Exhibit 1111 · Social-media thread (Twitter Files)
The Twitter Files: Twitter and the FBI "Belly Button" (thread, 3 January 2023)
When the State Department/GEC – remember this was 2020, during the Trump administration – wanted to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts it claimed would “amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation” about COVID, Twitter analysts were beside themselves.
Forty-post thread on 2020 to 2022. It says the State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) sought in 2020 to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts, that Twitter, Facebook and Google opposed adding the GEC to the FBI-DHS industry calls, and that FBI agent Elvis Chan proposed the FBI act as the 'belly button of the USG'. Posts 26 to 28 show requests from Treasury, NSA, states and HHS and a request from the office of Representative Adam Schiff, as House Intelligence Committee chair, to suspend a journalist, which the thread says Twitter declined. The thread marks the GEC episode as occurring 'during the Trump administration'.
- Source
- Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi), Twitter thread
- Date
- 3 January 2023
- Quoted from
- Post 10 of 40 (Thread Reader copy of the thread of 3 Jan 2023)
- Grade
- Reported
- Document
- https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1610394197730725889
- 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.