Thread by @TexasLindsay_

1. The strange story about a President of a Civil Rights group who sought help from Twitter to censor the reporting of journalist @JamesOKeefeIII.

2. Disclaimer: I have never covered election stories—only stories about free speech & human rights.

This story is about Freedom of the Press & people who lobbied Twitter to censor a journalist & citizens who commented on a story that was unfavorable for their political party.

3. It’s also worth noting that @JamesOKeefeIII, the journalist at the center of this story, is currently being represented by the @ACLU for a separate instance regarding the infringement of his rights as journalist.

4. On Jan. 4th, 2021, the CEO & President of the Leadership Conference on Civil & Human Rights, Vanita Gupta, reached out to the former VP of Twitter, Vijaya Gadde and thanked her for responding to her request regarding “the dangerous tweets I flagged for you.”

5. The Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights is funded by a number of foundations who primarily fund groups favorable of left-wing politics. Notably they received funding from George Soros’ Open Society, Ford, MacArthur and Bill Gates’ Foundations.

6. In the same email, Ms. Gupta asked that two women at, “Fair Fight” (Political Action Committee founded by Stacey Abrams in 2018) be looped in with their “team policing disinformation and threats re the Georgia elections.” tinyurl.com/WhoIsFairFight

7. Although Vanita Gupta was copied on correspondence that followed, there was no record uncovered of her interaction with Twitter after she asked to loop in the Political Action group. It’s also unclear why Gupta asked that they be looped in to address the tweets of concern.

8. Three days after Vanita Gupta emailed Twitter asking them to take action on “dangerous tweets,” her organization announced in a Tweet that Joe Biden had nominated her to be U.S. Associate Attorney General.

9. Although Gupta’s nomination likely factored into her lack of add’l correspondence, a request for comment from Ms. Gupta was not answered at the time of publication so we were unable to confirm her lack of involvement with Twitter once she looped in the “Fair Fight” team.

10. In response to Ms. Gupta’s request, Ms. Gadde looped in her team at Twitter to help review and escalate any issues.

11. The Twitter team then requested links from the Fair Fight Political Action Committee so they could “address accordingly.”

12. After receiving the list of tweets from the Fair Fight team, twitter employees replied that action had already been taken by labeling the “original tweet” that Fair Fight had flagged with Twitter’s “Civic Misinformation” label.

13. The label has since been removed, but tweet in question was a video shared by journalist @JamesOKeefeIII regarding the election in Georgia. You can the video watch and assess for yourself how “dangerous” it is:

https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/1346271086783197185

14. The second tweet on the list flagged by the Fair Fight PAC in request for Twitter to remove was @JamesOKeefeIII doing a follow-up to his story that the Fulton county election officials had removed staff bios from their website.

https://twitter.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/1346294482111770627

15. The 3rd link sent by “Fair Fight” to Twitter was for another social media app called Parler. Twitter noted this wasn’t even their platform but kindly offered that they could possibly mark the link as unsafe depending on their approach.

16. The rest of the tweets involved people posting screen shots of web archives of staff bios and other publicly available information.

17. Out of these 9 links that Fair Fight sent to Twitter, only one account was suspended, .
“CosmicScribe21.” However, it wasn’t suspended for a tweet, but instead Twitter claimed it violated a Ban Evasion policy (i.e. when users evade a ban by creating a new account)

18. Twitter then sent an update Fair Fight to let them know what action(s) had been taken on the journalist they accused of doxing in a video.

Twitter replied that there were no violations since in the video was public information.

19. Fair Fight pushed back and pleaded with twitter over concerns of safety accusing @JamesOKeefeIII of doxing people captured in their video.

But Twitter held their ground and said it did not violate their ToS.

20. After Twitter notified Fair Fight of the actions it would/wouldn’t take, Yoel Roth emailed his team noting that they need to invest in misinfo policy on “targeted conspiracies” compared the undercover reporting of election officials to dangerous conspiracies like “Pizzagate.”

21. Although @JamesOKeefeIII was not suspended for this instance in January 2021, Twitter did end up permanently suspending his account a few months later without warning. More on this and what followed coming soon.

22. In closing, I’d like to thank award-winning journalist, Paul Thacker @thackerpd for inviting me to go with him to HQ to help cover the Twitter Files. And @elonmusk for believing in free speech and allowing these stories to be told.

Veritas Vos Liberabit