Well this is quite a twist.

Over the past few weeks we have been treated to a series of investigative reports that have been dubbed “The Twitter Files.” Written by a series of independent journalists, they are the result of Elon Musk’s allowing reporters to basically “examine the books” at the company.

The idea is to clear the air, as it were. There has been a lot of controversy about Twitter’s manipulation of the public discourse. As everybody knew, Twitter’s management and employees put their thumb on the scale, promoting some speech while downplaying or outright banning other.

Conservatives were understandably angry, well before the revelations, because their own speech has been disproportionately disadvantaged.

Among the most provocative revelations has been the uncovering of the very close ties of Twitter management with the US government, especially the FBI and intelligence “community.” To many this was surprising because Twitter’s footprint is international, and we tend to associate the Leftism that runs deep at the company with skepticism of government.

That intellectual association is outdated, though, as government has become the power base for Leftist values. As the old guard retired the new generation of law enforcement, military, and intelligence leaders has been replaced by the woke. The Pentagon is run by Leftists, the intelligence agencies are Left, and the bureaucracy is Left. At some level it doesn’t matter who sits in the White House or Congress; the bureaucrats are Leftists.

Hence the comfortable connections to Twitter’s leadership.

The latest revelations come from Intercept reporter Lee Fang. His bombshell revelation is that Twitter and the Pentagon colluded to spread US propaganda, especially in the Middle East. Twitter aided the spread of mis- and dis-information to promote US policy.

TWITTER EXECUTIVES HAVE claimed for years that the company makes concerted efforts to detect and thwart government-backed covert propaganda campaigns on its platform.

Behind the scenes, however, the social networking giant provided direct approval and internal protection to the U.S. military’s network of social media accounts and online personas, whitelisting a batch of accounts at the request of the government. The Pentagon has used this network, which includes U.S. government-generated news portals and memes, in an effort to shape opinion in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, and beyond.

The accounts in question started out openly affiliated with the U.S. government. But then the Pentagon appeared to shift tactics and began concealing its affiliation with some of these accounts — a move toward the type of intentional platform manipulation that Twitter has publicly opposed. Though Twitter executives maintained awareness of the accounts, they did not shut them down, but let them remain active for years. Some remain active.

The revelations are buried in the archives of Twitter’s emails and internal tools, to which The Intercept was granted access for a brief period last week alongside a handful of other writers and reporters. Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the billionaire started giving access to company documents, saying in a Twitter Space that “the general idea is to surface anything bad Twitter has done in the past.” The files, which included records generated under Musk’s ownership, provide unprecedented, if incomplete, insight into decision-making within a major social media company.

Twitter is not the Voice of America, maintaining a veneer of being more of an information platform than an outright purveyor of curated information. That is not and has not been the case for years. It has meddled in both domestic and international politics, shaping The Narrative at the will of US and Western policy makers.

Twitter did not provide unfettered access to company information; rather, for three days last week, they allowed me to make requests without restriction that were then fulfilled on my behalf by an attorney, meaning that the search results may not have been exhaustive. I did not agree to any conditions governing the use of the documents, and I made efforts to authenticate and contextualize the documents through further reporting. The redactions in the embedded documents in this story were done by The Intercept to protect privacy, not Twitter.

THE DIRECT ASSISTANCE Twitter provided to the Pentagon goes back at least five years.

On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”

“We’ve got some accounts that are not indexing on hashtags — perhaps they were flagged as bots,” wrote Kahler. “A few of these had built a real following and we hope to salvage.” Kahler added that he was happy to provide more paperwork from his office or SOCOM, the acronym for the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Unflagging accounts seems relatively benign; the Pentagon should not be subject to restrictions that go beyond what any other user faces. And there is nothing inherently wrong about the US government engaging in psychological operations to shape the Narrative. It is their job, and frankly an important part of it. It is better to persuade others to bend to our will than use force, and I expect the military to use every means possible to do so. Better words than bombs.

But it’s not Twitter’s job to put its thumb on the scale either. You may have noticed that every government, friend or foe, has access to Twitter and puts its own propaganda out. It is part of the usefulness of Twitter, where users can scoop up as much information as possible to try to sort fact from fiction. If you don’t expect propaganda from Twitter you are an idiot.

On the same day that CENTCOM sent its request, members of Twitter’s site integrity team went into an internal company system used for managing the reach of various users and applied a special exemption tag to the accounts, internal logs show.

One engineer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that he had never seen this type of tag before, but upon close inspection, said that the effect of the “whitelist” tag essentially gave the accounts the privileges of Twitter verification without a visible blue check. Twitter verification would have bestowed a number of advantages, such as invulnerability to algorithmic bots that flag accounts for spam or abuse, as well as other strikes that lead to decreased visibility or suspension.

…

This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”

The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.

The basic problem with this is clear: Twitter was becoming a subsidiary of the US government. It’s ties with the security apparatus of the United States government turned it into a quasi-government agency, and reaffirms the notion that Twitter (and these agencies) were meddling in both domestic and foreign affairs at the behest of government officials.

Jack Dorsey tells Congress under oath that he doesn't censor or shadow-ban Republicans.@vijaya, the high priestess of the ministry of truth, intently watches over Dorsey's shoulder.#perjury#dorseyforprison pic.twitter.com/Mcm8VMpZKV

— SuzieQ (Alpha Female) (@SueElizabeth19) December 17, 2022

Some liberals have argued that since the government was under Trump’s leadership during this time period it was doing so on behalf of his policies, which is utterly absurd. The opposite is true. And this isn’t only my own judgment based upon the evidence, but the MSM itself kept on promoting (as a good thing) the conscious interference of the bureaucracy as part of #theresistance. Anybody who argues that James Comey’s FBI was promoting a Trump agenda is an idiot or a liar.

Remember the celebration of “Anonymous?” That was all about promoting bureaucratic resistance to Trump leadership.

So what we have here is Twitter cooperating with and promoting the policy preferences of high-level, often off-the-reservation officials whose goal is pursuing their own policies that at times differed from the elected leadership. They became the quasi-governmental arm of a bureaucracy while consistently denying the fact even to Congress, under oath.

This is appalling and dangerous–one could even argue seditious, to use a phrase beloved by the Left now. It is aiding a slow-motion coup.

This is a betrayal of Twitter users, of whom there are hundreds of millions around the world and in the US. A betrayal of our republican system of government, and direct participation in an information campaign that amounts to government censorship.

People should go to jail, both inside and outside of government.