According to information revealed in the latest Twitter Files release, the FBI paid Twitter over $3.4 million in U.S. tax dollars for “administration costs” related to the staff’s time spent working with the feds.
Breitbart News recently reported on the latest Twitter Files release published by journalist Michael Shellenberger, which detailed the links between Twitter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other intelligence agencies.
Breitbart News politics editor Emma-Jo Morris wrote:
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported, based on documents he obtained from Elon Musk, that federal agents “discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020″ — working with top management at Twitter to censor and disparage the Post‘s reporting on evidence of now-President Joe Biden’s personal business involvement with corrupt and adversarial regimes in Europe and Asia, in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Shellenberger revealed that there was “an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies,” to smear factual and accurate stories based on a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, which the FBI had in its possession almost a year before the Post’s reporting and knew was authentic.
Shellenberger details how agents outside the company worked to get Twitter management, many of whom were former agents themselves, to embrace the narrative that documents showing the Biden family earning tens of million dollars from Eastern European oligarchs and the Chinese Communist Party were part of a “Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” and then censor reporting on those documents on that premise. The narrative would then also be adopted by virtually all of legacy media in the lead up to voting day of 2020, and used to buttress their decision not to report on the material.
Shellenberger writes that “during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation,” referring to the Head of Trust and Safety and one of Twitter’s chief censors. Despite the fact that the FBI had the Biden scion’s laptop since December, 2019, and amid Roth allegedly pushing back that “Twitter executives *repeatedly* reported very little Russian activity” on the platform.
One key detail revealed in the extremely long Twitter Files thread by Shellenberger related to the reimbursement Twitter received for its work helping the FBI. According to internal documents, Twitter received $3,415,323 from the FBI for administrative costs.
46. The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.
“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021. pic.twitter.com/SmNse97QxK
— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 19, 2022
The information released as part of the Twitter Files gives the impression that the left-wing Silicon Valley giant profited by censoring information and opinions that the FBI took issue with, including the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Read more about the latest Twitter Files revelations at Breitbart News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan
Comments are closed.