December 19, 2022 – Twitter Files: FBI paid millions to Twitter for its cooperation; the Intelligence community’s pressure campaign

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations by Katie Weddington

Michael Shellenberger (Credit: public domain)

“Michael Shellenberger has just published the latest batch of what has come to be known as the Twitter Files. It’s a follow-up to Matt Taibbi’s recent Twitter Files release concerning FBI’s pressure campaign against Twitter to remove content the agency found objectionable.

Today’s release provides more details on the relationship between Twitter and the FBI, the suppression and removal of the Hunter Biden story from Twitter the FBI’s desire for Twitter to confirm a “foreign interference” narrative that didn’t exist, and how the FBI sought user location information for tweets that weren’t remotely criminal.

For a refresher, here are the highlights from one of the most recent releases from Taibbi, who has done excellent work on this continuing story:

  • The FBI requested take action on what it determined to be misinformation, which included jokes from small Twitter accounts about voting dates.
  • FBI e-mails to Twitter asking for assessment of terms of service violations and “location information” about accounts that allegedly “spread misinformation about the upcoming election.” Some of those accounts were permanently suspended.

  • How the 2016 “Russian election interference” hoax influenced the FBI’s 2020 operations into reviewing American social media posts.

Today’s thread by Shellenberger expands on what we have learned.

Some findings of note:

  • The FBI continued its requests of location and VPN IP data from Twitter users, done without a warrant and without a subpoena: “would Twitter be open to sharing which service provider(s) those VPN IP addresses resolved to?” To its credit, Twitter pushed back on this request.
  • In one case, the FBI requested user data for an account that was critical of BLM and the Democrats. Twitter responded by confirming “the account in question is domestic in origin.”
  • The US intelligence community was pushing Twitter to “share more information” and change its user privacy settings.

(…) Then we have one of the more remarkable pieces of information to be released from the Twitter: confirmation that Twitter was paid nearly $3.5 million for assisting the FBI with its processing requests.

(Read more: Techno Fog/The Reactionary, 12/19/2022)  (Archive)

More from Michael Shellenberger’s Twitter thread: