Leaked documents show how Steve Bannon and Breitbart sought to sabotage Twitter via negative coverage, potential litigation, and stock manipulation
Steve Bannon and his associates at Breitbart News planned a broad financial, legal, and editorial campaign to damage Twitter, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. Tweets: @katienotopoulos , @caseynewton , @kevinroose , @buzzfeednews , @willsommer , and @fwd See also Mediagazer Tweets: Katie Notopoulos / @katienotopoulos : I was wrong about what true “boss” email style is. It's not replying to everything quickly. It's opening an email 111 times and never reply. http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : If I wanted to sabotage Twitter I'd require it to replace its head of product once a year and prevent users from editing tweets http://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : There's a direct line between this @Bernstein / @RMac18 report on the alt-right's desperate attempt to undermine Twitter and the failure of their own platforms. http://www.buzzfeed.com/... @buzzfeednews : Before he became Trump's campaign manager, Steve Bannon sought to wage war against Twitter, tasking Breitbart News employees to look into editorial, financial, and legal ways they could harm it #AM2DM http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Will Sommer / @willsommer : Big @BuzzFeed story on how badly Milo wanted his blue checkmark back http://www.buzzfeed.com/... http://twitter.com/... BuzzFeed Tech / @fwd : Steve Bannon and Milo Yiannopoulos spent more than a year attempting to destroy Twitter as part of a culture war. Here's an inside look at their plans to sue, short and sandbag the social network. https://www.buzzfeed.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
BuzzFeed News obtained internal documents showing Bannon and Breitbart planned a three-front campaign against Twitter — hostile editorial coverage, litigation, and deliberate moves to depress the stock. The outlet publishing the files is itself one of Breitbart's media rivals, which makes the disclosure part of the same media-war terrain the documents describe.
The target here keeps drawing fire long after 2017: years later Twitter is still the platform whose internal decisions get weaponized by outsiders, from Elon Musk amplifying false claims that the FBI paid Twitter millions to Peiter Zatko's whistleblower allegations about its misinformation failures. This leak is an early, unusually explicit specimen of that pattern — an organized attempt to hit a platform through its narrative, its courtroom exposure, and its share price at once.
First-order effects
- Twitter now has documentary evidence of a coordinated effort to damage it financially and legally, giving its legal and investor-relations teams concrete grounds to respond — including referring any actual shorting scheme to securities regulators.
- Bannon and Breitbart face immediate reputational blowback from the leak itself: BuzzFeed's publication exposes their methods to the same audience the editorial campaign was meant to sway.
Second-order effects
- Other platforms and public media companies learn that partisan outlets can operate as attack vectors against their stock, forcing them to treat adversarial coverage as a market-risk problem, not just a PR one.
- Media rivals like BuzzFeed gain a competitive and editorial edge over Breitbart, while advertisers and investors reassess how much political conflict surrounds any platform they touch.
Third-order effects
- If coordinated editorial-plus-financial campaigns become a recurring tactic, expect platforms to institutionalize defenses — securities-law referrals, opposition research, and heavier legal/government-relations staffs — and expect regulators to scrutinize the blurred line between political media operations and market manipulation.
- The deeper structural shift is that social platforms stop being treated as neutral infrastructure and become standing political targets whose governance is contested from outside, a dynamic the later Twitter coverage shows repeating under new owners.
The trend: Social platforms are increasingly treated as political targets subject to coordinated editorial, legal, and financial pressure rather than neutral distribution infrastructure.