Honestly the stuff in these releases is pretty groundbreaking but the Twitter format is pretty awful for journalism like this imo. I tried to follow a couple of these threads in real time when they were coming out but, it was very difficult to follow.
This is the biggest difference vs other leaks (Snowden/Wikileaks/etc). Other than
This stuff should be turned into an Intercept-style series (at least back in the Snowden days, idk how Intercept is today). The summaries I get via NYPost or other sites aren't very good. NYTimes and others big news site don't really document it that closely, if at all. So the only option are disjointed Twitter threads.
Maybe they'll publish a couple longer form articles + all source documents after-the-fact? I have my doubts though.
I think it's fascinating and unfortunate that the newsworthy and interesting material about US intelligence running sockpuppet influence accounts in part 8 followed on the heels of a bunch of weak axe-grinding about supposed moderation bias and Hunter Biden's laptop. If Musk had handed this stuff off to the Intercept rather than Taibbi and Weiss there might have actually been some useful impact.
Do you mean today's release or the Twitter archive site?
If 8th release:
- showing for the 1st time it went beyond FBI/DOD/etc to include plenty of CIA. But the CIA involvement was always hidden by using an "OGA" label aka "Other Government Agency".
- a 90-person US task force ostensibly designed to combat "Foreign Influence" spent tons of time on domestic accounts.
- again shows Twitter under lots of pressure to find "foreign influence" but struggling to find any
- examples of them failing to find foreign influence for a particular account and deciding to brainstorm ways to ban it anyway
- Twitter was getting overwhelmed with requests, the FBI/others were sending lists of 100's, sometimes 1000's of accounts to be banned at a time, often with as little explanation as "Pro-Russian"
- explains how gov requests were carefully tailored by FBI to always be "Terms of Service violations", they'd come up with a reason to ban them that neatly tailored to fit the TOS... (which is kinda like parallel reconstruction if you think about it, just work backwards to find a reason)
I love the OGA thing, it's pretty typical trade speak in the industry. When I worked in defense contracting, we'd only refer to one big agency as 'they guys in maryland'. It should be pretty obvious which OGA that refers to. I'm not at all surprised by these releases but I figure most of the folks out there don't know how the sausage is made. Luckily there is no such agency known as an other government agency.
