Twitter works with spies. Big surprise!

Been reading some of the Twitter Files — you know, the stuff Elon Musk’s been “leaking” to the press via his legal team. One thing that’s been sort of interesting was the direction that Lee Fang took: asking Twitter to find contacts that the company had with the Pentagon.

What he found out was that the Pentagon — big surprise! — coordinated with Twitter execs to whitelist a bunch of accounts that its spooks were using to spread propaganda in the Middle East. Why? So that Twitter would not take them down as bots and ruin all their influence op fun.

The results Lee got weren’t really revelatory or surprising in any real way. But they did confirm a Pentagon sockpuppet influence/propaganda op whose general outlines have been known to journalists — including reporting that goes back to 2011 — and researchers for a while now.

I guess the only people that would be really excited by these emails  — other than the culture war addicts who are being fed by Musk’s PR op and think he’s exposing some kind of woke globalist Pentagon plot to suppress free speech — are journalists and historians. They’ll now have another bit of evidence to cite as a specific example of contact between a tech company and our security apparatus — that in this case was part of a larger attempt to mold of public opinion at home and abroad.

Speaking of Twitter and U.S. government foreign propaganda ops. It’s pretty well known that back in 2009, when Twitter was just started to gain popularity, the company coordinated with the State Department to make sure it could be used as a platform for protesters in Iran. Thinking back on it now, it’s pretty clear the State Department was trying to do something similar to what the Pentagon would also try to do: make sure that accounts it was running would not be cut off, right when it needed them most.

Back then, the person making the request on the State Department’s behalf was a young guy named Jared Cohen. Not long after that, he would leave the State Department to head up a Google foreign policy thinktank. Originally called JigSaw, it was created as to basically function as a kind of privatized arm of the State Department that operated from within Google and used Google’s own resources.

As I wrote in my book Surveillance Valley:

Founded in 2010 by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, a twenty-nine-year-old State Department whiz kid who served under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, JigSaw has launched multiple projects with foreign policy and national security implications.