2. 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”

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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

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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

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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.

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For those who continue to insist exposing the lie of Russiagate is a “right-wing” trope, here’s Jacobin reporting on the recent NYU study that of coure was largely ignored:

https://jacobin.com/2023/01/hillary-clinton-russian-bots-2016-presidential-election-trump

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Nunes didn’t “go after them” during this story. He wrote a classified memo and in early 2018 was accused - by elected officials Adam Schiff, Sen Feinstein, and Sen Blumenthal - of benefiting from Russian bots boosting #ReleaseTheMemo. The emails show the accusations were wrong.

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This has nothing to do with the politics of Nunes. It’s strictly about whether or not there were Russian bots boosting #ReleaseTheMemo. The emails show elected officials made these claims despite being told about the lack of evidence. What is there to discuss?

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This is hilarious. One of the main players in the last attempt to remove a President, the Mueller investigation, now seems dissatisfied with the current figurehead. Feels like the USSR, circa maybe 1983?

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1. New piece from the TWITTER FILES.
How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.

The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.

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2. In 2020, it was clear that the pandemic would require rapid innovation. Early on, there was a push to make the solution equitable: an international partnership to share ideas, technology, new forms of medicine to rapidly solve this crisis.

https://t.co/L4QNcCCzCE

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3. But global drug giants saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit. Behind closed doors, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine, including therapeutics and vaccines.

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4. BIO, the lobby group that represents biopharma, including Moderna & Pfizer, wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines.

https://t.co/EOX8HoYD46

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5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer's vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines.

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6. Twitter's reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine

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7. The potential "fake accounts" that Twitter monitored for protesting Pfizer? These were real people. Here's one the Twitter team flagged for potential terms of use violations. I talked to Terry, a 74 year old retired bricklayer in the UK on the phone.

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8. It's not clear what actions Twitter ultimately took on this particular request. Several Twitter employees noted in subsequent messages that none of this activism constituted abuse. But the company continued monitoring tweets.

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9. In a separate push, Pfizer & Moderna's lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects, which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid "misinformation."

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