21. Many requests arrived via Teleporter, a one-way platform in which many communications were timed to vanish:
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22.Especially as the election approached in 2020, the FITF/FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending lists of hundreds of problem accounts:
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23. Email after email came from the San Francisco office heading into the election, often adorned with an Excel attachment:
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24. There were so many government requests, Twitter employees had to improvise a system for prioritizing/triaging them:
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25. The FBI was clearly tailoring searches to Twitter’s policies. FBI complaints were almost always depicted somewhere as a “possible terms of service violation," even in the subject line:
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26. Twitter executives noticed the FBI appeared to be aasigning personnel to look for Twitter violations.
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27.“They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the last 5 days,” remarked Cardille.
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28. Even ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker agreed: “Odd that they are searching for violations of our policies.”
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29.The New York FBI office even sent requests for the “user IDs and handles” of a long list of accounts named in a Daily Beast article. Senior executives say they are “supportive” and “completely comfortable” doing so.
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30. It seemed to strike no one as strange that a “Foreign Influence” task force was forwarding thousands of mostly domestic reports, along with the DHS, about the fringiest material:
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31. “Foreign meddling” had been the ostensible justification for expanded moderation since platforms like Twitter were dragged to the Hill by the Senate in 2017:
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32. Yet behind the scenes, Twitter executives struggled against government claims of foreign interference supposedly occurring on their platform and others:
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33. The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions.
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34. “Found no links to Russia,” says one analyst, but suggests he could “brainstorm” to “find a stronger connection.”
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35. “Extremely tenuous circumstantial chance of being related,” says another.
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36. “No real matches using the info,” says former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth in another case, noting some links were “clearly Russian,” but another was a “house rental in South Carolina?”
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37. In another case, Roth concludes a series of Venezuelan pro-Maduro accounts are unrelated to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, because they’re too high-volume:
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