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Protecting digital liberties. Telling the story of online censorship. Fighting to win back the Golden Age of the Internet. Posts by @MikeBenzCyber.

Dec 5, 2022, 15 tweets

TWITTER FILES 1.0 THREAD: A comprehensive breakdown of the first release 👇

Twitter's election censorship operation is far more extensive than yet reported. Here's how it works:

2. The first thing to understand is that the Censorship Industry has been constructed using a "Whole-Of-Society" model.

That means censorship is coordinated through the government, the private sector (tech platforms), and civil society (academia, NGOs) working together:

3. The "Whole-Of-Society" censorship model was cobbled together after the 2016 election under pretext of fighting "foreign disinformation" on Twitter and Facebook.

But after Russiagate fell apart in summer 2019, the entire infrastructure was shifted to a "domestic" focus:

4. Kate Starbird, head of the UW disinfo lab and major censorship coordinator with both Twitter and the US government, lays out how her hivemind saw the operation here:

Note she explicitly targets "everyday people" and concedes that there wasn't the political will at first:

5. The Twitter Files 1.0 release from @mtaibbi show Vijaya Gadde coordinated the censorship of the Hunter Biden Laptop story before the 2020 election.

In 2021, after the election, Gadde was tapped by Biden's DHS to run its censorship advisory committee, alongside Kate Starbird:

6. This is important: the formal framework Starbird and Gadde worked under to censor the 2020 election explicitly set out censorship as a way to stop populists from mobilizing "protests," "legal action" and "mainstream coverage":

Source: stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:tr1…

7. The Twitter Files 1.0 release focus was on the FBI, and specifically former FBI General Counsel James Baker, who was then hired by Twitter as its Deputy General Counsel.

@JonathanTurley had an excellent write-up here of Baker's backstory here:
jonathanturley.org/2022/12/04/six…

8. What is lesser known about Jim Baker, and which mainstream news is not currently appreciating, is that in the run-up to the 2020 election, Baker was also leading the National Task Force on Election Crises (NTFEC).

9. NTFEC was a sort of 'sister organization' to a notoriously shady outfit also created at the same time called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP).

TIP spent summer 2020 wargaming how to overturn election results if candidate Trump won the election:

documentcloud.org/documents/7013…

10. Incredibly, TIP, which shared the same explicit aims and many overlapping members with NTFEC, premeditated a scenario in summer 2020 in which the Biden team would provoke a constitutional crisis on January 6 if Biden lost the election:

11. Even more incredibly, Jim Baker's sister network at TIP explicitly plotted to use Black Lives Matters protesters as a battering ram for the Biden faction to force Trump out of office, had Trump won the electoral college on Election Night 2020:

12. Just so no one misses the fine print, TIP sought to mobilize "racial justice activists" for "a Biden call to take to the streets," probing "the Biden campaign's ability to control these actors" if street muscle was needed to destabilize a Trump election win:

13. TIP, using the same "securing elections" pretext as Jim Baker's NFTEC, similarly threw off their nonpartisan cloak with inserts about how to stop "Trumpism" after the election.

They specifically plotted how to reduce Trump's access to media to stop him from running again:

14. Even in August 2020 (when TIP published their election crisis blueprint), they were plotting "investigations and possible charges" against Trump and ending the "the tradition of offering legal immunity" to past Presidents.

This was 3 months *before* the 2020 election:

15. What was Jim Baker, star of Twitter Files 1.0, doing over at NFTEC while TIP was cooking up an election crisis blueprint?

NFTEC was pressuring news media and journalists on *how to cover* election crisis events in the Biden campaign's favor:

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