The most troubling thing about the Berenson de-platforming isn't Twitter's decision per se, but whether it made that decision freely. Was it done at the behest of the federal government? The Twitter files provide circumstantial evidence that the White House played a role.
"When the Biden admin took over, one of their first meeting requests with Twitter executives was on Covid,"
writes journalist David Zweig in the Twitter files
[see this post - OB]. "The focus was on 'anti-vaxxer accounts.' Especially Alex Berenson."
Berenson was suspended hours after Biden
said to a reporter that social media companies were "killing people" by failing to police pandemic-related misinformation.
Zweig also
revealed that a series of meetings took place last December in which an "angry" Biden team excoriated Twitter executives because they were "not satisfied " with its "enforcement approach" and wanted "Twitter to do more and to de-platform several accounts."
In Twitter Files 6
[see this post - OB], Matt Taibbi described Twitter as an "
FBI subsidiary."
Agents from a dedicated task force would regularly send
lists of accounts—some with fewer than 1,000 followers—for Twitter to look at for terms-of-service violations, such as
this left-leaning account jokingly telling Republicans to vote a day late.
Former Twitter's former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, was in
weekly meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In return for the company's work handling FBI requests, Twitter
received $3.4 million between October 2019 and early 2021.
Complying with somewhere in the range of 8,000 requests would have required significant resources from Twitter, and there's no reason the government
shouldn't have to pick up the tab. But should this arrangement exist in a free society, given the mission creep that the Twitter Files exposed?
Another alarming secret revealed by the Twitter Files: what led Twitter to block users from sharing a major
New York Post story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop
[see this post - OB]. The files reveal that Jim Baker, the former FBI lawyer then working at Twitter,
leaned on Roth to treat the laptop as the likely result of a Russian hack-and-leak operation, despite little evidence
[sic for "no evidence" ; see this thread - OB] for that claim. The FBI had
told Roth to expect just such a foreign operation to drop in October and that Hunter Biden would be a likely target. A month before the laptop story broke, Roth even
participated in a tabletop simulation at the Aspen Institute about handling a Hunter Biden data dump.
Publicly, 51 former intelligence officials, including James Clapper, Michael Hayden, and John Brennan, published a
letter claiming that the laptop story "has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation." The twist? The
New York Post story turned out to be completely true.
With all that pressure coming from supposedly reputable and knowledgeable sources, how independently was Twitter acting when it suppressed the story?
Giving the government unfettered access to exert pressure behind the scenes turned a forum for free discussion—with all the unavoidable messiness and misinformation that free speech entails—into something much worse: a state-approved narrative generator.
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