1/ Good morning. Yesterday the Washington Post published a very important report on January 6- before, during, and after. I reckon it's one of the most important accounts published anywhere to date. It is full of new reporting and detail. washingtonpost.com/politics/inter…
2/ The article opens with the incredible account of Donell Harvin, a homeland security official who convened the nation's fusion centers which- for the first time since 9/11- were blinking red "coast to coast". He even told DC to prepare for mass casualties ~48 hours in advance.
3/ Based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of documents and multimedia assets, the report finds the "red flags were everywhere" and were compounding even weeks before the attack.
4/ We learn more about the FBI's mishandling of warnings, including confusion over how to deal with the volume of threats. And we learn here what has seemed obvious for months- FBI Director Christopher Wray was playing politics. This reeks of cowardice:
5/ This appears to again confirm the idea that senior military leaders feared putting the Guard on the ground because they worried then President Trump might try to use it as an instrument in the coup.
6/ The "before" section of the piece details the compounding furor over false election claims- @GrahamBrookie and @jaredlholt are quoted about the stirrings of extremists immediately after election day.
7/ The FBI even had information about threats to kill Capitol Police.
8/ Fascinating section here suggests posters were getting around content moderation rules by inserting words like "peaceful" into their chats. "Mitt Romney peacefully gets it first," said one.
9/ This junior analyst basically predicted the RNC and DNC bombs, and the general confusion at the Capitol.
10/ The concerns of senior military leaders are detailed again, including the fear Trump would attempt to use the National Guard to accomplish his coup if they were put on the street.
11/ More detail on the role of Jack Donohue, the former NYPD analyst who became director of intelligence for the Capitol Police who understood the threat, but he was apparently hampered by his tenure in the role.
12/ It is still not known which of these "larger" social media firms were sending posts to the fusion center in Northern California, but this offers more evidence that the FBI was receiving real time threat information from multiple social media firms.
13/ The Norfolk memo, the final warning from the "multibillion-dollar security apparatus built in the wake of 9/11", ignored because.... white people.
14/ Just a harrowing paragraph.
15/ @RepJayapal shared text messages she exchanged with her husband as the attack unfolded.
16/ The new details reported by the Post about the role of Trump lawyer Eastman are just incredible. This was a coup attempt, and Eastman believed he had the legal authority to push it through.
17/ Imagine if these belligerent tweets had been sent.
18/ Only after the 4:17 Trump tweet did the Army approve putting the Guard on the street, presumably because they may have felt more satisfied Trump would not use them to further advance his effort to stop the certification of Biden's victory.
19/ (Almost passed this over, but a stunning anecdote about Lindsey Graham)
20/ The final section of the report is called, aptly, Contagion, detailing the way that violent threats and disinformation have continued to spread across the country following the insurrection.
21/ It importantly notes that the insurrection is not, in fact, over.
22/ More on the alleged bias at the FBI against taking the threat from white "largely law-abiding" protestors seriously.
23/ All of that social media data- combined with video and other forms of data- became useful post facto to investigators tracking down the insurrectionists.
24/ The insurrection failed in the short term, but in the long run may indeed achieve its objective.

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More from @justinhendrix

31 Oct
The Washington Post has a new, comprehensive timeline with new details on the before, during and after of January 6.
washingtonpost.com/politics/inter…
These details suggest multiple social media firms had sent posts warning of Jan 6 violence (publicly only Parler is known so far to have sent warnings direct to the FBI.)
This is consistent with what Wray and others have said but the details on Dataminr are new.
Read 4 tweets
30 Oct
As Mike Pence hid from a marauding mob during the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, John Eastman, an attorney for Donald Trump, emailed a top Pence aide to say that Pence had caused the violence by refusing to block certification of Trump’s election loss.
washingtonpost.com/investigations…
WaPo:

“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman wrote to Jacob, referring to Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
washingtonpost.com/investigations…
This is incredible: Eastman- Trump’s lawyer- was still pushing Pence not to certify the electoral college vote AFTER the insurrection:
Read 5 tweets
29 Oct
"Reasonable people" would acknowledge your position is a scarecrow. Hardly anyone believes social media is the prime cause for society's issues. What "reasonable people" object to is your company knowingly making things worse and making billions while at it.
The worst part of this is that Facebook's own researchers are "Reasonable people." "Reasonable people" produced this insight into how your platform makes things worse. wsj.com/articles/faceb…
"Reasonable people" produced this insight into how your platform makes things worse. apnews.com/article/the-fa…
Read 11 tweets
28 Oct
For @techpolicypress, @jbakcoleman has a rallying call for academics who study social media:

It's time to build new connections across the social sciences and prepare to dig into the Facebook Papers in depth using qual and quant methods:
techpolicy.press/journalists-ar…
@techpolicypress @jbakcoleman .@jbakcoleman also says Facebook should also take this opportunity to rethink its relationship with academic researchers for the post-whistleblower period. Only maximum transparency will work going forward: techpolicy.press/journalists-ar…
"Understanding how social media impacts society is about as difficult as it is important. We somehow have to make sense of what happens when billions of remarkably complex brains are networked via smartphone to giant server farms leveraging PBs of data..." techpolicy.press/journalists-ar…
Read 4 tweets
26 Oct
"Hey everyone and thanks for joining today. We made good progress this quarter across a number of product priorities, and our community continues to grow. There are now almost 3.6 billion people who actively use one or more of our services..." politico.com/news/2021/10/2…
"...and I'm excited about our roadmap to keep building great new experiences for them. As expected, we did experience revenue headwinds this quarter, including from Apple's changes that are not only negatively affecting our business..." apnews.com/article/the-fa…
"...but millions of small businesses in what is already a difficult time for them in the economy. Sheryl and Dave will talk about this more later, but the bottom line is we expect we'll be able to navigate these headwinds over time..." cnn.com/2021/10/25/tec…
Read 31 tweets
25 Oct
1/ Seeing some tweets calling on specific Reps. to be "expelled" or "arrested" for their role in January 6.

A couple of thoughts.

First- it is right to say that any Rep. who played any role in planning violence should be expelled. I am unaware of hard evidence so far.
2/ Second- it may be right to call for anyone that planned to send protestors to the Capitol, with knowledge of the potential for violence, to be expelled. There is some evidence this happened.
3/ Third- calling on anyone to be expelled for participating in the objection is a non-starter. And frankly, counterproductive. Despite the fact that the objection was based on a lie, there was nothing illegal about it.
Read 5 tweets

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