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.”
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THE MINISTRY OF PROPAGANDA AT WORK: Twitter Files: Controlling The COVID Narrative.
TWITTER FILES, COVID EDITION: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate With Help From the White House.
Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread.
Follow-up piece to come next week, featuring leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions. https://t.co/TeEeCvMZa2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2022
1. THREAD:
THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE
– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy
– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed
– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
ICYMI: Notes on the Twitter Files (9):
“The bottom line? Federal law enforcement asserted primacy over all media distribution, a situation normally only found in tinpot regimes.”
The CIA is identified as the “OGA” (Other Government Organization or Other Government Agency) that is involved with “helping” Twitter moderate its platform. The CIA emerges as a prominent player in this respect. Still, it wasn’t the only one. It was only one of the many agencies from the government to “help” Twitter.
What’s the likelihood that other social media organizations — or other media organizations period — are more independent?
THE FBI DESTROYED ITS ONCE GREAT REPUTATION: The FBI’s response to the Twitter Files Is just like a guilty criminal blaming someone else.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Twitter Files Takeaway—The U.S. Government Is Now Full Soviet. “I am fond of saying that I was never a conspiracy theory kind of guy but after 2020 I now have a walk-in closet full of tin foil hats. What used to be called ‘out there’ thinking is now merely the truth.”
IT’S HARD TO SEE THIS, BUT WE OWE IT TO THE FUTURE NOT TO LOOK AWAY: Twitter files #7: the FBI sets up the scam.
TWITTER FILES: FBI Exerting Power for Power’s Sake.
TWITTER FILES PART SEVEN: The Guns Begin to Smoke.
This starts to bring it all together.
This isn’t smoking gun proof yet.
But this begins to show us where to find the smoking guns.
And it tells us that yes, the FBI deliberately ran a coordinated disinformation campaign against the people of the United States of America, and a coup against the lawful government of the United States of America that the people had elected.
And now that it’s coming out: The Cathedral Turns Torquemada On Elon Musk.
CNN PUNDITS UPSET THEY WEREN’T HANDED TWITTER FILES:
The Twitter files have been a series of reports made by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger, detailing the behind-the-scenes conversations at Twitter over several years concerning the company’s efforts towards censorship and information suppression.
The files have shown that previous Twitter leadership, including CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey as well as Vijaya Gadde, former Twitter lead counsel, lied about shadow-banning conservative voices for years. The files have revealed the deliberate efforts to censor stories around Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” and have detailed how Twitter executives, especially former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, devised a justification to ban the sitting president.
“I think the problem here though is that Elon Musk is effectively serving as a gatekeeper for this information. He is not giving it to newsrooms. He is giving it to handpicked journalists who are then agreeing to the condition or at least one condition of tweeting out the files instead of posting the news stories,” Darcy said.
“That’s not the spirit of free speech,” Lemon replied.
To be fair, free speech has never really been a topic that CNN has cared much about. But as Musk himself tweeted on Friday, “So inspiring to see the newfound love of freedom of speech by the press.”
TWITTER FILES PART SIX REVEALS FBI’S TIES TO TECH GIANT: ‘AS IF IT WERE A SUBSIDIARY.’
“The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi began the thread on Friday. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth… a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”
Taibbi highlighted the FBI’s social media task force established after the 2016 presidential election to monitor foreign interference prominently featured in the Twitter Files.
“Do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? ‘You have to prove to me that inside the f—ing government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,’ says one former intelligence officer,” Taibbi wrote.
Why, it’s as if: Head Of Twitter’s Censorship Operation Was A Former FBI, CIA Operative.
Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.
But why are these stories being dumped by Musk’s hand-picked journalists on the weekend? As Ace of Spades notes, “Of course he drops it late Friday afternoon, again. So… the media has an easier time ignoring it — bury news you don’t want covered with a Friday evening dump — and the only people who care about it, conservatives, have to blog about it Friday night. Yeah, let’s never hold this for Monday morning, ever. Not even a single time.”
A TWITTER FILES FOOTNOTE: “The Twitter Files reveal the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Biden family corruption at the behest of the deep state authorities with whom Twitter was collaborating. The absurd letter by 51 former intelligence officials reported by Natasha Bertrand and published by Politico was a key piece of the puzzle (to the extent it was a puzzle). Holman Jenkins takes it up in his Wall Street Journal column ‘Hunter Biden’s Laptop and 2020’s First Big Lie.’. He puts it this way: ‘The absurdity of the intelligence veterans’ claim was obvious at the time. The people who run America’s major news outlets (at least those who aren’t idiots) knew it. So obvious was the lie that America’s biggest news organizations have to remain silent now because of their own complicity.'”
For all their bleating about “our democracy,” America’s ruling class was so eager to shut down Donald Trump’s presidency that they were willing to do root-structural damage to that very democracy to do so, at the cost of destroying tens of millions of Americans’ faith in our institutions’ basic fairness and honesty. On the other hand, it’s now clear that that faith was misplaced.
And now they turn to making Elon Musk public enemy #1, because they hate and attack any effective resistance.
OF COURSE THEY KNEW. BUT THEY STILL DID IT BECAUSE THEY COULD: Twitter files reveal they themselves knew Trump ban was bogus.
THEY KNOW FIRSTHAND EXACTLY WHY: Twitter Files Part 5: Employees From Commie Countries Thought Censoring Trump Was a Bad Idea.
FREDDIE DE BOER ON The Twitter Files and Writing for the Maw.
While I’m not really interested at all in the Twitter files as such, I am always interested in the meta-discursive details of how the media talks to itself. The large majority of our media that is not explicitly conservative seems to have fallen into almost total unanimity that the Twitter files are not worth paying attention to, that Musk’s leadership is bad, and that the people reporting on the Twitter files are bad as well. And I’m interested in how these orthodoxies develop within media. I’m interested, in other words, in the Maw.
The Maw is, broadly speaking, the expression of the culture war as operationalized by the consensus opinions of media. The Maw is the aggregate of opinions of paid-up journalists and writers and pundits and, specifically, the opinions they will allow. When a big story breaks, there’s an initial feeling-out period where the media talks to itself and decides what the consensus opinion will be. As time has gone on, this process has gotten faster and faster, so that now the media consensus and the expectation that all decent people will glom onto it develop in a matter of minutes. What’s interesting about the Twitter files is that both an inciting incident (the Hunter Biden laptop story and its censorship by Twitter) and an eventual consequence of it (the release of the Twitter files) fell into the Maw with incredible speed. Immediately, in 2020, the enforced consensus within media was that there was no story to speak of regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story; it was not only not worthy of influencing the election, it should not have been reported on at all, and Twitter’s decision to artificially limit its spread was justified. So too with the Twitter files: as soon as Matt Taibi started tweeting about them, it seems, most in newsmedia were convinced they were unimportant. This is the Maw at work – it’s the expression of culture war in what the media sees as a respectable position to hold. In the Maw, nothing independent survives. . . .
Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.
Think of them as paid Democratic Party operatives and you won’t go far wrong. In fact, you won’t go wrong at all.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Twitter Files Expose Dangerous Deep State-Big Tech Revolving Door. More here.
It does seem that rather a lot of shady intel/law enforcement types found work controlling content at social media companies.
IDEAS SO GOOD PEOPLE CAN’T BE ALLOWED TO HEAR ANY CRITICISMS: The Twitter files: leftism requires censorship. “One of the funny (although not ‘funny ha-ha’) things about all of this is that these same people bleat on about ‘democracy’ and its great value and worth. And yet they think of the public as unable to sort out the wheat from the chaff, as children in need of control from – yes – Big Brother Twitter. And they’re not the least bit ashamed about it. They had to do it to save democracy.”
It makes sense when you realize that by “democracy” they just mean a system where Democrats are firmly in charge.
Related: America’s Ruling Regime Doesn’t Fear Disinformation. It Fears Truth.
THE RULES SHIFT TO FIT THE POLITICS OF THE MOMENT: Twitter Files 4.0 reveal how executives changed policies to permanently ban Trump.
From the comments: “Worthy of Adam Schiff at his most mendacious.”
THE TWITTER FILES: Bari Weiss Twitter Files Reveal Systematic ‘Blacklisting’ of Disfavored Content.
The previous installment, released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, focused on the confused and chaotic decision on the part of Twitter executives to offer a “hacked materials” rationale for suppressing the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story; as such, the files mostly provided more evidence of what was already fairly well-known.
The Weiss installment, on the other hand, offers significant evidence of something that many people merely suspected was taking place: wholesale blacklisting of Twitter accounts that were perceived to be causing harm.
Weiss provides several examples of ways in which the platform limited the reach of various high-profile users: Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine who opposed various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, was on a “trends blacklist,” which meant that his tweets would not appear in the trending topics section; right-wing radio host Dan Bongino landed on a “search blacklist,” which meant that he did not show up in searches; and conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was slapped with a “do not amplify” label. At no point did anyone at Twitter communicate to these individuals that their content was being limited in such a manner.
These actions, of course, sound a lot like “shadow banning,” which is the theory that Twitter surreptitiously restricts users’ content, even in cases where the platform has not formally issued a ban or suspension. For years, various figures on the right and contrarian left have complained that the reach of their tweets had substantially and artificially diminished for nonobvious reasons, contrary to the stated claims of top-level Twitter staffers who steadfastly asserted: “We do not shadow ban.”
This claim depends upon how the term is defined. To be clear, Twitter has publicly admitted that it suppresses tweets that “detract from the conversation,” though the platform’s plan was to eventually move toward a policy of informing users about suppression efforts—a move that never took place.
Related: The Twitter Files are damning to the government.
Second, we are learning that Twitter worked closely with like-minded government bureaucrats to squelch legitimate news, information, and discussion. They did so to protect favored candidates (Democrats) and political positions (progressive). We will undoubtedly learn that Facebook, Google and other media giants had similar ties to Washington. We certainly need to know.
The government’s role here is damning. Its primary job under the First Amendment is to protect free speech, not to kill it. It botched that vital job, and it did so deliberately to increase its own control over private speech in public fora and, apparently, to promote certain political views.
The only good news here is that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is exposing the old management’s efforts to suppress speech and promote political bias on its platform. To expose those malign efforts, he ordered some of Twitter’s internal documents be given to two journalists: Matt Taibbi (who quickly published some of his findings as tweets) and Bari Weiss (who is beginning to publish some findings and promises to publish a longer analysis).
We have now learned that some of Twitter’s holdover executives worked secretly to prevent the transfer of those documents to Taibbi and Weiss. The key figure here seems to be Twitter’s second-ranking attorney, James Baker, who came to the company from his post as the FBI’s top lawyer. When Musk discovered Baker was undermining him, Musk fired him immediately. We don’t know if Baker was trying to shield bad behavior by Twitter’s old management, or by the FBI and CIA, or by all of them. In any case, Baker seems to be one of those swamp creatures who routinely slide through revolving doors, forging profitable links between their private employers and government agencies.
As bad as Twitter’s old management was, the reaction of left-leaning journalists to Elon Musk’s efforts has been frankly astonishing. Instead of seeking full disclosure, as reporters normally would (and should), they have attacked Musk for trying to ensure it. Instead of demanding free speech, as honorable journalists would (and should), they have demanded even more censorship to stop legally permissible content from appearing on the social media platform. They believe in “free speech for me, but not for thee.”
Just think of the media as Democratic party operatives with bylines (who recently lost many of their inside sources within Twitter after Musk’s purchase), and it all makes sense. Such as the Stig Bensmithing breaking news: NBC News’ Ben Collins offers an emoji to express his disinterest in Twitter Files Part 2.
