Elon Musk and his big mouth have been terrible for his once-worshipful investors. But thanks to the owner and chief executive of Twitter, the company has released a treasure trove of confidential files detailing routine interference, censorship and influence operations by an alphabet soup of US security, military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, including the CIA, which incidentally, isn’t supposed to operate domestically. Those clandestine and under-the-table operations essentially aim to monitor, control and censor social media platforms to filter information and influence public opinion. They are, in other words, precisely the accusations that US politicians and senior security and intelligence officials have levelled against TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance. TikTok has to go It has always looked ridiculous that the world’s most powerful government is going after a media platform used mainly by young Americans to record amusing encounters and funny shenanigans. It is now identified by both leading US political parties as a direct threat to national security. If you go through some of the Twitter files – whose significance has been compared by one investigative journalist to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, the official “secret” history of the Vietnam war – you would have a much better understanding as to why that is so. Quite simply, US security, intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies can access confidential data and control its flow not only with Twitter, but also with all the other big social media platforms and telecoms companies. This government practice is nothing new, but dates back to the telegram and telephone operators as well as rail and postal delivery services of the past two centuries, and then of course, the wireless telecoms and internet companies in recent decades, as Edward Snowden has shown. TikTok ‘ghost mall’ indicator of problems with Malaysia’s failed Silicon Valley The problem with TikTok is that it is a Chinese-owned company even though many of its executives in the United States are Americans. As TikTok has become as big and popular as Instagram and Twitter, it has been negotiating with US officials since the Donald Trump presidency to satisfy their security demands. Ironically, this means the US government has to do everything by the book. While officials can be sure that US media companies will be discreet, the same is not true of TikTok, especially when it comes to interference and influence operations. As anti-China hawk and Republican Senator Marco Rubio said, “it is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good”, because previous efforts at reform had been meaningless. Now we know why. While TikTok has been bending over backwards to accommodate US demands, it could never meet the level of compliance beyond the law demanded by Washington of other domestic media and telecoms companies. What the Twitter files reveal The files run to thousands of documents and messages. Thankfully, God’s Spies, an investigative portal run by journalist Thomas Neuburger, provides a one-stop shop for both analysis and access to those files being examined by a dedicated team of reporters, among them are Lee Fang of the investigative news site Intercept and Bari Weiss, formerly of The New York Times. As Matt Taibbi, another investigative team member puts it: “It is hard to know where Twitter ends and the intelligence agencies begin … Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track.” According to Weiss, “teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavoured tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users”. Between January 2020 and last month, she wrote, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, whom Musk forced to resign. FBI requests for information about Twitter users included active investigations, according to Taibbi. “A surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts,” Taibbi wrote in a tweet. “The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.” TikTok names Harvard-educated executive to lead e-commerce product development Apparently, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security flagged content users for moderation and/or suspension. Twitter frequently complied. Agents show particular interest in tweets about Hunter Biden, the president’s son that could influence the 2020 election outcome. Another document showed the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) complaining about why Twitter failed to comply with a previous request. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi wrote. In an internal email dated July 8, 2020, an in-house Twitter lawyer said she had invited the FBI and CIA to attend a conference on information operations. “The FBI was only fronting for a whole assembly of other government security agencies, and even some local police departments, in requesting that tweets be deleted, accounts deprecated and the like,” Neuburger wrote. What I find most disturbing is the Pentagon’s extensive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Telegram and Twitter to produce news and influence global public opinion. Lee Fang provided an extensive analysis and posted the relevant files on December 20, on threadreaderapp.com . It’s titled “How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign”. The Pentagon’s “propaganda network relentlessly pushed narratives against Russia, China, and other foreign countries”, Lee wrote. Some of the latest released Twitter documents provided further evidence for an investigation by the Stanford Internet Observatory, which in August, exposed “a US military covert propaganda network on Facebook, Telegram, Twitter & other apps using fake news portals and deep fake images and memes against US foreign adversaries”. Twitter not only knew about “CENTCOM’s (the US Central Command of the Pentagon) network going back to 2017 and as late as 2020 knew these accounts were covert/designed to deceive to manipulate the discourse”, Lee wrote, “a violation of Twitter’s policies & promises. They waited years to suspend”. Twitter did some psy ops itself. According to Lee, its communications team was closely “in touch with reporters, working to minimise Twitter’s role. When the WashPost [The Washington Post] reported on the [Pentagon] scandal, Twitter officials congratulated each other because the story didn’t mention any Twitter employees & focused largely on the Pentagon”. Lee concluded that “many of these secretive US military propaganda accounts, despite detection by Twitter as late as 2020 (but potentially earlier) continued tweeting through this year, some not suspended until May 2022”. US House administration arm bans TikTok on official devices In October, Musk’s takeover of Twitter, then still hanging in the balance, was reported to have raised national security alarms among top officials. Well, now we know why. The national security, intelligence and military establishment almost certainly carry out the same operations and establish the same kind of relationships with other popular social media platforms. Twitter just has the misfortune of being taken over by Musk, who then decided, for his own undisclosed agenda, to release all those confidential files involving the government. As TikTok becomes huge like the other US social media, there is no doubt that the same government agencies will not tolerate its presence in the US without the same level of control and access. But they can’t risk it by virtue of its ultimate Chinese ownership. The truth is that TikTok will insist on doing everything by the book under US law, unlike all the other compliant US media companies. That’s why it has to be killed.