"Federal Belly-button of the Industry"
Another acronymic meaning for the FBI
There are a handful of alternate definitions out there for “FBI.” Some that even employees (current, former and suspended) of the once highly respected agency have used from time to time. “Federal Belly-button of the Industry” can now be added to that list of monikers. On January 3, 2023, Investigative journalist Matt Taibbi published additional threads to Twitter regarding the ongoing Twitter Files. The massive undertaking of sorting through thousands of emails, internal messages and other data in the company’s possession has been done at the behest of Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
As noted in FBI, Christmas Lie, a number of other acclaimed investigative journalists and authors are working alongside Taibbi in order to provide the Twitter Files in numerous, cohesive installments on the platform. On December 21, 2022, the FBI responded to the Twitter Files by saying, “It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency." The FBI was at least a week late when levying this feckless attack, however.
Prepare yourself for a heavy dose of “doublethink,” or language used to deliberately confuse the meaning of words. A week prior to the FBI’s paltry attempt at obfuscating the Twitter Files and those working on them for public release, NPR took their own crack at it. In their special series titled, “Untangling Disinformation,” NPR has a piece titled, “Elon Musk is using the Twitter Files to discredit foes and push conspiracy theories.”
As if the series and piece titles weren’t enough to warp our brains with doublethink, the content certainly is. NPR describes the Twitter Files as, “a collection of internal emails and Slack chats capturing Twitter employees discussing company policies and fraught moderation calls. So far they've covered the decision to ban Trump, Twitter's short-lived decision to block a news story in October 2020 drawn from material on Hunter Biden's laptop, and how the company limits the reach of accounts that break its rules, including some well-known right-wing users.”
In their ignorance, or perhaps worse if done deliberately, NPR entirely left out the main reason the Twitter Files are being released; government direction/involvement with the suppression of speech. Not only are the Twitter Files a collection of internal emails and chats between employees, but also those between Twitter employees and government officials acting in their official capacity. NPR is entirely content with glossing over the potential impact of the Hunter Biden laptop story muzzling (and subsequent Russian disinformation lie), and again leaves out the primary issue of the government directing Twitter to limit the reach of accounts that the government believed in violation of Twitter’s rules.
NPR’s self-aggrandizing act and selective interpretation of what the Twitter Files are, is itself, “disinformation” that needs untangling. But of course it is. NPR was created by the federal government and has been tied to it ever since its inception in 1970. Like most government programs, NPR faced a budget crises and afterwards stricter controls were emplaced on it by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (don’t let that name fool you either though; it’s a government entity).
NPR, and its advocates, try to claim that they only receive around 1% of their annual budget from the federal government. But, a bit deeper analysis, including documents available on NPR’s website, show that the 1% figure they like to claim is what they receive directly from the federal government. The most reasonable estimation is that when direct and indirect (federal, state and local) government funds are accounted for, NPR receives about 10%, or roughly $25,000,000 a year as of 2018, from the government. So, of course they will propagate the government narrative that Twitter’s new CEO and his hand picked journalists are pedaling conspiracy theories.
But, they aren’t. In light of the most recent Twitter Files release, it is clear that elected politicians were the ones espousing conspiratorial views and disinformation. Over the last number of years, our political and news media elite have gravitated towards labelling that which they don’t approve of as “Russian disinformation,” or other similar terms. Granted, the worst of the worst offenders are frequently tied to Russia. For a number of reasons, this Russian labelling seems to have been the primary focal point for the worst attacks. Remember the now thoroughly debunked Russian collusion hoax? If not, this article by Paul Sperry will bring you back up to speed. Of critical importance here is that Russiagate is yet another primary example of just how far off the rails the FBI has become.
It may be difficult to harken back to 2016, or even earlier than that, when the Russia narrative really took a foothold. The current Twitter Files threads do remind us to some degree just how important that narrative was to those vying for political power at the time. As the Twitter Files revealed, the then Public Policy VP Colin Crowell pointed out through internal communications that the Democrats were “taking their cues from Hillary Clinton.” Clinton herself, during the same week in September, 2017, that Crowell pointed this out, said, “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.”
This was in light of Twitter revealing to the Senate that it had suspended 22 possible Russian accounts and another 179 that may have been linked to them. This small number did not sit well with Democrats. One senator, Mark Warner, who was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, held an immediate press conference where he lambasted Twitter as “frankly inadequate on every level.”
In response to being in the government’s and media’s crosshairs for not doing enough to stop alleged Russian propaganda, Crowell told Twitter employees to “keep producing material” for the government because Warner had political incentive to keep the Russian issue at the precipice of the news cycle. Because of the bad press Twitter was now receiving, Twitter responded by setting up their own working group to root out any Russian accounts they could find. Yet, by mid October of 2017, they concluded that, “No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend).”
By mid-2020, the FBI asserted itself as the conduit by which other government entities could access Twitter; or as FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) Elvis Chan put it, the United States government’s “belly button” to the industry. Last night, Taibbi was on Tucker Carlson Tonight giving a recap of the Twitter Files. Based on his investigative reporting thus far, Taibbi said, “I think we can say pretty conclusively after looking at tens of thousands of emails over the course of these weeks that the government was in the censorship business in a huge way.” Furthermore, Twitter got to the point where internally Twitter would take content down if the intelligence community said to, although they were not professing that publicly.
Taibbi seemingly lamented the state of free speech in this country as well by saying, “I gave to the ACLU for years. I’m one of those sort of dyed in the wool liberals and grew up that way. I’m deeply disappointed. I think a lot of people who are politically on that side of the aisle are missing the boat on this. They don’t understand the gravity of the situation. They’re thinking about this in partisan terms. It’s not a partisan story. This is a story about the architecture of the intelligence community and law enforcement getting its hands on speech and on the ability of people to communicate with one another through platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and they’re doing this in a very profound way. Much more serious than I thought at the beginning of this story.”
Taibbi also pointed out there are detractors (like NPR as referenced above) who are saying that Twitter acted on their own because the government didn’t formally ask or demand that Twitter take certain action. However, as reading the Twitter Files shows, the government threatened legislative action, had monthly (and sometimes more frequent) meetings with Twitter, and took other actions to coerce the response it wanted. Furthermore, as Taibbi said last night, “how voluntary is it really when the FBI or the NSA, or the CIA or the DHS comes to your company and presents you with an Excel spreadsheet of thousands of names and says ‘we assess that theses accounts are linked to the Internet Research Agency and they’re foreign threat actors.’ I think these companies feel enormous pressure to do the moderation and I think the initial work that we’ve done proves that they did so.” That certainly appears to be the case.
Taibbi has posted summaries to all the Twitter Files here on Substack that also include links to each Twitter thread.
Kudos to Matt Taibbi, the investigative reporters, authors and Garret O ‘ Boyle. A read that this guy sure appreciates being posted. 💪🏻