MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: How the “Censorship Industrial Complex” Case Was Built. “Three separate investigations took over a year to nail down the case that government agencies were improperly censoring by proxy. Forced by courts to stop, they’re desperately trying for a reboot.”
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MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files Extra: How the World’s “No-Kidding Decision Makers” Got Organized. “The Atlantic Council is hosting its 360/0S Summit at RightsCon this week, and Twitter Files documents tell us more about how this VIP-room-within-a-VIP-room was formed.”
HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN IN JAIL FOR WHAT HE DID WITH AIDS: Twitter Files: The Fauci Pharma Files Begin.
IT IS IMPORTANT NOT TO FORGET THIS IS STILL COMING OUT: Twitter files blacklists.
DEPLATFORMING AS DIGITAL HEMLOCK: The Twitter Files Saga Is a Story as Old as Socrates.
WE CAN’T STOP PAYING ATTENTION. IT’S IMPORTANT: Twitter Files #15: More glimpses behind the Potemkin village the left built.
#JOURNALISM:
1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15
MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD pic.twitter.com/bLRpDpuWql— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 27, 2023
ADAM SCHIFF IS NOT HUMORLESS, HE’S A PRACTICAL JOKE: Latest ‘Twitter Files’ reveal Humorless Adam Schiff, Dems pushed to censor Biden joke.
RIPPED OFF BY THE THOUGHT POLICE. The Twitter Files show how censorship’s supporters got snookered.
The First Amendment protects not only speakers but also consumers, listeners and viewers. As the high court held in Virginia Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976), when speakers are muzzled, their intended audience suffers a First Amendment violation too. Twitter users, even those who weren’t censored themselves, would therefore have standing to bring suit.
Suing federal agents would pre-empt the claim that there was no “state action.” The nub of the “nothingburger” argument is that the Twitter Files fail to show government “coercion” and Twitter therefore never became a state actor. That argument is wrong: A private party can become a state actor through voluntary joint action with the government, which the Twitter Files richly detail. But a class action against federal defendants would avoid the entire question. They’re obviously state actors.
And as the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), it is an “axiomatic” principle of constitutional law that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s exactly what the Twitter Files show officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies doing—inducing and encouraging Twitter to censor constitutionally protected speech.
The plaintiffs wouldn’t have to prove Twitter was a state actor. It wouldn’t even matter if Twitter had rebuffed all the government’s censorship requests (which it didn’t). Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made this point in Backpage.com v. Dart (2015): When a government official unconstitutionally attempts to induce a private company not to carry someone else’s speech, the official’s conduct “is actionable and can be enjoined” even if the company “ignores it.”
A class action would eliminate another roadblock. Some free-speech cases against social-media companies have been dismissed on the ground that the individual plaintiffs couldn’t show that the government had targeted them or their posts in particular. A class action escapes this difficulty. It might target the CDC’s successful effort to get Twitter to adopt policies banning posts arguing that children didn’t need Covid-19 vaccines or observing that the government’s own data show the shots don’t prevent infection or transmission. These policies denied all users important information and opinions and thereby violated the First Amendment rights of listeners as well as speakers regardless of whether the government was involved in a particular individual’s being censored.
If Twitter is no longer acting as a federal censorship field office, why wouldn’t such a class action by social-media users be moot like an individual lawsuit against the company? Because of Facebook, Google and other internet companies. As Matt Taibbi reported, “the government was in constant contact not just with Twitter, but with every major tech firm.” There’s no reason to think that has stopped. A class action against federal defendants would seek to halt all government efforts to use social-media companies to achieve the censorship the Constitution forbids.
The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have already jointly brought a similar lawsuit, and preliminary discovery has added more evidence of federal involvement in censorship at all major social-media companies.
Fight the power.
MATT TAIBBI: Capsule Summaries of all Twitter Files Threads to Date, With Links and a Glossary. “For those who haven’t been following, a compilation of one-paragraph summaries of all the Twitter Files threads by every reporter. With links and notes on key revelations.”
MATT TAIBBI: Twitter Files: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In. “The documents lay out the scheme. You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions.”
NEEDS TO BE DONE: Memorializing the Twitter Files – IX. Twitter & Other Gov’t Agencies
MATT TAIBBI ON THE TWITTER FILES:
These next few pieces are the result of looking at two discrete data sets, one ranging from mid-2017 to early 2018, and the other spanning from roughly March 2020 through the present. In the first piece focused on that late 2017 period, you see how Washington politicians learned that Twitter could be trained quickly to cooperate and cede control over its moderation process through a combination of threatened legislation and bad press.
In the second, you see how the cycle of threats and bad media that first emerged in 2017 became institutionalized, to the point where a long list of government enforcement agencies essentially got to operate Twitter as an involuntary contractor, heading into the 2020 election. Requests for moderation were funneled mainly through the FBI, the self-described “belly button” of the federal government (not a joke, an agent really calls it that).
The company leadership knew as far back as 2017 that giving in to even one request to suspend this or that set of accused “hostile foreign accounts” would lead to an endless cycle of such demands. “Will work to contain that,” offered one comms official, without much enthusiasm, after the company caved for the first time that year. By 2020, Twitter was living the hell its leaders created for themselves.
What does it all mean? I haven’t really had time to think it over. Surely, though, it means something. I’ve been amused by the accusation that these stories are “cherry-picked.” As opposed to what, the perfectly representative sample of the human experience you normally read in news?
Charges like this are more revealing than they are damning.
CHRIS BRAY: The Twitter Files Are a Business Problem.
State and local governments also expect Twitter to act on their content concerns and complaints about disinformation, which means fifty governors and attorneys general and state directors of public health and state police commanders picking up the phone, and 3,243 sheriffs and district attorneys and public health directors expecting to be able to reach out to their partners at Twitter, and close to 20,000 mayors and police chiefs, and thousands of state legislators and tens of thousands of city councilmembers, and on and on and on. “You tell this Jack Dorsey that I’m the damn mayor pro tem here in Glendale, and I want my concerns to be dealt with.”
And so, if we accept the premise that governments have special rights to demand content moderation, if the staff director of a legislative committee in the Arkansas state legislature and a sheriff in Maryland and the flag officers at all the MACOMS and Jen Psaki’s deputy assistant and a member of a county board of supervisors in Oregon and the chief of staff to the governor of Rhode Island, being Very Important People, all expect to by God get a direct meeting with Twitter executives because @buttchug623 is saying some things that they do not like at all, and oh by the way the prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is holding on line 6 and he’s pissed and when can you pencil in a half-hour with Turkmenistan’s finance minister, then how much does it cost to manage all of those relationships?
Elon Musk has fired so many people, that it looks like he doesn’t expect Twitter to be jumping through hoops for all those Very Important People any longer.
THE FILES MIGHT REVEAL IT BUT THE PRESS WON’T: Did the Twitter Files Just Reveal an Impeachable Offense for Biden? “Biden’s directive to quash free speech critical of his policies is sparking calls for impeachment.”
THE MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA AT WORK: Twitter Files: Controlling The COVID Narrative.