first of several stories detailing Biden family
corruption and revealing the close involvement of Joe Biden in his
son�s foreign business ventures in the years during and after Biden�s
vice presidency. Hunter, although doing no real work, was making tens
of millions of dollars from foreign companies in places like Ukraine
and China. The Post�s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what
was happening.

According to the emails on the laptop, Hunter introduced then-Vice
President Biden to a top executive at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy
company that was paying Hunter (who had no credentials or experience in
the energy business) up to $50,000 a month to sit on its board. Soon
after this meeting, Vice President Biden pressured the Ukrainian
government to fire a prosecutor investigating the company. In an
earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter for �advice on how
you could use your influence� to benefit the company. The Post�s
ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking level of
corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose emails suggest
his father was closely connected to his overseas business ventures.
Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter providing
access to Joe Biden.

Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It
removed links to the Post�s reporting, appended warnings that they
might be �unsafe,� and prevented users from sharing them via direct
message�a restriction previously reserved for child pornography and
other extreme cases. In an extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the
Post�s account and the accounts of anyone who shared links to its
reporting, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
These actions were justified under the pretext that the stories
violated Twitter�s hacked-materials policy, even though there was no
evidence, then or now, that anything on the laptop was hacked.

Twitter executives at the highest levels were directly involved in
these decisions. Former head of Legal, Policy, and Trust Vijaya Gadde,
the company�s chief censor, played a key role, as did former head of
Trust and Safety Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems to have been done
without the knowledge of Twitter�s then-CEO Jack Dorsey. And it was
done despite internal pushback from other departments.

�I�m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as
unsafe,� wrote a Twitter communications executive in an email to Gadde
and Roth. �Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?�
asked former VP of Global Communications Brandon Borman. His question
was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker�a former top lawyer
for the FBI and the most powerful member of a growing cadre of former
FBI employees working at Twitter�who said that �caution is warranted�
and that some facts �indicate the materials may have been hacked.�

But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives
knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and
every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets
like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly
admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the
White House.

If there were no hacked materials in the Post�s reporting, why did
Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the
Post published its first laptop story, there had been an organized
effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information
about Hunter Biden. The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody
since the previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer
repair shop. So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of
straightforward criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as
of corruption and influence-peddling.

The evening before the Post ran its first story on the laptop, FBI
Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Roth at Twitter through
a special one-way communications channel the FBI had established with
the company. For months, the FBI and other federal intelligence
agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss news reports about Hunter
Biden ahead of the 2020 election as �hack-and-leak� operations by state
actors. They had done the same thing with Facebook, whose CEO Mark
Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan in an August 2022 podcast. As
Michael Shellenberger reported in the seventh installment of the
Twitter Files, the FBI repeatedly asked Roth and others at Twitter
about foreign influence operations on the platform and were repeatedly
told there were none of any significance. The FBI also routinely
pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal search warrant
process, which Twitter at first resisted.

In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter executives to get top secret
security clearances so the FBI could share intelligence about possible
threats to the upcoming presidential election. The next month, Chan
sent Roth information about a Russian hacking group called APT28. Roth
later said that when the Post�s story about Hunter Biden�s laptop
broke, �It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-
leak campaign alarm bells.� Even though there was never any evidence
that anything on the laptop was hacked, Roth reacted to it just as the
FBI had conditioned him to do, using the company�s hacked-materials
policy to suppress the story as soon as it appeared, just as the agency
suggested it would, less than a month before the election.

Suspending the President
The erosion of Twitter�s content moderation standards would continue
after the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, reaching its apogee on January
8, 2021, two days after the Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the
extraordinary decision to suspend President Trump, even though he had
not violated any Twitter policies. As the Twitter Files show, the
suspension came amid ongoing interactions with federal agencies�
interactions that were increasing in frequency in the months leading up
to the 2020 election, during which Roth was meeting weekly with the
FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence. As the election neared, Twitter�s
unevenly applied, rules-based content moderation policies would
steadily deteriorate.

Content moderation on Twitter had always been an unstable mix of
automatic enforcement of rules and subjective interventions by top
executives, most of whom used Twitter�s censorship tools to diminish
the reach of Trump and others on the right through shadow banning and
other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote in the third
installment of the Twitter Files: �As the election approached, senior
executives�perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they
met more as time progressed�increasingly struggled with rules, and
began to speak of �vios� [violations] as pretexts to do what they�d
likely have done anyway.�

After January 6, Twitter jettisoned even the appearance of a rules-
based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a pair of tweets that top
executives falsely claimed were violations of Twitter�s terms of
service. The first, sent early in the morning on January 8, stated:
�The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA
FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into
the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any
way, shape or form!!!� The second, sent about an hour later, simply
stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden�s inauguration on
January 20.

That same day, key Twitter staffers correctly determined that Trump�s
tweets did not constitute incitement of violence or violate any other
Twitter policies. But pressure kept building from people like Gadde,
who wanted to know whether the tweets amounted to �coded incitement to
further violence.� Some suggested that Trump�s first tweet might have
violated the company�s policy on the glorification of violence.
Internal discussions then took an even more bizarre turn. Members of
Twitter�s �scaled enforcement team� reportedly viewed Trump �as the
leader of a terrorist group responsible for violence/deaths comparable
to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that basis and on the totality
of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.�

Later on the afternoon of January 8, Twitter announced Trump�s
permanent suspension �due to the risk of further incitement of
violence��a nonsense phrase that corresponded to no written Twitter
policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was unprecedented.
Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of state in
Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence. Internal
deliberations unveiled by the Twitter Files show that Trump�s
suspension was partly justified based on the �overall context and
narrative� of Trump�s words and actions�as one executive put it��over
the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.�

That is, it was not anything Trump said or did; it was that Twitter�s
censors wanted to blame the President for everything that happened on
January 6 and remove him from the platform. To do that, they were
willing to shift the entire intellectual framework of content
moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the consideration
of �context and narrative,� thereby allowing executives to engage in
what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.

Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right to
engage in viewpoint discrimination�something the government is
prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when
Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company
than like an extension of the federal government.

***

Among the most shocking revelations of the Twitter Files is the extent
to which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies came to view
Twitter as a tool for censorship and narrative control. In part six of
the Twitter Files, Taibbi chronicles the �constant and pervasive�
contact between the FBI and Twitter after January 2020, �as if
[Twitter] were a subsidiary.� In particular, the FBI and the Department
of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor tweets and lock accounts
it believed were engaged in �election misinformation,� and would
regularly send the company content it had pre-flagged for moderation,
essentially dragooning Twitter into what would otherwise be illegal
government censorship. Taibbi calls it a �master-canine� relationship.
When requests for censorship came in from the feds, Twitter obediently
complied�even when the tweets in question were clearly jokes or posted
on accounts with few followers.

Some Twitter executives were unsure what to make of this relationship.
Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point asked how he should refer to
the company�s cooperation with federal law enforcement and intelligence
agencies, suggesting it be described in terms of �partnerships.� Time
and again, federal agencies stressed the need for close collaboration
with their �private sector partners,� using the alleged interference by
Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext for a massive government
surveillance and censorship regime operating from inside Twitter.

Requests for content moderation, which increasingly resembled demands,
came not only from the FBI and DHS, but also from a tangled web of
other federal agencies, contractors, and government-affiliated think
tanks such as the Election Integrity Project at Stanford University. As
Taibbi writes, the lines between government and its �partners� in this
effort were �so blurred as to be meaningless.�

The Deputization of Twitter
After the 2016 election, both Twitter and Facebook faced pressure from
Democrats and their media allies to root out Russian �election
meddling� under the thoroughly debunked theory that a Moscow-based
social media influence operation was responsible for Trump�s election
victory. In reality, Russia�s supposed meddling amounted to a minuscule
ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter bots. But the truth was not
acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the anti-Trump federal
bureaucracy.

In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous pressure to �keep producing
material� on Russian interference, and in response it created a Russia
Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to Moscow�s Internet Research
Agency. The task force did not find much. Out of some 2,700 accounts
reviewed, only two came back as significant, and one of those was
Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet. But in the face of bad press
and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter executives decided to
go along with the official narrative and pretend they had a Russia
problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new regulations, they
pledged to �work with [members of Congress] on their desire to
legislate.� When someone in Congress leaked the list of the 2,700
accounts Twitter�s task force had reviewed, the media exploded with
stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots�and
Twitter continued to go along.

After that, as described by Taibbi, �This cycle�threatened legislation
wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources,
followed by Twitter caving to [content] moderation asks�[came to] be
formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement.�

Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a new policy. In public, it would
say that all content moderation took place �at [Twitter�s] sole
discretion.� But its internal guidance would stipulate censorship of
anything �identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-
sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.� Thus Twitter
increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State Department,
and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit content
moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could
function as �the belly button of the [U.S. government].� These requests
would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to
the 2020 election.

By 2020, there was a torrent of demands for censorship, sometimes with
no explanation�just an Excel spreadsheet with a list of accounts to be
banned. These demands poured in from FBI offices all over the country,
overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the government would pay Twitter
$3.4 million in compensation. It was a pittance considering the work
Twitter did at the government�s behest, but the payment illustrated a
stark reality: Twitter, a leading gatekeeper of the digital public
square and arguably the most powerful social media platform in the
world, had become a subcontractor for the U.S. intelligence community.

***

The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths
about social media and the deep state.

First, the entire concept of �content moderation� is a euphemism for
censorship by social media companies that falsely claim to be neutral
and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a virtual monopoly on public
discourse in the digital era, we should stop thinking of them as
private companies that can �do whatever they want,� as libertarians are
fond of saying. The companies� content moderation policies are at best
a flimsy justification for banning or blocking whatever their
executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a policy of
pervasive government censorship.

Second, Twitter was taking marching orders from a deep state security
apparatus that was created to fight terrorists, not to censor or
manipulate public discourse. To the extent that the deep state is using
social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to subvert the First
Amendment and run information psy-ops on the American public, these
companies have become malevolent government actors. As a policy matter,
the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory approach we have taken to them
should come to an immediate end.

Third, the administrative state has metastasized into a destructive
deep state that threatens to bring about the collapse of America�s
constitutional system within our lifetimes. Emblematic of the threat is
the fact that �the intelligence community� has proven itself incapable
of not interfering in American elections. The FBI in particular has
directly meddled in the last two presidential elections to a degree
that should call into question its continued existence. Indeed, the
FBI�s post-9/11 transformation from a law enforcement agency to a
counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering agency with seemingly
limitless remit has been a disaster for civil liberties and the First
Amendment. We need either to impose radical reforms or scrap it
entirely and start over.

The late great political scientist Angelo Codevilla argued that our
response to 9/11 was completely wrong. Instead of erecting a sprawling
security and surveillance apparatus to detect and disrupt potential
terrorist plots, we should have issued an ultimatum to the regimes that
were harboring Al Qaeda: you make war on these terrorists and bring
them to justice or we will make war on you. The reason not to do what
we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security and surveillance apparatus
powerful and pervasive enough to do what we wanted it to do was
incompatible with a free society. It might defeat the terrorists, but
it would eventually be turned on the American people.

The Twitter Files leave little doubt that Codevilla�s prediction has
come to pass. The question we face now is whether the American people
and their elected representatives will fight back. The fate of the
republic rests on the answer.

--
Let's go Brandon!