42. From the outset, our goal in investigating this story was to discover and document the steps leading up to the banning of Trump and to put that choice into context.

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43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.

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44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.

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45. This was reported by Shellen Berger MD, Isaac Grafstein, Snoozy Weiss, Olivia Reingold, Peter Savodnik, Nellie Bowles.

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The question is who should make those decisions and how.

/END

https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/twitter-broke-its-own-rules-to-ban

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Every website has to make some decisions about content moderation if only to enforce laws, including the one upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Virginia v. Black (2003), against issuing threats of violence against “a particular individual or group of individuals.”

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Governments would quickly find themselves facing the same problem as Twitter in deciding who should be allowed to speak and who shouldn’t.

In retrospect, Dorsey’s vision of a single digital town square was hopelessly naive.

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COMING at 4 est:

TWITTER: THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

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1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

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

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3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

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

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5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

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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.

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7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.

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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.

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9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

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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.

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11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines:

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12.An 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.

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“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:

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