The Case of Elon Musk and the Holder of the Twitter Files: The Nature of the “Laptop from Hell” and the “Understanding of Twitter”

Federal authorities are investigating Elon Musk in connection with his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, the social media platform said in a court filing Thursday.

The company’s court filing elsewhere accused Musk’s legal team of failing to produce draft communications with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a slide presentation to the Federal Trade Commission as part of the two sides’ ongoing litigation over whether Musk can walk away from the deal.

That has been widely reported on over the past two years. The material shared by Musk paints a more vivid picture of the scramble inside Twitter to figure out what to do – but does not fundamentally alter that picture.

Last week, Musk proposed following through with his deal to buy the company at the originally agreed upon price of $54.20 per share. The judge that was overseeing the case later in the week ruled to stop proceedings until October 28 after Musk requested it.

While the Twitter Files disclosures highlighted requests from the Biden campaign for Twitter to review tweets that might violate its policies, the committee heard testimony that Republicans also sought to influence the platform — and that the company had even changed its policies to allow Trump to post content that broke its rules.

“Twitter did not ask Zatko to torch his own documents, much less demand that he do so,” Twitter’s filing read. It was not known what information contained in Zatko’s notebooks.

Over the weekend, Musk smeared Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, who features prominently in the documents, with homophobic tropes common in anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. He also attacked Dr. Fauci who Musk says will be featured in future installments of theTwitter files.

Since 2000, that paranoia has only grown. Trump took to calling Hunter Biden’s computer the “laptop from hell”—a quip that would later become the title of a book from a Post columnist. The book described the story as one of “the greatest coverups in media history” and promised to uncover the “coordinated censorship operation by Big Tech, the media establishment, and former intelligence operatives.” The book castigates Twitter for suppressing the story, but it acknowledges that the platform made a mistake after the election.

According to sources at the FBI and at Twitter who spoke to CNN, none of that information was disclosed to Twitter executives trying to decide how to treat the laptop story, nor to anyone else for that matter.

The revelations include the bureau’s contact with Twitter to moderate its contents and the allegation that foreign influence and election tampering were involved.

The Q main narrative was confirmed by the tweets files, wrote one QAnon influencer. “Balenciaga confirms the rest.” The message that references the claims about the involvement of the fashion brand in child exploitation was viewed more than 100,000 times on Telegram. (Despite some optimism that his account would be restored, that particular QAnon influencer remains suspended on Twitter.) Other QAnon influencers seized on the fact that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s personal email, which Taibbi failed to censor in a screenshot he shared, used the custom top-level domain .pizza.

Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

By the time the New York Post published its laptop story in October of 2020, YoelRoth had met with the FBI and other government officials. He was prepared for a hack operation.

On Wednesday, Roth testified that potential Russian interference was the frame through which Twitter viewed the Post story – even though he personally did not believe the Post article broke Twitter’s rules.

On Election Day 2016 he wrote, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist for a reason.”

We’ve all made some questionable postings but I want to be clear that I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

The internal documents on the social media platform offer a glimpse into internal debates that took place before the company decided to ban President Donald Trump following an attack on the US Capitol.

At the time of Trump banning, the company said that he had implied that he would continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election, and that the inauguration could be seen as a statement that the election was not legitimate.

Anika said that she wasn’t seeing clear or coded instuction to violence after Trump’s January 8 post saying the “75,000,000 great American patriots who voted for me, America first and Make America great again, will have a hard time.” They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

(Navaroli later testified to the House committee investigating January 6 that she and other staffers had been alarmed by content posted on Twitter by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups that echoed statements by Trump, and had worried about the risk of violence ahead of the attack.)

The staffer who removed their names from the screenshot said that Trump’s subsequent announcement that he wouldn’t attend Biden’s inauguration was a clear no-violation. But a different staffer questioned whether that tweet could be “proof that [Trump] doesn’t support a peaceful transition,” according to Weiss’ tweets.

The process of involving multiple staffers and teams and relying on research for high-profile decisions does not seem out of line with how social platforms make content moderation decisions.

Over the past two weeks, Musk has been releasing internal documents to a handpicked group of journalists who are digging through them and posting excerpts on Twitter.

Many tech journalists, social media experts and former employees say that Musk’s claims are overstated, because the documents share so far mostly corroborate what is already known about policing a large social network.

Renée DiResta is a researcher at theStanford Internet Observatory who studies how narratives spread on social networks and she says that the people who are confronting high-stakes, unforeseen events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how are coming through in theTwitter Files.

They show Twitter executives and rank and file employees grappling with difficult tradeoffs, questioning the company’s rules and how they should be applied – and in some cases, getting things wrong.

When it came to sharing a New York Post story about shady business dealings by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, users were temporarily blocked from using the social media platform.

Citing its rules against sharing hacked material containing private information, Twitter showed a warning to anyone who tried to post a link to the article saying it was “potentially harmful.” The post suspended its account on the social media site until it deleted all of its posts about the story.

There was no evidence of government involvement in the New York Post story, despite claims by Musk and others.

“I continue to believe there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time,” he wrote. “Of course mistakes were made.”

He said he wished the internal files had been “released Wikileaks-style, with many more eyes and interpretations to consider.” He added: “There’s nothing to hide…only a lot to learn from.”

Defending Trump on Twitter: How Is He Heaps His Mind? A Democratic Analysis of the Impact of Musk’s Twitter ban on the company and the public

DiResta said there’s good reason to demand more insight into how social media companies operate. “Often these decisions are quite inscrutable,” she said. “These are platforms that shape public opinion, and so the question of how they’re moderated and how they’re designed is impactful.”

But she said to get the full picture, outsiders need more than the “anecdotes” Musk’s selected journalists are sharing – which, so far, focus exclusively on charged, highly partisan American political dramas.

To better understand the decision to ban Trump, she said it would be beneficial to see discussions around the other world leaders who have not been kicked off the platform.

There’s value in the information that’s been made public, but it’s also reinforcing a perception of yourself as a partisan individual in the United States, DiResta said.

Framing the disclosures as secret knowledge plays particularly well on Twitter, said Mike Caulfield, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

His message triggered threats against both men. Roth and his family have been forced to flee their home, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn’t solve anything,” Dorsey wrote on Tuesday. You should direct blame at me or lack of it.

He made deep cuts to the company’s trust and safety workforce which includes teams focused on non-English languages. Some of the members of the external Trust and Safety Council came under attack on the internet after Musk criticized them.

According to a Trust and Safety Council member who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, the CEO’s willingness to target people working to keep the platform’s users safe is creating a chilling effect.

Musk did not return my email seeking comment. He claimed that the accounts had shared what he said was assassination coordinates on him, despite the fact that none of the journalists had done such a thing. O’Sullivan, Mac, and Harwell had reported recently on the banning of @ElonJet, the account that posted real-time updates on the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet. But that’s far different than actually doxxing him.

The Times and The New York Times — The Punitive Case of a Social Media Reporter: Harwell, Buzbee, DiResta and Elon

“It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,’” DiResta said.

The New York Times had mixed feelings about their reporters using social media, and if they can now be suspended from it for reporting fairly straightforwardly, you have to wonder if that is the tipping point.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. There is a daily digest about the evolving media landscape.

Sally Buzbee of The Post said that the suspension of Drew Harwell’s account directly undermines the claim that Musk intends to run a platform dedicated to free speech. Harwell was not given an explanation as to why he was kicked out of the social networking site after reporting about Musk. Our journalist should be reinstated immediately.”

Today, they are very empty. As Harwell told me, “Elon says he is a free speech champion and he is banning journalists for exercising free speech. I think that calls into question his commitment.”

Demystifying the FBI: Dean Obeidallah, the Washington Post, and the Lieu-Comer Correspondence

Dean Obeidallah is a former attorney and is the host of the daily show on the radio. If you want to follow him, you can do so through his verified account: Dean Obeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

In response to the documents known as the “Twitter Files,” GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told Fox News that the FBI “needs to be dismantled.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Ted Lieu of California — recently elected vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus — slammed one of the journalists that Musk picked to share the files, disputing the allegation that the FBI had stopped investigating “child sex predators or terrorists” to focus on a “surveillance operation” of people using the platform.

The relationship of these two journalists and Musk is not known. Taibbi told me Sunday morning via a Twitter direct message that “I do not work for Musk in any way, shape, or form.”

However, the thin-skinned Musk temporarily banned reporters from Twitter whom he falsely claimed shared his “exact real-time” location — and even those who just asked him for a quote, as The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz found out Saturday night. If the journalists don’t sell the story Musk wants, wouldn’t he? It is not possible to know.

We need Congress to subpoena a complete set of the so-called T-shirts, as well as force Musk to testify on national TV.

After this fact finding has finished, the FBI leadership should testify. The bureau should welcome this opportunity, given the smears by certain GOP lawmakers such as Comer that “the FBI had its own ministry of propaganda.”

The FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Homeland Security met with social media giants to discuss threats posed by foreign actors to influence our elections in the run-up to the 2020 election.

But why did the administration of Donald Trump raise concerns about a state actor possibly releasing information that could hurt Joe Biden and Hunter Biden?

Beyond that, Taibbi alleges that the FBI began flagging certain Twitter accounts because of their content, starting in January 2020 — again under the Trump administration.

Billy Baldwin, the brother of Alec Baldwin, is one of the people that was targeted in the last month for being conservative and left-wing.

The president asked if the Justice Department could investigate SNL, after he stated that the Federal Communications Commission should look into the show.

In the end, the bureau may simply be protecting our nation from threats — as it should. Musk could be trying to attract more users on the right, by going after the FBI, since some celebrities and others have left the platform since he took over. Or there could be FBI wrongdoing.

There were a few terse interactions early on. Tech executives said the FBI only shared limited information that was useless to protect their platforms, according to reports published by CNN and other news organizations.

Chan said government agents never raised Hunter Biden specifically and that his name came up only when a Facebook analyst asked about relevant information. An FBI agent in the meeting declined to answer, Chan recalled, adding that she was likely not authorized to address the question because at the time the FBI had not publicly confirmed its Hunter Biden investigation.

While the released Twitter messages have yet to reveal a smoking gun showing the government ordered a social media company to suppress a story, Republicans on Capitol Hill say there are enough questions raised by the internal communications to merit calling tech executives to testify.

The hearing is the first time that Twitter’s former Deputy Counsel James Baker, also a former top official at the FBI, will speak publicly since Musk fired him in December.

The former US intelligence officials that wrote the open letter after the laptop story broke want to be heard from. James Clapper, who served as the Director of National Intelligence and a CNN contributor, was one of the former officials who signed the letter.

“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

CNN Live: Former tech executives in Silicon Valley discussed the enigmatic nature of the FBI’s investigations into foreign election misinformation and campaigning

The Musk who has the access to the internal messages is Michael Shellenberger. The timing of the message, Shellenberger said, suggests that Chan was secretly givingRoth information about the Hunter laptop.

The official said eight of the documents pertained to “malign foreign influence actors and activities,” the FBI’s terminology for foreign government election meddling. The official said the FBI flagged the posts as potential evidence of election-related crimes, including voter suppression activities.

Under federal law, the FBI is obligated to reimburse companies for the costs of complying with legal requests as part of its investigative work, according to the bureau.

“All the information exchanged is about the actors and their activity,” a second FBI official who reviewed the communications told CNN. “What we are not providing is specifics about the content and the narrative. We aren’t telling the platforms to do anything. We are just providing it for them to do as they see fit under their own terms of service to protect their platforms and customers.”

The executives want to beef up their internal controls so that they have a good chance of winning the next election. They knew that they needed to forge a relationship with the US government to root out foreign misinformation.

One former FBI official who spoke to CNN recalls that tech executives would insist on meetings away from their campuses, in part because government agents weren’t welcome. Feelings in Silicon Valley toward the intelligence community were still raw since the Edward Snowden leaks detailed a vast data collection apparatus that targeted the tech companies.

Nevertheless, the meetings went ahead. The first one took place at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. A person familiar with meetings told CNN that they were at the offices of social networking companies.

According to former tweeters and FBI officials, by 2020 their discussions have become better coordinated and useful to both sides. One indicator of how advantageous the relationship had become: By 2020, Facebook was issuing press releases about some of the discussions.

At several points, the communications show that he was resisting pressure to reveal certain information, such as which third-party services were used by some account-holders to access Twitter.

Others within Twitter noted the US government’s interest in Twitter’s data and urged colleagues to “stay connected and keep a solid front against these efforts.”

James Baker told the committee that he was unaware of any illegal actions by any government agency or political campaign on the handling of the Hunter Biden laptop situation.

The FBI agent who played a key part in the meetings testified recently that he was warned about the rumors by law enforcement agencies.

Chan was deposed this year as part of a lawsuit brought by the Missouri attorney general alleging government censorship of social media. It was not Chan who said that the government told social media companies to expect hack-and-leak campaigns.

Three former Twitter executives are testifying Wednesday at the House Oversight Committee over Twitter’s decision to temporarily suppress a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, in what’s set to be the first high-profile hearing for the new Republican majority investigating President Joe Biden’s administration and family.

The chairman of House Oversight is probing the new owner of the social media company in the wake of internal communications from the staff about the decision to temporarily block users from sharing.

“We basically want to know what the Twitter policy was with respect to how they determined what was disinformation,” Comer said. “We want to know what role the government played in encouraging Twitter to suppress certain stories and certain Twitter accounts. We look into tax dollars and how much they are spent on social media, like if federal agencies spent any tax dollars at all.

In addition to Baker, Twitter’s former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde and former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth are appearing before the committee.

To drive home that point, the Democrats called Collier Navaroli as witness. She testified last year to the Jan. 6 select committee about the platform’s role in the insurrection.

They cherry-pick witnesses who fit their narrative. It isn’t really like an objective examination of how good or bad it is that could lead to genuine reform or regulation. That’s not what their objective is here” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat.

In his opening statement he is expected to say that in the lead-up to January 6, 2021, Twitter became the global platform for seditious violence against our government and for coordinating logistical movements and tactical maneuvers in the mob violence against our.

I will ask the executives ofTwitter why a member of Congress was banned permanently from using the service. A Georgia lawmaker said that her account was permanently banned from the social media site.

Greene’s account was suspended last January for repeated violations of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy, the company said at the time. Her account was restored in November after Musk purchased Twitter.

Twitter Could Have Learned to Disturbate the Biden Campaign, but it’s Not Awful: a Congressional Hearing on the Laptop Story

Democrats say they intend to poke holes in the Republican allegations surrounding the laptop story – while questioning the committee’s decision to hold the hearing in the first place.

In the lead up to the hearing, Musk traveled to Capitol Hill and met with a number of House Republicans. The Kentucky Republican said that Musk offered him tips on lines of questioning, though Comer declined to offer more details ahead of the hearing.

During the more than six hours of the Oversight Committee hearing, Republicans accused the social media company of colluding with the FBI and Biden’s campaign to influence the story of the Post.

The chair of the committee said that, under the leadership of their witnesses, the federal government used to accomplish what it didn’t have the power to: limit the free exercise of speech.

“I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told the panel, alluding to Russia’s hacking of Democratic National Committee emails that year that were selectively leaked to the public in the final months of the campaign.

The new majority in the House will use the hearings to begin investigations into the Biden administration and the tactics of the federal government against conservatives.

Anika Collier Navaroli, a former Twitter safety policy employee called as a witness by committee Democrats, told the panel that Twitter removed the phrase “go back to where you came from” from its policy barring abuse of immigrants after Trump expressed the sentiment in a 2019 tweet targeting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-NY) and other Democratic congresswomen.

Collier Navaroli also testified that the Trump White House had asked Twitter to remove a tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen insulting the president. Twitter declined to do so, but Democrats seized on her testimony to rebut Republicans’ claims of political bias.

The committee was told that the decision to block the Post story link was taken by the former chief legal officer. She said in retrospect, Twitter should have immediately unlocked the newspaper’s account when it reversed that decision.

“The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,” he said. It’s not obvious what the correct response is to a cyberattack on the campaign for the presidential election.

The split-screen format that has become the norm when lawmakers grill tech executives was followed by Republicans accusing witnesses of censorship, while Democrats argued tech platforms had not done enough to crack down on harmful content.

Greene attacked the panel for her ban and lobbed baseless allegations against the former executives. That included echoing smears against Roth previously amplified by Musk. The threats that resulted from Musk’s airing of those rumors forced him to sell his home.

The Republicans were accused by the Democrats of wasting time and money on a political crusade.