Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas previously worked at OpenAI. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Perplexity AI, a startup that has previously come under fire from online publishers, is attempting to rebuild trust with media players through revenue-sharing agreements. But that effort hasn’t stopped complaints about how the company surfaces content. Its latest challenge comes from Japanese media groups Nikkei and Asahi Shumbun, which today (Aug. 26) filed a joint lawsuit accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement.
Co-founded in 2022 by CEO Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity has quickly become a leader in A.I.-powered search and is currently valued at $18 billion. Unlike traditional search engines that return links, Perplexity responds to queries by summarizing information found online, accompanies by citations.
Perplexity did not respond to Observer requests for comment on the lawsuit.
Nikkei, which owns the eponymous Japanese newspaper and the Financial Times, and Asahi Shumbun claim that Perplexity has been storing and resurfacing their articles since at least June 2024, a practice the publishers describe as “free riding” on journalists’ work. The lawsuit, filed in a Tokyo District Court, demands that the A.I. company delete stored articles, stop reproducing publisher content, and pay each media company 2.2 billion Japanese yen ($15 million) in damages.
The suit also alleges that Perplexity ignored robot.txt safeguards implemented by the news publishers to block unauthorized crawling and sometimes presented articles alongside incorrect information, a move the publishers argue “severely damages the credibility” of their newspapers.
This is not Perplexity’s first clash with news publishers. Earlier this month, Yomiuri Shimbun, another major Japanese newspaper, filed its own lawsuit against the company. U.S. outlets have also raised challenges.
Last year, Condé Nast, Forbes and The New York Times all threatened legal action over alleged copyright infringement. Perplexity is currently battling a 2024 lawsuit from Dow Jones and The New York Post—both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—claiming that the startup misused content to train A.I. models. A court recently rejected Perplexity’s bid to dismiss that case.
For now, the media industry remains divided on how to handle the rise of A.I. Some, like the Associated Press, Vox Media and The Atlantic, have signed licensing deals with OpenAI. Others remain wary. The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over unauthorized use of its content, while Canadian startup Cohere was hit with a similar lawsuit this year from more than a dozen news publishers. Thompson Reuters has also accused A.I. platform Ross Intelligence of copyright infringement in a case that dates back to 2020.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: New York Post
It’s hard to argue that the New York Post is exactly what it once was.
After Rupert Murdoch bought it and remade it in his Fleet Street image in 1976, the city woke up each morning faced with its brazen, often hilarious front page (a.k.a. “the wood”) and the fearsome, must-read “Page Six” gossip column. Everybody read it, from cop to CEO, and for decades it was the paper of record for the city’s id, helping set the agenda for the rest of the coverage, from glossy magazines to the nightly news, in the media capital of the world. Today, with information and outrage coming from a million different directions into your phones, that power is less so; the Post can often feel like it is playing catch-up to the internet. But by becoming more of a national tabloid — with lots of gossip, scandal, and right-wing spin — it’s doing better than most local newspapers, and even, in recent years, has claimed to be profitable.
Last month, I met up with Susan Mulcahy and Frank DiGiacomo, two New York Post veterans — Mulcahy from 1978 to 1985, DiGiacomo from the late 1980s to 1993 — who are out today with a 528-page oral history of the Post. We chatted over coffee at the Odeon, where copies of the New York Times, the Daily News, and, naturally, the Post were proudly — and somewhat anachronistically — displayed on the restaurant’s magazine rack, throwbacks to an era when everybody wasn’t just staring at their screens. Their book, Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, tells the story of the Post during the Murdoch era through the voices of more than 230 current and former staffers who lived it. (Read an excerpt here.) “I feel like we’ve got sort of the pros, cons, the good, bad, and the ugly,” says DiGiacomo, whose oral history of “Page Six” for Vanity Fair in 2004 formed the basis for part of the book project, which was originally Mulcahy’s idea.
You’re both quoted in your own oral history.
Frank DiGiacomo: Yeah, well, we were kind of inspired by the [George] Plimpton book on Edie Sedgwick. And he’s in that.
Susan Mulcahy: We didn’t want to put too much of ourselves in.Several of my quotes in our book are from Frank’s Vanity Fair piece. Then there were a couple places where we were putting this whole thing together about outrageous Steve Dunleavy drunk stories. And Frank and I are talking about it. I’m like, “I’ve got one. I’m going swimming at this health club and Dunleavy …” Then Frank had a very different experience covering Trump than I did because it was so much later. So that was appropriate for him to put in his experience covering Trump. I don’t think we’re in it that much.
When did you work at the Post?
Mulcahy: I was there in ’78, so I wasn’t there when he first bought the paper, but I was there a year later. There were a lot of things I liked about working there, but there were many things I hated and I wanted to get out. At a certain point, I was trapped. I left town for ten years in part because I just felt like I was typecast by New York. So it just was like “Page Six,” “Page Six,” “Page Six.” But there was some of it, the political incorrectness, yes, some of it was offensive, but some of it was kind of funny … There were also no women in positions of power in the Murdoch era. It was all guys.
DiGiacomo: I was hired for a tryout on “Page Six,” and I was part time forever.
What was it like then?
DiGiacomo: Working on “Page Six,” you get this map of the power grid of the city and you see who’s pulling strings where. I don’t think I could have had the career that I had afterward if not because of that. I knew who to call. I had a huge rolodex, and it just was good. I mean, working for [longtime “Page Six” editor] Richard Johnson, who is a very underrated editor and a very funny guy to work for. People would call him, and he goes, “I got it, it’s at the bottom of my pile.” And he had great stuff. So there was that. I also learned you learn to take very complex stuff and condense it, which is very helpful now in this age.
Mulcahy: We checked out everything. When we would say “Rumor has it,” it was not a rumor. And “Page Six” was checked more, not only by the lawyers, but Joe Rab, who was a very long-term features editor there, was the final read.
Did “Page Six” feel all powerful then?
Mulcahy: “Page Six” was sort of an entity unto itself. So the power of “Page Six,” it was amazing to me, the politicians — I went to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner when there were no celebrities there. Trust me. Or the Inner Circle dinner. Have you ever been to that? Sometimes it can be amusing. It’s a big local political dinner. And the mayor always gets up onstage, whatever. And these politicians — they knew who I was, they all read “Page Six” — they’d have comments, and you’d get calls from their adviser. I don’t remember that I ever got a call from a specific politician yelling at me but from their advisers and political consultants.
DiGiacomo: Sean Penn — who then was at the height of his fame — calling to ask to “please don’t write this.” Or Mickey Rourke calling to say he was going to kick Richard Johnson’s ass. You had these people reaching out, and you were like, Okay, people are reading this. Robert De Niro called me a “fucking prick” once.
What happened?
Mulcahy: It’s different now. I mean, I still read “Page Six” and enjoy it and everything. But when I was doing it, it was like putting together a mini condensed version of a newspaper or magazine — media, politics, entertainment, Wall Street, society. You had to have a little bit of everything. You had to have a real balanced mix. And if you didn’t have any entertainment stories, you had to come up with one, because it had to be balanced. It was very powerful at the time.
DiGiacomo: The problem is that once the age of the internet hit, you had all of these sites coming up that were specialized. All of the subjects that “Page Six” covered and put together on one page were suddenly being taken away … And I discovered this when I went to work briefly for the Daily News. Once traffic became important, it just became about reality TV and the Kardashians. And I think it just sort of gives the sameness to things. But I will say this about “Page Six”: They get Elon Musk on the phone.
Rupert Murdoch directs coverage in the Post’s newsroom, 1977.
What was it like to cover Trump in the early days?
DiGiacomo:
Exhausting. I mean, that was really the heyday. It was the time of the “Best Sex I Ever Had” cover. And you would just be bombarded with stuff from all the desks. They were getting these tips, and they would come to you. And if the competition got it, and you didn’t, whether it was true or not, it just was like, “How did you miss that?” So that was a great deal of stress, and I was just exhausted by him.
How important was the Post in his rise?
DiGiacomo:
I can’t say the Post was solely responsible. I mean, because of the competition between the News and the Post, everybody wanted a piece of this. I think that’s why the Trump-Ivana-Marla thing still holds the record for the most woods in a row. It’s my theory that Trump learned to speak tabloid, which he still uses to this day — these very short, sort of general sentences that are exaggerated.
Has the Post lost too much of its New York–ness trying to make it on the internet?
DiGiacomo:
I do think that at least for the first period that Murdoch owned it, the Post did define New York. Graydon Carter says that when he came to New York, he read it to sort of know what he needed to know in the city and — especially with “Page Six” — the people he needed to know. And Letterman used it. Saturday Night Live used it. So I think it really defined New York then. And again, I think when he got it back, after breaking the union and stuff, there was that period in the sort of late ’90s and early 2000s where, again, it was really good at sort of capturing the Sex and the City era of New York. Now, I just feel that a lot of it is just creating fear.
It seems pretty obvious that Rupert Murdoch is less involved in the paper than he used to be.
Mulcahy:
He’s got so much else going on, and has had so much else going on, for such a long time. And at this point, it’s probably age. But you see, we had the anecdote that starts the book, when things were not going the way he wanted them, when Xana Antunes was the editor, he showed up at the editorial meetings and really chastised her in a public way.
DiGiacomo:
I think he gets involved when there’s an election at stake. I really do think that that’s when he’s really in it.
Mulcahy:
Although Gary Ginsberg told us that when Col Allan was the editor, he and Murdoch talked every day. So does he still talk to Keith Poole every day? I kind of doubt it, but I don’t know.
How did you go about asking people to participate?
DiGiacomo:
I think what was surprising was that a lot of people wanted to tell their stories. And the other thing that was very surprising is that even people who had been fired would say, “This was the best job of my career.” And there were those people who were difficult and some people just wouldn’t talk to us. And I think a few had NDAs or some issues —
Did you try Murdoch?
DiGiacomo:
Oh yeah.
Mulcahy:
We had his secretary’s email, which is way better than going through the PR person. And she strung us along for — how long? I don’t want to say “strung us along” — that’s not fair. But she didn’t say “no.” And so it was like at least two months, if not three. And I get these emails saying, “Well, I haven’t spoken to him yet. He’s out of the country.” Then, ultimately, I got a call from the PR people, and I thought, Okay, that’s the end.
DiGiacomo:
The other thing, I mean — it was frustrating, but I think understandable — was we approached a lot of celebrities who were stories and, to a person, except for Candice Bergen, they said “no.”
Mulcahy:
Well, we got John Waters and Isaac Mizrahi.
DiGiacomo:
It’s my opinion that no one wants to piss off the Post.
Mulcahy:
Alec Baldwin did talk to Frank for Vanity Fair but not for this book. No, he wouldn’t talk to us. Weird.
DiGiacomo:
Well, he was also going through a lot of legal stuff at that point.
Post legend Steve Dunleavy with Joey Buttafuoco Photo: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty
What was the biggest challenge of doing the book?
DiGiacomo:
Well, I mean, constructing an oral history is super-hard. And we talked every Monday to sort of discuss, first, how are we going to break this up? Then what would happen was we’d each sort of work on chapters, then switch and add things, then we each sort of edited the chapters.
Mulcahy:
At the beginning, we did talk about — and we ran this by our editor — we were like, “Should we do a Dunleavy chapter; should we do headlines?” We did do a headlines chapter, but it worked chronologically. And at one point we had dates for every chapter. This chapter is ’78 to ’79, and it just didn’t work because we had so much, so what we ended up doing is breaking it into sections.
DiGiacomo:
I find it very frustrating when I read an oral history and it’s just quotes. Because you’re like, Where am I in the story, and the subjects keep changing? I mean, I do feel like we really worked hard to make this flow, if not exactly chronologically, close to it.
And also in the book people are — without knowing, obviously — in conversation with each other, just based on the way you’ve ordered it, which is so much fun.
Mulcahy:
We made sure we went back to everybody … Some of these phone calls were very difficult to make. I really like Peter Vecsey, and I like Phil Mushnick, but I had to call Vecsey and say, “Phil Mushnick says you’re a bully and a psychopath.”
And what was the best part about writing the book?
DiGiacomo:
While I was working there, I heard all these amazing stories and I was like, Are all these true? A lot of ’em were told at bars, and I was just like, “The stories are so great.” It was one of the reasons I pitched the Vanity Fair piece too. And the other thing, I mean, I was not exactly happy about it, but a lot of people we interviewed died because we were working during COVID. I feel a measure of pride that we got this stuff down. I don’t think the Post would’ve ever done it.
What’s your favorite story from the book?
Mulcahy:
I really got a kick out of so many of the Dunleavy stories. When I first started working here, I found Steve to be very funny. I enjoyed him as a character in the office, but he ultimately drove me out the door. I did not go to his funeral, but I did appreciate what a great character was. No one could believe he lived to be 81.
DiGiacomo:
Wayne Darwen’s story about Dunleavy having sex with his fiancée on a snowbank. I mean, that was a story that I’d heard forever. And it was like, “Can this really be true?” And it was.
Mulcahy:
The stories about the Christmas party in ’79. I was like a clerk on “Page Six” at that point — oh my God. The fistfights, the drinking, people just standing on desks and falling off. Then the next day, one of the two guys that got in the fistfight, Craig Ammerman and Daniel O’Donnell, one of them, I’m not sure which one, then got in his car, drove up on the West Side, then drove into the window of a big car dealership. I just thought, Wow, that’s not the kind of Christmas party I was expecting. So I love that my memory was valid because I thought I just remembered that being insane. And enough people who I talked to said it was like something out of a movie.
Looking back, do you miss it?
Mulcahy:
I think I had a love-hate relationship with the Post forever because I feel as though when I was a senior in college, when I started working there, I feel like I grew up there. Then doing this book made me appreciate some of the things that were positive about it. I’m still pissed off, but there was a little more positivity as I was remembering than at the time.
DiGiacomo:
I wouldn’t say it was necessarily a happy experience, but it was formative for me. And it really toughened me up as a reporter. And I also think that I was pretty naïve before I worked there. You lose that very quickly.
Mulcahy:
That’s true. You just have to have very thick skin.
Do you think the paper will survive after Rupert?
Mulcahy:
I don’t know that it’ll survive. If Lachlan becomes the definitive heir and the trust is broken up, I don’t think so. One person, Eric Fettmann, worked there for a long time. He says he thinks that Lachlan respects the Post brand and he would keep it going. But I don’t know. I don’t think the kids have the same attachment to it. That’s one thing that’s positive. Doing this book, we really learned there are obviously negative sides to Murdoch, but there are positive sides, and one of them is the guy loves newspapers. So that’s important. He also works really hard. That was amazing. People would talk about not only him in the office but calling — you never said to Murdoch, when he called in from wherever he was around the globe, you never said there’s nothing going on, because you would get an earful: “What do you mean?” You’d say, “We’re working on a great one.” If there’s a murder here, we’re following up on it. You never said there was nothing going on. So he really was very driven to have the paper be what he wanted it to be. But at this point, I don’t know.
DiGiacomo:
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think if Lachlan wins, there’s a chance. But if he’s not the sole, I think they’ll shut the Post down.
COLLEGE POINT, Queens (WABC) — Pro-Palestinian protesters swarmed the New York Times printing facility in Queens, one of the largest facilities in the nation.
Some popular newspapers will likely be delivered on a delay Thursday morning due to the commotion at the facility.
Police say that at around 1 a.m. Thursday, protestors prevented tucks from accessing the 300,000-square-foot building by blocking the roads with debris.
Many laid down in a chain, connecting to each other with tubes. They held signs that read, “Stop the presses. Free Palestine” and “Consent for genocide is manufactured here.”
This facility is responsible for printing the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Newsday, and the New York Post. There are 27 printing facilities across the country.
Law enforcement was called to clear the protesters. No arrests were made.
The trucks eventually gained access to the building.
Have a breaking news tip or an idea for a story we should cover? Send it to Eyewitness News using the form below. If attaching a video or photo, terms of use apply.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, denied allegations of antisemitism Saturday after The New York Post revealed video of the Democratic candidate suggesting that Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon genetically engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Kennedy’s latest foray into conspiracism came at an Upper East Side press dinner last Tuesday. “COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said while eating linguini and clam sauce. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Kennedy’s comments echo “well-worn anti-Semitic literature blaming Jews for the emergence and spread of coronavirus which began circulating online shortly after the pandemic broke out,” The Post noted. The paper quoted an infectious disease expert who said she did not “see any evidence that there was any design or bioterrorism that anyone tried to design something to knock off certain groups.”
The dinner reportedly “descended into a foul bout of screaming and polemic farting” after host Doug Dechert and “octogenarian art critic Anthony Haden-Guest” began yelling at each other over climate change, which Dechert called a “hoax.” At one point in the argument, Dechert “let rip a loud, prolonged fart while yelling, as if to underscore his point, ‘I’m farting!’”
On Twitter, Kennedy called the latest Post story “mistaken” and said he had “never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews.” He claimed to have been arguing that the “U.S. and other governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons,” and that evidence demonstrating the disparate racial impact of Covid-19 is “a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons.” “I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered,” he said.
In subsequent tweets, Kennedy accusedPost reporter Jonathan Levine of having “exploited this OFF-THE-RECORD conversation to smear me by association with an outlandish conspiracy theory.” Levine wrote Saturday that Dechert had said it was on the record, and a second attendee confirmed to the Post that Dechert told him the same.
Internal Twitter communications released by the company’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, are fueling intense scrutiny of the FBI’s efforts alongside social media companies to thwart foreign disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election.
At the heart of the controversy is Twitter’s decision in October 2020 to block users from sharing a New York Post story containing material from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. Conservative critics have accused Twitter of suppressing the story at the behest of the FBI, something they claim the released communications, dubbed the “Twitter Files,” demonstrate.
Musk himself has alleged the communications show government censorship, suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.
But so far, none of the released messages explicitly show the FBI telling Twitter to suppress the story. In fact, the opposite view emerges from sworn testimony by an FBI agent at the center of the controversy. And in interviews with CNN, half a dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, all deny any such directive was given.
“We would never go to a company to say you need to squelch this story,” said one former FBI official who helped oversee the government’s cooperation with companies including Twitter, Google and Facebook.
Musk and his conservative allies have insinuated the released messages provide evidence of illicit behavior by the FBI, suggesting the exchange of secret files pertaining to Hunter Biden, and improper payments made to Twitter. But CNN’s interviews with people directly involved with the interactions and with those who have reviewed the documents disprove those claims.
Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists Musk tapped this month to comb through Twitter internal messages for evidence of free speech violations, said himself on December 2 that “there is no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
What is clear, however, is that following Russia’s meddling campaign in 2016, plus after years of interactions with federal agents about how to spot foreign disinformation efforts, Twitter executives were hyper suspicious of anything that looked like foreign influence and were primed to act, even without direction from the government.
By the time the New York Post published its laptop story on October 14, 2020, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then head of site integrity, had spent two years meeting with the FBI and other government officials. He was prepared for some kind of hack and leak operation.
“There were lots of reasons why the entire industry was on alert,” Roth said at a conference in November, not long after he resigned from Twitter. Roth insists he was not in favor of blocking the story and thought the company’s decision was a mistake.
As the released communications show, Twitter initially acted to suppress the story for a few days in part out of concerns that Hunter Biden, the son of the then-Democratic presidential candidate, was being targeted as part of a foreign election interference operation similar to the one Russia carried out in 2016.
What Twitter did not know at the time was that Hunter Biden was the subject of a federal criminal investigation. Since as early as 2018, the Justice Department has been investigating Hunter Biden for his business activities in foreign countries. In late 2019, nearly a year before the story first emerged in the New York Post, the FBI had used a subpoena to obtain a laptop that Biden allegedly left behind at a Delaware computer repair store.
According to sources at the FBI and at Twitter who spoke to CNN, none of that information was disclosed to Twitter executives trying to decide how to treat the laptop story, nor to anyone else for that matter.
“It was an ongoing investigation, so I would never approve of talking about it,” said the former FBI official.
While the released Twitter messages have yet to reveal a smoking gun showing the government ordered a social media company to suppress a story, Republicans on Capitol Hill say there are enough questions raised by the internal communications to merit calling tech executives to testify.
Scrutiny is building around the role of Twitter’s recently-fired deputy general counsel James Baker, a former top FBI official who joined Twitter in the summer of 2020. The released documents show Baker was in regular contact with his former colleagues at the FBI, giving rise to rampant accusations from conservatives that he was the conduit for the government to pressure Twitter.
In some of the material released by Twitter, an email shows Baker setting up a meeting – in the midst of Twitter’s internal deliberations about how to handle the New York Post story – with Matthew Perry, an attorney in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel. It is not clear what the two discussed.
The FBI declined to discuss any communications Baker had with FBI officials once he arrived at Twitter.
Baker is among a number of former Twitter executives called to testify this month by Republican Rep. James Comer, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee. Baker declined to comment for this story.
Comer also wants to hear from several former US intelligence officials who, days after the laptop story broke, wrote an open letter saying it had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The group of former officials who signed the letter included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who, as a CNN contributor, appeared on the network to express his view.
Though the former officials admitted, “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” their letter set the tone for much of the early discussion and coverage of the laptop.
In a statement to CNN, the FBI said, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.
“The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Among the messages given the most attention from Musk and other critics are a series of emails between Roth and Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent based in San Francisco, where he focuses on cybersecurity and foreign influence on social media. On October 13, the day before New York Post story published, Chan instructed Roth to download ten documents on a secure portal.
Roth responded, “received and downloaded – thanks!”
Michael Shellenberger, who is among those Musk has entrusted with access to the internal messages, wrote about the Chan communication with Roth. Shellenberger does not describe the contents of the files, but he does insinuate that the timing of the message suggests Chan was secretly providing Roth information about the Hunter laptop.
At the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, a team reviewing the internal communications released by Musk says it has identified the 10 documents Chan sent to Roth. “I reviewed all 10 of these documents personally and I can say explicitly there is nothing in these 10 documents about Hunter Biden’s laptop or about any related story to that,” an FBI official involved in the review told CNN.
The official said eight of the documents pertained to “malign foreign influence actors and activities,” the FBI’s terminology for foreign government election meddling. The official said the other two documents were posts on Twitter the FBI flagged as potential evidence of election-related crimes, such as voter suppression activities.
Another interaction that has drawn suspicion is an internal message from early 2021 that Shellenberger cites showing that the FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million beginning October 2019. In the message, an unnamed associate emails Baker saying, “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”
The FBI says the bureau is obligated under federal law to reimburse companies for the cost they incur to satisfy subpoenas and other legal requests as part of the FBI’s investigative work.
The FBI describes its discussions with Twitter as the type of information-sharing that Congress and both the Trump and Biden administrations encouraged to help tech companies and social media platforms protect themselves and their users. The released messages appear to show that FBI officials repeatedly noted that it was up to the content moderators at the company to take action if a post violated their rules.
“All the information exchanged is about the actors and their activity,” a second FBI official who reviewed the communications told CNN. “What we are not providing is specifics about the content and the narrative. We are also not directing the platforms to do anything. We are just providing it for them to do as they see fit under their own terms of service to protect their platforms and customers.”
After the 2016 election, social media executives knew they had a problem. Russian operatives had used their platforms to run a massive covert influence campaign to help elect Donald Trump, using bots to spread disinformation and sow division among Americans.
To prepare for the next election, the executives set about bolstering their internal controls, including hiring former law enforcement and intelligence officials. But they also knew they had to forge a closer relationship with the US government to help root out foreign trolls and sources of disinformation.
What followed were a series of regular meetings with federal agents that began in May 2018.
The released communications as well as interviews with people involved in the meetings portray routine, friendly and sometimes tense contacts between company executives and the government officials with whom they regularly interacted. Among the released communications are lively exchanges between Twitter and the FBI, revealing some of the sensitivities — and tensions — at play as the government and Silicon Valley slowly figured out how to work together.
One former FBI official who spoke to CNN recalls that tech executives would insist on meetings away from their campuses, in part because government agents weren’t welcome. Feelings in Silicon Valley toward the intelligence community were still raw since the Edward Snowden leaks detailed a vast data collection apparatus that targeted the tech companies.
“Early on, who hosted the meeting was also a political football,” said a person familiar with the meetings between the government and Silicon Valley. “Each company wanted someone else to. There were worries about employees seeing a bunch of feds and leaking it in an inaccurate way.”
One tech source, however, dismissed this and said companies offered their offices for the meetings out of a shared sense of responsibility.
Nevertheless, the meetings went ahead. The first one took place at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Later meetings were held at Twitter and LinkedIn’s offices, a person familiar with the meetings told CNN.
Some of the early interactions were terse. Reports published by CNN and other news organizations described complaints from some tech executives that the FBI was sharing only limited information, useless to help the companies protect their platforms.
A telling moment came early on when a government lawyer lectured tech executives about the limits on what the government can do to help, multiple people who attended the meeting told CNN. One Silicon Valley executive described how the lawyer gave a 20-minute speech about the First Amendment and insisted that “government representatives can’t tell the companies to take any content down.”
Former Twitter employees and FBI officials involved say that by 2020, their discussions had become better coordinated and useful to both sides. One indicator of how advantageous the relationship had become: By 2020, Facebook was issuing press releases about some of the discussions.
Musk and other critics of the interactions point to released messages that they claim show a cozy relationship between the government and Twitter. But the messages also show Roth, Twitter’s then head of site integrity, repeatedly pushing back against asks from the FBI.
At various points, the Twitter communications show Roth resisting pressure to reveal certain information about users absent a formal legal request, such as which third-party VPN services were used by some account-holders to access Twitter.
Roth also shut down a request that the company share more of its data with intelligence officials.
Others within Twitter noted the US government’s interest in Twitter’s data and urged colleagues to “stay connected and keep a solid front against these efforts.”
Conservative critics continue to blame Roth for Twitter’s suppression of the laptop story, but he insists he didn’t make the final call and says he thought it was a mistake. “It is widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Roth said last month. “It is absolutely, unequivocally untrue.”
Exactly who in Twitter’s leadership ultimately made the call to block the story remains unclear.
In December 2020, Roth gave a sworn declaration to the Federal Election Commission saying the government had warned of expected hack-and-leak incidents targeting people associated with political campaigns. Roth said that he learned in the meetings with government agencies there were “rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Roth did not point to the government as the source of the rumor, but his claim that law enforcement agencies gave general warnings about disinformation campaigns dovetails with recent testimony from Chan, the FBI agent who played a key role in the meetings.
Chan was deposed this year as part of a lawsuit brought by the Missouri attorney general alleging government censorship of social media. Chan disputed that the government told social media companies to “expect” hack-and-leak campaigns, saying that it would have only warned companies it was a possibility.
That Hunter Biden might be the target of a hack-and-leak operation was being publicly discussed at the time, after it emerged that Burisma Holdings, a company he worked with in Ukraine had reportedly been hacked by Russian military intelligence early in 2020.
Chan also testified that government agents never raised Hunter Biden specifically, and that his name came up only when a Facebook analyst asked specifically for relevant information. An FBI agent in the meeting declined to answer, Chan recalled, adding that she was likely not authorized to address the question because at the time the FBI had not publicly confirmed its Hunter Biden investigation.
For days, Twitter owner Elon Musk had teased a massive bombshell disclosure based on internal company documents that he claimed would reveal “what really happened” inside Twitter when it decided to temporarily suppress a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.
But on Friday, instead of releasing a trove of documents to the public, Musk’s big reveal pointed to a series of tweets by the journalist Matt Taibbi, who had been provided with emails that largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.
Attracting thousands of retweets, Taibbi’s winding tweet thread reaffirmed how, in the initial hours after the Post story went live, Twitter employees grappled with fears that it could have been the result of a Russian hacking operation.
It showed employees on Twitter’s legal, policy and communications teams debating – and at times disagreeing – over whether to restrict the article under the company’s hacked materials policy, weeks before the 2020 election, where Joe Biden, Hunter Biden’s father, ran against then-President Donald Trump.
While some questioned the basis for the decision and warned that Twitter would be inviting allegations of anti-conservative bias, others within the company, including senior officials, said the circumstances surrounding the Post story were unclear and recommended caution, according to screenshots of internal communications shared by Taibbi.
(Then-CEO Jack Dorsey – whom Taibbi said was not involved in the decision – has told US lawmakers that in hindsight, suppressing the story was a mistake.)
The emails Taibbi obtained are consistent with what former Twitter site integrity head Yoel Roth told journalist Kara Swisher in an onstage interview earlier this week. During that interview, Roth said he felt at the time that the Post reporting bore the hallmarks of a Russian hack-and-leak operation, an assessment that was shared at the time by dozens of former US intelligence officials. Roth did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
The Taibbi posts undercut a top claim by Musk and Republicans, who have accused the FBI of leaning on social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop stories.
Musk tweeted Friday night, amid the Taibbi posts, that Twitter had acted “under orders from the government.”
Taibbi said in his series of tweets that “there is no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.”
Lawyers for Facebook parent company Meta have made similar comments in recent weeks, disputing claims from Republicans that the FBI coerced Facebook to suppress the laptop stories.
Taibbi said the material he reviewed referenced general FBI warnings about potential attempted Russian interference in the elections, which also dovetails with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public account of Facebook’s handling of the New York Post story and affirms how Twitter was on high alert for possible foreign meddling.
In the wake of the article’s suppression, Taibbi said one Democratic congressman, California Rep. Ro Khanna, wrote to Twitter’s chief legal officer suggesting it was a bad look and a departure from First Amendment ideals to suppress a news report containing details that affect a presidential candidate. Khanna noted in the email he was saying this even though he was a “total Biden partisan.” Khanna did not respond to a request for comment.
The tweet thread also highlighted how officials from both political parties routinely wrote to Twitter asking for specific tweets to be removed. Taibbi included a screenshot of an email from the “Biden team” asking to delete tweets. A CNN review of those tweets on an archive site showed some purported photos of Hunter Biden, including nudity, that may have violated Twitter policy.
Taibbi said the contact from political parties happened more frequently from Democrats, but provided no internal documents to back up his assertion. He also did not say that Democrats requested that Twitter suppress the Post story, and his account did not suggest that the US government had ever pressured Twitter to suppress the story.
