(NewsNation) — Over nearly a decade, Twitter and most other social media companies made a sea change in their relationships with the federal government: from keeping it at arm’s length to fully embracing cooperation, according to internal Twitter documents obtained by independent journalist Matt Taibbi and others.
“The overall arc of the Twitter files stories were about how Twitter went from not wanting to be partners with the government on censoring and content moderation to becoming a full-fledged partner with them by 2020,” Taibbi told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo on Friday.
The basis of Taibbi’s story, published in his Substack site “Racket News,” came from a massive number of documents that Elon Musk gave him when Musk bought Twitter in 2022. He has since renamed the social media firm X.
Taibbi says the turning point came in 2020, when Twitter was the victim of a hack that exposed the accounts of several of high-profile users, including former President Barack Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden and Musk himself.
To deal with the hack and the negative publicity around it, Twitter hired an independent security contractor to investigate. That person was quickly fired after it came to light that they had a formal arrangement with some U.S. intelligence agencies.
Taibbi says the company Twitter hired “was a firm that had been launched by seed money from an investor that sits on the board of In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm.”
People from other intelligence agencies were also involved in the internal audit of Twitter. “Before you knew it, the entire senior ranks of Twitter were filled with people from a variety of intelligence services,” Taibbi said.
Taibbi’s latest story describes what he calls the “middle” of that journey for Twitter management: the transition from reluctance to acceptance.
He said that most social media platforms had a “standoffish” relationship with the government up until around 2012. “Then there started to be this pressure for them to partner with the government on these issues. Some of them gave in faster than others. Twitter was really the last of the holdouts.”
Taibbi says it was not any specific issue that caused the shift: “It turns out they (Twitter managers) were trying to improve their relationships with these agencies,” he said.
