The latest “Twitter files,” published on Thursday last week by investigative journalist Matt Taibbi reveal how the federal government weaponised private companies, taxpayer-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – and even commercial news media – to target social media accounts disseminating content that ran counter to official narratives.

The files – dubbed the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” – confirm that the US government sought, indirectly and via private intermediaries, to have “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation” removed from Twitter and other social media platforms.

The revelations revealed how NGOs, working with the federal government, sought to censor social media content about Covid-19 vaccine injuries that was truthful, on the basis that it encouraged “vaccine hesitancy.”

These revelations came on the same day the US House of Representatives’ Select Subcommittee on the Weaponisation of the Federal Government heard testimony about the revelations contained within the “Twitter files.”

Taibbi testified at Thursday’s hearing, as did author Michael Shellenberger, who has contributed to prior “Twitter files” releases.

According to Taibbi, the bulk of censorship requests didn’t come directly from the government, but rather through a wide array of non-governmental actors who “partnered” with Twitter.

This “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” said Taibbi, included NGOs and “an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media,” which worked together with “state agencies like DHS [US Department of Homeland Security], FBI or the Global Engagement Centre (GEC)” – an arm of the US State Department.

According to Taibbi, the NGOs included the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

“NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government,” Taibbi wrote. “Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way,” but now they act as “effectively one team” with intelligence officials.

Taibbi noted that efforts by prominent NGOs and private media outlets extended beyond attempts to censor narratives surrounding Covid-19, including vaccines and those injured by them, to requests to remove – or “deplatform” – the accounts disseminating such content.

In one instance, Hannah Murphy, a technology correspondent with Financial Times, contacted Twitter, giving the platform “until end of day” to provide a “steer” regarding whether the accounts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defence and other members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” would be removed.

NewsGuard is a “fact-checking” organisation that partners with major social media platforms and the World Health Organization, and which has received significant funding from Big Pharma.

NewsGuard also partners with the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, the author of “The Disinformation Dozen.”

Taibbi described the Stanford Internet Observatory’s “Election Integrity Partnership” (EIP) – renamed the Virality Project after the 2020 US election – as “perhaps the ultimate example of the absolute fusion of state, corporate, and civil society organizations” and as “among the most voluminous ‘flaggers’ in the #TwitterFiles.”

Upon relaunching, the Virality Project, was “on-boarded” to an internal Twitter ticketing system, said Taibbi, “absorbing this government proxy into Twitter infrastructure.”

The Virality Project recommended “multiple platforms take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”

As previously reported by The Defender, the Virality Project developed the US Food and Drug Administration’s “Rumour Control,” which claims to fight online “misinformation” and “disinformation” about Covid-19 vaccines.

EIP’s research manager, Renee DiResta, who previously worked for the CIA, described how her entity is filling “gaps” in enforcing what federal government legally cannot, alongside “tech partners” such as Google, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter, under “remove, reduce or inform” policies.

EIP claimed it succeeded in getting 22 million tweets labelled prior to the 2020 US elections.

New Knowledge, an organisation DiResta founded, “helped design the Hamilton 68 project,” which targeted “Americans like ‘Ultra Maga Dog Mom,’ ‘Right2Liberty,’ a British rugby player named Rob Bishop” and “people who used the term ‘deep state.’”

Another DiResta initiative, Project Birmingham, appears to have created fake “Russian bots,” which then followed political candidates, such as Alabama’s Roy Moore in 2017. Moore was then accused of having Russian support for his US Senate candidacy.

“This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” said Taibbi. “It’s the opposite of what a free press does.” Packaged as a bulwark against lies and falsehood, it is itself often a major source of disinformation, with American taxpayers funding their own estrangement from reality.”

Thursday’s “Twitter files” release also emphasised the taxpayer funding received by the NGOs removing content at the US government’s behest.

“Although the state is supposed to stay out [of] domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the DFRLab, New America and other ‘anti-disinformation’ labs are receiving huge public awards,” Taibbi wrote.

According to Taibbi, the Aspen Institute is taxpayer-funded, receiving “millions a year from both the State Department and USAID” – the US Agency for International Development.

“Do we want government in this role?” Taibbi asked.

One example, described by Taibbi as the “Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex” was the release of the Aspen Institute’s “Information Disorder” report in August 2021, in a “star-studded confab” that included media personalities, social media executives, representatives of federal agencies and even royalty.

The report’s “taxpayer-backed conclusions” recommended that “the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier,” the placement of “speech offenders” in a “holding area” and the governmental restriction of “disinformation,” “even if it means losing freedom.”

The Aspen report recommended that “the power to mandate data disclosure be given to the FTC” (Federal Trade Commission). Taibbi noted that the FTC was “just caught” by the House Judiciary Committee “in a clear abuse of office, demanding information from Twitter about communications with (and identities of) #TwitterFiles reporters.”

In another example, Taibbi said, “Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only seek content moderation but apply subjective ‘risk’ or ‘reliability’ scores to media outlets, which can result in reduction in revenue.”

Aside from its “partnerships” with NGOs, Taibbi described how Twitter directly acted as “a partner to government,” holding regular “industry meetings” with the FBI and the DHS and developing “a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government.”

Taibbi said the HHS, US Treasury, National Security Agency and local police departments submitted content reports to Twitter. Taibbi tweeted, “Some of these tweets contained “obvious ‘misinformation,’ like accounts urging people to vote the day after an election.” But other reports “had shakier reasoning,” Taibbi said.

The latest “Twitter files” release – and the subject matter of several of the previous releases – took centre-stage at Thursday’s Select Subcommittee Hearing on the Weaponisation of the Federal Government.

• A Tell / The Defender report