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I want to thank fellow writer Matt Taibbi for this great article.
Twitter tried to balk at cooperating with government agencies deemed “political.” In the end, it allowed everyone access through the FBI “Belly Button”
In the first week of May, 2020, at the peak of Covid-19 panic, Twitter senior legal executive Stacia Cardille received a communication from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the would-be operational/analytical arm of the U.S. State Department. Founded in the Obama years under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the GEC was like the State Department’s wannabe version of the NSA or the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Appended to an attachment with a long list of names was a note from the GEC — remember, these were the Trump years — that read, in part:
We are providing these 5,500 accounts that display inorganic behavior and follow two or more of the 36 Chinese diplomatic twitter accounts that we have identified in the report. Due to the fact that these accounts follow two or more of these diplomatic accounts, and a good portion of them are newly created, we believe that they are suspicious.
Let’s stop right there. You do not need to have a legal background to see that something doesn’t look right. Why would a Federal agency send a public company this type of information? Why would you not do your own investigation to see if any laws are being broken?
Twitter should have brought in legal experts to see if this was true. And if it was, why wouldn’t the federal agency turn this over to the DOJ?
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