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"And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works." - Bastiat
"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." - Voltaire
The Craziest Friday Ever
On staying at Substack, and leaving Twitter, I guess
https://www.racket.news/p/the-craziest-friday-ever
Matt Taibbi (07 April 2023)
Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.
It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.
Not much suspense there; I’m staying at Substack. You’ve all been great to me, as has the management of this company. Beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter, a decision that apparently will come with a price as far as any future Twitter Files reports are concerned. It was absolutely worth it and I’ll always be grateful to those who gave me the chance to work on that story, but man is this a crazy planet.
Have a great weekend, everyone. I’m off on vacation with my kids next week, but I’ll check in. Best and take care, Matt
Originally Posted by Occam's Banana
Twitter blocks Substack links after platform announces competing ‘Notes’ feature
Users were given the message "Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter" when they try to retweet or like a post containing a Substack link.
https://thepostmillennial.com/twitte...-notes-feature
Hannah Nightingale (07 April 2023)
On Friday, Twitter users reported issues with retweeting or liking posts that contain links to Substack, a newsletter platform.
Twitter has placed restrictions on how users interact with posts containing the links, coming days after Substack announced that it would launch "Notes," a feature that closely resembles Twitter.
On the desktop version of Twitter, users were given the message "Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter" when they try to retweet or like the post. Likes and retweets on the mobile version of the social media platform did not work.
The outlet stated that it appears that Twitter has blocked responses to tweets that include Substack links as well.
"It appeared, however, that tweets with links to Substack newsletters with a unique domain name or shortened links did function normally on Twitter," NBC reported.
In a statement to The Verge, Substack founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth said, "We’re disappointed that Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work. Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else. This abrupt change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, that rewards great work with money, and that protects the free press and free speech. Their livelihoods should not be tied to platforms where they don’t own their relationship with their audience, and where the rules can change on a whim."
"Any platform that benefits from writers’ and creators’ work but doesn’t give them control over their relationships will inevitably wonder how to respond to the platforms that do," the founders wrote on Twitter.
In a post announcing Substack Notes, the three said that Notes would be a way for users to post "short-form content and share ideas with each other and their readers," and will "drive discovery across Substack."
Unlike it’s recommendations feature, "Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links," the trio said.
The post later added, "While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything."
Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists who broke the Twitter Files and uses Substack to post articles, said in an email on Friday: "Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.
"It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.
"Not much suspense there; I’m staying at Substack. You’ve all been great to me, as has the management of this company. Beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter."
Tech Crunch described Substack's Notes feature as remarkably similar to Twitter:
"Notes shared on the platform are displayed in a dedicated short-form feed that looks a lot like Twitter. Once you share a note, it’s essentially like posting a tweet. Each note displays a like count and comment count. There’s also the option to “restack,” or retweet, a post."
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi
At present, the following warning page is served when clicking the Substack link in Matt Taibbi's Twitter bio (this is not particular to Taibbi, and the same thing occurs for other such links to Substack - the Taibbi link is merely presented here as an example):
https://twitter.com/safety/unsafe_li...i.substack.com
This is what happens when people who don't understand the Internet and hate the principles that built the Internet ... run the Internet.
The Kingdom of God has come upon you. -- Matthew 12:28
Meet the Censored: Me?The Craziest Friday Ever
On staying at Substack, and leaving Twitter, I guess
https://www.racket.news/p/the-craziest-friday-ever
Matt Taibbi (07 April 2023)
Earlier this afternoon, I learned Substack links were being blocked on Twitter. Since being able to share my articles is a primary reason I use Twitter, I was alarmed and asked what was going on.
It turns out Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival. When I asked how I was supposed to market my work, I was given the option of posting my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.
Not much suspense there; I’m staying at Substack. You’ve all been great to me, as has the management of this company. Beginning early next week I’ll be using the new Substack Notes feature (to which you’ll all have access) instead of Twitter, a decision that apparently will come with a price as far as any future Twitter Files reports are concerned. It was absolutely worth it and I’ll always be grateful to those who gave me the chance to work on that story, but man is this a crazy planet.
Have a great weekend, everyone. I’m off on vacation with my kids next week, but I’ll check in. Best and take care, Matt
The Elon Musk portion of the Twitter Files story meets its M. Night Shyamalan ending. On the WTF week to end all WTF weeks
https://www.racket.news/p/meet-the-censored-me
Matt Taibbi (12 April 2023)
Nearly five months ago I was presented with a rare opportunity, to look through internal correspondence at Twitter. A small group of other journalists and writers soon jumped down the rabbit hole to join the one-in-a-million search.
At the time the company was just completing a contentious sale, which featured multiple stops, starts and legal actions, along with competing furious public relations campaigns. New owner Elon Musk accused the old regime of lying about the percentage of Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAU) on the platform (i.e. how much on Twitter was real traffic and how much was spam), said he was “obviously overpaying,” and insisted he was an advocate of the right “to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”
I was amazed at this story’s coverage. From the Guardian last November: “Elon Musk’s Twitter is fast proving that free speech at all costs is a dangerous fantasy.”From the Washington Post: “Musk’s ‘free speech’ agenda dismantles safety work at Twitter, insiders say.” The Post story was about the “troubling” decision to re-instate the Babylon Bee, and numerous stories like it implied the world would end if this “‘free speech’ agenda” was imposed.
I didn’t have to know any of the particulars of the intramural Twitter dispute to think anyone who wanted to censor the Babylon Bee was crazy. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, going to war against a satire site was like dressing up in a suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae. This was an obvious moral panic and the very real consternation at papers like the Washington Post and sites like Slate over these issues seemed to offer the new owners of Twitter a huge opening. With critics this obnoxious, even a step in the direction of free speech values would likely win back audiences that saw the platform as a humorless garrison of authoritarian attitudes.
This was the context under which I met Musk and the circle of adjutants who would become the go-betweens delivering the material that came to be known as the Twitter Files. I would have accepted such an invitation from Hannibal Lecter, but I actually liked Musk. His distaste for the blue-check thought police who’d spent more than a half-year working themselves into hysterics at the thought of him buying Twitter — which had become the private playground of entitled mainstream journalists — appeared rooted in more than just personal animus. He talked about wanting to restore transparency, but also seemed to think his purchase was funny, which I also did (spending $44 billion with a laugh as even a partial motive was hard not to admire).
Moreover the decision to release the company’s dirty laundry for the world to see was a potentially historic act. To this day I think he did something incredibly important by opening up these communications for the public.
Normally when someone comes to you with a story you ask what it is they want or expect out of press coverage, both so you can understand their motives and to avoid misunderstandings later on. I asked the question, but I can’t say I ever fully understood the answer. It didn’t matter. Within a few days of seeing documents it was clear we were looking at something bigger than us, Musk, or Twitter, more or less completely obviating the motivation question as far as I was concerned.
I went into the project expecting to answer a few narrow questions, maybe about how internal content moderation worked, or if federal law enforcement made an inappropriate call or two to discourage high-profile stories. Remember, in the pre-Twitter Files world, Twitter was still denying that it shadow-banned people at all (“We do not,” they’d explained). Also, the notion that there’d been any contact at all between the FBI and a company like Facebook ahead of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a national scandal after Mark Zuckerberg blurted out something along those lines to Joe Rogan. Just one possible recommendation made headlines, let alone regimes of spreadsheet requests.
When we got into the Files, we were caught off guard. The content-policing system was more elaborate and organized than any of us imagined. A communications highway had been built linking the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a slew of other platforms. Among other things this looked more like a cartel than a competitive media landscape, and I had an uneasy feeling early on that publicizing this arrangement might create a host of unanticipated problems for everyone involved. Still, there was no question this was in the public interest. So we kept going.
About two weeks into the #TwitterFiles project, the company suspended the accounts of CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, VOA’s Steve Herman, and a few other social media personalities like Aaron Rupar, reportedly for sharing information about the movement of Elon Musk’s private jet.
My phone instantly blew up with wisecracks. “I must have missed John Stuart Mill’s ‘private jet exception’ passage in On Liberty,” texted one ball-busting friend. After about six ringtones I rolled my eyes, popped an Advil, and turned my phone off, knowing what was coming. The suspensions, even if quickly reversed, were sure to ignite nuclear levels of pearl-clutching and self-pity among the same censorious power-worshipping media jerks who a few months before were howling about Musk because they thought he was for free speech.
Bari Weiss decided the situation demanded a public statement. I absolutely respected the decision, but disagreed. I thought the outcry — coming from people who never said a word across years of suppression of the type of people I wrote about in the “Meet the Censored” series, like J6 videographer Jon Farina, Canadian broadcaster Paul Jay, and the World Socialist Web Site — was a bad-faith trap. These people didn’t care about the issue at all, except in a self-interested way, while they probably did care about shifting public attention from #TwitterFiles releases.
From that moment the project was a football between two committed antagonists: a sporadically censorious CEO I didn’t really understand on one hand, and on the other, a bloc of vicious uniparty authoritarians who were committed to throttling speech as an ideological goal, whose methods and tendencies felt all too familiar.
The latter group isn’t interested in engagement and prefers a strategy of obliteration. This played out in a very real way for new Twitter from the start, in the form of sweeping advertiser boycotts led by groups like David Brock-founded Media Matters, Free Press, Accountable Tech and Color of Change. Twitter Files reporters like me experienced a less personally damaging version of the same deal, through an impressive total mainstream coverage blackout of #TwitterFiles revelations, coupled with a near-constant string of smears and stories assuring the uniparty faithful that all those documents they were assiduously kept from reading about were nothingburgers.
We were never on the same side as Musk exactly, but there was a clear confluence of interests rooted in the fact that the same institutional villains who wanted to suppress the info in the Files also wanted to bankrupt Musk. That’s what makes the developments of the last week so disappointing. There was a natural opening to push back on the worst actors with significant public support if Musk could hold it together and at least look like he was delivering on the implied promise to return Twitter to its “free speech wing of the free speech party” roots. Instead, he stepped into another optics Punji Trap, censoring the same Twitter Files reports that initially made him a transparency folk hero.
Even more bizarre, the triggering incident revolved around Substack, a relatively small company that’s nonetheless one of the few oases of independent media and free speech left in America. In my wildest imagination I couldn’t have scripted these developments, especially my own very involuntary role.
I first found out there was a problem between Twitter and Substack early last Friday, in the morning hours just after imploding under Mehdi Hasan’s Andrey Vyshinsky Jr. act on MSNBC. As that joyous experience included scenes of me refusing on camera to perform on-demand ritual criticism of Elon Musk, I first thought I was being pranked by news of Substack URLs being suppressed by him. “No way,” I thought, but other Substack writers insisted it was true: their articles were indeed being labeled, and likes and retweets of Substack pages were being prohibited.
I asked Substack co-head Hamish McKenzie what was going on. He said he wasn’t sure, but offered that they’d just announced a new “Notes program” the day before. I had to ask, “What’s that?” I had no clue what ‘Substack Notes” was:
[image hidden to save space]
As many unfortunately know now, my next move was to ask Elon what was going on. He didn’t answer right away, which is fine, the man is busy, but the math on this was pretty simple. Whatever was going on between Twitter and Substack had nothing to do with me or with other Substack writers, and if Twitter was going to label our work unsafe and not allow us to share my articles, I couldn’t endorse all this by using the platform, and said so. This prompted a quick ping! and a furious Signal question: “So you want Substack to kill Twitter?”
[... continued at link (subscription required): https://www.racket.news/p/the-craziest-friday-ever ... ]
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 04-13-2023 at 03:38 AM.
__________________________________________________ ________________
"A politician will do almost anything to keep their job, even become a patriot" - Hearst
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 04-20-2023 at 12:53 PM.
The Kingdom of God has come upon you. -- Matthew 12:28
Twitter Files Part 22 - Thacker
#FauciPharmaFiles
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thackerpd/status...37538663727106
Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...663727106.html
PDF: https://files.catbox.moe/rhpewy.pdf
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
Taibbi: Report On The Censorship-Industrial Complex
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/...strial-complex
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
Twitter Files Part 23 - Lowenthal
The Information Cartel
PDF: https://files.catbox.moe/usrl9q.pdf
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
"Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
"Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
"Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul
Proponent of real science.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.
At times your humor evades me. But if it ever happens, I will drink gasoline in atonement for my lack of faith.
freedomisobvious.blogspot.com
There is only one correct way: freedom. All other solutions are non-solutions.
It appears that artificial intelligence is at least slightly superior to natural stupidity.
Our words make us the ghosts that we are.
Convincing the world he didn't exist was the Devil's second greatest trick; the first was convincing us that God didn't exist.
[The Twitter Files: index of posts]
TWITTER FILES #20
Berenson v. Twitter
Alex Berenson (01 June 2023)
Tweets (1-10):
Tweets (11-20):
Tweets (21-29):
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 07-15-2023 at 06:24 AM.
Elon Musk reveals former Twitter employee who colluded with DHS to censor James O'Keefe now works for Google
Department of Homeland Security official Brian Scully admitted to working alongside Twitter to censor the journalist during a deposition.
https://thepostmillennial.com/elon-m...rks-for-google
Katie Daviscourt (03 June 2023)
Journalist James O'Keefe of O'Keefe Media Group revealed on Saturday that Twitter censored his reporting at the direction of the Department of Homeland Security before Elon Musk took over the social media platform in 2022.
Elon Musk ultimately revealed that the responsible Twitter employee has since left the company.
O'Keefe uploaded a video to his Twitter account which revealed Department of Homeland Security official Brian Scully admitting to working alongside Twitter to censor the journalist during a deposition.
"More Twitter Files: Here is Brian Scully, DHS official being asked about the “debunking” teams at Counter Foreign Interference Task force, trying to stop the spread of O’KEEFE video journalism," O'Keefe wrote. "In the deposition, Brian Scully confirms he was emailing TWITTER back and forth in efforts to debunk our videos."
"Twitter responds, 'Thank you so much, we've applied a label to the tweet,'" said O'Keefe.
The guerilla journalist, who was recently ousted from Project Veritas, released a series of documents that allegedly shows communications between DHS and Twitter discussing "debunking" O'Keefe's reporting, although the emails are redacted in the document.
"This is the email between Scully, and apparently those at Twitter (their emails were redacted). Maybe @elonmusk can let me know who at Twitter was emailing DHS about journalists?" O'Keefe said, calling on Elon Musk to oust the employees.
According to the document, Scully and alleged officials with Twitter discussed "debunking," otherwise known as slapping content with a "fact-check," on O'Keefe's reporting of USPS whistleblowers alleging fraudulent activity surrounding mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election.
"Hi Brian, have you seen // heard of any debunks of the Project Veritas USPS videos?" one email sent to Scully said.
Scully responded, "Which video? There appears to be more than one. I'm looking at USPS employee in NV, but have been told there's also a "whistleblower" in MI.
"I just checked with our teams so you don't have to spin your wheels. Doesn't look like a debunk exists yet," an alleged Twitter employee replied.
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/s...27433424121857
Twitter Files EXTRA - @NAffects
How the World’s “No-Kidding Decision Makers” and the “Anti-Disinformation” Field Got Organized
PDF: https://files.catbox.moe/vzi2s6.pdf
Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Robert Heinlein
Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler
Groucho Marx
I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.
Linus, from the Peanuts comic
You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith
Alexis de Torqueville
Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it
A Zero Hedge comment
FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info, including journalists
The FBI aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to ban Twitter users and collect their data, leaks reveal. Twitter declined to censor journalists targeted by Ukraine, including Aaron Maté.
BY AARON MATÉ - JUN 7, 2023
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has aided a Ukrainian intelligence effort to censor social media users and obtain their personal information, leaked emails reveal.
In March 2022, an FBI Special Agent sent Twitter a list of accounts on behalf of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ukraine’s main intelligence agency. The accounts, the FBI wrote, “are suspected by the SBU in spreading fear and disinformation.” In an attached memo, the SBU asked Twitter to remove the accounts and hand over their user data.
The Ukrainian government’s FBI-enabled targets extend to members of the media. The SBU list that the FBI provided to Twitter included my name and Twitter profile. In its response to the FBI, Twitter agreed to review the accounts for “inauthenticity” but raised concerns about the inclusion of me and other “American and Canadian journalists.”
The FBI’s attempt to ban Twitter accounts at the request of Ukrainian intelligence is among the most overt requests for censorship revealed to date in the Twitter Files, a cache of leaked communications from the social media giant.
...
The listed Twitter profiles, the SBU alleged, have been “used to disseminate disinformation and fake news to inaccurately reflect events in Ukraine, justify war crimes of the Russian authorities on the territory of the Ukrainian state in violation of international law.”
In order “to stop Russian aggression on the information front,” the SBU continued, “we kindly ask you to take urgent measures to block these Twitter accounts and provide us with user data specified during registration.”
...
The disclosure of a collaboration on censorship between the FBI and SBU is the latest documented instance of Ukrainian state-tied attempts to target foreign voices. A Ukrainian website known as Myrotvorets maintains a list of what it calls “enemies of Ukraine.” I was recently added to that list along with The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, as well as the comedian and YouTube host Jimmy Dore.
...
More: https://mate.substack.com/p/fbi-help...censor-twitter
"Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country, and giving it to the rich people of a poor country." - Ron Paul
"Beware the Military-Industrial-Financial-Pharma-Corporate-Internet-Media-Government Complex." - B4L update of General Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Debt is the drug, Wall St. Banksters are the dealers, and politicians are the addicts." - B4L
"Totally free immigration? I've never taken that position. I believe in national sovereignty." - Ron Paul
Proponent of real science.
The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own, and do not represent this forum or any other entities or persons.
CLIP from SYSTEM UPDATE #95:
INTERVIEW: Aaron Maté Targeted by FBI/Ukraine Censorship Plot | SYSTEM UPDATE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49vCKJ3aZMY
[The Twitter Files: index of posts]
TWITTER FILES #21
Twitter Files: Missouri v. Biden edition
Matt Taibbi (11 July 2023)
Compilations:
- Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...081650688.html
- PDF file: <n/a>
Related posts:
Other links:
- article: Twitter Files: Missouri v. Biden Edition
{Matt Taibbi @ racket.news} [subscription required]- article: My Wray or the Hard Wray: New Twitter Files Contradict FBI Director’s Testimony
{Jonathan Turley @ jonathanturley.org} [posted HERE (below) and HERE (thread)]
Tweets (1-5):
Tweets (6-10):
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 07-15-2023 at 06:24 AM.
h/t @Brian4Liberty: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...%92s-Testimony
My Wray or the Hard Wray: New Twitter Files Contradict FBI Director’s Testimony
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/07/1...ors-testimony/
Jonathan Turley (13 July 2023)
Yesterday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray was another maddening experience of faux contrition and open evasion. Wray apologized for violations that have already been established by courts or Congress (often over the best efforts of the FBI). However, on ample public evidence of new violations, Wray continued to use his favorite testimonial trilogy to dismiss any questions: expressing (1) lack of knowledge, (2) ongoing investigations, and (3) promises of later answers or briefings. He did, however, hold forth in detail after Rep. Eric Swalwell asked him about FBI Family Day. Despite the near total lack of substance, Wray did make one surprising denial. He insisted that the FBI does not engage in censorship efforts, focuses only on “foreign disinformation,” and does not pressure companies to censor others. Those denials are not only directly contradicted by the recent 155-page opinion of a federal court and the Twitter Files, but a new release from the Twitter Files and journalist Matt Taibbi.
Wray said that “…The FBI is not in the business of moderating content, or causing any social media company to suppress or censor.” He then added that these companies are not under any pressure in making their own decisions whether to censor people or groups flagged by the FBI.
The statement is obviously false. The FBI maintained a large operation of agents actively seeking the censorship of thousands, as discussed in my prior testimony.
Taibbi, however, has released another example of how aggressive the FBI was with social media companies. In the latest Twitter Files release, there is one email exchange where Twitter “immediately” suspended accounts flagged by the FBI without investigation.
Taibbi explained:
“In one shot, you can see the FBI asks to remove three accounts, that gets forwarded to Twitter, Twitter immediately suspends them, the accounts. But more importantly, when there’s a glitch, and the accounts remain up, the FBI immediately writes back and says, what’s the deal? We just wrote to you, why is it still up? So, that shows the nature of the relationship basically that it’s not really a collaboration. It’s much more like somebody reporting to an authority.
… [W]hat happens in these instances in the ones that I was showing, they’re just forwarding names of accounts that they say are associated with foreign threat actors. It’s very vague. And Twitter is taking them down before they even investigate. In this case, they later determined that they couldn’t find anything connecting them to any bad actors. In fact, one of them was from Canada. And so, that’s the problem. If it’s not connected with a crime, they’re just asking to take accounts down because they don’t like the profile of them.”
We also have hundreds of emails that show the FBI and other agencies targeting individuals for a wide array of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. The latter category is truly Orwellian. It covers true statements that can be used for a misleading purpose.
The latest email does not suggest that the FBI was the passive, helpful agency portrayed by the Director. For most people reading the email, it sounds like it is my Wray or the hard Wray.
THREAD: The Facebook Files
From thread: The Facebook Files[The Twitter Files: index of posts]
NOT THE TWITTER FILES #2
The Feds Who Run Facebook (Ex-CIA / FBI / NSA / DHS / etc.)
Name Redacted (18 December 2022)
Tweets (1-9):
Tweets (10-15):
[...]
//[The Twitter Files: index of posts]
NOT THE TWITTER FILES #2
The Feds Who Run Facebook (Ex-CIA / FBI / NSA / DHS / etc.)
Name Redacted (18 December 2022)
Tweets (1-9):
Tweets (10-15):
[...]
@ Thread Reader: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...235932161.html
https://twitter.com/NameRedacted247/...58111235932161
Tweets (2-10):
[...]
//
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 09-20-2023 at 03:13 PM.
https://twitter.com/shellenberger/st...18171383398825
to: https://twitter.com/shellenberger/st...20754525208849
[thread archive: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...383398825.html]
{Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger | 16 November 2023}
A US government-funded group at Stanford said its work was "nonpartisan," but it wasn't. A newly released tranche of files, exclusive to Public, show that it demanded censorship of Republican elected officials, but not of Democrats, for making equivalent claims of election fraud.
Government-Funded Stanford Group Successfully Urged Censorship Of Republicans But Not Democrats For Equivalent Claims
Both Republicans and Democrats claimed election fraud, but Stanford Internet Observatory and Twitter only sanctioned Republicans
by @shellenberger & @galexybrane
[bold emphasis added - OB]
[...]
The US government-funded Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) claims that its 2020 Election Integrity Project (EIP) and its 2021 Virality Project (VP) were “non-partisan research coalitions.” They did not discriminate against Republicans or conservatives, SIO insists.
But a new tranche of SIO files subpoenaed [the files were requested, not subpoenaed ; see the correction at the bottom of this post - OB] by the House Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Mark Green (R-TN), and Homeland Security Subcommittee for Oversight Chairman Dan Bishop (R-SC) reveal that SIO singled out Republicans for censorship, even though Democrats engaged in similar kinds of inaccurate or misleading speech.
One member of Congress singled out for censorship was alarmed to learn of the pattern. “In striving to silence duly elected Congressmen and prevent them from communicating with constituents,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told Public, “this government-funded censorship network has shown itself to be a far greater threat to our representative democracy than any foreign nation.”
Representatives from Stanford Internet Observatory did not respond to a request for comment.
To see the pattern of partisan behavior, we have to go back to November 2020, when the EIP was well underway.
At 5:58 am, November 4, 2020, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-SC) tweeted, “The Silicon Valley Cartel is in on the STEAL! Censoring our President while DEMOCRATS work overtime to STEAL THIS ELECTION! I need you to join me in the fight to STOP THIS.!”
At 8:32 AM on November 4, 2020, an EIP staff person wrote a note to Twitter staff in the Jira messaging system. It read, “Twitter team - We know you are aware of the #stopthesteal push but we have gathered here some of the major contributors which according to our data // past incidents are high priority incidents… We recommend actioning these quickly.”
The EIP representative flagged the above tweet and two others. Shortly after, Twitter censored at least three of Greene’s tweets, and these tweets are still censored on the platform.
When one clicks on the arrow to the right of the tweet, which normally allows a user to copy the link, a box pops up that reads, “Why can’t you share this? We try to keep X a place for healthy conversation, so we’ve disabled most of the ways to engage with this post.”
Twitter executives acknowledged their censorship of Greene internally.
At 6:24 pm, November 4, 2020, Twitter’s senior legal counsel, Sean Edgett, emailed other Twitter executives. “We continue robust enforcement of our policies and have labeled approximately 150 Tweets for premature claims of victory,” Edgett wrote. “Additionally, we continue to label and interstitial the account of House candidate Marjorie Taylor Green for violations of our policies.”
Defenders of the censorship advocacy by Stanford sometimes argue that only Republicans made false statements about the elections. SIO has said that Republicans and Trump supporters simply spread more falsehoods. “EIP’s research determined that accounts that supported President Trump’s inaccurate assertions around the election included more false statements than other accounts,” wrote SIO.
But many Democrats, including Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams, have claimed, without evidence, that Republicans have stolen elections. For example, in May 2020, Abrams wrote on Twitter that “the GOP wins by impeding eligible citizens from voting.”
But where Twitter executives throttled Greene’s tweet, which cannot be shared, Abrams’ tweet has over 1,200 retweets.
It’s true that Abrams made her claim before EIP had been created. But other Democrats claimed election fraud while EIP was operational.
“Feeling oddly thankful that @staceyabrams had her own election stolen from her so that she had time to save America,” tweeted actor Edward Norton on January 6, 2021. "@staceyabrams had her election stolen from her,” tweeted woman’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe the same day.
Twitter censored neither the tweet by Norton nor by Rapinoe, even though they made accusations nearly identical to Greene’s.
EIP analysts might say that by January 2021, they only researched the 2020 election, not actively flagging content about other elections. But the partisan bias of SIO can also be seen in its approach to Covid. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and many Democratic officials made inaccurate claims about the ability of the Covid vaccine to prevent infection and transmission, yet the VP never flagged them.
In the summer of 2021, when VP was searching for Covid misinformation to report, Democrats like Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and California Governor Gavin Newsom pushed the misleading narrative that only unvaccinated people could spread Covid and that there was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
They made these claims well after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had admitted that “breakthrough infections” were common in vaccinated people. If VP cared about accuracy and objectivity, it would have recognized that this Democrat-driven narrative was not based on solid national data. As Rochelle Walensky said last June, the CDC never had aggregate Covid vaccination and hospitalization data.
When Twitter censored Greene, she accused the platform of violating the First Amendment. Internally, Twitter executives dismissed her allegation and told themselves that Greene was wrong. However there is strong evidence that the Department of Homeland Security created EIP and VP to demand censorship on its behalf. What’s more, two of the university partners involved in EIP and VP received considerable funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is part of the federal government.
The exchanges between VP, EIP, and social media platforms raise a troubling question: Was SIO acting on behalf of the federal government when it demanded censorship of elected Republicans?
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CORRECTION: Congress *requested,* it did not *subpoena,* the files. We have updated the article at Public.
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 11-17-2023 at 07:12 PM.
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