Twitter Files Extra: How the Files Could Help Incoming Investigators
Posted by freedomforall 2 days, 21 hours ago to Politics
Excerpt:
"Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” executives attended countless conferences at which officials from the White House, the DoD, DOJ, and other agencies would attend, in addition to European or Australian bodies interested in establishing a tighter global “accountability framework.” Clearly there were regular transatlantic discussions geared toward setting up something like a single transatlantic clearing-house on “disinformation,” but we were never able to find the right point of entry. Was it NATO/STRATCOM? Were academic conferences the key? What about a think-tank that conducted “tabletop” exercises to help journalists plan for a “hack and leak” story on Hunter Biden and Burisma, but also issued ambitious recommendations for global reforms?
Tackling such unanswered questions would help us understand how close we came to the U.S. implementing something like Europe’s Digital Services Act, which would have effectively wiped out the First Amendment. There are ways this could have been accomplished without legislation, without the public even being aware of it.
To this end, there’s traffic in the Twitter Files about agencies ranging from the NSA to other DOD groups to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office to the National Science Foundation and beyond. For every government office, there are a dozen or more NGOs or federal contractors with whom Twitter worked, often using euphemisms like “information sharing” and “building trusted relationships.” Investigations again stalled from the Twitter side because of a lack of visibility into government operations.
The Twitter Files as a pop-culture phenomenon were useful in helping shine a light on a few big problems that previously had been denied, by both the state and the private sector. But making noise through journalism only goes so far. Investigators could do more with this material, to help solve deeper mysteries."
"Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” executives attended countless conferences at which officials from the White House, the DoD, DOJ, and other agencies would attend, in addition to European or Australian bodies interested in establishing a tighter global “accountability framework.” Clearly there were regular transatlantic discussions geared toward setting up something like a single transatlantic clearing-house on “disinformation,” but we were never able to find the right point of entry. Was it NATO/STRATCOM? Were academic conferences the key? What about a think-tank that conducted “tabletop” exercises to help journalists plan for a “hack and leak” story on Hunter Biden and Burisma, but also issued ambitious recommendations for global reforms?
Tackling such unanswered questions would help us understand how close we came to the U.S. implementing something like Europe’s Digital Services Act, which would have effectively wiped out the First Amendment. There are ways this could have been accomplished without legislation, without the public even being aware of it.
To this end, there’s traffic in the Twitter Files about agencies ranging from the NSA to other DOD groups to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office to the National Science Foundation and beyond. For every government office, there are a dozen or more NGOs or federal contractors with whom Twitter worked, often using euphemisms like “information sharing” and “building trusted relationships.” Investigations again stalled from the Twitter side because of a lack of visibility into government operations.
The Twitter Files as a pop-culture phenomenon were useful in helping shine a light on a few big problems that previously had been denied, by both the state and the private sector. But making noise through journalism only goes so far. Investigators could do more with this material, to help solve deeper mysteries."
