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Twitter and Jack Smith - A Tech Worker's Take [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-09

So, I don’t write here very often because I generally don’t feel like I have much to add, but after spending half the day watching the “news” media’s attempts to understand why Jack Smith wanted the Twitter data for Trump and wanted to keep that request secret, I feel I can add a bit of extra thought around this leveraging my knowledge from a couple decades in tech, especially my work on large data systems and related analytics.

First, it is outside my knowledge or expertise whether or not the media is right that he would need the tweets straight from the source to present them in court, but regardless, I don’t believe that he really cares about that as much as everything else he can acquire.

1) Location information associated with the Tweets

Twitter, like most social media, or tech in general, is going to store almost everything they can about anything you do on their services. Sometimes they want the data for advertising, sometimes they just want it in case they can figure out a new way to monitize it in the future, sometimes they want it to actually improve their product. Regardless, they collect it and store it. Even popular video games are known to store terabytes of data on a daily basis just for anti-cheat activities.

To this end, Twitter almost certainly has location data from the devices that Trump’s tweets came from. Even if a phone had location services turned off, or the tweets originated on a PC, they will have the IP address which can then be used to track back to who was using that IP at that date and time.

2) Device details

In the past, people used to utilize various services to tell if Trump account tweets were coming from an Apple or Android app. It became increasingly apparent that Trump tweeted from one device, while his staffers used the other device.

This is likely still the case, even though I believe most of the data is no longer publicly available from Twitter. Twitter would still store it internally. Going even further, they would likely have model of device, screen resolution, text sizes, and a bunch of other unique identifiers. So even if Trump and his staff all used the same model Android Galaxy S10 phone, there is likely metadata attached to each and every tweet that could tell you specifically which device it came from.

This is important is showing that Trump himself tweeted something versus a staffer having tweeted the content (and directly blame to staffers).

3) Direct Messages

I did hear one discussion of “maybe they are after the direct messages” but as the media does, they talked themselves out of this insisting Trump only used it to tweet.

The thing is, we don’t know if he ever sent DMs or received them. Jack Smith likely wouldn’t be sure either unless he had already obtained evidence supporting that he did.

Regardless, he would want to know and if there was content, he would want access to it. Its possible Trump never sent DMs, but others in on the conspiracy sent him DMs with details that could support Jack Smith’s case. Likewise, all those DMs would have read receipts on the backend that show what time and place each device was in when it saw the DMs or sent them. All valuable information.

4) Non-Twitter application data

Let's us not forget Trump was banned by Twitter related to Jan 6 and was eventually unbanned by he who shall not be named.

For someone as big as Trump, I doubt the banning just happened. A decision was made and a switch flipped and it was done.

Most likely, Trump had been warned by Twitter repeatedly. His team, and potentially Trump himself, responded and they negotiated multiple times over months and months. All those discussions are valuable. They can show Trump and his team’s state of mind regarding Jan 6 activities. For all we know, Trump wrote to Twitter at some point “You can’t stop me from telling people to go to the capital” or “If you ban me the same people who went to the capital for me will show up at your offices”. We don’t know, but I am betting those communications around his banning would be very interesting to Jack Smith and his team.

Likewise, any communication about unbanning him. While Trump hasn’t posted since being unbanned, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t accessed Twitter, used DMs, indirectly provided location tracking data, or had private communications with Twitter regarding the unbanning and talking about why he was banned in the first place. All valuable paper trails worth investigation.

5) Finally, you have the co-conspirators

As far as I could tell, and I haven’t read the actual request so I may be entirely off base here, but the request from Twitter was in support of the investigation. There is nothing saying this was just Trump. Jack Smith and his team likely requested everything I called out above for both Trump and all his co-conspirators and even a few dozen other individuals associated with Trump and his co-conspirators.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Would love to hear other’s thoughts on these and other things beyond just Trump’s tweets and DMs that Jack Smith and his team may be after here.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/9/2186256/-Twitter-and-Jack-Smith-A-Tech-Worker-s-Take

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