Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and his staff members relentlessly asked Twitter to censor posts on the social media platform, according to internal Twitter documents published Thursday by journalist Matt Taibbi.
The files, distributed by Twitter CEO Elon Musk to just a handful of reporters since his takeover of the tech giant late last year, showed that Schiff and other Democrats refused to accept Twitter's warning that there was no evidence of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.
On Friday, Taibbi tweeted that Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and his staff "wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down."
One request concerned a parody photo of then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden.
"The real issue was Donald Trump retweeted the Biden pic," Taibbi tweeted. "To its credit Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious ‘humorous intent’ and ‘any reasonable observer’ — apparently, not a Schiff staffer — could see it was doctored."
Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein, however, responded by claiming there was a "slippery slope concern here."
Twitter also refused requests for banning content about Schiff and his team.
That followed an earlier release that said Schiff sought to have a journalist, Paul Sperry, banned from the platform.
"Twitter Files" consist of thousands of internal documents, including many Slack discussions, between Twitter employees about their content moderation decisions.
The latest installment, dubbed Twitter Files 14, also said Schiff's office "repeatedly complained about 'QAnon related activity' that were often tweets about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine 'whistleblower' or the Steele dossier:"
The Schiff team actually did have a concern about its own behavior. Members worried that "deamplification" of tweets might "make it harder for law enforcement to track the offending Tweeters."
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