There’s smoking gun evidence now of what some, including The Trends Journal, have been pointing out with other substantiation for a long time: the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies are operating with and overseeing tech companies in systematic political surveillance, manipulation, election influence operations and censorship of American citizens.

The Twitter Files, including a recently released sixth batch of information, have added yet more substantiation of just how closely the FBI and other intel agencies were overseeing and controlling political censorship and election influence operations on the world’s largest social communication platform.

Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists tasked by new Twitter owner Elon Musk with analyzing and releasing data pertaining to government influence involvement with the company, posted a thread on Friday that detailed a damning new batch of company information.

Some of the more salient revelations from “batch six” include:

• At least 150 email communications occurred between then Twitter Head of Safety Yoel Roth and the FBI, between Jan 2020 and Feb 2022
• FBI and DHS regularly sent social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation
• FBI and DHS were so paranoid they actively flagged clear joke comments and accounts with low follower numbers for censorship
• High profile names including Billy Baldwin and the RSBN Network, which established itself by covering popular Trump rallies in their entirety in 2016 and 2020, while showing the enormous crowd sizes, which mainstream networks often avoided doing
• The FBI clearly acted in the “master” role, dictating to Twitter concerning actions to be taken to censor content and accounts on the social media platform
• Intelligence agencies articulated the thoroughly discredited 2016 “Russian Collusion” hoax (initiated by the Hillary Clinton campaign and sustained and furthered by sympathetic operatives with the Federal government for years), to justify the erection of its Twitter censorship apparatus
• State governments also had a hand in flagging content on Twitter for censorship
• Government and Intel agency allied think tanks and organizations such as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy, were enlisted to mass-review content for flagging and censorship
• The FBI allowed Twitter employees to know and share classified information with virtually no impediments; Taibbi explained that a “Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were ‘impediments’ to the sharing of classified information ‘with industry.’ The answer? FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to ‘no impediments’ to classified information?”

The FBI was made uncomfortable enough by the latest revelations to issue a response. A spokesman for the agency told Fox News Digital:

“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

The statement is a lie of course, that pretends the FBI sought to involve itself only in cases where there was evidence of “foreign malign influence.”

In fact it has been caught, along with other intel agencies and officials, in domestic election interference and suppression of political and free speech rights of Americans completely unconnected from any foreign influence.

The Hunter Biden laptop is the most obvious instance of the FBI’s—to use their own language—“subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.” 

Over the weekend, journalist Matt Taibbi posted a supplemental thread revealing evidence that the FBI bullied Twitter employees like Yoel Roth, when they occasionally protested that the agency was proving no evidence of foreign influence for take-down “requests” of many posts, and suspensions of Twitter accounts.

One other nugget Taibbi highlighted was that the FBI admitted there were discussions of what to censor on Twitter not just at the FBI, but among the whole USIC. That’s the United States Intelligence Community.

As Taibbi noted, “The idea of the FBI acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community is interesting, given that many agencies are barred from domestic operations.”

Zerohedge has a good analysis of that supplemental thread.

Late Breaking: “Twitter Files” Batch 7 Released Monday 19 December

And the FBI just kept coming the week before Christmas, as a seventh batch of Twitter files showed the agency pressuring Twitter to censor the NY Post Hunter Biden story just hours before it went public.

The internal Twitter papers made public on Monday reveal that an FBI agent got in touch with then Twitter Head of Safety Yoel Roth on 14 October 14 2020, just before the Post’s article exposing Hunter Biden’s dubious international business activities. 

The timing, as the Post itself has pointed out in reaction to the Twitter Files late-breaking release, was less than a month before Hunter Biden’s father, Joe Biden, went to the Presidential polls against President Donald Trump, who was the incumbent at the time.

According to independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, who along with Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, has been given access to the internal Twitter info, FBI San Francisco Special Agent Elvis Chan emailed 10 documents to Roth on the evening of 13 October 2020, over a unique one-way communications channel. 

Chan also communicated with at least one other Twitter official. Chan’s conduct was part of a concerted more extensive FBI campaign to suppress discussion and information on the Twitter platform about damaging info concerning dealings of both Hunter and Joe Biden, under the false pretense that the laptop and/or its info was a product of “foreign interference in elections.”

The “Twitter Files” Part Six Complete Thread

The “Part Six” Twitter Files batch is so important, we present Taibbi’s listed points of “The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY” here, so our readers can see and refer to it as necessary:

“1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.” Christopher Wray has been the director of the FBI since 2017.

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines,” Taibbi tweeted a link to FBI El Paso with the post.

“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.”

“13. ‘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:”

“14. Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his ‘civic misinformation’ of Nov. 8:”

“15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding:”

“16. ‘Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,’ said@ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging.”

“17. Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two –@ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa– were suspended.”

“18. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that ‘may warrant additional action’:”

“19. Agent Chan passed the list on to his ‘Twitter folks’:”

“20. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin:”

“21. Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, ‘Thanks, Twitter’ letter:”

“22. When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah replied: ‘My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?'”

“23. ‘I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That’s crazy,’ said @Tiberius444”

“24. In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her ‘soon to be weekly’ meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:”

“25. The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were ‘impediments’ to the sharing of classified information ‘with industry.’ The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

“26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to ‘no impediments’ to classified information?”

“27. At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of ‘escalations’ apparently raised at the meeting, which were already ‘handled.'”

“28. About one, she writes: ‘Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).'”

“29. Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of ‘possible violative content’ tweets:”

“30. Here, too, most tweets contained the same, ‘Get out there and vote Wednesday!’ trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on:”

“31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to ‘you and the team,’ then delivers a packet of ‘products’:”

“32. The executive circulates the ‘products,’ which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.'”

“33. The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.”

“34. While the DHS in its ‘products’ pans ‘permissive’ social media for offering ‘operational advantages’ to Russians, it also explains that the ‘Domestic Violent Extremist Threat’ requires addressing ‘information gaps’:”

“35. FBI in one case sent over so many ‘possible violative content’ reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them:”

“36. There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI:”

“37. Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends ‘bouncing’ content based on evidence from ‘DHS etc’:”

“38. State governments also flagged content”

“39. Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.”

“40. ‘WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?’ Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of ‘our partner support portal’ – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet:”

“41. Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS)”

“42. If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as ‘partners’ with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS”

“43. The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.”

“44. The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.”

“45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch

@BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.”