Exhibit 1114 · Social-media thread (Twitter Files)
Twitter Files #17: New Knowledge, the Global Engagement Center, and State-Sponsored Blacklists (thread, 2 March 2023)
Here are 5500 names GEC told Twitter it believed were “Chinese… accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation.”
Forty-eight-post thread on the State Department Global Engagement Center (GEC). It says the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which the thread says the GEC funds, sent Twitter about 40,000 accounts on 8 June 2021 (Twitter's Trust and Safety chief found 'virtually all appear to be real people'), and that the GEC sent Twitter lists of 5,500 'Chinese' accounts and 499 Iranian accounts that Twitter staff disputed. It cites an inspector general report for $98.7 million obligated to the GEC. A note says the Lab's director wrote that the 40,000-name list was not published because of low confidence in it.
- Source
- Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi), Twitter thread
- Date
- 2 March 2023
- Quoted from
- Post 14 of 48 (Thread Reader copy of the thread of 2 Mar 2023)
- Grade
- Reported
- Document
- https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1631338650901389322
- Accessed
- 2026-11-10
- Cited by
- Findings citing this exhibit
- Note
- Reported: internal Twitter documents as selected, screenshotted and described by the thread's author after Twitter's owner gave the writers access; no complete archive is public and the one X capture opened (Part 1) rendered as an empty shell in the Wayback Machine, so the readable copy is the Thread Reader capture linked under archive (the posts themselves were not re-opened on X). The primary documents that would replace it are the underlying emails and Slack messages, which a court, Twitter or a regulator has not produced in full.