More from the Twitter Files: Congressionally-Requested Censorship

by Sharon Rondeau

(Jan. 4, 2023) — In Tuesday’s “Twitter Files” release by Matt Taibbi, he revealed that in the fall of 2017, as congressional and Special Counsel investigations ensued into alleged “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russian government, two congressmen, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA28), pressured Twitter to produce evidence from its platform of alleged Russian election interference that saw Donald Trump elected President of the United States.

Following the election and Trump’s inauguration, Republicans held the Washington, DC triumvirate of the White House and majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

In the initial five tweets of Part 1 of his new release, Taibbi provided background as to how Twitter was drawn in to examining accounts for possibly nefarious Russian activity after Facebook removed several hundred accounts of “suspected Russian origin.”

Facebook had the larger problem, Twitter executive Colin Crowell told coworkers in early September 2017. However, he acknowledged that Facebook’s disclosure of the removed accounts “is going to draw us into conversations w/Congress” and that Twitter should “be responsive to inquiries from Capitol Hill.”

Continuing, Taibbi wrote, “6.In September, 2017, after a cursory review, Twitter informed the Senate it suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with ‘possible links’ to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined.”

Taibbi’s next tweet reported, with two screenshots from a contemporaneous Reuters article, that Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner “held an immediate press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as ‘frankly inadequate on every level.'”

In tweet #9, Taibbi displayed a September 29, 2017 email Crowell wrote to founder and then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey detailing a bipartisan meeting he attended with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees indicating that Warner and Schiff pressured the company to “keep producing material” they were seeking to validate their claims that “Russian activity” impacted the 2016 election.

For many months, including after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team reported it could not substantiate the allegation that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the Russians, Schiff claimed he possessed “direct evidence” of wrongdoing but ultimately never produced it.

Democratic 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, then promoting her book, “What Happened?”, Crowell wrote, was providing “cues” to Intelligence Committee Democrats through her claims that Facebook “and other social media” “enabled Russian agents” during the campaign, resulting in her loss to Trump which she never fully accepted.

A Twitter “PR crisis” subsequently ensued, Taibbi wrote, after the company’s “Russia Task Force,” formed to identify accounts possibly generating Russian propaganda, failed to yield the congressionally-desired “material.”

At approximately 8:08 p.m. EST, Taibbi was Tucker Carlson’s guest speaking about his latest “Twitter Files” release which Taibbi concluded demonstrated that Twitter “caved” to congressional pressure. In the second part of Taibbi’s January 3 release, he reported that Twitter censored journalist Paul Sperry by suspending his account indefinitely at Schiff’s request.

Although Twitter initially hesitated to comply with Schiff’s office’s demand, responding with, “WE DON’T DO THIS,” it ultimately acquiesced in Sperry’s case.

In response on Wednesday, his account recently reinstated, Sperry tweeted, “Explains why Twitter could never give me a reason for my suspension. It was Schiff!”