"Expand formal and informal partnerships” with “Amazon Web Services, GoDaddy, or PayPal."
On April 20, 2021, a Twitter attorney emails a 32-page document titled “Alethea Group Recommendations.” It says, “Twitter has an opportunity to become the industry leader.”
How? At the top of the list is “Develop and expand threat intelligence capabilities.” This starts with hiring an “outside vendor to provide consistent threat intelligence feeds on priority markets or topics for Twitter, such as on COVID-19 misinformation, QAnon, violent hate groups, or foreign government-operated IO.”
Why an outside vendor? Because “Outside vendors often have access to more unique datasets, language capabilities, and geographic expertise,” Alethea reasons. ”This approach is consistent with Twitter’s platform peers, such as Facebook, and to a lesser extent, YouTube’s new analytic team focused on Sophisticated Threat Actors.”
The second major recommendation is to “Expand formal and informal partnerships” with “domain hosting companies, digital ad providers, and financial platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, GoDaddy, or PayPal.” Why? So that Twitter can respond to “threat actors in a more holistic fashion.”
In other words, Alethea is proposing that Twitter lead an effort to organize all other social media companies, e-commerce companies, and Internet Service Providers, to de-platform, de-monetize, and de-person disfavored individuals.
But would Twitter executives still make their own decisions about content moderation? Yes, affirms Alethea, but only after outsourcing “decision-making processes when it comes to disinformation and misinformation or a major security incident.”
Alethea also proposes developing systems to place content from purveyors of “misinformation and disinformation” in a “void” so that users can’t see or share it. “This could include not allowing content to load from their websites, sending users to an error page, having adversaries inadvertently (and unknowingly) tweet dog pictures, quinoa recipes, or sports scores.”
According to Alethea, “Threat intelligence could still be gathered within these artificial environments and used to inform future action against threat actors.”
Other recommendations from Alethea are for Twitter to“create a more diverse team,” expand reporting options for users, and “invest in a program that will teach news literacy to high school students and college students.”
Over email, Nina Jankowicz stressed to us that she had never seen the Alethea recommendations. “I never had contact with or access to Alethea customers or products. This was by design so as to protect customer confidential information. My role was entirely externally-facing.”
When we asked what motivated her to pursue a relationship with Twitter, Kaplan wrote, “We respect client confidentiality and cannot confirm any client relationships. I have not advocated for censorship and your allegations are false.”
“I have never and would never ask a social media platform to censor,” Kaplan told us. “I have flagged inauthentic coordinated behavior or what current X owner Mr. Elon Musk refers to as “the spam bots” which he seeks to “defeat” as they violate the terms of service for his and other platforms, as well as threats of violence against individuals. I have not urged social media companies to censor and that allegation is categorically false.”
Kaplan told us she was unaware that Zatko had repeatedly advocated for Twitter to hire Alethea.
READ ALETHEA’S “RECOMMENDATIONS” HERE:
environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2024/