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First Twitter Files of 2023 shows how intelligence community gained influence over the platform
The first Twitter Files of 2023 have been released by journalist Matt Taibbi, and they reveal how the intelligence community gained the influence it had over the platform. It begins in August 2017 when Facebook suspended 300 accounts with “suspected Russian origin.”
1.THREAD: The Twitter Files
How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
However, Twitter’s leaders weren’t worried because they were sure there wasn’t a Russia problem. Screenshots of emails from Twitter’s former Vice President, Global Public Policy & Philanthropy, Colin Crowell, and Twitter’s former legal head, Vijaya Gadde, confirm that Twitter had been in contact with Facebook and agreed that the best public relations strategy was to say nothing on record and to issue a statement bringing them “closer to Facebook, their vulnerabilities on this issue, and the follow-up stories on Russia.”
In another email, Crowell noted that Twitter wasn’t the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling but that the spotlight was on Facebook. The screenshot revealed that a group of Twitter executives were “due to see the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee” in a non-public and private meeting.
In the section of the email titled Important Context, Crowell wrote: “Twitter is not the focus of inquiry into Russian election meddling right now – the spotlight is on FB because FB has better targeting ability than we have for campaign-related advertising; and, because the Trump campaign spent massively on FB during the election compared to what they spent w/us.”
Credit: Matt Taibbi
Following that, Twitter suspended 22 possible Russian accounts and 179 others with “possible links” to those accounts out of a larger set of 2,700 suspects that were manually examined. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, wasn’t too happy with Twitter. He held a press conference to denounce Twitter’s report as “frankly inadequate on every level.”
Crowell’s response was “#Irony” after he received an email from Warner’s re-election campaign asking for $5. Following that, Crowell met with congressional leaders and told his team at Twitter to keep producing material.
“Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at the top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them.”
Credit: Matt Taibbi
He added that the Democrats were taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who said, “It’s time for Twitter to stop dragging its heels and live up to the fact that its platform is being used as a tool for cyber-warfare.”
Credit: Matt Taibbi
This led Twitter to form a Russia Task Force due to anxiety over its PR problems. The task force began with data shared from counterparts at Facebook; however, Taibbi noted that those searches of accounts tied to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) were a dud.
One screenshot read: “No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity.”
Another one pointed out that after manually reviewing 2,500 accounts, they thought it was exhaustive. “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.”
Taibbi noted that the search found “only 2” significant accounts based on the same data that later inspired panic headlines such as “Russian Influence Reached 126 million through Facebook alone.”
Twitter’s failure of its Russian task force to produce material made its PR crisis worse. Several stories sourced into the Intel Committee were reported on in the news. This led Twitter to change its thoughts on the smallness of its Russia problem.
Senate staff told Twitter leaders that Senator Warner felt like the tech industry was in denial for months, and Twitter “pledged to work with them on their desire to legislate.”
Following that, Twitter’s Policy Director, Carlos Monje, shared key highlights of the legislation that Senators Warner, Klobuchar, and McCain were introducing.
“Knowing that our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight, I wanted to share some relevant highlights of the legislation Senators Warner, Klobuchar and McCain will be introducing,”
Credit: Matt Taibbi
As Twitter began preparing its ads policy and removing RT and Sputnik to placate Washington, the committees leaked the larger list of 2,700 accounts. This led to a media circus, with Twitter being the star of the show. Internally, Twitter didn’t want to endorse the findings by Buzzfeed and the University of Sheffield, which said they found a new network on Twitter with close connections to Russian-linked bot accounts.
Credit: Matt Taibbi
Credit: Matt Taibbi
The Senate asked Twitter for a write-up of what happened when the Buzzfeed piece came out. Twitter then apologized for the same accounts it initially told the Senate was not a problem. This led to a new revelation. “Reporters now know this is a model that works.”
Taibbi noted that this cycle would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement. And this is how the intelligence community gained its influence over Twitter. In public, Twitter would remove content “at our sole discretion.”
Privately, the platform would “off-board” anything that was “identified by the U.S. intelligence community as state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”
If you would like to access all of the Twitter files, an archival website has been built, which includes all of the threads as organized, long-form blog posts and links to articles written by the independent journalists who have released the Twitter Files.
Your feedback is welcome. If you have any comments or concerns or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter at @JohnnaCrider1.
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Tesla’s AI Chief just hinted at something big for FSD v14 lite owners
Tesla’s AI chief suggests the newest FSD v14 Lite build may finally go wide release.
Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, noted on Sunday that the newest FSD v14 Lite build rolling out to Hardware 3 cars is likely the version that goes to wide release, the strongest signal yet that Tesla is near to closing out an early access phase that Hardware 3 owners have waited more than a year for.
Elluswamy made the comment in response to an extensive review from Tesla owner Zack, known on X as @BLKMDL3, who tested software version 2026.20.6.10 and detailed the changes in a lengthy post. “FSD v14 Lite (for Tesla AI3 hardware vehicles) review.
The update restarts a rollout that had stalled after its initial release. Tesla began pushing FSD v14 Lite to Hardware 3 early access drivers on June 29, bringing driving behavior learned on the newer Hardware 4 computer down to the more limited chip that has powered Tesla vehicles built between 2019 and early 2023. That release, as we covered in detail, gave roughly 4 million HW3 vehicles their first meaningful update since being frozen on version 12.6 in early 2025.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ Release Notes: new capabilities and features
The latest build adds features that bring Hardware 3 closer in line with what Hardware 4 owners already have. FSD can now start directly from park without a brake pedal confirmation, a change Zack called a small but meaningful quality of life improvement. The interface also picks up the blue “P” park icon, approaching destination alerts, and a dedicated Self-Driving app with streak tracking, all details previously exclusive to the AI4 branch of v14, as outlined in Tesla’s original release notes.
The stakes around Hardware 3 go beyond software polish. Tesla sold the Full Self-Driving package for years on the promise that every vehicle equipped with it had the hardware needed to eventually drive itself without supervision. That promise broke down during Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call, when Musk acknowledged HW3 cars could not run unsupervised FSD, prompting Tesla to offer trade-in discounts and hardware retrofits alongside the Lite software track.
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla has continued to frame v14 Lite as the primary path forward for the HW3 fleet, telling owners in April that international markets would follow the U.S. rollout once regulatory approvals came through. For now, HW3 owners in the early access group are the only ones running the new build. A broader rollout would mark the second major software delivery to the legacy fleet since Tesla first released FSD v14 to Hardware 4 vehicles, and the first sign since June that the Lite program is still moving rather than stuck in early access limbo.
In a pointed message on X, Elon Musk warned that firms maintaining significant short positions in SpaceX over time face “very low” survival probability.
The statement comes amid post-IPO volatility for the rocket company, now trading under the ticker $SPCX.
The survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2026
Five weeks after what was described as the largest IPO in history, the stock had fallen roughly 30% from its peak above $2.6 trillion, briefly surpassing Microsoft and Amazon in market value. Short sellers celebrated gains of about $8.7 billion, but Musk’s reply underscores his long-term conviction.
The warning directly echoes a detailed bullish analysis arguing that Starship’s cost reductions could unlock a multi-trillion-dollar space economy. Projects ranging from solar power beamed from orbit and asteroid mining to orbital data centers and Mars terraforming were projected to create over $100 trillion in new market capitalization.
In this vision, SpaceX acts as the essential infrastructure provider, akin to AWS for cloud computing, capturing monopoly-like revenues from launches, crew transport, and data traffic across a rapidly expanding frontier.
This is far from the first time Musk has targeted short sellers. With Tesla, he has repeatedly framed persistent bears as destined for major losses. In July 2024, Musk declared that once Tesla achieves full autonomy and volume production of Optimus robots, “anyone still holding a short position will be obliterated. Even Gates,” referencing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ reported short bets.
Elon Musk reveals what Tesla stock surge could do to Bill Gates
Earlier, in 2018, he taunted shorts that they had “about three weeks before their short position explodes,” a remark followed by sharp stock gains. Musk has also called short selling “value destroying” and once suggested it “should be illegal,” viewing it as betting against innovation and progress.
Critics often dismiss Musk’s optimism as hype, especially when near-term metrics like quarterly deliveries or stock fluctuations disappoint.
Yet his pattern remains consistent: framing short positions against his companies as fundamentally misjudging exponential technological leaps. For SpaceX shorts, the message is clear: betting against multi-planetary ambitions and the infrastructure monopoly they enable carries existential risk for the firms involved.
As Musk and supporters see it, the space economy’s upside dwarfs Earth-bound valuation models, making today’s dips temporary in a decades-long ascent.
Tesla has evidently revealed which of its vehicle models will be the first to receive Starlink integration: the Cybercab.
Tesla’s Santana Row showroom now has a full-fledged display of the Cybercab, with an extensive bit of information hung around an exhibit that seems to reveal the vehicle’s newest feature: an integrated Starlink antenna that will enable secure and reliable internet access during trips.
Credit: @Starscream_SJC | X
Cybercab is geared toward autonomous ride-hailing for one or two passengers. The production units rolling off the lines at Gigafactory Texas are built without steering wheels or pedals, meaning when public rides begin, passengers will not need to interact with a human being or control the vehicle in any way outside of what appears on the center screen for their entertainment during the ride.
Tesla Santana Row will be reopening tomorrow with a full focus on self-driving. Everything in the showroom is about Robotaxi and Cybercab with stats and information about the technology. The Cybercab on display is the production model. pic.twitter.com/yIUYdOGFOp
— Shaun Cassidy (@Starscream_SJC) July 20, 2026
Along the display, Tesla wrote this message about Cybercab:
“Cybercab is built for autonomy. It has no steering wheel, no side mirrors, and no pedals. It goes where you tell it to go and how you want it to, so you can relax along the way. It is hyper aware and responsive to your surroundings, monitoring other drivers, responding to emergency vehicles, utilizing its expertise in the rarest scenarios to help keep you safe.”
Tesla has been teasing a potential Starlink integration for quite some time now. In December, the company hinted at potential Starlink internet terminal integration within its vehicles in a patent that described a vehicle roof assembly with integrated radio frequency (RF) transparency.
The company wrote in its patent application that a new roof design built with materials that differ from the standard metallic or glass elements used in today’s cars would allow it to integrate modern vehicular technologies, in particular, ones that require radio frequency transmission and reception.
Tesla suggested high-strength polymer blends, like Polycarbonate, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, or Acrylonitrile Styrene Acrylate.
This is the first time we’ve seen Tesla officially confirm the Starlink integration into the Cybercab. It’s not much of a surprise considering the company’s intention behind the Cybercab, which is to make travel autonomous.
Productivity will now be at a maximum during a work-related commute, while the center screen could be utilized for Netflix or potentially even live TV for those who are heading to dinner or to a fun activity.
Tesla’s AI Chief just hinted at something big for FSD v14 lite owners
Elon Musk sends first warning to SpaceX short sellers
