CTH | Twitter is simply a discovery vector to reveal the larger dynamic of
DHS being in control of social media. That was the DHS/ODNI problem
James Baker was trying to mitigate by his filtration of the released
documents. The “Twitter files” are one tentacled element in a much
larger story.
To put it in brutally honest terms, The United States Dept of
Homeland Security is the operating system running in the background of
Twitter.
You can debate whether Elon Musk honestly didn’t know all this before
purchasing Twitter from his good friend Jack Dorsey, and/or what the
scenario of owner/operator motive actually is. Decide for yourself.
For me, I feel confident that all of the conflicting and odd
datapoints only reconcile in one direction. DHS, via CISA, controls
Twitter.
Wittingly or unwittingly (you decide) Elon Musk is now the face of that govt controlled enterprise.
If you concur with my researched assessment, then what you see being
released by Elon Musk in the Twitter Files is actually a filtered
outcome as a result of this new ownership dynamic. And with that
intelligence framework solidly in mind, I warn readers not to take a
position on the motive of the new ownership.
Put simply, DHS stakeholders, to include the DOJ, FBI and Office of
the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), are mitigating public
exposure of their domestic surveillance activity by controlling and
feeding selected information about their prior Twitter operations.
If TikTok is a national security threat, then TikTok is to Beijing as Twitter is to Washington DC.
The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always
been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, and then
ultimately controlling and influencing public opinion.
dailycaller | Twitter kept secret “blacklists” that included a doctor at Stanford
and several prominent conservative voices that suppressed their ability
to be found or heard on the social media platform, according to
journalist Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press and former
Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnist, who launched the
second chapter in Elon Musk’s so-called “Twitter Files” Thursday
evening.
Weiss tweeted what appeared to be a photo of Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy,
with his account being prominently marked as being under a “Trends
Blacklist.” Bhattacharya was secretly blacklisted because he “argued
that Covid lockdowns would harm children,” and was thus unable to trend
on the platform, according to Weiss.
In addition to Bhattacharya, Twitter placed
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk under a “Do Not Amplify” notice,
while right wing talk radio personality Dan Bongino, who has appeared
on Alex Jones’ InfoWars, was placed
under a “Search Blacklist,” according to Weiss. The practice of
limiting the access or reach of users’ content, commonly referred to as
“shadow banning,” is something that Twitter has denied doing in the
past, and is referred to internally as “Visibility Filtering” or “VF,”
Weiss reported.
“Think
about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what
people see to different levels,” a senior Twitter employee reportedly told Weiss. “It’s a very powerful tool.”
-took billions from us -banned opposition parties -nationalized all TV stations -rejects calls for peace deals -banned the Orthodox Church -attacked Elon Musk on Twitter -took photoshoots for magazines -framed Russia for strikes in Poland
Time | Greatest single news event of 1938 took place on September 29, when four
statesmen met at the Führerhaus, in Munich, to redraw the map of
Europe. The three visiting statesmen at that historic conference were
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain, Premier Edouard
Daladier of France, and Dictator Benito Mussolini of Italy. But by all
odds the dominating figure at Munich was the German host, Adolf
Hitler.
Führer of the German people, Commander-in-Chief of the German Army,
Navy & Air Force, Chancellor of the Third Reich, Herr Hitler reaped on
that day at Munich the harvest of an audacious, defiant, ruthless
foreign policy he had pursued for five and a half years. He had torn
the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. He had rearmed Germany to the
teeth— or as close to the teeth as he was able. He had stolen Austria
before the eyes of a horrified and apparently impotent world.
All these events were shocking to nations which had defeated Germany
on the battlefield only 20 years before, but nothing so terrified the
world as the ruthless, methodical, Nazi-directed events which during
late summer and early autumn threatened a world war over Czechoslovakia.
When without loss of blood he reduced Czechoslovakia to a German
puppet state, forced a drastic revision of Europe's defensive
alliances, and won a free hand for himself in Eastern Europe by getting
a "hands-off" promise from powerful Britain (and later France), Adolf
Hitler without doubt became 1938's Man of the Year.
Most other world figures of 1938 faded in importance as the year drew to
a close. Prime Minister Chamberlain's "peace with honor'' seemed more
than ever to have achieved neither. An increasing number of Britons
ridiculed his appease-the-dictators policy, believed that nothing
save abject surrender could satisfy the dictators' ambitions.
Among many Frenchmen there rose a feeling that Premier Daladier, by a
few strokes of the pen at Munich, had turned France into a second-rate
power. Aping Mussolini in his gestures and copying triumphant Hitler's
shouting complex, the once liberal Daladier at year's end was reduced
to using parliamentary tricks to keep his job.
During 1938 Dictator Mussolini was only a decidedly junior partner in
the firm of Hitler & Mussolini, Inc. His noisy agitation to get Corsica
and Tunis from France was rated as a weak bluff whose immediate
objectives were no more than cheaper tolls for Italian ships in the
Suez Canal and control of the Djibouti-Addis Ababa railroad.
Gone from the international scene was Eduard Benes, for 20 years
Europe's "Smartest Little Statesman." Last President of free
Czechoslovakia, he was now a sick exile from the country he helped
found. Pious Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, Man of 1937, was
forced to retreat to a "New" West China, where he faced the possibility
of becoming only a respectable figurehead in an enveloping
Communist movement. If Francisco Franco had won the Spanish Civil War
after his great spring drive, he might well have been Man-of-the-Year
timber. But victory still eluded the Generalissimo and war weariness
and disaffection on the Rightist side made his future precarious.
Time | The call from the President’s office came on a Saturday evening: Be
ready to go the next day, an aide said, and pack a toothbrush. There
were no details about the destination or how we would get there, but it
wasn’t difficult to guess. Only two days earlier, on the 260th day of
the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians had retreated from the city of Kherson. It was the only regional capital they had managed to seize since the start of the all-out war in February, and the Kremlin had promised it would forever be a part of Russia. Now Kherson was free, and Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to get there as soon as possible.
His bodyguards were urging him to wait. The Russians had
destroyed the city’s infrastructure, leaving it with no water, power, or
heat. Its outskirts were littered with mines. Government buildings were
rigged with trip wires. On the highway to Kherson, an explosion had
destroyed a bridge, rendering it impassable. As they fled, the Russians
were also suspected of leaving behind agents and saboteurs who could try
to ambush the presidential convoy, to assassinate Zelensky or take him
hostage. There would be no way to ensure his safety on the central
square, where crowds had gathered to celebrate the city’s liberation,
within range of Russian artillery.
NYPost | White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Monday it was
“not healthy” for Twitter owner Elon Musk to publish internal company
files revealing Twitter’s censorship of The Post’s 2020 reporting on
Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“What is happening — it’s frankly, it’s not healthy. It won’t do
anything to help a single American improve their lives. And so look, we
see this as an interesting, you know, coincidence, and you know, it’s a
distraction,” Jean-Pierre concluded during her Monday briefing, offering
a lengthy denunciation of Musk’s Friday reveal of how Twitter execs decided to suppress The Post’s damning expose.
“We see this as an interesting, or a coincidence, if I may, that he
would so haphazardly — Twitter would so haphazardly push this
distraction that is full of old news, if you think about it,”
Jean-Pierre said, brushing off the politically motivated denial of free
speech protections raised by Musk’s document dump.
“And at the same time, Twitter is facing very real and very serious
questions about the rising volume of anger, hate and anti-Semitism on
their platform and how they’re letting it happen.”
The voice of the Biden administration did not note that the Musk-led Twitter booted rapper Kanye West
last week for tweeting a swastika after making a series of anti-Semitic
remarks — or that as of Monday, the nation’s most famous Jew-basher’s
18.4 million-follower account on Facebook-owned Instagram remains
active.
Jean-Pierre’s denunciation of Musk’s moves toward transparency came
in response to questions from Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich.
“On Twitter, because you guys said you’re keeping a close eye on Elon
Musk’s ownership and this is the first time we’ve talked to you since
he released the files a few days ago — is it the White House view that
decisions at Twitter were made appropriately in terms of decisions to
censor this reporting ahead of the election?” Heinrich asked.
jonathanturley | In the aftermath of the release of the “Twitter Files,” the
media and political establishment appear to be taking a lesson from
Karl Marx who said, “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as
farce.”
The censoring of the Hunter Biden scandal before
the 2020 election by Twitter and others was a tragedy for our
democratic system. That tragedy was not in its potential impact on a
close election, but the massive (and largely successful) effort to bury a
story to protect the Biden campaign. It has now ended in farce as the
same censorship apologists struggle to excuse the implications of this
major story.
The Twitter Files confirmed that Twitter never had any evidence of a
Russian disinformation campaign or hacking as the basis for its decision
to censor the New York Post story. Indeed, some at Twitter expressed
concern over preventing the sharing of the story. Former Twitter Vice
President for Global Communications Brandon Borrman asked if the company
could “truthfully claim that this is part of the policy” for barring
posts and suspending users.
Those voices were few and quickly shouted down as the company barred
the sharing of the story, including evidence of a multimillion-dollar
influence peddling scheme by the Biden family.
The back channel communications between Biden campaign and Democratic
operatives show a willing use of the company to suppress political
discussion of the scandal before the election. It was an
all-hands-on-deck moment for the media and Twitter was eager to lend a
hand.
Over a year ago, I discussed how the brilliance of the Biden campaign
was to get the media to become invested in the suppression of the
story. After two years, major media finally but reluctantly admitted
that the laptop was authentic as well as the emails detailing massive
transfers of money from foreign interests (including some with foreign
intelligence links).
Many have responded by shrugging that influence peddling is not
necessarily a crime, ignoring that it is still a massive corruption
scandal with serious national security concerns. After all, as Heather
Digby Parton argued in Salon on December 5, “There is nothing there
other than a man making money by trading on his family name.”
After the release of the “Twitter Files,” many of these same figures
have shifted to excuse the censorship done at the request of Biden
campaign or Democratic operatives.
For some of us who come from long-standing liberal Democratic
families, it has been chilling to see the Democratic Party embrace
censorship and denounce free speech, including organizing foreign and corporate interests to prevent Musk from restoring free speech protections.
Beyond personally attacking Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi, many
have resorted to two claims that are being widely repeated in the media
to avoid discussing the coordinated censorship efforts between this
company and Democratic operatives.
jonathanturley | As thousands of Twitter documents are released on the company’s
infamous censorship program, much has been confirmed about the use of
back channels by Biden and Democratic officials to silence critics on
the social media platform. However, one familiar name immediately popped
out in the first batch of documents released through journalist Matt
Taibbi: James Baker. For many, James Baker is fast becoming the Kevin
Bacon of the Russian collusion scandals.
We can now tell you part of the reason why. On Tuesday, Twitter Deputy General Counsel (and former FBI General Counsel) Jim Baker was fired. Among the reasons? Vetting the first batch of “Twitter Files” – without knowledge of new management.
Baker has been featured repeatedly in the Russian investigations
launched by the Justice Department, including the hoax involving the
Russian Alfa Bank. When Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann wanted
to plant the bizarre false claim of a secret communications channel
between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, Baker was his go-to,
speed-dial contact. (Baker would later testify at
Sussmann’s trial). Baker’s name also appeared prominently in
controversies related to the other Russian-related FBI allegations
against Trump. He was effectively forced out due to his role and reportedly found himself under criminal investigation.
He became a defender of the Russian investigations despite findings of
biased and even criminal conduct. He was also a frequent target of
Donald Trump on social media, including Twitter. Baker responded with
public criticism of Trump for his “false narratives.”
After
leaving the FBI, Twitter seemed eager to hire Baker as deputy general
counsel. Ironically, Baker soon became involved in another alleged back
channel with a presidential campaign. This time it was Twitter that
maintained the non-public channels with the Biden campaign (and later
the White House). Baker soon weighed in with the same signature bias
that characterized the Russian investigations.
Weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post ran an
explosive story about a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden that contained
emails and records detailing a multimillion dollar influence peddling
operation by the Biden family. Not only was Joe Biden’s son Hunter and
brother James involved in deals with an array of dubious foreign
figures, but Joe Biden was referenced as the possible recipient of funds
from these deals.
The Bidens had long been accused of influence peddling, nepotism, and
other forms of corruption. Moreover, the campaign was not denying that
the laptop was Hunter Biden’s and key emails could be confirmed from the
other parties involved. However, at the request of the “Biden team” and
Democratic operatives, Twitter moved to block the story. It even
suspended those who tried to share the allegations with others,
including the White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who was suspended for linking to the scandal.
Even inside Twitter, the move raised serious concerns over the
company serving as a censor for the Biden campaign. Global Comms Brandon
Borrman who asked if the company could “truthfully claim that this is part of the policy” for barring posts and suspending users.
Baker quickly jumped in to support the censorship and said that “it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been [hacked] and that caution is warranted.”
Keep in mind that there was never any evidence that this material was
hacked. Moreover, there was no evidence of Russian involvement in the
laptop. Indeed, U.S. intelligence quickly rejected the Russian disinformation claim.
However, Baker insisted that there was a “reasonable” assumption that
Russians were behind another major scandal. Faced with a major scandal
implicating a Joe Biden in the corrupt selling of access to foreign
figures (including some with foreign intelligence associations), Baker’s
natural default was to kill the story and stop others from sharing the
allegations.
Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Carol Guzy, and Dmytro Kozatsky,
a Ukrainian soldier and photographer who was held in the Mariupol steel
plant, join Andrea Mitchell to discuss “Relentless Courage: Ukraine and
the World at War,” a new book featuring a collection of images
capturing Ukrainians’ enduring fight. Ambassador Markarova, who writes
in the book about a journalist lost to the war, tells Mitchell: “He was a
very beautiful human being, full of light,” and Russia’s targeting of
civilians “shows how inhumane this aggressive regime is, and how this
war is about the values, democracy.” She adds, “We will not stop until
there is accountability.”
I’m afraid I don’t have an earth-quake of a conclusion here; what
stuns me is the ease with which Kozatsky is penetrating our cultural
institutions. Booking agents, facilities managers, press agents, board
members who organize such things, fashion editors, network anchors: All
combining their efforts to service a Nazi professionally, as if it were
the most normal thing in the world, which at this point perhaps it is.
It would also be nice to know if how many other Ukrainian efforts like
this are going on, and if they are… facilitated by anyone “in
government.”
mediaite | 27 tweets that are essentially identical
Construct Tweet: [Say formerly respected or once
great, etc.] Matt Taibbi [call it PR or comms or like that] for the
[world’s richest man, the richest person in the world, so on]. Quote
tweet thread.
eg
Wajahat Ali
@WajahatAli
·
Follow
Matt Taibbi…what sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good
work back in the day. Should be a cautionary tale for everyone. Selling
your soul for the richest white nationalist on Earth. Well, he’ll eat well for the rest of his life I guess.
But is it worth it?
Watching some of the most famous, most powerful and richest men red-pill themselves into disaster. Pretty wild!
Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world's richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you're speaking truth to power.
NYTimes | It
was, on the surface, a typical example of reporting the news: a
journalist obtains internal documents from a major corporation, shedding
light on a political dispute that flared in the waning days of the 2020
presidential race.
But when it comes to Elon Musk and Twitter, nothing is typical.
The
so-called Twitter Files, released Friday evening by the independent
journalist Matt Taibbi, set off a firestorm among pundits, media
ethicists and lawmakers in both parties. It also offered a window into
the fractured modern landscape of news, where a story’s reception is
often shaped by readers’ assumptions about the motivations of both
reporters and subjects.
The tempest
began when Mr. Musk teased the release of internal documents that he
said would reveal the story behind Twitter’s 2020 decision to restrict
posts linking to a report in the New York Post about Joseph R. Biden
Jr.’s son, Hunter.
Mr. Musk, who has
accused tech companies of censorship, then pointed readers to the
account of Mr. Taibbi, an iconoclast journalist who shares some of Mr.
Musk’s disdain for the mainstream news media. Published in the form of a
lengthy Twitter thread, Mr. Taibbi’s report included images of email
exchanges among Twitter officials deliberating how to handle
dissemination of the Post story on their platform.
Mr.
Musk and Mr. Taibbi framed the exchanges as evidence of rank censorship
and pernicious influence by liberals. Many others — even some ardent
Twitter critics — were less impressed, saying the exchanges merely
showed a group of executives earnestly debating how to deal with an
unconfirmed news report that was based on information from a stolen
laptop.
And as with many modern news stories, the
Twitter Files were quickly weaponized in service of a dizzying number
of pre-existing arguments.
The Fox
News host Tucker Carlson, who often accuses liberals of stifling speech,
made the claim that the “documents show a systemic violation of the
First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history.” House
Republicans, who have called for an investigation into the business
dealings of Hunter Biden, asserted with no evidence that the report
showed systemic collusion between Twitter and aides to Joe Biden, who
was then the Democratic nominee. (Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive
at the time, later reversed the decision to block the Post story and told Congress it had been a mistake.)
Former
Twitter executives, who have lamented Mr. Musk’s chaotic stewardship of
the company, cited the documents’ release as yet another sign of
recklessness. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said
that publicizing unredacted documents — some of which included the
names and email addresses of Twitter officials — was “a fundamentally
unacceptable thing to do” and placed people “in harm’s way.”
nypost | Exactly two years ago, on October 19, 2020, one of the dirtiest
tricks in electoral history was played on the American people by 51
former intelligence officials, who used the false alarm of “Russian
interference” to stop Donald Trump winning a second term as president.
Using the institutional weight of their former esteemed roles, they
signed a dishonest letter to mislead voters 15 days before the election,
claiming that material from Hunter Biden’s laptop published by the New York Post “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
In their expert opinion, “the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”
Russia was “trying to influence how Americans vote in this election …
Moscow [will] pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump
win and/or to weaken Biden should he win.
“A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are
[sic] clearly designed to discredit Biden … It is high time that Russia
stops interfering in our democracy.”
It was all a lie. Their letter was the culprit “interfering with democracy” in broad daylight.
Not one of the 51 had seen any material from the laptop or bothered asking for it, but their letter, instigated by, signed and delivered
to Politico by Democratic operative and former John Brennan aide Nick
Shapiro, killed the story stone dead. It got candidate Joe Biden off the
hook for the corrupt influence-peddling scheme his family had been
running through the eight years of his vice presidency.
The shameful letter was used by Joe Biden three days later, on October 22, to deflect Trump’s attack in their last debate.
“There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what
he’s accusing me of is a Russian plan … Four, five former heads of the
CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage … You know
his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for
honor and telling the truth … The character of the country is on the
ballot.”
Biden dismissed as a Kremlin smear all the evidence that was on his
son’s laptop of dirty money from China and Russia, of all his meetings
with Hunter’s overseas business partners, and all the lies he had told
about his involvement in Hunter’s business deals. The letter, like
the Steele dossier and Russia collusion hoax peddled by many of the
signatories, has helped fuel a moral panic about Russia in recent years
that now has heightened the risk of nuclear war.
As well as sharing their Trump derangement, the Dirty 51 sit on the
same boards and think tanks, speak at the same events or liberal TV
shows, write for the same publications, pal around with the same
journalists, retweet each other’s “Slava Ukraini” or Mar-a-Lago memes,
share hawkish views about regime change in Russia and are remarkably
sanguine about the prospect of nuclear war.
You would think since so many have been outed for their involvement
in the (non-existent) weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence disaster
that justified the Iraq war, not to mention secret prisons, torture,
warrantless eavesdropping and the bulk collection of Americans’ data,
they might have learned some humility.
jonathanturley | The internal company documents released by Musk reinforce what we
have seen previously in other instances of Twitter censorship. A recent federal filing revealed
a 2021 email between Twitter executives and Carol Crawford, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media chief. Crawford’s
back-channel communication sought to censor other “unapproved opinions”
on social media; Twitter replied that “with our CEO testifying before
Congress this week [it] is tricky.”
At the time, Twitter’s Dorsey and other tech CEOs were about to
appear at a House hearing to discuss “misinformation” on social media
and their “content modification” policies. I had just testified on private censorship in
circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate.
Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “‘little
brother’ problem, a problem which private entities do for the government
that which it cannot legally do for itself.” In response, Dorsey
insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.”
The implications of these documents becomes more serious once the
Biden campaign became the Biden administration. These documents show a
back channel existed with President Biden’s campaign
officials, but those same back channels appear to have continued to be
used by Biden administration officials. If so, that would be when
Twitter may have gone from a campaign ally to a surrogate for state
censorship. As I have previously written, the administration cannot censor critics and cannot use agents for that purpose under the First Amendment.
That is precisely what Musk is now alleging. As the documents were being released, he tweeted,
“Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st
amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to
suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.”
The incoming Republican House majority has pledged to investigate —
and Musk has made that process far easier by making good on his pledge
of full transparency.
That may be why political figures such as Hillary Clinton have enlisted foreign governments to compel the censoring of fellow citizens: If Twitter can’t be counted on to censor, perhaps the European Union will be the ideal surrogate to rid social media of these meddlesome posters.
The release of these documents has produced a level of exposure
rarely seen in Washington, where such matters usually are simply
“handled.” The political and media establishments generally are
unstoppable forces — but they may have met their first immovable object
in Musk.
gizmodo | There is genuine news value to a story
along the lines of “These Are the Emails That Led to Twitter Suppressing
the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.” It is rare for a company as large and
valuable as Twitter to account so thoroughly for wrongdoing, perceived
or actual. The emails resemble the documents received in response to a
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They detail internal drama at
a company whose power is on the order of a government agency, maybe
greater. BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos tweeted, “Any news outlet would’ve
loved to have this scoop! It’s just not a ‘scandal’ as teased.”
Twitter’s
new owner considers it “the de facto public town square,” suggesting he
believes in a level of public accountability. Again, not unlike a
government agency. Though it is thrilling to receive once-hidden
documents in response to a FOIA, it is also possible that those
documents are boring, that they tell you what you already know. Such is
the case with the Twitter files. We learned how Twitter came to its decision to block the Post’s story, but we did not learn a shocking new reason why. We knew Twitter suppressed the story before the release of these documents, and, for the most part, we knew who was involved.
Those
people have since suffered professional punishment and left Twitter.
Vijaya Gadde, the former chief legal officer who played a “key role” in
the decision, according to Taibbi, was fired by Musk. Roth quit over
Musk’s “dictatorial edict.” Borrman left before Musk arrived. Jack
Dorsey, CEO at the time, is gone. When deciding to digitally quarantine
the Post’s story, did those people act out of fealty to Joe Biden and
the Democratic Party? Out of opposition to the Republican Party and
hatred for Donald Trump? Out of distaste for the New York Post? Judging
by the documents we have, we can’t say they did. Was it drastic
interference in the political process and the press? It was. We already
knew that.
Taibbi interviewed
several anonymous ex-Twitter employees on the decision, all of whom
expressed shock and outrage at the company’s actions: “Everyone knew
this was f–ked,” he quotes one source. But since Taibbi doesn’t quote
that expletive from the leaked emails, we can reason they included few
or no quotes as sensational for his purpose. Ergo, we can deduce that
those executives said little to support claims of nefarious purposes.
Outlets
far more vested in the Hunter Biden story than Gizmodo also seem vexed
by the release, and delivered the news below muted headlines. If the
story of Hunter Biden’s laptop belongs to any one outlet, it belongs to
the New York Post, which has never shied away from a blaring headline in
its 221-year life. Yet the Post’s two Friday-night notifications about
Musk’s actions were restrained. The first was a simple curtain-raiser
about Musk’s promise: “Elon Musk to drop Twitter files on NY Post-Hunter
Biden laptop censorship today.” The other was a “Read these
documents”-style headline: “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Elon Musk’s
Twitter drops Post censorship details.” Fox News’ push alert, delivered
via Apple News, read “Elon Musk drops bombshell docs on Twitter
censorship.”
Bombshell, bombshell, bombshell… what, exactly, is the bombshell? We’ve
yet to hear it explode. Maybe we’ve heard too much about this story,
and we’re missing the forest for the trees. Or maybe these documents
detail a decision where the outcome was already well-documented.
On
its website, the Post argues why you should care. Twitter is censoring
things willy-nilly and concocting reasons to do as it goes along, its
headline implies: “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented
reason to censor Post’s reporting.”
And
yet, it is not shocking that Twitter used an ad hoc decision to
moderate a piece of content from one of America’s most infamous
tabloids. The social network had done that exact thing for years as it
struggled with toxic users—violent white nationalists, virulent
transphobes, harassers and bullies of all political stripes, et cetera,
et cetera, ad infinitum et ad nauseam. The company never had a handle on
content moderation, and it certainly doesn’t now, no matter how much Musk crows. Back in 2016, a lengthy investigative story
published by Buzzfeed showed how Twitter had been struggling with
abusive posters since its 2006 founding. Jack Dorsey and all his
executives made things up as they went along, just like Musk.
Lastly,
did the United States government run interference on a social media
company for the former vice president? That would be shocking indeed, a
bonafide bombshell. Musk himself said as much Friday: “Twitter acting by
itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but
acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no
judicial review, is.” That is true! And Taibbi once believed that is
what happened. In August 2022, he tweeted: “The laptop is by the far the
secondary issue. The real problem is the FBI stepping in to cut
distribution of true story [sic],” as pointed out
by Columbia professor and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufecki. But
on Friday night, Taibbi rescinded the assertion: “There’s no
evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop
story.”
realclearpolitics | The relentless attacks on Elon Musk since he purchased Twitter should
be familiar to most Americans. It’s exactly what Democrats and their
media and corporate allies did to demonize Donald Trump.
The McCarthyite formula is simple: Claim you are defending high-minded principles (Democracy! The rule of law! Civil discourse!) to justify efforts to delegitimize someone you’ve identified as a political opponent.
Democrats denied Trump’s presidency from day one; Hillary Clinton and
Joe Biden themselves declared for years that he had stolen the 2016
election. In the name of election integrity, Democrats turned a bogus
conspiracy theory cooked up by Clinton’s campaign about Russian
collusion into years of official investigations that undermined and
tainted Trump. When Special Counsel Robert Mueller proved that a lie,
Democrats immediately seized on a few innocuous sentences in a Trump
phone call with a foreign leader to launch just the third presidential
impeachment in U.S. history.
Those events are well-known, but ponder them for a moment. This was a
soft coup, a nonviolent version of Jan. 6 that was far more dangerous
than the Capitol riot. The effort to remove a lawfully elected president
was planned and orchestrated by officials at the highest level of
government and the media. While Jan. 6 was a one-off eruption of crazed
anger, the false attacks on Trump edged our political discourse toward
Orwellian Newspeak by presenting lies and smears as ringing defenses of
sacred constitutional values.
The ongoing attacks against Musk are following the same playbook. The
man once hailed by liberals as a genius for developing electric vehicles
is now Public Enemy No. 1 because he says Twitter should allow more
free speech. Ponder that as well: Musk’s enemies are casting him as a
threat to the country because of his commitment to one of America’s most
cherished freedoms.
foxnews | An FBI agent testified to Republican attorneys general this week that the FBI held weekly meetings with Big Tech companies
in Silicon Valley ahead of the 2020 presidential election to discuss
"disinformation" on social media and ask about efforts to censor that
information.
On Tuesday, lawyers from the
offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of
Louisiana deposed FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan as part of
their lawsuit against the Biden administration.
That suit accuses high-ranking government officials of working with
giant social media companies "under the guise of combating
misinformation" to achieve greater censorship.
Chan, who serves in
the FBI’s San Francisco bureau, was questioned under oath by court
order about his alleged "critical role" in "coordinating with
social-media platforms relating to censorship and suppression of speech
on their platforms."
During
the deposition, Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign
Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media
companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the
2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general's
office.
Those meetings were initially quarterly, then monthly, then weekly
heading into the presidential election between former President Donald
Trump and now President Biden. According to a source, Chan testified
that in those multiple, separate meetings, the FBI warned the social
media companies that there could be potentially Russian "hack and dump"
or "hack and leak" operations.
In their complaint, the GOP AGs
noted an Aug. 26 podcast episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience," in which
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that "the FBI basically came to us" and
told Facebook to be "on high alert" relating to "a lot of Russian
propaganda." Zuckerberg added that the FBI said "there’s about to be
some kind of dump… that’s similar to that, so just be vigilant."
As
noted in the complaint, Zuckerberg stated, "If the FBI… if they come to
us and tell us we need to be on guard about something, then I want to
take that seriously." Zuckerberg said he could not recall if the FBI
specifically flagged the Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian
disinformation, but said that the story "basically fit the pattern" that
the FBI had identified.
"On information and belief, the FBI’s reference to a 'dump' of
information was a specific reference to the contents of Hunter Biden's
laptop, which was already in the FBI's possession," the complaint said.
theatlantic | If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended toown the libsby adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore awhite lives mattershirt during one of his fashion shows.
This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdropYe’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recentlydiningwith former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.
All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as abarometerfor what kind ofawfulbehavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’sInfowarsbroadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.
LATimes | While West initially struggled to be taken seriously as a rapper, his
solo breakthrough came after a brutal car wreck that required his jaw
to be wired shut. The impervious confidence of his song “Through the Wire” and his debut, “The College Dropout,” propelled him to 10 Grammy nominations in 2005.
When he castigated President George W. Bush’s failed response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on live TV — “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” — many Americans saw a brave rapper taking on the government and standing up for the Black community.
“In that moment after Katrina, his lack of social graces made him an important figure speaking truth to power,” Wasow said.
West
recorded a bestselling, orchestra-driven album, “Late Registration,”
with indie producer Jon Brion. West’s next LP, “Graduation,” won a 2007
sales war with 50 Cent, seen as a victory for ambitious, heartfelt
hip-hop.
Yet the sudden, tragic death
of his mother in 2007, after complications from cosmetic surgery,
shattered his world. He seemed to blame himself for it — “When I moved
to L.A., she moved to L.A. And she wound up in a place that would eat
her alive,” he wrote in XXL after her death. “If I had lived in New
York, she’d still be here.”
He rapped about his feelings on 2008’s “Pinocchio Story,”
from the bleak and groundbreaking LP “808s & Heartbreak”: “The only
one was behind me / I can’t find her no more, I can’t call her no more …
The day I moved to L.A., maybe that was all my fault.”
“A single
mom with a single child, they had each other’s backs no matter what,”
Baker said. “That’s a little bit of where that fierce protectiveness
comes from. When I found out that Donda died, my first reaction was,
will he be OK?”
His boastfulness and hair-trigger temper enlivened
awards shows and earned a “South Park” parody. In 2009, he rushed the
stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to vent frustration over Taylor
Swift beating Beyoncé for best female video. It blew up a planned tour
with Lady Gaga and led Obama to insult him on that hot-mic recording.
From a fellow Chicago legend, it hurt. “You know I’m your favorite,”
West said afterward. “Just tell me you love me. And tell the world you
love me. Don’t tell the world I’m a jackass, I’m fighting hard enough.”
West
made some of his finest music in the next years, including 2010’s “My
Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and 2013’s “Yeezus,” and in 2014 married
Kardashian in a fame-merging event for the ages. Yet signs of creeping
antisemitism began to emerge. West said in a 2013 radio interview that
“Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.
… We ain’t Jewish. We don’t get family that got money like that.” He
responded to criticism by saying, “I thought I was giving a compliment. …
I don’t know how being told you have money is an insult.”
Fans
began to question his beliefs, and even his stability, in 2016. He wrote
on Twitter that “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” and depicted him and
Trump nude in bed in the video for “Famous.” He declared onstage at a
California concert that, while he didn’t vote, he “would have voted for
Trump.” He underlined the point by meeting with Trump in New York,
claiming, “I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication
with our future President if we truly want change.”
That
November, after Kardashian was bound and robbed in a Paris hotel room,
West’s paranoia spun out further. Onstage at a concert, he said, “Jay-Z,
call me, bruh. You still ain’t called me. ... Jay-Z, I know you got
killers. Please don’t send them at my head. Just call me. Talk to me
like a man.” He ended the show early and canceled his remaining tour.
Just hours later, after police responded to a welfare check call at his
trainer’s home, West entered treatment at UCLA Medical Center for a
“psychiatric emergency,” according to the Los Angeles Fire Department
dispatch call.
Slate | Musk’s
rightward drift is one of the most scrutinized storylines in the tech
sector. After fashioning himself as an ecological visionary dedicated to
saving human civilization from disaster through clean energy, space
colonization, and a thick portfolio filled with generous government
contracts, Musk has recently solidified himself as a fringe, sideshow
mouthpiece for the Lauren Boebert wing of the GOP. (He still claims to
be a centrist, in the same way that commentator Tim Pool claims to be a
disaffected liberal.) All of the man’s established precepts have been
swapped out with issues that reek of a distinctly paleoconservative
tang. For instance: He now believes that swooning birth rates are a bigger threat to the human race than climate change is.
Musk has carried that philosophy into his management approach, and has
operated his newly purchased social network with the cloying, unserious
cruelty of so many unaccountable titans of capital before him: mass
layoffs, hollowing austerity measures, and yes, a willingness to
frequently rub elbows with guys like Ian Miles Cheong. It is as if his
sole desire is to be hated by liberals, which appears to be the only
animating praxis of the entire Republican Party.
I’m not here to home in on the particulars of Musk’s politics. (I already did that, a month ago.)
In fact, I’d argue that his recent redpilling is barely relevant to why
his stewardship of Twitter has been so uniquely agitating. Sure, it
isn’t ideal that Musk has restored the accounts of guys like Jordan
Peterson, but I am not of the opinion that social media has much effect
on corporeal reality. (May I reiterate one more time: the midterms!)
Instead, the worst part about Musk’s Twitter tenure is that he is simply
bad at posting.He was consistently one of the most
oppressive presences on social media in the mid-2010s, back when he was
promising to dig a tunnel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and he’s
only grown more obnoxious as he attempts to fabricate a strained MAGA
pivot while he slowly loses all of his famous friends. We have handed
over the Crucible of Posting to someone who has a remedial understanding
of the art; honestly, that might be the impetus for his radicalization.
There’s
already a lot of literature that’s been published on Musk’s
shortcomings as a poster. In 2021 the New York Times went long on the
frequency at which Elon pilfers memes he finds on Reddit without proper accreditation
(a big no-no—just ask @FuckJerry). The underlying thesis here is that
he was never able to engineer the creativity, humor, or cultural fluency
necessary to become an elite tweeter, so, like innumerable struggling
YouTubers and canceled podcast hosts before him, Musk has started
playing to the cheap seats by taking on the woke mob in the name of free speech, which has, frankly, becomethe hackiest and most overplayed hand on social media.
Slate | You
are Elon Musk. You possess the not-wholly-unjustified sense that you
can beat anyone in business combat. Being the richest guy in the world
confers a certain steamrolling feeling that is hard to shake. Some of
that vibe is even grounded in reality. For example, you can more or less use securities law as toilet paper
while building up shares in Twitter and not lose a wink of sleep over
it. You can hire excellent lawyers and deploy them for limitless hours
against your critics and enemies. The worst day of your life is still a
day in which you have more wealth than anybody else.
Some
of this strength is only in your head, though. Being you has privileges
and curses, and one of each is that you’re surrounded in large part by
sycophants. Some of them have fancy jobs and want to do business with you.
Most of them, numbering somewhere in the millions, will never meet you
but will cheer you on all the while, believing there is genius in
everything you do. They will believe you can browbeat an extremely
well-lawyered public company into getting out of a deal that has no
apparent legal out. (To be fair, Wall Street may also believe that.)
When you get stuck buying that company, and things immediately get
rough, you might pick a fight with the most valuable company in the
history of the world. What looks like desperation to most people will
look like a stroke of nine-dimensional chess
to your fanbase. You could accidentally shoot yourself in the testicles
with a rifle, and your most devout followers would spot a long game to
start a prosthetic genital company at a $2 trillion valuation.
WaPo | If there’s a group that should be fleeing Twitter, one would think it would be Black women. An analysis
by Amnesty International and Element AI found that Black women were 84
percent more likely than White women to receive abusive and hateful
tweets. At this point in my career, I’ve been threatened with rape and
called the n-word more times than I can count. I’ve had authoritarian
and supposedly liberal governments attack me online. And that doesn’t
include the tweets from professional, blue-check-marked figures who have
condescended to me and belittled my work or expertise.
Twitter
has always been a snake pit catering to the worst of human impulses. It
rewards the most extreme viewpoints. And it has reinforced our
society’s race and gender caste divides, making the space safest for
White people at the top (especially men) and more brutal for Black,
Brown and LGBTQ people at the bottom.
Here’s
the thing: In real life, Black women have not had the privilege of
retreating every time things get tough or our spaces get taken over by
rich, obnoxious White men. For years, via Twitter, Black women have been
sounding the alarm about having targets on our backs. We’ve protested,
we’ve resisted. Yet it took Musk, the rise of blatant antisemitism and
elite men feeling uncomfortable to finally prompt more widespread
protests and, now, an exodus.
I
agree that staying on Twitter to engage in battles with trolls isn’t
“resistance.” But building community and mobilizing resources are.
Twitter
is probably the only global digital platform where elite institutions
and powerful individuals share space with marginalized people, including
the working and lower classes. It has the power to quickly focus
enormous amounts of attention on crucial issues.
I’ve
seen people use Twitter to raise funds for mutual aid groups and
disaster recovery. Disabled people have called Twitter a lifeline of
networking and support. And just recently, the case of Shanquella
Robinson, who was killed in Mexico while on a trip with friends, would not have gotten mainstream attention if it weren’t for Black Twitter.
Twitter
hashtags have been used to help organize, mobilize and amplify the
biggest peaceful resistance movements on the planet — movements that, by
the numbers, have dwarfed white supremacist rallies and the raging
crowd at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
Twitter
has also been a powerful tool for accountability, especially for Black
voices challenging harmful narratives out of major media institutions.
And on a small, personal scale, it can be revolutionary, allowing
individuals to form life-giving relationships with people they otherwise
never would have met.
I
know Twitter is no substitute for on-the-ground activism and deep
engagement with weighty problems. And it’s always risky to become
dependent on a platform one doesn’t own. But as the times ahead get more
challenging, the last thing liberals should do is abandon the potent
tools at their disposal — even if those tools aren’t perfect.
People
on the right know well how to exploit every instrument of social and
cultural power. Sadly, the left seems not to have figured this out.
Liberal inaction and retreat do not bode well for anti-racist allyship
or “resistance.”
So
yes, I will go down with the Twitter ship. I’m not interested in
hyperfocusing on the antics of one rich man. Instead, I’ll train my
attention on the energy, creativity and beauty of the communities that
have made Twitter my digital home for the past decade. The racists,
fascists and trolls haven’t stopped me before. We shouldn’t let them
stop us now.
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