#TwitterFiles is becoming a conspiracy theory

They are making claims not based on evidence.

Elon Musk bought Twitter in defense of “free-speech”, or so he claims (he’s been doing a lot of censorship since). One (legitimate) issue that inspired him was the censorship of the of the October 2020 “Hunter Biden Laptop) story. Now that he controls Twitter, he’s revealing the behind-the-scenes communications that led to the event — the “TwitterFiles”.

It’s turning into a conspiracy theory. For example, Musk tweeted the claim that “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public”. Techdirt has a story that thoroughly debunks this: the money paid by the FBI is required by law for responses to court orders.

In this post, I’m going to debunk another claim, that the FBI was behind Twitter’s decision to censor the story. Yes, the FBI spent much of 2020 warning Twitter of a coming leak in October of a hack of Hunter Biden emails, but it was a different leak, and had nothing to do with the laptop.

In January 2020, the news broke that Russian GRU hackers had broke into Burisma and stolen internal emails. From that moment on, it was widely discussed in the press that some of these emails featuring Hunter Biden would show up as an “October Surprise”, the thing that happens every election where dirt is released shortly before the election before the target can respond. Given the Russian influence on the 2016 election, it seemed reasonable that they’d try again in 2020.

This was public knowledge, the consensus among the media. It wasn’t the FBI that was pushing this narrative, but the FBI responding to the narrative. If there had been no laptop, the FBI still would’ve been having those discussions with Facebook and Twitter. It’s an Occam’s Razor thing — we have an adequate explanation for the FBI’s activities that does not involve a secret conspiracy involving the laptop.

TwitterFiles #7 tries to link the two, but abjectly fails to do so. The evidence shows that the Burisma emails and laptop emails were completely unrelated issues. At no point in any TwitterFiles does it show the FBI discussing the laptop with Twitter. The reader is expected to believe this, lacking the context that the FBI had very good reason to discuss a Burisma October surprise with Twitter.

I work in cybersecurity and have had much the same contacts with the FBI has Twitter. I know from experience that they are a bit corrupt, that they do try to suppress speech. They threatened to to deliberately taint my FBI file in 2007 in order to pressure me into canceling a talk at a cybersecurity conference. It wouldn’t take much for me to believe in malfeasance here. But it would take some evidence. The complete lack so far in the TwitterFiles is telling.

There are valid criticism here. There isn’t evidence, no hint of the conspiracy-theory. But we do see FBI has biases.

The FBI appears far too obsessed with Russian interference in the election. Yes, Russia tried a bunch stuff in 2016, but it appeared they were more timid in 2020. TwitterFiles does seem to show a fight between the FBI and Twitter has they went hunting for confirmation of their bias.

Twitter was clearly influence by the Burisma hacking story. Maybe the FBI had something to do with this. But the events of 2016 also clearly had something to do with, such as the October Surprise of the DNC hack and the Podesta email leaks.

This is difficult thing to fact-check. The fact is, the FBI had a copy of the laptop for a year. It’s not unreasonable to believe the FBI were pushing this story for a year to influence Twitter when the laptop eventually dropped. All we can say is #1 that there’s no evidence of this, and #2 that all the evidence we have is easily explained from the events that were known to happen, such as the Burisma hack and prior October Surprises like the Podesta leak.

Elon Musk has all the evidence, all the private correspondence of Twitter employees. But he’s so far, he’s failing to prove his theories of conspiracies. Musk has repeatedly said he wants Twitter to be a platform of info instead of a misinfo hellscape, but so far, he’s failing to deliver on that.