Page 6 of 9 FirstFirst ... 45678 ... LastLast
Results 151 to 180 of 268

Thread: The Twitter Files

  1. #151
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-04-2023 at 06:58 PM.



  2. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  3. #152



  4. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  5. #153
    [The Twitter Files: index of posts]

    NOT THE TWITTER FILES #3
    The Feds Who Run Google (Ex-CIA / FBI / NSA / DHS / etc.)
    Name Redacted (26 December 2022)



    This Twitter user looked up all the former feds now employed at Google and you have to read it to believe how incestuous the government and Big Tech are
    https://notthebee.com/article/this-a...d-big-tech-are
    Harris Rigby (02 January 2022)

    In case it wasn't clear after Elon Musk canned James Baker, the former FBI lawyer who became a Twitter lawyer and worked from the inside of the Big Tech platform to protect what you might call the deep state, the government and Big Tech have become one gigantic anti-freedom behemoth.

    Big government is squelching speech and protecting Democrats and the cultural hegemony of the Left by planting their former employees in all the tech platforms.

    This anonymous Twitter user did some research into several Big Tech companies through publicly accessible info and found some VERY interesting connections.
    The government and Deep-State folks are too smart to go the direct route and censor the right through government laws.

    But "Google is a private company," so the government is hiding behind the Big Tech giant to covertly enforce speech codes.

    Buckle up, this is some crazy stuff:Rossman has since taken his account private, but the screenshots are all 100% real. This is a former deep state CIA analyst and he's a Senior Manager of "TRUST & SAFETY" at Google. And he's an anti-white, anti-Trump, "I'm with her," anti-conservative bigot.

    He's in charge of deciding what is and isn't hate speech and deciding what you see when you search Google.

    And you think he's fair and balanced?

    There's more:The government and Big Tech are all one big happy family.
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-04-2023 at 06:59 PM.

  6. #154
    "Fauci Files" coming???

    Skip to 3:54:

    Jer. 11:18-20. "The Kingdom of God has come upon you." -- Matthew 12:28

  7. #155
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 07-15-2023 at 06:12 AM.

  8. #156
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 07-15-2023 at 06:13 AM.

  9. #157

  10. #158
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    [The Twitter Files: index of posts]

    TWITTER FILES #11
    How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
    Matt Taibbi (03 January 2023)
    ...
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    [The Twitter Files: index of posts]

    TWITTER FILES #12
    Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”
    Matt Taibbi (03 January 2023)
    ...
    It just keep getting worse. Twitter was the willing bitch of Congressional Democrats and DNC/Swamp FBI agents.
    "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.

  11. #159
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty View Post
    It just keep getting worse. Twitter was the willing bitch of Congressional Democrats and DNC/Swamp FBI agents.
    IMO, this is the worst stuff to come out of the "Twitter Files" so far.

    They knew it was bull$#@! - they knew it - and they still bent the knee anyway, just to get politicians and "journalists" to stop saying mean things about them. But it didn't work (surprise, surprise!). It only confirmed the effectiveness of the tactic. So of course, it just got worse. And then, once they let in the 800-lb. gorilla (and his angry chimp friends, like GEC) in order to further appease their critics, they belatedly discovered they were no longer really in charge. At that point, they were just the feds' bitches.
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-03-2023 at 08:57 PM.

  12. #160
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    IMO, this is the worst stuff to come out of the "Twitter Files" so far.

    They knew it was bull$#@! - they knew it - and they still bent the knee anyway, just to get politicians and "journalists" to stop saying mean things about them. But it didn't work (surprise, surprise!). It only confirmed the effectiveness of the tactic. So of course, it just got worse. And then, once they let in the 800-lb. gorilla (and his angry chimp friends, like GEC) in order to further appease their critics, they belatedly discovered they were no longer really in charge. At that point, they were just the feds' bitches.
    Nope, they wanted to do this and the Dems gave them a fig leaf of cooperating with the government.
    They are as bad or worse than government Dems.
    Any indication of reluctance was fake so they could cover themselves if it came out.
    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



  13. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  14. #161
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    Nope, they wanted to do this and the Dems gave them a fig leaf of cooperating with the government.
    They are as bad or worse than government Dems.
    Any indication of reluctance was fake so they could cover themselves if it came out.
    Yeah, I think you're giving them way too much credit.

    I don't think they're nearly that clever or elaborately foresighted.

    So I'm just gonna go with Hanlon's Razor on this one.

  15. #162

    some connectable dots regarding Trump's impeachment

    Some interesting clues in #27 which lead me to bump this old thread about Rand asking Justice Robert's a question (which he would not answer) while NOT naming the "whistleblower" connected to Trump's impeachment.
    http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...-question-quot

  16. #163
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    TWITTER FILES #11
    How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In
    Matt Taibbi (03 January 2023)

    [...]
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    TWITTER FILES #12
    Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”
    Matt Taibbi (03 January 2023)

    [...]
    Interview with Matt Taibbi (via "Twitter Spaces" audio interface ; starts @ about 2:00):

    US IC coerced Twitter to promote fake Russia hoax
    https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1rmGPkDZWvMKN
    Matt Taibbi, et al. (03 January 2023)



    https://twitter.com/scotthortonshow/...05963538378752
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-04-2023 at 01:06 AM.

  17. #164
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    Yeah, I think you're giving them way too much credit.

    I don't think they're nearly that clever or elaborately foresighted.

    So I'm just gonna go with Hanlon's Razor on this one.
    The probability that we are getting "the real low-down" on Twitter is approximate 0%. They had nearly a year to white-glove the offices and get their stories straight. So, while Hanlon's Razor is always on the table, it should be applied only after "un-distorting" the "facts" we're being "given" here. Musk is no Lone Ranger, he has children, which means he can be made to play ball with the mafia DC Establishment, which means that these dumps are only the tip of the iceberg, the tip they were least worried about going public. Whatever was actually going on behind closed doors must have been far worse.
    Jer. 11:18-20. "The Kingdom of God has come upon you." -- Matthew 12:28

  18. #165
    Twitter said to have suffered data breach as hackers expose 235 million users' information -- Data dump contains users' names, e-mail addresses, screen names, number of followers and phone number

    Obviously, this has nothing to do with Musk threatening to dump the Fauci Files.
    Jer. 11:18-20. "The Kingdom of God has come upon you." -- Matthew 12:28

  19. #166
    Quote Originally Posted by ClaytonB View Post
    The probability that we are getting "the real low-down" on Twitter is approximate 0%. They had nearly a year to white-glove the offices and get their stories straight. So, while Hanlon's Razor is always on the table, it should be applied only after "un-distorting" the "facts" we're being "given" here. Musk is no Lone Ranger, he has children, which means he can be made to play ball with the mafia DC Establishment, which means that these dumps are only the tip of the iceberg, the tip they were least worried about going public. Whatever was actually going on behind closed doors must have been far worse.

  20. #167
    Quote Originally Posted by ClaytonB View Post
    Twitter said to have suffered data breach as hackers expose 235 million users' information -- Data dump contains users' names, e-mail addresses, screen names, number of followers and phone number

    Obviously, this has nothing to do with Musk threatening to dump the Fauci Files.
    "Hackers".
    "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.

  21. #168
    [The Twitter Files: index of posts]

    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
    https://taibbi.substack.com/p/capsul...of-all-twitter
    Matt Taibbi (04 January 2023)

    It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

    In order, the Twitter Files threads:

    [...]

    GLOSSARY OF “TWITTER FILES” TERMS

    [...]

    This page will be kept open and updated as needed. If you have questions about terms, please send them to taibbi@substack.com



  22. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  23. #169
    Twitter Files Part 12 PDF: https://files.catbox.moe/b7132b.pdf
    Twitter Files Part 13 PDF: https://files.catbox.moe/vllgp3.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

  24. #170
    How to Take the Twitter Files to Court
    File a class action against federal agents seeking an injunction against social-media censorship efforts.
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-...ch-11672846719
    [archive link: https://archive.ph/2246X]
    Jed Rubenfeld (04 January 2023)

    Elon Musk says the Twitter Files prove a profound and systematic violation of the First Amendment. Commentators on the left insist they’re a “nothingburger.” This dispute ought to be resolved in court. But how?

    The wrong way would be more First Amendment lawsuits against Twitter by targets of censorship such as journalist Alex Berenson. Mr. Berenson was suspended in 2021 for disputing public-health orthodoxy about Covid vaccines. Although Twitter reinstated Mr. Berenson’s account before Mr. Musk took over the company, a judge dismissed the First Amendment claim without even allowing discovery, declaring it “implausible” that the federal government was heavily involved in the company’s censorship decisions. That assumption was wrong. We now know that federal agencies were deeply enmeshed in Twitter’s censorship, from high-level policy making to targeting specific posts.

    But because of two recent developments, there are no real remedies available to a plaintiff in such a case. First, a Supreme Court decision, Egbert v. Boule (2022), virtually guarantees that a plaintiff in these circumstances couldn’t recover monetary damages. Second, Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter precludes injunctive relief. If the company no longer works with federal agents to censor speech and is welcoming back the past targets of such censorship, there’s nothing to enjoin.

    Instead, Twitter users—including but not limited to those targeted for censorship—should bring a class action against the government agents involved in the censorship.

    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 [see this thread - OB], and preliminary discovery has added more evidence of federal involvement in censorship at all major social-media companies. But a motion to dismiss is pending in that case, and it remains to be seen whether courts will find that state attorneys general have standing to press these claims. A user class action would overcome this difficulty too.

    That no monetary damages lie waiting explains why plaintiff class-action firms aren’t lining up to bring this litigation. But that shouldn’t deter intrepid public-interest lawyers who still believe in the First Amendment, few though they may be. (And if the plaintiffs prevail in a civil-rights case, their lawyers are entitled to attorney fees at market rates.)

    Let’s hope that proves incentive enough. The internet, as the Supreme Court has said, is the modern public square. The freedom of speech can’t survive in this country if the government is free to work with tech companies to control what can be said or seen in that square.

    Mr. Rubenfeld is a professor at Yale Law School and a First Amendment lawyer. He has advised numerous clients who have been censored online.
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-05-2023 at 01:57 AM.

  25. #171
    "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

  26. #172
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    ...Although Twitter reinstated Mr. Berenson’s account before Mr. Musk took over the company, a judge dismissed the First Amendment claim without even allowing discovery, declaring it “implausible” that the federal government was heavily involved in the company’s censorship decisions.
    ...
    How convenient. Seems legit.

    “Yo, judge, you got to dismiss my case, it’s like, you know, implausible that I did something wrong.”
    "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.

  27. #173
    Media Silent as Twitter Files Expose Flagrant Misconduct in Govt. & Journalism | SYSTEM UPDATE #15
    "On last night's @SystemUpdate_, we explored the full corporate media blackout on all revelations from the Twitter Files - insisting it's all trivial and from illegitimate journalists - while we reviewed the latest bombshells from Taibbi's reporting:" -- @ggreenwald
    https://rumble.com/v23wcgu-twitter-f...-campaign.html


    CLIP:

    CNN - complaining about Taibbi - declares itself one of the few "major credible news organizations"
    "CNN -- complaining that the Twitter Files only went to fake journalists who have no legitimacy (such as @MTaibbi) -- declared itself one of the few "major, credible news organizations." Serious question: by which conceivable metric is this true?" -- @ggreenwald
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDP8YE0BgZI
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-06-2023 at 02:35 AM.

  28. #174

  29. #175
    I'm sure the shredders and data scrubbers at Youtube, Facebook, Google, and the rest have been VERY busy lately.
    "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

  30. #176

    https://www.twitter.com/AGAndrewBail...68537021353986
    "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.



  31. Remove this section of ads by registering.
  32. #177

  33. #178
    Quote Originally Posted by CaptUSA View Post
    I'm sure the shredders and data scrubbers at Youtube, Facebook, Google, and the rest have been VERY busy lately.
    Such a shame. I was looking forward to the day where we can read their files. Guess we'll just have to hope that someone who works at those companies will have a change of heart and keep a copy so they can be released later.
    Last edited by Anti Globalist; 01-07-2023 at 06:37 PM.
    "Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration is minding my own business."

    Calvin Coolidge

  34. #179
    Did 'every conspiracy theory' about Twitter turn out to be... true?
    The internal company documents offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the federal agencies distorted the public debate on one of the world's largest social media platforms.
    https://rumble.com/v24oead-did-every...e...-true.html



    Did 'Every Conspiracy Theory' About Twitter Turn Out To Be True?
    The internal company documents offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the federal agencies distorted the public debate on one of the world's largest social media platforms.
    https://reason.com/video/2023/01/09/...ut-to-be-true/
    Zach Weissmueller & Regan Taylor (09 January 2023)

    The so-called Twitter Files [see HERE - OB], written by a group of independent journalists given access to internal company documents, offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at how the federal government shaped the flow of information on one of the world's largest social media platforms.

    Some tech pundits say that the Twitter Files contain no secrets: they knew about the thousands of takedown requests the company receives every month from law enforcement agencies and the courts, or they had already opined about the immense challenges of content moderation. However, the Twitter Files have brought important new information to light. They show that the company stifled debate over important policy issues by shadowbanning certain accounts for no good reason and then misleading the public. They show that Twitter was routinely strongarmed by the White House and the FBI into complying with frivolous takedown requests. And they provide evidence that the intelligence community likely influenced the decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story during Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign.

    "Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true," Elon Musk said on the All-In podcast in late December. "Is there a conspiracy theory about Twitter that didn't turn out to be true?"

    Conspiracy theorists are often sloppy with the facts and exaggerate what actually happened. But the information brought to light by the Twitter Files should be alarming to anyone who cares about free speech and a free society. Is the government meddling similarly with YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google search? How can we prevent the internet from becoming a centralized apparatus through which state actors shape and censor public debate? Here are three major takeaways from the Twitter Files:

    1. Twitter distorted the conversation and misled the public.
     
    Twitter had a system of "whitelists" that allowed its algorithms and human moderators to turn engagement dials up and down based on what a user said. It used this power to limit the ability of certain groups and individuals to reach an audience, including conservative commentator Dan Bongino, Stanford economist and medical school professor Jay Bhattacharya [see this post - OB], mRNA vaccine critic Alex Berenson, and the Libs of TikTok account. [see this post - OB]

    The company regularly tap-danced around the meaning of "shadowbanning" to maintain plausible deniability. In a 2018 blog post, Twitter's Trust and Safety team wrote, "We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile)."

    Needless to say, making Tweets so hard to find that digging through someone's profile is the only way to unearth them is what's commonly known as "shadow banning," or, as Twitter employees termed it with an Orwellian flair, "visibility filtering."

    The Twitter Files show that company staff became increasingly comfortable using these tools to manage the flow of information and political discourse around the 2020 election, regularly deploying filters to limit the visibility of Trump's tweets and many others pertaining to election results in the weeks preceding the January 6 riot and the decision to evict the president from the platform.

    Of course, Twitter is a private company, and it has every right to label the tweets of Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kuldorff as "misleading" when he tweets statements such as, "Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should."

    But Twitter is still worthy of our condemnation. Stanford physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya was shadowbanned despite being a respected epidemiologist from a prestigious university, and many of his warnings during the pandemic turned out to be correct.

    And you can acknowledge serious problems with the work of former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson—who, for instance, badly misinterpreted data to infer a spike in "vaccine-caused mortality"—while still believing it's preferable to have a public airing of controversial and deeply flawed arguments.

    A better way to deal with speech you disagree with is to respond to it, as Derek Thompson attempted to do in The Atlantic when he called Berenson "The Pandemic's Wrongest Man." Ironically, Twitter raised Berenson's profile by allowing him to inhabit the role of the oppressed truth-seeker.

    2. The government is secretly policing speech.
     
    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.

    3. Twitter permitted covert state propaganda on its platform.
     
    The U.S. ran sock-puppet accounts on Twitter and then may have tried to shut them down secretly when it looked like it was caught in the act.

    After Trump won the 2016 election, and Hillary Clinton blamed Russia for her loss, Congress began to focus intently on the role of foreign misinformation on the internet.

    Twitter began transparently labeling accounts associated with any government, whether it be a politician or a state-run media outlet. It also pledged to Congress to "rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations & deceptive propaganda."

    But apparently, that didn't always extend to propaganda disseminated by the U.S. government.

    As The Intercept's Lee Fang revealed [see this post - OB], the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) asked Twitter to "whitelist" several Arabic-language accounts spreading messages in support of the U.S.-backed Yemen War so that they would get the same special treatment that verified accounts receive. Twitter complied.

    One whitelisted account described "accurate" U.S. drone strikes that "only hit terrorists." At first, the accounts had an attached disclosure noting that they were linked to the U.S. government. But that disclosure was eventually dropped from many accounts, and at least one "whitelisted" government sockpuppet account used an A.I.-generated image as a profile picture.

    An internal email thread shows that the Department of Defense wanted to meet with Twitter's legal team in a secure facility. One member of Twitter's team speculated that the agency wanted to classify its work with Twitter to "avoid embarrassment." Baker suspected that the fake accounts were set up using "poor tradecraft" and that they want to wind down the operation without revealing the accounts' "connection to the DoD."

    So what should we demand of Congress in light of the Twitter Files revelations?

    Lawmakers should rein in the FBI and other executive agencies with stricter reporting requirements and defund any federal task force whose mission includes fighting the slippery concept of "misinformation." And yet that will probably never happen—the new omnibus bill just increased the FBI's funding. Unfortunately, if a tool of centralized speech control can be abused by a government, it's a virtual certainty that it will be abused eventually.

    We should follow the advice of Julian Assange and the cypherpunk movement that shaped his thinking, which maintains that technology, not government policy, is the only effective check on authoritarian tendencies in the long run.

    "You cannot trust a government to implement the policies it says it's implementing," Assange said in a filmed discussion with his fellow cypherpunks in 2017. "We must provide the underlying tools, cryptographic tools that we control, as a sort of use of force."

    The good news is that many people are gradually waking up to the dangers of allowing a company to maintain centralized control over public conversation. After Trump's de-platforming, many conservatives migrated to the encrypted network Telegram. Since Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, many progressives have joined the decentralized platform Mastodon. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has invested in Nostr, an open protocol that allows users to transmit a post over a decentralized network of relays using cryptographic keys. Dorsey and published an article calling for "a native internet protocol for social media," arguing that "Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control" and "moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice."

    And suppose Elon Musk wants to keep Twitter relevant and competitive in this continually fracturing landscape and live up to his promise of bringing more free speech to the platform. In that case, he will have to take these developments seriously and think about ways that Twitter 2.0 can avoid the fate of its predecessor by once again falling victim to state interference.

    He should aim to design a platform that makes this kind of meddling impossible so that we don't have to trust any tech executive, including Elon Musk, not to censor speech on behalf of the government.
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 01-10-2023 at 05:10 PM.

  35. #180
    Where they at Elon?!

    Jer. 11:18-20. "The Kingdom of God has come upon you." -- Matthew 12:28

Page 6 of 9 FirstFirst ... 45678 ... LastLast


Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 1
    Last Post: 06-06-2021, 01:57 PM
  2. Replies: 9
    Last Post: 04-18-2019, 11:35 PM
  3. Twitter files for IPO
    By jct74 in forum Economy & Markets
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 09-14-2013, 07:45 AM
  4. from Twitter: Fileserve deleting USA files, ending affiliate
    By cindy25 in forum U.S. Political News
    Replies: 20
    Last Post: 01-20-2012, 11:40 PM
  5. Replies: 15
    Last Post: 07-30-2011, 12:19 AM

Select a tag for more discussion on that topic

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •