To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.
why aren’t US media covering massive protests in France over inflation and cost of living? pic.twitter.com/CWO3z0ntPt
— dilan (@dilanpcook) January 8, 2023
neuberger | These are the latest Twitter Files since the first two sets were released. They extend the list collected here and here. (Emphasis added below.)
Twitter Files 8 — How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign
Lee Fang, December 20, 2022
An expanded version was published at The Intercept.
Despite promises to shut down covert state-run propaganda networks, Twitter docs show that the social media giant directly assisted the U.S. military’s influence operation. […]
Twitter Files 9 — Twitter and “Other Government Agencies”
Matt Taibbi, December 24, 2022
Also published as “Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter” at his Substack site.
The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.
2. The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors - from local cops to media to state governments.
3. Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying. […]
Twitter Files 10 — How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
David Zwieg, December 26, 2022
2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.
3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. […]
5. Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @TheFP showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes. […]
As I’ve said many times about these reports, if you build a gun, anyone can use it. Especially if its use is widely cheered. This is how we repealed the Fourth Amendment — by both parties approving and participating in its violation.
The next Republican president will use every power bequeathed by the last two Democrats. And when out-of-power Democrats complain, as they rightly should, much of the public will say “So the shoe’s on the other foot.”
The public will be wrong in that. But only because no party should have these powers, not because one of them should.
Kunstler | Could it be that the educated and creatives of the coastal cities — the thinking class, the politically active on the Left — had become so callous and arrogant as to dismiss the suffering “little people” they once worked to protect and defend — or had that also been an act? One thing for sure: the Democratic Party lost this group as core constituents and they had to search elsewhere for a voter base.
Another thing had changed along the way: the Democratic Party became dominated by activist women, who exhibited two outstanding behavioral tendencies: they tended to make decisions on the basis of emotion… their feelings about this-and-that; and they were much more ruthless in political battle than men — their emotions eclipsed age-old principles, such as the idea of fair play. In short, they resorted almost automatically to dirty fighting.
That is probably at the heart of what is most confounding and vexing about the great political division in America these days. We are under a vile spell of pervasive dirty fighting. Dirty fighters have no respect for reality or for principle; they do whatever they can do to win the fight. Bad faith is the order of the day. Hence, the battle over how elections will be conducted and who gets to vote. You can read about it in Monday’s (Dec 26th) New York Times, an above-the-fold story titled: Democrats, Feeling New Strength, Plan to Go on Offense on Voting Rights. (As long as it stays up.) The story says:
Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.”
Note the last three words. The Times boldly announces that opinion about elections should now be subject to criminal prosecution if it deviates from whatever the official story is — as determined by whom? Well, that would be a juridical apparatus controlled by the Democratic Party. Who else might it be? The Times doesn’t venture to say. You can also see that the Party doesn’t believe in any principle that states who or why somebody should be qualified to vote. Sign up people who manage to get a driver’s license, whether they are citizens or not. Sign up the convicted criminals and the children. Dirty fighting = dirty elections.
This is the direction our country has been going in. I can offer only one note of consolation about what looks like a pretty demoralizing predicament: what you’re seeing is the end product of the late-stage in the life of a society. Obviously, it is ending badly. The catch is we are entering a new era of American life, an era of deep economic disorder, especially, that will go very hard on the nation, that will rearrange many of the social categories we now take for granted, that will compel people of all classes to pay attention to reality, to what actually works and who actually knows how to work what works. In that disposition of things, dirty fighting will be recognized for what it is.
Perhaps the biggest part of that unspooling event will be the bankruptcy and the failure of the government in Washington, its consequent loss of legitimacy, and the end of its ability to control and harass the people who live under it. Think I’m kidding? Stand by now and wait for it.
greenwald | These moves by the U.S. Security State to commandeer censorship decisions on TikTok, accompanied by the hovering threat to ban TikTok entirely from the U.S., appear to be having the desired effect already. When we launched our new live nightly show on Rumble, System Update, our social media manager created new social accounts for the program on major social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, etc. Each day, she posts identical excerpts from the prior night's shows on each social media account.
For Monday night's show, I devoted my opening monologue to documenting how reporting by mainstream Western media outlets on Ukraine and President Zelensky completely reversed itself as soon as Russia invaded in February. When one reviews the trajectory of how these media outlets radically reversed everything they had been saying about Ukraine and Zelensky, one can see the Orwellian newspeak — we have always been at war with Eastasia — happening in real time.
For years, for instance, mainstream news outlets in the West repeatedly warned that the Ukrainian military was dominated by a neo-Nazi group called the Azov Battalion, that the Kiev-based government was becoming increasingly repressive and anti-democratic (including ordering three opposition media outlets closed in 2021), and that Zelensky himself was not only supported by a single Ukrainian oligarch but he himself had massive off-shore accounts of hidden wealth as revealed by the Pandora Papers. And the U.S. State Department itself, in 2021, had documented a long list of severe human rights abuses carried out either with the acquiescence or even active participation of the Zelensky-led central government.
One of the video excerpts from our program that was posted to all social media sites, including TikTok, was this indisputably true and rather benign review of how media outlets, including The Guardian, had previously depicted Zelensky as surrounded by corruption and hidden wealth. To be sure, the excerpt was critical of Zelensky, but there is absolutely nothing even factually contestable, let alone untrue, given that the whole point of the clip is to show how the media had spoken of Ukraine and Zelensky prior to the invasion as opposed to the fundamentally different tone that now drives their coverage:
Shortly after posting this video, we were notified by TikTok that the
video was removed by the platform. The cited ground was “integrity and
authenticity,” namely that the video, for unspecified reasons, had
“undermine[d] the integrity of [their] platform or the authenticity of
[their users].” The warning added that TikTok "removes content and
accounts that…involve misleading information that causes significant
harm.” In a separate communication, TikTok notified our program that our
“account is at high risk of being restricted based on [our] violation
history” (the sole violation we were ever advised of was this specific
video). As a result, TikTok warned, “the next violation could result in
being prevented from accessing some feature.” A more ambiguous warning
could scarcely be imagined.
dailycaller | The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a new statement Wednesday following the latest “Twitter Files” dump.
The FBI accused the “Twitter Files” release as an attempt “to discredit” the agency by disclosing information on the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter in October 2020. Journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that the agency warned the previous executives at Twitter of a “hack-and-leak” by “state actors” surrounding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop to influence the 2020 presidential election.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the statement began.
“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” the agency concluded.
The “Twitter Files” revealed that the FBI and Twitter worked closely in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. Internal documents published Monday found that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 for managing its financial burdens caused while complying with the agency’s requests. (RELATED: Twitter Gave ‘Special Protection’ To Pentagon Propaganda Accounts, Docs Show)
Taibbi reported he found no evidence that the FBI had involvement in Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, though new reports released by author Michael Shellenberger indicated they may have, in fact, been involved.
Former FBI Deputy General Counsel James Baker argued Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth’s claim that the Post’s report did not violate the social media site’s policies on October 14, according to Shellenberger. The agency had already been in possession of Biden’s laptop since December 2019, indicating that the agency knew the Post reported the story accurately.
Musk announced Dec. 6 that he fired Baker for allegedly withholding the release of documents related to the suppression of Biden’s laptop.
The agency also flagged certain tweets for Twitter to remove from the platform, the files found. Some agents were even employed at the social media company.
Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the incoming House Oversight Chair, said Tuesday that Congress should block funding of the FBI until it disclosed the alleged involvement in Big Tech censorship.
“In the beginning, I thought that there were probably two or three rogue employees who were orchestrating this cover up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but now we know the FBI had a division of at least 80 agents,” Comer said. “We also know that the FBI paid Twitter over $3 million for their time, all the time they took over the past couple of years in telling them who to suppress, who to ban. You know, it’s just things that the government has no role in.”
“The FBI was never granted the authority to create any type of disinformation task force that policed the social media sites. Now this we know with Twitter,” he continued. “We’ve heard similar stories from Zuckerberg. Who knows what went on at YouTube and Google. This is an agency that’s out of control.”
CTH | Once you change your reference point and review the Twitter File release from a different perspective, things make sense. DHS doesn’t operate on the backbone of Twitter, in this scenario Twitter is operating on the backbone of DHS. The information and content on Twitter exist, or not, by the permission and authority of the national security state, DHS.
Influencing public opinion take on the priority dimension. Created narratives, established by media partners, can be enhanced or throttled (think Russiagate). Public perceptions can be uplifted or deemphasized. Political candidates can be boosted or dismissed.
Control over the public conversation is not simply in the hands of the Twitter ‘safety council’ executives, the platform content is shaped by the guiding hand of the controlling interest – the government. Under this scenario the defining of disinformation, misinformation or malinformation by DHS/CISA takes on a new level of influence.
So why did they permit it to be sold? Again, control.
Every non-Twitter, non-DHS controlled, information and discussion site is a watering down of the influence of Twitter. The inability to influence a platform like Truth Social would be particularly troublesome. So, launder the handling of the DHS platform to Elon Musk and create the illusion of a refresh.
Twitter 2.0 now rebrands with a renewed ability to influence. Not accidentally, a pro DeSantis shaping is part of the objective. In the eyes of the control state, Rumble and Truth Social represent the threat of Donald Trump. Meanwhile Twitter and YouTube represent the controlled alternative, Ron DeSantis.
There are trillions at stake.
The ‘magic’ inside Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop is the intelligence community ability to shape, mold and create the illusion of choice. Remember, shaping opinion is the goal and within that dynamic some voices must be removed, throttled and controlled, while other voices must be amplified.
♦ Elevator Speech: Twitter is to the U.S. government as TikTok is to China. The overarching dynamic is the need to control public perceptions and opinions. DHS has been in ever increasing control of Twitter since the public-private partnership was formed in 2011/2012. Jack Dorsey lost control and became owner emeritus; arguably, Elon Musk has no idea, well, at least no more of an idea than he does about the financial underwriting of the purchase itself.
The larger objective of U.S. involvement in social media has always been monitoring and surveillance of the public conversation, influencing public opinion, and then ultimately controlling the outcomes.
Tens of millions of Brazilians are on the streets in protest of their fraudulent election. Do you see those voices on Twitter?
The Twitter social media company residing on the backbone of DHS would help explain why.
CTH | Arguably, Glenn Greenwald has been the most critical voice about the rise of the U.S. surveillance state and generational shift of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to conduct domestic surveillance on American citizens. There’s a reason Greenwald lives in Brazil where no extradition treaties with the U.S. government exist.
Curiously, when it came time to release information about DHS connections to Twitter, Glenn Greenwald was not considered as an acceptable outlet for the information. Instead, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss were selected by Elon Musk to represent his sunlight and transparency interests. However, in this brief video Greenwald gets to interview Taibbi about his findings. {Direct Rumble Link}
Interested viewers will note Taibbi’s #1 takeaway from his review of the Twitter Files data is that evidence of the DHS connection to Twitter exists. Taibbi speaks of the “instructions” coming into Twitter from U.S. government officials. Yet, curiously missing from the documented evidence provided by Taibbi was anything showing a paper trail of this instruction pathway he is describing.
Greenwald is smart, strategically smart; Greenwald also knows why he was
not selected to review the files. Glenn artfully guides Taibbi to
discuss elements of the story that perhaps Taibbi himself doesn’t
recognize are being shaped for his reporting. Note: “we don’t know how the ‘ask’ works yet.”
city-journal | I browsed the news recently only to discover that, according to a popular science magazine, I was responsible for the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, husband to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In an opinion piece for Scientific American, writer Bryn Nelson insinuated that my factual reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour was an example of “stochastic terrorism,” which he defines as “ideologically driven hate speech” that increases the likelihood of unpredictable acts of violence. On the night of the attack, Nelson argued, I had appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss my reporting, and, hours later, the alleged attacker, David DePape, radicalized by “QAnon” conspiracy theories about “Democratic, Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer.
This is a bizarre claim that, for a magazine supposedly dedicated to “science,” hardly meets a scientific standard of cause and effect. There is no evidence that DePape watched or was motivated by Tucker Carlson’s program; moreover, nothing in my reporting on Drag Queen Story Hour encourages violence or mentions Nancy Pelosi, QAnon, or Satan-worshipping pedophiles. My appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight and DePape’s attack against Paul Pelosi are, in reality, two unrelated incidents in a large and complex universe. And Nelson, a microbiologist specializing in human excrement, is full of it.
But Nelson isn’t trying to prove anything in a scientific sense. Under the concept of “stochastic terrorism,” logic, evidence, and causality are irrelevant. Any incident of violence can be politicized and attributed to any ideological opponent, regardless of facts.
The scheme works like this: left-wing media, activists, and officials designate a subject of discourse, such as Drag Queen Story Hour, off-limits; they treat any reporting on that subject as an expression of “hate speech”; and finally, if an incident of violence emerges that is related, even tangentially, to that subject, they assign guilt to their political opponents and call for the suppression of speech. The statistical concept of “stochasticity,” which means “randomly determined,” functions as a catch-all: the activists don’t have to prove causality—they simply assert it with a sophisticated turn of phrase and a vague appeal to probability.
Though framed in scientific terms, this gambit is a crude political weapon. In practice, left-wing media, activists, and officials apply the “stochastic terrorism” designation only in one direction: rightward. They never attribute fire-bombings against pro-life pregnancy centers, arson attacks against Christian churches, or the attempted assassination of a Supreme Court justice to mere argumentation of left-wing activists, such as, say, opposition to the Court’s decision in Dobbs. In those cases, the Left correctly adopts the principle that it is incitement, rather than opinion, that constitutes a crime—but conveniently forgets that standard as soon as the debate shifts to the movement’s conservative opponents.
In recent years, the Left has not only monopolized the concept of “stochastic terrorism” but also built a growing apparatus for enforcing it. Last year, left-wing organizations and the Department of Justice collaborated on a campaign to suppress parents who oppose critical race theory, under the false claim that sometimes-heated school-board protests were incidents of “domestic terrorism.” Earlier this year, left-wing activists and medical associations called on social media companies and the Department of Justice to censor, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender theory. The obvious goal is to suppress speech and intimidate political opponents. “Stochastic terrorism” could serve as a magic term for summoning the power of the state.
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.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 6, 2022
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.
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.
Washington has fully mobilized in its all-out war against Musk. Yet, with a record number of users signing up with Twitter, it seems clear the public is not buying censorship. They want more, not less, free speech.
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.
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.
kunstler | Barreling down to Christmas and the bitter butt end of a bad year, a primal fear of the deepening darkness makes people desperate — another reminder that human nature has not changed so much in ten thousand years, despite the discoveries of Prozac and plant-based meat. Yet Freud was right: death has its attractions for tormented minds. Thus, our nation appears to hasten to its own funeral.
Can anyone actually grok how “progressive” thinking works these days? This faction now in charge of so many things has decided in the starkest terms that freedom of speech has got to go. For some years, the Party of Chaos had achieved such exquisite control of all national debate by seizing the dials and toggles of social media that they made reality itself their hostage. The truth was only what they said it was, and anyone who said otherwise got banished, cancelled, and even destroyed.
There seemed to be no way to overcome this death grip on the process of consensus, the formation of a coherent collective idea about what is going on in the world. And so, any number of scams could be run on the people of this land. They could rig elections in plain sight. They could surreptitiously suspend due process of law when it suited them. They could send national police thugs to your door at five-o’clock in the morning with riot guns, body armor, flash bangs, and bogus warrants. They could take your livelihoods, your freedom to move about, your childrens’ minds and bodies, and your dignity. Finally, they could take your life with false vaccines — and, unlike the Nazis in 1944, get the private sector to dispose of the corpses.
And now a struggle ensues over the relationship between the truth and the making of a consensus. Elon Musk bought Twitter — the horror! — and methodically set about to liberate this new digital “public square” from insidious and nefarious manipulation. It’s not a trifling matter, of course, but it’s amusing to watch Elon play with our nation’s overlords; and even more entertaining to see these tyrants strain and bluster to justify their war against free speech. How did the cognitive elite, America’s thinking class, the law professors, the editors and pundits, the public intellectuals, the managers of most everything, ever find themselves so self-owned in idiocy?
I wish I’d been a fly-on-the-wall in that meeting mid-week between Elon Musk and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple — the very same week that Apple disabled the Air-drop function on iPhones in China (slyly, by means of a new OS update), making it more difficult for street protesters to coordinate their movements against CCP lockdowns. Rumors were flying days before that the Lords of Tech would pull on Twitter the same kind of treatment they dealt to Parler two years ago, a then-rising rival app for Internet chatter that threatened to open up free debate. Apple and Google took Parler out behind the woodshed and shot it in the head — and nobody could do a damn thing about it. I have a hunch that Elon explained a few things to Tim Cook that made him think twice about another move like that.
Twitter is different than the upstart Parler was. Twitter was already established as the authorities’ official arbiter of approved thought in America. Under the old boss, Jack Dorsey, Twitter accomplished its thought management ends with a staff of thousands of mini-Stalins rooting out anything that smelled like opposition to the official narratives. (Elon fired the whole lot of them in short order.) It has been revealed since then that Twitter carried out censorship at the aggressive prompting of US deep state officialdom, the nagging, twanging, and strong-arming by bureaucrats from many federal agencies. Who knows (not yet, anyway) how many Twitter censors were actually put in-place by the government?
So now, one big truth has come nakedly out in the open: the Left is against the First Amendment to the Constitution. Free speech, they say repeatedly now, makes our democracy unsafe. It can’t be allowed. They say that because they don’t have a better argument. The safety talking-point is a shopworn cliché from their grab-bag of Woke shibboleths that the public is sick of hearing. Anyone with half a brain can see how transparently dishonest and stupid it is. It’s not going over well, even among a people so sorely gaslighted as the USA in late 2022.
Speaking of what is safe and what is not safe, one of the main deceptions the past three years has been the suppression of information about the Covid-19 vaccines that were foisted on the population — for many, made a requirement to earn a living. The old Twitter worked strenuously to bury any data and all news that suggested the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were disabling and killing people. It has now reached a critical point, with so many suspicious “all-causes” deaths coming to the public’s attention. This is what the authorities are really afraid of: that the people will learn their government has carried out — by epic incompetence or true malice — something the looks like an attempted genocide.
jonathanturley | The real question is why the political, business, and media establishment is ramping up this campaign. The answer is power. With President Biden and Democratic senators supporting investigations, the message could not be clearer: proceed at your own peril. That message was brought home by Politico’s Sam Stein when he warned Musk that it is “[a]lways risky to attack members of congress. Especially risky with Dems assured of Senate power.”
For years, Democratic politicians and their allies have exercised an enormous degree of control over political discourse through allies in the media and social media.
The problem is that censorship only works if it is complete. If there are alternative sources for information, free speech is like water . . . it finds a way out. That is why Democratic members pressured cable carriers to drop Fox News, the most popular cable news network on television. (For the record, I appear as a Fox News legal analyst). Having an echo chamber on every other news channel means little if alternative views or stories are just a click away.
The same is true for print media. With the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and a few other newspapers, the effort to kill stories like the Hunter Biden laptop could not be completely successful. The truth found a way out and now the same outlets that peddled the false “Russian disinformation” claim are admitting that the laptop is authentic.
The threat is an even greater on social media, the area of greatest success for those seeking to control political discourse. If Musk carries through on his pledge, the public will have a free speech alternative and they are already speaking loudly by signing up with the company in record numbers. Despite a creepy Facebook advertising campaign to convince the public to embrace censorship, it has not worked.
The public is not buying. They are buying Free Twitter.
So, the only way to regain control is to prevent people from getting the app or threaten to force Twitter into insolvency. The problem is Musk, an eccentric billionaire who is not easy to intimidate.
Musk now stands against a massive alliance of governments, corporations, celebrities, and politicians. He has only the public and free speech on his side.
He needs to use both.
Musk cannot remain on defense and just take political and economic hits. The campaign is growing because the risk is growing for these various interests.
The way to end this is simple: release everything related to the company’s massive censorship operation. This is an effort to force Musk not only to resume censorship but to protect the censors. So, open the files. Allow the public to see not just communications on censorship (including subjects beyond Hunter Biden) but how Twitter may have used verification, throttling, algorithms, or other methods to control speech. The company does not have to release codes or potentially damaging information to reveal the back channel communications, deliberations, and targeting choices.
By embracing total transparency, Musk can force Apple and other companies to face the ugly realities of censorship. The anti-free speech alliance has declared total war on Twitter. It is time for Twitter to get into this fight and realize that free speech is not just its guiding principle but its greatest weapon.
When Musk threatened to restore free speech protections, Hillary Clinton and others went public to “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
So be it.
The Musk purchase has forced people to pick sides in this fight for free speech. However, Musk can leave the dogs at home and just unleash the truth.
politico | The mass firing represents the next stage in Musk’s takeover of the social network that remains a mainstay in how political leaders from President Joe Biden to French President Emmanuel Macron to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei communicate with a global audience.
In the hours after acquiring Twitter in late October, Musk fired the company’s board, including its chief executive Parag Agrawal, as well as Vijaya Gadde, who ran the social media company’s legal, policy and trust teams.
In a bid to increase revenue at the social media network that has historically struggled to turn a profit, Musk also wants to charge people $8 a month so that their accounts can be verified via the company’s now-iconic “blue tick” logo. The mass layoffs announced Friday are also part of these efforts to make the company more profitable.
The world’s richest man has become a lightning rod in the battle over free speech and content moderation. He’s tried to reassure advertisers that he wouldn’t let the platform devolve into a “free-for-all hellscape.” But some major advertisers have called for a pause in business with the platform, particularly after Musk shared a false story about an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
“He specifically said to us that he does not want Twitter to be a hate amplifier,” said Yael Eisenstat, head of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, who participated in a call with Musk alongside other civil society groups this week. “We will continue to watch to make sure that those actions actually happen.”
igorchudov | Pfizer is “pausing advertising on Twitter” because it is “concerned that Mr. Musk could scale back content moderation, which they worry would lead to an increase in objectionable content on the platform.”
Pfizer was one of the most significant sources of revenue for Twitter. I constantly saw Pfizer ads and promoted posts, such as this creepy one:
(If you are not sure why “the human brain” becomes so sweaty once pink “science” grabs it firmly from behind, neither am I)
What is interesting is that this advertising pause involves not only Pfizer but other large multinationals with no specific issues related to Twitter censorship, such as General Mills, a producer of popular but unhealthy breakfast cereals.
Who is behind this? Meet a new “action coalition” called “Accountable Tech” that is directing efforts to withhold advertising money from misbehaving technology companies. You may be very surprised, or not, but “Accountable Tech” is packed with Democratic operatives:
Accountable Tech is spearheading this letter to Twitter advertisers:
Accountable Tech joined more than 25 groups to deliver the below message in a letter to Twitter’s top advertisers to demand nonnegotiable requirements for their ad business in the midst of Elon Musk’s acquisition:
To whom it may concern:
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter will further toxify our information ecosystem and be a direct threat to public safety, especially among those already most vulnerable and marginalized.The undersigned organizations believe that Twitter should continue to uphold the practices that serve as guideposts for other Big Tech platforms. We call on you – Twitter’s top advertisers – to commit to these standards as non-negotiable requirements for advertising on the platform:
Keep accounts including those of public figures and politicians that were removed for egregious violations of Twitter Rules – such as harassment, violence, and hateful conduct – off the platform
All these coalitions attempt to influence large advertisers into doing their bidding by withholding ad money from tech companies that “Accountable Tech” wants to punish.
I understand why Pfizer, a company selling the fraudulent “Covid vaccine” and relying on censorship for continued sales, has a vested interest in Twitter continuing to censor vaccine skeptics. However, other companies mentioned above do not have such reasons.
theepochtimes | A medical board has moved to strip top cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough of his certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, claiming that he provided misleading medical information to the public about COVID-19 vaccines.
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) informed McCullough of the action in a recent letter.
The board stated that McCullough’s statements questioning COVID-19 vaccination for healthy people younger than the age of 50 and pointing out that Americans have died after getting a COVID-19 vaccine triggered a review, which led to a recommendation that McCullough’s board certifications be revoked.
The ABIM’s Credentials and Certification Committee found that McCullough had “provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public,” the letter states.
“By casting doubt on the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines with such seemingly authoritative statements, made in various official forums and widely reported in various media, your statements pose serious concerns for patient safety,” it reads. “Moreover, they are inimical to the ethics and professionalism standards for board certification.”
McCullough was given until Nov. 18 to appeal.
If he appeals, the matter will be considered by a panel designated by the ABIM’s Board of Directors and at least one hearing would be held. The panel could accept the recommendation, rescind it, or impose an alternative punishment.
A medical board has moved to strip top cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough of his certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, claiming that he provided misleading medical information to the public about COVID-19 vaccines.
The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) informed McCullough of the action in a recent letter.
In a May notice of potential disciplinary measures, the board said it had learned that McCullough made “numerous widely reported and disseminated public statements about the purported dangers of, or lack of justification for, Covid-19 vaccines.”
As an example, the board cites McCullough’s March 10, 2021, testimony before a Texas Senate panel in which he said that people who have recovered from COVID-19 have “complete and durable immunity” and that there was no rationale for vaccinating such a person.
McCullough also said at the time that there was “no scientific rationale” for people who are healthy and younger than 50 to receive one of the vaccines.
In a declaration in a court case, meanwhile, McCullough said that more than 18,000 COVID-19 vaccine deaths had been submitted to the U.S.-run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and that the number of reported deaths was far above that of all other vaccines combined.
ABIM says the statements might violate the board’s policy on false or inaccurate medical information, which states that “providing false or inaccurate information to patients or the public is unprofessional and unethical” and could lead to sanctions.
McCullough responded the following month, requesting the matter be dismissed and offering a point-by-point rebuttal.
To back up his statements on COVID-19 vaccination, for instance, McCullough referenced data that shows people younger than 50 have a minuscule risk of death after contracting the illness, particularly if they don’t have serious underlying medical conditions.
