Everything Is the ‘Twitter Files' Now

Yahoo

02-05-2025

Darren Beattie, a senior official at the State Department, is concerned that his agency has abused its powers under previous Democratic administrations. To rectify that, he has decided to marshal the power of his office—in what his fellow State Department employees reportedly described as 'unusual' and 'improper' ways—to conduct a political witch hunt.
Yesterday, the MIT Technology Review revealed that, in March, Beattie made a request to gain sweeping access to communications between and about the State Department and journalists, disinformation researchers, and Donald Trump critics. Specifically, Beattie was targeting the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) hub, which the State Department shut down this year and the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was shut down in 2024—both of which focused on tracking foreign disinformation campaigns. Right-wing critics have accused these offices of engaging in censorship campaigns against conservatives, under the pretense of fighting fake news.
In response to these unproven allegations, Beattie—who had also served as a speechwriter in President Trump's first administration, though he was fired in 2018 after CNN reported that he had attended a conference featuring prominent white nationalists—asked the State Department for all 'staff emails and other records with or about roughly 60 individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation.' This request included correspondence with and about journalists, including The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum, researchers at institutions such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, and political enemies of the Trump administration, such as the former U.S. cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs. Beattie also wanted all staff communications that mentioned a specific list of keywords ('incel,' 'q-anon,' 'Black Lives Matter,' 'great replacement theory') and Trump-world figures, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to the report, he plans to publish any noteworthy internal communications he receives as part of a transparency campaign to win back public trust in government agencies. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
[Read: The white nationalist now in charge of Trump's public diplomacy]
Let's be clear about what's really happening here. A high-ranking member of the Trump administration is turning federal-government data—in this case, State Department communications—into a political weapon against perceived ideological enemies. The individuals Beattie has singled out (Bill Gates, the former FBI special agent Clint Watts, and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who had a short and somewhat disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, to name a few) are familiar targets for the far right's free-speech-defender crowd. The keywords Beattie has asked his department to search for (which also include 'Alex Jones,' 'Glenn Greenwald,' and 'Pepe the Frog') are ones that seem likely to produce a juicy piece of correspondence, but who knows? This is a fishing expedition—a government agency using a kind of grievance-politics Mad Libs in an effort to find anything that might make it appear as if vestiges of the 'deep state' were biased against the right.
Beattie himself has reportedly told State Department officials that this campaign is an attempt to copy Elon Musk's 'Twitter Files' playbook. Shortly after purchasing Twitter, Musk picked a few ideologically aligned journalists to comb through some of the social network's internal records in an attempt to document its supposedly long-standing liberal bias—and moreover, how political and government actors sought to interfere with content-moderation decisions. The result was a drawn-out, continuously teased social-media spectacle framed as a series of smoking guns. In reality, the revelations of the Twitter Files were much more complicated. Far from exposing blanket ideological bias, they showed that Twitter employees often agonized over how to apply their rules fairly in high-pressure, politicized edge cases.
The Twitter Files did show that the company made editorial decisions—for example, limiting reach on posts from several large accounts that had flaunted Twitter's rules, including those of the Stanford doctor (and current National Institutes of Health head) Jay Bhattacharya, the right-wing activists Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and Chaya Raichik, who operates the Libs of TikTok account. Not exactly breaking news to anyone who'd paid attention. But they also showed that, in some cases, Twitter employees and even Democratic lawmakers were opposed to or pushed back on government requests to take down content. Representative Ro Khanna, for example, reached out to Twitter's executive leadership to express his frustration that Twitter was suppressing speech during its handling of the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
Of course, none of this stopped Musk from portraying the project as a Pentagon Papers–esque exercise in transparency. Teasing out the document dump back in December 2022, Musk argued that the series was proof of large-scale 'violation of the Constitution's First Amendment,' but then later admitted he had not read most of the files. This was fitting: For the Twitter Files' target audience, the archives and their broader contexts were of secondary importance. What mattered more was the mere existence of a dump of primary-source documents—a collection of once-private information that they could cast as nefarious in order to justify what they believed all along. As I wrote in 2022, Twitter had been quite public about its de-amplification policies for accounts that violated its rules, but the screenshots of internal company documents included in the Twitter Files were interpreted by already aggrieved influencers and posters as evidence of malfeasance. This gave them ammunition to portray themselves as victims of a sophisticated, coordinated censorship effort.
For many, the Twitter Files were just another ephemeral culture-war skirmish. But for the MAGA sympathetic and right-leaning free-speech-warrior crowds, the files remain a canonical, even radicalizing event. RFK Jr. has argued on prime-time television that 'I don't think we'd have free speech in this country if it wasn't for Elon Musk' opening up Twitter's archives. Similarly, individuals mentioned in the files, such as the researcher and Atlantic contributor Renée DiResta, have become objects of obsession to MAGA conspiracy theorists. ('One post on X credited the imaginary me with 'brainwashing all of the local elections officials' to facilitate the theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump,' DiResta wrote last year.) Simply put, the Twitter Files may have largely been full of sensationalistic claims and old news, but the gambit worked: Their release fleshed out a conspiratorial cinematic universe for devotees to glom on to.
Beattie's ploy at the State Department is an attempt to add new characters and updated lore to this universe. By casting a wide net, he can potentially gain access to a trove of information that he could present as evidence. Say the request dredges up an email between a journalist and the GEC that references Ukraine and Russia. Such communications could be innocuous—a request for comment or an on-background conversation providing context for a news story—but, to somebody unfamiliar with the intricacies of reporting, it could look sinister or be framed by an interested party as some kind of collusion. As Musk proved with the Twitter Files, Beattie and the State Department don't even need to do the dirty work of sifting through or presenting the information themselves. They can outsource that work to a handpicked network of sympathetic individuals or news outlets—or, for maximum chaos, they can release the raw information to the public in the name of pure transparency and let them make their own connections and judgments.
Perhaps the records request could dredge up something concerning. It's not out of the realm of possibility that there could be examples of bias or worse in a large tranche of private conversations between a government agency and outside organizations on a host of polarizing topics. But Beattie's effort, as far as MIT described it, bears none of the hallmarks of an earnest push for transparency. Instead, it reeks of cynical politicking and using one's privileged government position to access private information for political gain.
Publishing the internal correspondence of people the administration sees as critics and ideological opponents may very well have a chilling effect on journalists and institutions trying to hold government agencies to account. At the very least, it sends a message that the administration is willing to marshal the information stores it has been entrusted with by its citizens to harass or intimidate others. It is, in other words, an attempt to abuse government power in the precise way that Beattie and Republicans have accused Democrats of doing.
Whether Beattie is successful or not, we'll likely see more of this from the current administration. The Twitter Files was a glimpse of the future of right-wing political warfare, and its success offered a template for providing red meat to an audience with an insatiable appetite for grievance. Now Musk, the man who created the playbook, is at the helm of a government-wide effort to collect and pool federal information across agencies. It is not unreasonable to imagine that one outcome of DOGE's efforts is a Twitter Files–esque riffling through of the U.S. government's internal comms.
Twitter Files–ing is a brute-force tactic, but one that has an authoritarian genius to it. The entire effort is billed as an exercise in building trust, but the opposite is true. It's really about destroying trust in everyone except the select few who are currently in charge. Take over an institution and use the information of that institution against it, in order to show how corrupt it was. Suggest that only you can fix it. Rinse and repeat.
Article originally published at The Atlantic