According to internal documents released on Tuesday by freelance journalist Matt Taibbe, Twitter employees succumbed to pressure led by a member of the Democratic Party in the fall of 2017 and changed its advertising policy to ensure a closer relationship with US intelligence agencies. in the platform elections as of September 6, 2017, internally determined that the concern is centered on the Facebook platform, which they believe is under congressional scrutiny, according to Tybee.
However, Twitter faced renewed pressure after Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, then vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, lambasted the company later that month for publishing a “blatantly inadequate” report on Russian activity on the platform. . He blocked only 22 of the 2,700 accounts he suspected were linked to Russian power groups.
“Democrats are taking a cue from Hillary Clinton, who speaks clearly in her book about the role of Russian propaganda and dirty tricks spread through social media,” Vice President for Public Policy Colin Cromwell wrote in a September 2017 email to the founder and former CEO Twitter Jack. Dorsey and others in their defeat.
A key component of the lobbying campaign was the looming threat of a law that would prevent Twitter from running political ads, combined with negative publicity for the platform from major US media outlets.
In response to growing public pressure, Twitter convened a task force on October 2, 2017 to further investigate the influence of Russian activists on the platform, but concluded by October 23 that only 17 of the 2,500 accounts under investigation were linked to Russia. the report said the accounts identified “major” advertisers, both from Russian-sponsored media outlets and from Russia Today and Sputnik.
Twitter was preparing to change its advertising policy and remove offending accounts to stave off imminent legislative threats, and the platform committed to working with Senator Warner and other Democratic politicians, as well as Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona.
After an initial list of 2,700 suspicious accounts was leaked in a Buzzfeed article in November 2017 and pressure resumed on the social media platform, the company was forced to apologize to politicians for their inaction on registered accounts.
According to the report, Twitter publicly reaffirmed its stance that the promotional content was removed at the company’s “sole discretion”, but the company quickly changed its internal guidelines to establish a new relationship with US intelligence agencies.
According to the internal directive, “Any user identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored organization conducting cyber operations against US-related targets, such as elections, is not allowed to advertise on Twitter,” one of the documents says.
Three years later, the FBI had a close relationship with and communicated closely with Twitter employees in the lead up to the censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop story, and the agency paid Twitter millions, according to an earlier investigation into internal Twitter documents by author Michael Shellenberger.
