More revelations about the previously secret world of “coordination” between the Biden administration and major social media companies have come out with a new set of Twitter Files documents.
Released by journalist Paul D. Thacker, they show that what political opponents consider to be collusion rather than coordination did not concern only the US – and that the entire scheme was playing out through what were effectively middlemen.
The White House denies these accusations, including before Senate commissions investigating the damning claims, and fights them in courts.
However, the Twitter Files paint a different picture, and this time the focus involves Twitter, censorship demands coming from India, the State Department, and a lobbying firm, Albright Stonebridge, that was in charge of “coordination.”
It was 2021 when Twitter turned to Albright Stonebridge (a merger of groups founded by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former US National Security Advisor Sandy Berger) for help.
The social platform was facing censorship demands, this time concerning criticism around India’s Covid policies.
Given its founders, previous funding it received from the Gates Foundation, and a Politico report saying ten of Biden’s top national security and foreign policy officials “had ties” to Albright Stonebridge – the firm seems to be just one degree of separation from the current White House.
Twitter wanted the lobbyists to pressure the US government (via the State Department) to help the company out in India, a huge market.
According to the new batch of documents, they did, and the State Department started “working closely with Twitter to deal with the company’s problems in India” – while itself indirectly pressuring Twitter to engage in censorship “around the same timeframe,” Thacker writes.
Namely, there was another actor: the Atlantic Council, nominally an independent think tank – but a recipient of a State Department grant – and one that, as Thacker says, has a board “littered with former heads of national security agencies, including the CIA.”
It once had Albright as a board member. A tangled web, indeed.
Previous Twitter Files documents show that the Atlantic Council and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) banded together to compile a censorship list of about 40,000 Twitter files critical of the Indian government (but allegedly “engaging in inauthentic behavior”).
“These emails (call) into sharp question claims by Democrats and their allies in the media that Twitter did not collude with federal agencies and was free from Biden administration pressure to make its own censorship decisions,” Thacker concluded.
