Twitter executives were influenced by the Democrats so much so they made changes to the social platform's advertising policy in 2017, Matt Taibbi has revealed. The changes in advertising policy were made in order to facilitate closer cooperation with the US intelligence agencies, the man behind the Twitter Files expose revealed. citing internal documents he accessed.
"Internal Guidance: Any user identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations against targets associated with U.S. or other elections, or an entity associated with such operations, shall not be allowed to advertise on Twitter," a key Twitter said, according to Taibbi.
The turnaround by Twitter came following coercion from the intelligence community and the Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who was the vice chair of the Senate's Intelligence Committee at that time, Taibbi said, according to The Daily Caller.
Initially, Twitter executives did not believe that there was significant interference from Russian intelligence operatives in the 2016 US Presidential election, but this did not fit in the narrative of the US intelligence agencies like the FBI.
A Twitter report summing up its finding that there was negligible foreign interference in the 2016 election, in which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, was slammed as 'frankly inadequate' by Senator Warner. Taibbi said the Senate Committee's Democratic leadership was unhappy over the Twitter's statement that it suspended only 22 of 2,700 Twitter handles that had come under suspicion of being aligned with Russian influence groups.
Pressure From Democrats
The pressure from the Committee continued, and there was the looming threat of legislation that would reduce Twitter's chance to display political advertisements. Twitter then formed another task force to probe the Russian influence angle but found that only 17 of the 2,500 accounts had any connection.
Twitter was eventually forced to change its advertising policy and deny space to accounts that it had earlier called unproblematic after due investigation.
The same thing was repeated three years later when the Hunter Biden laptop scandal erupted. FBI was allowed to work closely with Twitter at this time ensuring that the microblogging platform censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Daily Caller story even goes on to say that FBI 'paid Twitter millions for its employees' time' over this period.
Ukraine Propaganda
In another expose earlier in December, Taibbi had revealed that the US Federal establishment aggressively demanded Twitter executives to take down accounts that appeared to be 'anti-Ukraine', citing unproved charges that the Russian agencies were behind those accounts.
Taibbi, who released the explosive account of misdeeds in Twitter before Elon Musk took the social media company private, said the Federal authorities such as the CIA, FBI and other intelligence wings, repeatedly called for the 'digital execution' of accounts without giving adequate justification.
In early December, Twitter boss Elon Musk released explosive information on how top Twitter executives hurriedly decided that the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post was probably a Russian misinformation officer. The expose by Musk also showed that an influential group of former intelligence officials including CIA Director John Brennan and ex-National Security Council Director James Clapper also colluded in the efforts to suppress the damning Post story Hunter and Joe Biden.
