The first Twitter Files of 2023 explain how the intelligence community took control of the network.

 Matt Taibbi, a journalist, has released the first of a series of files on the intelligence community's influence on the platform. In August of last year, Facebook suspended 300 accounts with suspected Russian origin. They were sure there wasn't a Russia problem, so they weren't worried. 

 

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The best public relations strategy was to say nothing on record, according to emails from the former Vice President, Global Public Policy & Philanthropy, Colin Crowell, and the former legal head, Vijaya Gadde. The focus of the inquiry into Russian election meddling was on Facebook, according to an email from Crowell. The group of executives were due to see the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a non-public and private meeting.

 

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The focus of the inquiry into Russian election meddling is on Facebook because it has better targeting ability than we have for campaign-related advertising, according to the section of the email titled Important Context. Out of a larger set of 2,700 suspects that were manually examined, 179 Russian accounts and 179 others with possible links were suspended. Warner is the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. He held a press conference to condemn the report. After he received an email from Warner's campaign asking for $5, Crowell responded with "#Irony". 

 

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After that, he met with congressional leaders and told his team to keep producing. Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at the top of the news, maintain pressure on us and the rest of industry to keep producing material for them. Hillary Clinton said that it was time for the Democrats to stop dragging their heels and live up to the fact that their platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare. 

 

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Credit: Matt Taibbi

 

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This led to the creation of a Russia Task Force. The task force began with data shared from counterparts at Facebook, however, Taibbi noted that those searches of accounts tied to Russia's Internet Research Agency were a dud. No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity. They thought they had reviewed 2,500 accounts. Only two of the 32 suspicious accounts have significant spend, one of which is Russia Today. Taibbi noted that the search found only 2 significant accounts based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines such as "Russian Influence Reached 126 million through Facebook alone". The failure of the Russian task force to produce material made the PR crisis worse.

 

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 There were several stories about the Intel Committee in the news. The change of thoughts on the smallness of the Russia problem was caused by this. Senator Warner felt like the tech industry was in denial for months, and Senate staff told them that they would work with them on their desire to legislate. Carlos Monje shared key highlights of the legislation that the senators were introducing. As the committees leaked, I wanted to share some relevant highlights of the legislation that the senators will be introducing. The media circus was caused by this, with the star of the show being Twitter.

 

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Credit: Matt Taibbi

 

 

 They didn't want to endorse the findings by Buzzfeed and the University ofSheffield, which said they found a new network on Twitter with close connections to Russian-linked bot accounts. When the piece came out, the Senate asked for a write-up. The accounts it initially told the Senate were not a problem were apologized for. This led to a new revelation. Reporters now know that this model works. Taibbi noted that this cycle would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. This is how the intelligence community gained influence. 

 

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Credit: Matt Taibbi

 

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In public, we would remove content at our sole discretion. Privately, the platform would off-board anything that was identified by the U.S. The intelligence community is a state-sponsored entity. If you would like to access all of the files, an archival website has been built, which includes all of the threads as organized, long-form blog posts and links to articles written by the independent journalists.