The Digital Swamp
How the FBI changed the narrative on Twitter
By Henry Haden, ‘25
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The past few months were revelatory in understanding the commitment of America’s institutions to the First Amendment. Since the 2016 election, social media giants and the government assured Americans of many false claims which undermined faith in conservatism. High-ranking bureaucrats and Silicon Valley elites weaponized the public sphere against conservatives, silencing them while propping up progressive dogma and special interest groups.
During the Trump administration, left-wing politicos made unfounded accusations that Donald Trump was propped up by Russian disinformation circulating through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Russian disinformation became a convenient scapegoat for the failures of Democratic politicians that in reality caused Trump’s policies to take hold across America.
By extension, Russian interference could be used to discredit scandals and controversies relating to Democrats — for instance, the startling allegations which arose from the troublesome contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop as outlined in the infamous October 2020 New York Post article. With the 2020 election quickly approaching, the onus would be on Biden’s team to offset the “danger” of this story to their campaign.
Ultimately, progressive federal agencies sought to censor the story in conjunction with social media companies, notably the FBI working with Twitter. Such a move seems more familiar in authoritarian regimes. However, Americans would want an explanation for the disappearance of a story from a prominent outlet like the New York Post, and what better narrative to explain this than Russian disinformation?
As a politicized company, Twitter was uniquely vulnerable to approaches by the FBI. Ultimately, this would result in Twitter staff acting as an extension of the Democratic Party and FBI but not before a series of key events.
This past November, Elon Musk finally took ownership of Twitter, firing the old executives. As part of Elon Musk’s stated commitment to free speech, he quickly restored Donald Trump’s Twitter account, following a poll on Twitter that disgruntled many on the left. Musk also committed to releasing internal information on Twitter’s past censorship and “content moderation.” He contacted journalists to sift through internal Twitter documents and report their findings on Twitter — the Twitter Files.
In the first installment, journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted the evolution of Twitter’s censorship policies before the 2020 election. Tools initially designed to combat spam and financial fraudsters were used by “outside actors” to manipulate speech.
Matt Taibbi tweeted, “by 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’
Celebrities and ordinary citizens could be removed at the behest of political parties. Both the Biden campaign and the Trump White House had access to these tools, but they were based on contacts that were often politically aligned. In the 2020 election cycle, 98.47% of political contributions at Twitter were made to Democrats.
It’s no surprise Twitter took unprecedented measures to stop the circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story. According to Taibbi, “they even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.” Cutting off the circulation of the story, this measure silenced voices critical of the Biden campaign.
When questioned, the Twitter team responded that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy. Naturally, Twitter staff employed the Russian disinformation narrative to discredit the story.
In Part 7 of the Twitter Files, Michael Schellenberger outlined an orchestrated effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after the story was published. By the end of 2019, the FBI was in possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Strangely, the day before the story would be published, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent 10 documents to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity.
When the credible New York Post story was published the next day, Twitter and other social media companies censored the article. In a sworn declaration by Roth given in December 2020, he mentioned that “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected that ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election.” In meetings, Roth heard “rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Separately, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that the FBI said Facebook should be on high alert and that the FBI “thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016.”
However, in November following the article’s October 2020 release, FBI agent Elvis Chan testified that he had not seen any real evidence of Russian interference thus far, saying, “Through our investigations, we did not see any similar competing intrusions to what had happened in 2016.” Despite this, Chan said that he “warned the companies about a potential for hack-and-dump operations from the Russians and the Iranians on more than one occasion.”
More concerningly, FBI involvement continued to increase at Twitter. Former General Counsel of the FBI, Jim Baker, worked for Twitter at the time. According to Schellenberger, Baker “played a central role in making the case internally for an investigation of Donald Trump” when at the FBI. Schellenberger adds, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.”
Efforts continued to influence Yoel Roth and change how the Hunter Biden laptop story was covered. By the middle of September 2020, an encrypted messaging network was set up between Twitter and FBI employees. Baker’s involvement would become more concerning as he had a top-secret clearance. According to Schellenberger, “on Sept 15, 2020, the FBI’s Laura Dehmlow, who heads up the Foreign Influence Task Force, and Elvis Chan, request to give a classified briefing for Jim Baker, without any other Twitter staff, such as Yoel Roth, present.”
After the story was published on October 14th, Roth said the story was not “clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy,” but, against available evidence, Baker said otherwise, stating that it would be reasonable to assume the materials found on the laptop were hacked. By this point, the damage had been done. Twitter executives bought into the hacking narrative and censored the story. Baker thanked the FBI for its work as it successfully censored the conversation on Twitter, undoubtedly impacting the narrative preceding the 2020 election with a digital public sphere weaponized against conservatives.
The revelations which continue to surface from the Twitter Files are bothersome. Domestic digital censorship is not limited to information pertaining to elections, and it has been used to influence opinions on other issues ranging from foreign policy to COVID.
Admittedly, social media companies are private, and one of the beauties of a free market is that new alternative sites can emerge. However, the federal government’s apparent involvement in censoring Americans is a step too far. As the Twitter Files show, unelected bureaucrats can sway the narrative in private companies with little accountability barring intervention from someone like Elon Musk.
There is hope, and conservatives seem to be getting smarter. At the start of the new session of congress, the House GOP approved a resolution to create a panel to probe the weaponization of the federal government.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is expected to head the subcommittee. Debating the resolution on the House floor, Jordan said, “We don’t want to go after anyone, we just want it to stop. And we want to respect the First Amendment to the Constitution that the greatest country in the world has. That’s what this committee is all about, and that’s what we’re gonna focus on, that’s what we are going to do.”
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