The FBI Pays Twitter
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From the article:
Emails and documents explaining Twitter deliberations here are interesting—though hardly the sort of smoking guns many on the right are making them out to be. Taken all together, they showcase a company trying hard to balance competing concerns, including free speech, electoral integrity, national security, freedom of the press, public relations, and lawmaker demands, sometimes acquiescing to and sometimes pushing back against government requests.
Twitter's internal communications do not suggest a company itching to tilt the 2020 election or to benefit Joe Biden but one still reeling from accusations of aiding Russian trolls during the 2016 election and facing immense pressure from government forces not to let it happen again. Twitter ultimately made the wrong call in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story on the grounds that it may stem from hacked materials, but it was also an understandable mistake (and one quickly corrected) given the totality of the circumstances.
If there are real villains here, it's FBI and DHS agents excessively vigilant about potential foreign propaganda in 2020 and overzealous about countering election-related misinformation. But given everything that happened on this front in 2016—the (relatively pathetic) attempts at a Russian influence campaign and the subsequent years of hysteria about it—it's not terribly surprising that authorities were on high alert. And warning social media companies to be on high alert, too, is actually pretty far down on the list of damning things these agencies do.
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The article refers to the “statutory” reimbursement, apparently a requirement that the FBI offer reimbursement to communications companies that expend resources to assist them in investigations. Apparently when looked at through a particular ideological lens, that makes them a “subsidiary” of the FBI, despite Shellenberger documenting, even stressing, how much Twitter pushed back.
