Extraordinarily Confused Congressional Rep. Thinks Social Media Companies Are Secretly Communicating With Gov’t Censors… Via Jira
from the did-you-put-in-a-ticket dept
I wrote last week about the bizarrely bad House Oversight hearing that was supposed to expose how Twitter, the deep state, and the, um “Biden Crime Family” conspired to suppress the NY Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Of course, wishful thinking does not make facts, and we already know that story is totally false. The hearing not only reconfirmed that the GOP’s fantasy scenario never happened, instead it revealed that the Trump White House actually demanded tweets that insulted the President get taken down and that Twitter bent over backwards to give Trump more leeway, even after he broke clear rules. It was something of a disaster hearing for the GOP.
But, one of the craziest bits of the hearing came from new Congressional Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who worked for Turning Point USA and PragerU before being elected. Her five minutes has garnered some extra attention for being even crazier than either Reps. Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, both of whom had pretty crazy rants.
In particular, Rep. Luna (who has been facing some interesting news reporting of late) made some claims about there being a conspiracy between Twitter and the government to communicate via “the private cloud server”… Jira.
Of course, as anyone with even the slightest bit of understanding about, well, anything, would tell you, it’s that Jira is an issue and project tracking software, normally used for things like bug tracking. Luna claimed this was a violation of the 1st Amendment, because she apparently hasn’t the slightest clue how the 1st Amendment actually works.
From the transcript (helpfully provided by Tech Policy Press, though we’ve corrected it based on the video), you can see former Twitter exec Yoel Roth’s confusion over all this. For anyone who understands this, you can recognize Roth’s confusion because he recognizes that she’s completely misconstruing Jira and what it does. But, to Rep. Luna, she seems to think she’s caught Roth out in a giant conspiracy.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Mr. Roth. Mr. Roth, have you communicated with government officials ever on a platform called Jira? Yes or no? Real quick answer, we’re on the clock, yes or no?
Yoel Roth:
Not to the best of my recollection.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Not to your recollection. Great. Have, if you did in the event, communicate who would’ve had access to this platform.
Yoel Roth:
That’s the nature of my confusion. JIRA’s…
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Okay. Did you ever speak to government officials on Jira regarding taking down social media posts?
Yoel Roth:
Again, not to the best of my recollection.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Can you explain to me why the federal government would ever have interest in communicating through Jira? Mind you, a private cloud server with social media companies without oversight to censor American voices? I wanna let you know that this is a violation of the First Amendment and the federal government is colluding with social media companies to censor Americans. Mr. Chairman, I ask for unanimous consent to submit these graphics into record. And Mr. Roth, I’m gonna refresh your memory for you this flow chart.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY):
Without objection so ordered.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Thank you chair. This flow chart shows the following Federal agency’s social media companies, Twitter, leftist, nonprofits, and organizations communicating regarding their version of misinformation using Jira, a private cloud server. On this chart, I wanna annotate that the Department of Homeland Security, which has a following branches, cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, also known as CISA Countering Foreign Intelligence Task Force, now known as the Misinfo, Disinfo and Mal-information, MDM, this was again, used against the American people. The Election Partnership Institute or Election Integrity Partnership, EIP, which includes the following, Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington Center for Informed Public, Graphika and Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. And potentially according to what we found on the final report by EIP, the DNC, the Center for Internet Security, CIS- a nonprofit funded by DHS, the National Association of Secretaries of State, also known as NASS and the National Association of State Election Directors, NASED.
And in this case, because there are other social media companies involved, Twitter, what do all of these groups though, have in common? And I’m going to refresh your memory. They were all communicating on a private cloud server known as Jira. Now, the screenshot behind me, which is an example of one of thousands shows on November 3rd, 2020, that you, Mr. Roth, a Twitter employee, were exchanging communications on Jira, a private cloud server with CISA, NASS, NASED, and Alex Stamos, who now works at Stanford and is a former security of security officer at Facebook to remove a posting. Do you now remember communicating on a private cloud server to remove a posting? Yes or no?
Yoel Roth:
I wouldn’t agree with the characteristics.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
I don’t care if you agree. Do you, this is, this is your stuff, yes or no? Did you communicate with a private entity, the government agency on a private cloud server? Yes or no?
Yoel Roth:
The question was, if I…
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Yes or no? Yeah, I’m on time. Yes or no?
Yoel Roth:
Ma’am, I don’t believe I can give you a yes or no.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Well, I’m gonna tell you right now that you did and we have proof of it. This ladies and gentlemen, is joint action between the federal government and a private company to censor and violate the First Amendment. This is also known, and I’m so glad that there’s many attorneys on this panel, joint state actors, it’s highly illegal. You are all engaged in this action, and I want you to know that you will be all held accountable. Ms. Gadde, are you still on CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Council? Yes or no?
Vijaya Gadde:
Yes, I am.
Rep. Anna Luna (R-FL):
Okay. For those who have said that this is a pointless hearing, and I just wanna let you guys all know, we found that Twitter was indeed communicating with the federal government to censor Americans. I’d like to remind you that this was all in place before January 6th. So, to say that these mechanisms weren’t in place, and to make it about January 6th, I wanna let you know that you guys were actually in control of all of the content and clearly have proof of that. Now, if you don’t think that this is important to your constituents and the American people from those saying that this was a pointless hearing, I suggest you find other jobs. Chairman, I yield my time.
If you actually want to watch all this play out, it’s at 5 hours and 31 minutes in this video (the link should take you to that point). You can see how proud Luna is of herself as she thinks she’s proven “joint state action” and found the secret “Jira private cloud server” where social media and government actors colluded to censor people.
The problem, of course, is that none of this is even remotely true. Whether Luna knows it’s not true, has very stupid staffers who told her something false, or if they just don’t care because it sounds good… I don’t know. I do know that Luna has continued to take a victory lap on this nonsense, including claiming on Steve Bannon’s podcast that she caught Roth “lying” under oath to a member of Congress, and she insisted that the panelist’s stunned faces were not because they were realizing just how confused Luna was about all this, but (she said) because they all wanted to immediately text their lawyers about how in trouble they were.
So, let’s debunk all of this nonsense. And, I won’t even bother digging into the fact that at the time of this supposed smoking gun, Trump was in office, and his hand appointed director ran CISA. There’s so much other dumb stuff, I don’t even have time to spend any more time on that.
Now, once again, Jira is a ticketing system, and a widely used one. It is not a “private cloud server” for “communicating.”
All of the details of what’s going on here were totally public already. The Election Integrity Partnership, which was a private project run by the Stanford Internet Observatory, UW Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Digital Forensic Research Lab, have been quite open and public about what they did to try to track and monitor election mis- and dis-information.
They released a big report, called The Long Fuse in 2021 that details how they used Jira to track possible election disinfo vectors. They used it internally, but they were also able to “tag” in different organizations if they thought it was necessary. This is described pretty clearly and publicly in the report on page 18 and 19:
To illustrate the scope of collaboration types discussed above, the following case study documents the value derived from the multistakeholder model that the EIP facilitated. On October 13, 2020, a civil society partner submitted a tip via their submission portal about well-intentioned but misleading information in a Facebook post. The post contained a screenshot (See Figure 1.4).
In their comments, the partner stated, “In some states, a mark is intended to denote a follow-up: this advice does not apply to every locality, and may confuse people. A local board of elections has responded, but the meme is being copy/pasted all over Facebook from various sources.” A Tier 1 analyst investigated the report, answering a set of standardized research questions, archiving the content, and appending their findings to the ticket. The analyst identified that the text content of the message had been copied and pasted verbatim by other users and on other platforms. The Tier 1 analyst routed the ticket to Tier 2, where the advanced analyst tagged the platform partners Facebook and Twitter, so that these teams were aware of the content and could independently evaluate the post against their policies. Recognizing the potential for this narrative to spread to multiple jurisdictions, the manager added in the CIS partner as well to provide visibility on this growing narrative and share the information on spread with their election official partners. The manager then routed the ticket to ongoing monitoring. A Tier 1 analyst tracked the ticket until all platform partners had responded, and then closed the ticket as resolved.
According to two different people I spoke to at the EIP, this Tier 2 setup, where companies got tagged in happened rarely. Instead, these tickets were mostly just used internally for EIP’s own research efforts. But, either way, note the issue. This is not government employees telling social media to take down posts. This is the EIP, basically a bunch of disinformation researchers, conducting research, and escalating issues to companies to be “independently evaluated against their policies.”
Now, as for the “smoking gun” which Luna showed where she claimed she’s proven “state action,” it’s very blurry and impossible to see in the C-SPAN video, and she didn’t tweet it either. Perhaps because it kinda debunks her entire argument.
The screenshot also isn’t anything secret. It was part of EIP’s own presentation explaining how the EIP worked! In this 12 minute video, Stanford’s Alex Stamos explains the whole process, and at 4 minutes and 14 seconds, he shows a specific example, which appears to be the blurry example that Luna claimed was her smoking gun. Except when you look at it, you see it’s actually an item that (1) EIP found and highlighted (not government officials) of actual election disinfo (someone claiming to be a poll worker burning ballots for anyone who voted for Trump). (2) They tagged in Yoel Roth from Twitter, who rather than just take it down, actually pushed back saying “Is there any evidence establishing that this was a hoax.” (3) EIP then reached out to the relevant election board to see if they had any proof that it was a hoax, and (4) them getting back a press release from the Election Board saying it was a hoax.
That is… not the government colluding to censor Americans. Nor is it Yoel Roth communicating with government officials. It’s EIP (not a gov’t org) raising a potential issue that clearly violates Twitter’s policies, but rather than immediately taking it down, Roth wants actual evidence. That then causes EIP to reach out to other orgs who can speak to the government officials and find out if there’s any further evidence.
In other words, nothing shown in the screenshot is Yoel communicating with government officials (only with EIP). Nothing shown is government officials demanding Twitter censor anyone. Instead, it shows private actors flagging some potentially consequential election disinfo. Finally, nothing in it shows that Twitter is quick to censor content based on these requests, rather it shows Yoel’s sole communication in the chain pushing back on what seems to be pretty clear disinfo, but demanding actual evidence that it’s false before he is willing to take action. Also, none of it was secret! EIP literally posted it themselves to brag about how their system worked to share useful information about election disinfo.
Once again, America, I beg you: elect better people.
Filed Under: alex stamos, anna paulina luna, disinformation, election disinformation, elections, hearings, house oversight committee, information sharing, jira, ticketing system, yoel roth
Companies: atlassian, election integrity partnership, stanford, twitter