Having destroyed a president, our intelligence services expanded their grasp
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We’ve long known about those analytical processes, but the Twitter Files show something new. We now have clear evidence that agencies like the FBI and the DHS are in the business of mass-analyzing social media activity — your tweets and mine, down to the smallest users with the least engagement — and are, themselves, mass-marking posts to be labeled, “bounced,” deleted or “visibility filtered” by firms like Twitter. The technical and personnel infrastructure for this effort is growing. As noted in the thread, the FBI’s social media-focused task force now has at least 80 agents, and is in constant contact with Twitter for all sorts of reasons.
The FBI is not doing this as part of any effort to build criminal cases. They’ve taken on this new authority unilaterally, as part of an apparently massive new effort to control and influence public opinion.
These agencies claim variously to be concerned about election integrity, foreign interference, medical misinformation, and monitoring domestic extremism, among other things. As crises wax and wane, the building out of the censorship infrastructure to ever-bigger and broader dimensions has been constant, suggesting that creating and deploying the tool to manipulate opinion was always the real end.
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So far, the chief characteristic of the modern digital censorship regime seems to be the way public agencies and private contractors collaborate so smoothly on the project. Follow the journey of any particular piece of content, and you’ll find it may have moved in and out of the private sector multiple times on the way to being zapped at the finish line.
A lot of this was known before, but we’re seeing how it works at most every link of the chain now. It’s exciting, and I have every hope we’ll
And This:
What is the objective of tracking Billy Baldwin?' Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi slaps down Democratic House Judiciary Committee member Ted Lieu for accusing him of 'lying' about FBI flagging up social media accounts
The NECP [FBI National Election Command Post]wrote that it was "made aware of Tweets by certain accounts that may warrant additional action due to the accounts being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election." The account belonging to Billy Baldwin, who is the brother of Alec and Stephen Baldwin, was included on the list.
In the email, the NECP requested "coordination" with the tech company to "determine if the accounts it identified had violated Twitter's terms of service and may be subject to any actions deemed appropriate by Twitter."
It also requested the "issuance of preservation letters regarding the accounts identified below in order to preserve subscriber information and content information pending the issuance of legal process."
In addition, the NECP requested "any location information associated with the accounts that Twitter will voluntarily provide to aid the FBI assigning any follow-up deemed necessary to the appropriate FBI field office."
In the next tweet, Taibbi posted a screenshot of an email from Nov. 6 in which an FBI San Francisco agent forwarded the list to "Twitter folks."
… Baldwin is a vociferous critic of Donald Trump and frequently speaks out against the former U.S. president as well as Republican members of Congress, conservatives and Elon Musk on Twitter. His Twitter profile reads, "Biden 81,283,786/ Trump 74,222,552," a reference to the 2020 presidential election results.
