Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Feb 8, 2023 • 57 tweets • 21 min read • Read on X
TWITTER FILES: CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS

Twitter executives, including fmr FBI lawyer Jim Baker, who served as Twitter Deputy Counsel, are about to testify in front of the House Oversight Committee about their handling of the Hunter Biden laptop

Let's go

BACKGROUND

Rep. Jamie Raskin calls Twitter files “authentically trivial” and "silly," but doesn't address the coordinated effort by the intelligence community to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop, which was in FBI possession since Dec 2019, *before* its contents became public in Oct 2020. Image
Witnesses: Jim Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, Anika Collier Navaroli Image
Baker claims he urged caution around the Hunter Biden laptop when in reality he led the charge within Twitter to reverse the finding by Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth that the NY Post story had *not* violated Twitter policies

Baker repeatedly and forcefully urged Roth and other Twitter executives to censor and thus discredit the NY Post story. After he did so, Roth reversed his decision, and censored the story. Image
Vijaye Gadde, the former general counsel of Twitter, claims that its censorship of the NY Post article was done in line with its policy against hacked materials, but she does not mention that Roth & his team found they were *not* from hacking.

There was extremely strong evidence the Hunter Biden emails were authentic and *not* the result of hacking. The @nypost included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden and an FBI subpoena proving it had taken possession of the laptop.

It would have taken a few minutes for Jim Baker, Yoel Roth, Vijaye Gadde to confirm whether the FBI subpoena was real or fake. None of them did so.
Yoel Roth, like Vijaye, opens his statement describing content moderation decisions that are not particularly controversial, such as against hate speech. This has been a strategy from many Twitter execs & defenders, including regime media.

The real issue here is disinformation.
"Twitter made a mistake," says Roth, about Twitter's censorship of the NY Post story about the laptop. "I've been clear that in my judgment at the time, Twitter should not have taken action to block the NY Post's reporting." Image
Roth says that Twitter's mistake was due to his memory of Russia's hack & leak of DNC emails in 2016.

He fails to mention that he himself said FBI repeatedly primed him in 2020 to dismiss reports of the laptop as another Russian disinfo operation.

The Democrats put forward a former Twitter exec. as a witness who says, "I was not involved in the decision around Hunter Biden's laptop," which is the main topic of this hearing. She then changes the topic to January 6. Image
.@RepAndyBiggsAZ asks Roth, "Were there experts... you consulted between 9 am and 10:15 am," when Roth reversed his decision.

Roth says, "We were following this discussion as it unfolded on Twitter... and that informed Twitter's judgement"

No mention of Baker.
The witness Anika Collier Navaroli talks about how alarmed she was when Trump called his tweets "little missiles" and argues that Twitter didn't censor enough in advance of January 6.
Roth says he regrets his tweet saying there were "ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE" and that he doesn't think all conservatives are Nazis Image
Gadde says that Hunter Biden never told Twitter that he was a victim of a hack

Gadde says she did not contact Biden's lawyer to ask if the laptop was authentic Image
Baker says that he did not talk to his FBI contacts about the Hunter Biden laptop on October 14, the day the NY Post published its article.

We know that at 3:38 pm that day, Baker arranged a phone call with the General Counsel of the FBI.

Roth says that he has been harassed since leaving Twitter, which is something that I and every other journalist who covered the Twitter Files have condemned publicly and repeatedly.

Nobody should be subjected to the harassment that Yoel Roth was subjected to.
Roth confirms that he was warned in meetings with intelligence agencies and other social media companies that there could be a hack and leak operation involving Hunter Biden, but adds that the Hunter Biden info may have come from another social media firm

Roth does not say which firm that was, but it is notable that when Joe Rogan asked Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg about the Hunter Biden laptop, Zuckerberg said his staff was warned by FBI of a coming Russian hack and dump operation

Roth says FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan said publicly that the documents Chan sent to Roth on the evening of Oct 13 did not relate to the Hunter Biden laptop.

Roth says, "The company made a decision that it did violate company policy. It wasn't my personal judgment at the time that it did. But the decision was communicated to me by my direct supervisor, and ultimately I didn't disagree with it enough to object to it." Image
Roth has confirmed for the first time that he was overruled by his boss, Del Harvey, in censoring the laptop.
Rep. @AOC calls the Hunter Biden laptop "disinformation," which is bizarre. No serious person today denies that the Hunter Biden laptop is real. Multiple news media companies have confirmed that it is real and wasn't tampered with.

cbsnews.com/news/hunter-bi…
Rep. Fry asks Roth about FBI constantly emailing Twitter about foreign interference.

Roth calls the FBI reports "a bit of mixed bag"

Roth says he wouldn't describe FBI as pressuring Twitter, but on Jan 2, 2020 a Twitter exec complained of "sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our API policies."

And that same month, Roth resisted FBI efforts to get Twitter to share data outside of the normal search warrant process.

Rep. Dan Goldman claims the first paragraph in the Oct 14 NY Post was "completely false" bc the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, but the NY Post didn't claim he wasn't corrupt, only that Biden pressured the government to fire him.

Not clear what Goldman's talking about Image
Gadde says, "I ultimately approved that decision" to censor the laptop.
.@Jim_Jordan asks Baker if talked to any of the 51 former CIA Directors and other intelligence community officials who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be Russian disinformation
Baker says, "I've talked to those people in the course of my career."
Baker: "I don't recall discussing that publication that they did about the Hunter Biden laptop with any of those people."
Rep. @AOC says the "information coming out of the NY Post" was "disinformation," which is bizarre. She seems to be saying that the laptop is not authentic, which is not something any mainstream journalist or policymaker believes anymore.
A committee member asks Gadde, "How is visibility filtering any different from shadow banning?"

Gadde: "I believe there are different definitions of shadowbanning... At that time I specifically defined shadow banning to mean something different than visibility filtering."
But, as @bariweiss reported last December, "What many people call 'shadow banning,' Twitter executives and employees call 'Visibility Filtering' or 'VF.' Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning."

Gadde misrepresented what Twitter was doing.

Roth confirms to Rep. @RepTimBurchett that Twitter neither de-platformed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor removed his Tweet calling Israel "a malignant cancerous tumor... that has to be removed and eradicated"

Image
As background, @bariweiss documented widespread "incitement to violence" and hate speech by major political figures that Twitter did nothing about, even as it moved to de-platform a sitting president.

A committee member asks Roth if the Russian trolls were more on Trump's or Biden's side and Roth says, "We saw Russian operatives playing both sides and often playing them against each other... manufacturing drama."
.@RepBeccaB stresses that the Biden campaign did not demand Twitter censor the Hunter Biden laptop, but that's never been the issue.

The issue is that FBI & intel community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings.

The implication of Rep. Balint is that all of this is a conspiracy theory, but when we asked former top CIA media analyst, "So you think the FBI could have been 'pre-bunking' the laptop?" he said, "I don’t think there’s any other possibility."

public.substack.com/p/former-top-c… Image
Rep. Gary Palmer asks how the former Twitter executives justified removing Trump while leaving on Twitter Iran's Ayatollah, who called for the destruction of Israel.

"You understand how hypocritical this is, right?" says Palmer.

None offer a defense of that decision.
In Twitter Files Part 4, I documented how, on January 7, senior Twitter execs created justifications to ban Trump and sought to change policy for Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders

In Twitter Files Part 5, @bariweiss reported that Twitter staff unanimously concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.

“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement."

“Don’t see the incitement angle here.”

Anika Navaroli, who is also testifying, agreed, saying, "I also am not seeing clear or coded incitement in the DJT tweet... Safety has assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time.”

"Navaroli... testified... that the ban came only after Twitter execs had for months rebuffed her calls for stronger action against Trump’s account" — @drewharwell @washingtonpost

washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
But Navaroli, as a Twitter executive, expressed precisely the opposite, stressing that Trump had not, in fact, violated Twitter policies

.@RepArmstrongND notes that, after intense FBI warnings of Russian disinformation, Twitter execs. did not seek to find out if the Hunter Biden laptop the result of hacking.

Instead, they reversed their own evaluation.

Worth watching:
.@RepPatFallon notes that Joe Biden repeatedly denied, while campaigning for president, ever talking to his son, Hunter, about his business dealings and that the Oct 14 NY Post article about the Hunter Biden laptop disproved that.

nypost.com/2020/10/14/ema…
.@RepDanGoldman stresses that people couldn't confirm the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop right away, but a) they could have and b) Roth & his team had already determined there was no evidence it was from hacking before they were overruled by Baker, Gadde, and Harvey
.@Jim_Jordan responds to Goldman:

"You know who knew the laptop was real? The FBI! Maybe they had it for a year and just said, 'You know what? We're gonna put it on the shelf and we're not going to look at it. But if anyone knew it was real, it's them."
Back to shadow-banning

Roth: "It would not surprise me to know that visibility filtering labels had been applied to the accounts of elected officials."

Jordan: "But the user doesn't know?"

Roth: "It was not Twitter's practice to notify users."
Rep @laurenboebert notes that Twitter applied "an aggressive visibility filter" on January 9, 2021, for 90 days, after she tweeted what she says was a joke: "Hillary must be pissed it took the DNC until 2020 to successfully rig an election." Image
@RepLuna accuses Twitter executives of working with the intelligence community and NGOs through the Jira cloud server system to censor tweets and thus violate the First Amendment.
Rep. @ChuckEdwards4NC asks Roth about his participation in an Aspen Institute zoom meeting in June 2020 with reporters and other social media execs. to plan how *not* to cover a potential Russian "hack & leak" relating to Hunter Biden

Rep. Edwards: "Why was Hunter Biden chosen as the subject of this scenario? Just weeks before the October 14th, 2020 publication of the first Hunter Biden story?"

Roth: "I don't know."
.@RepScottPerry : "Do you find it highly coincidental that it actually happened and it was Hunter Biden at all?"

Roth: "My statement does not suggest the FBI told me it would involve Hunter Biden... I think there is a coincidence there and I really can't speak as to how"

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 20
Biden pardoned Fauci. He says it’s not an admission of guilt. But if Fauci were innocent, no pardon would be needed. The evidence suggests Fauci helped create the Covid pandemic, and then covered it up. The investigation must go forward. All Covid & Fauci Files must be released.
Fauci led an aggressive disinformation effort to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. If the Covid virus didn’t escape from the lab, why did he deliberately spread false or misleading information about it? Why did he repeatedly interfere in the investigation?
Fauci played the media like a fiddle. They called the lab lead a “conspiracy theory.” Then, documents showed that Fauci’s main allies had sought to insert a furin cleavage site in the exact place where it exists on the Covid virus. Reason #7,969 for why the legacy media is dead.
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 17
Strong words from LA fire fighters to the chief: "[I]f you had done things right... fatalities would have been reduced, property would have been saved....the preventive systems... were nonexistent... We attribute this to... lack of experience, arrogance, inability to lead..."
Another good scoop by @RichMcHugh @NewsNation

Excellent video segment too:

Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 15
January 2: National Weather Service (NWS) warns of “extreme fire weather conditions” in Los Angeles

Jan. 3: NWS repeats warning in special LA briefing

Jan. 4: LA Mayor Karen Bass flies to Ghana on junket

Jan. 7: LA goes up in flames as Bass poses for photos at cocktail party Image
January 2: "...extreme fire weather conditions... Potential Fire Weather Risk" Image
January 3: "Critical Fire Conditions... fire season will continue in to the New Year!" Image
Read 8 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 9
Over the next few weeks you’re going to hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles.

Those will be lies. They could have prevented them. Governor Newsom cut the funding for preventing forest fires and failed to build sufficient water resources for fighting fires. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.5 million in funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department and then went to Ghana even though she knew of the risk of catastrophic fires.

It’s true that California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, are fiery places. It’s true that the Santa Ana winds made the fires worse.

But Newsom and Bass have known about those hazards for all of their careers and failed to deal with them. Their rank incompetence and lack of leadership are shocking and scandalous.

It’s hard to overstate how badly they screwed up water management. LA firefighters haven’t had the water they needed. Newsom hasn’t built the new water reservoirs that Los Angeles needed. And Newsom even cut the budget for water infrastructure projects last year.

Why is that? Part of the reason is that they were focused on other things. Making the fire department more racially diverse. Climate change. Homelessness.

And the reason they were focused on those things is because those are what the radical Left that controls the Democratic party wanted them to focus on.

Year after year, they do nothing while focusing on things like trans and Trump and climate and ignoring the things that really matter to the people of California.

The Democrats in California aren’t like Democrats in other states. They are radicals. I would know, since when I was a young radical I moved to California for that reason.

As many of us get older, we become more moderate. We become more practical. We understand firefighters and police officers are necessary. We are reminded of the importance of things like safe streets and hard work and good schools.

But more than that, I saw the consequences of radical progressive policies on the environment, homelessness, crime, education, water, and everything else. Violent criminals, in particular, are devouring Los Angeles, Oakland, and the rest of California.

The people who control the Democratic Party in California worship books about Los Angeles, like City of Quartz by the Marxist author Mike Davis. In that book, Davis claims that the problem in Los Angeles is that too much money goes to things like firefighting to protect wealthy neighborhoods.

They did the same thing on crime and homelessness. They failed to provide adequate funding to the police. They weakened the laws that allowed for burglaries and robberies. They subsidized homelessness, attracting homeless people from around the United States to camp illegally and start fires.

Over half of the fires in places like Los Angeles and Oakland are caused by the homeless committing arson, often out of some petty revenge.

We don’t know what started all of the fires, but at least one started within the housing subdivision. Others may have started in the interface between housing and wildlands. Or it could have been started by the homeless.

Whatever the case, California and LA didn’t invest enough in preventing fires because they were distracted by radical Left causes.

When Rick Caruso ran for Mayor against Karen Bass, he called for increasing the fire department’s budget.

A big part of the reason he lost is simply because he was white. I watched focus groups in 2022 and the most racist people were white liberals in Los Angeles. When they discussed the mayoral race, the white people overwhelmingly said they couldn’t vote for a white man and had to vote for a black woman because she was black.

The Latino men and women in separate focus groups were much less racist. They wanted to know about their policies.

It was the radical Left that invented the racist idea that white people alive today should feel guilty about things white people did in the past. Racist white guilt led people in Los Angeles and California to vote against a guy who would have prevented those fires.

And so, over the next few weeks, when you hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles, don’t believe them.

It’s time for California to grow up and move beyond the juvenile Leftism that has destroyed the state and destroyed Los Angeles. We can’t trust our leaders to run anything. It’s not just incompetence. It’s that they really don’t care.

It’s time for Californians to demand new leaders — ones who aren’t beholden to the radicals who control the Democratic Party. .
Called it. Here's @MayorOfLA claiming that the $17.5 million she cut from the budget " really did not impact what we've been going through over the last few days."
The LA Fire Chief disagrees. Last December she said her department was "facing unprecedented operational challenges due to... budgetary reductions" that had "affected the Department's ability to maintain core operations" including "fire prevention..." and "the Department's capacity to prepare for... large-scale emergencies, including wildfires..."

Couldn't be any clearer.Image
Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 8
The media is ridiculing Trump for saying that wind turbines are killing the whales. But they are. There were 12 whale deaths off the East Coast in December alone. The North Atlantic right whale species will go extinct unless the Trump administration acts to end the slaughter.
The science is clear. The increased wind industry boat traffic is behind the whale deaths. Scientists have also documented illegal, high-decibel noise, which separates mothers from babies. The Biden administration is covering up the evidence for money.

saverightwhales.org/media
Here is the full documentary, "Thrown to the Wind." It contains and explains all of the scientific evidence. The government agencies have refused to conduct the necessary research and are working with the media, paid off by the industry, to spread disinformation.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 6
Justin Trudeau has resigned. He framed himself as an honest, caring, and compassionate leader. He was not. He falsely smeared his critics as Nazis. He justified freezing bank accounts using faked intelligence. And he spread disinformation while demanding censorship. Let's dig in: Image
Trudeau spread disinformation to persecute his critics. He froze their bank accounts. He demanded censorship. We have to talk about the malignant narcissism of Justin Trudeau:

Trudeau froze the bank accounts of protesters by claiming it was an emergency. It wasn't. Public's @galexybrane helped uncover proof that his government used faked intelligence to illegally frame protesting truckers as violent extremists.

Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(