I & I Editorial Board“No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer, you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” — M. Stanton Evans
For years Twitter denied that it targeted conservatives, despite piles of evidence to the contrary. But who could have imagined that Twitter had been working hand-in-glove with leftist officials in the federal government to silence speech they didn’t like. If Twitter was this bad, imagine what true tech giants like Facebook and Google have been up to.
As conservative paragon M. Stanton Evans rightly observed, whatever you think, it will likely turn out to be far worse.
The revelations that have been emerging over the past month from Twitter’s once-hidden corners – courtesy of Elon Musk – are being greeted with shrugs by reporters and editors who used to care about free speech. For everyone else, each layer uncovered by the Twitter files is worse than even its fiercest critics on the right had imagined.
Matt Taibbi, who is one of the few honest journalists left, has been on top of this from day one, and recently put together a compendium of what we’ve learned about a company that claimed its mission was to give people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
The first batch exposed the internal machinations over Twitter’s decision to blacklist the New York Post’s explosive Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 elections. Much of that was already known.
The second batch showed that Twitter was in fact shadowbanning people – despite repeated claims to the contrary. “Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user,” Taibbi notes, including a “Search Blacklist,” a “Trends Blacklist,” and a “Do Not Amplify” setting.
Next, we learned that Twitter “Trust and Safety” head Yoel Roth “not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence” and got an insider’s view of how Twitter changed its rules and ignored concerns of several staffers to ban President Donald Trump.
It gets worse as we started to learn the extent to which the federal government had effectively privatized its censorship operations.
As Taibbi notes, “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was ‘constant and pervasive,’” and it “was compensated for ‘processing requests’ by the FBI” to the tune of millions of dollars. It “directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from ‘Other Government Agencies,’ i.e., the CIA.”
Other batches of documents show how Twitter caved to pressure from Congress and the media to produce material “showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform,” and “took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.” (Paul is a former colleague of ours from Investor’s Business Daily who has contributed to Issues & Insights.)
Incredibly, instead of celebrating this rare insight into a major corporation’s decision-making process, and demanding similar accountability from Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the rest, the mainstream press has either ignored the story, downplayed it as meaningless, or focused on Musk’s management of the company.
And the miscreants on the left, who back in the day would have been apoplectic about a giant company working with the FBI and CIA to censor Americans, have been busy calling Musk a racist and wondering if they should sell their Teslas.
We don’t know where this story will go from here. But one thing we are certain of is that we will inevitably find out that it’s worse.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Matt Taibbi
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Would you call Twitter a de facto government psy-ops agency? Or a subcontractor working for the government? Makes sense that the major media and the leftists in general ignore the story, as they are also de facto government/Democrat party agents on the same payroll. Most likely, because “Intel agencies have Seven Ways From Sunday” to screw their opponents, not even congress will go beyond what is already known from Twitter. Even if some Edward Snowden style informant makes manifest the CIA, NSA, FBI et al. workings with Fakebook & Google, the response will most likely be a big yawn. Even Operation Prism, the funneling of all fiber optic data to the NSA via the telecomms remains relatively unknown to the public despite its revelation.
When confronted with the Twitter files, the FBI response was that this was business as usual and extended similarly into Corporate America, the universities and every other conceivable entity. Is real Congressional investigation even possible in a police state of this magnitude with broad cancel culture powers? The architects of the USA Patriot Act included paid consultants such as the head of the Soviet KGB and East German STASI head honcho, Marcus Wolf. USA.gov learned totalitarian methodology from the best of the communist police states. Trump is being used as a warning example to anybody challenging Deep State/establishment agendas. Even a DeSantis will have to fall in line or be brought down. The Democrats are masters of the police state, and even lawyers are brought down and disbarred when they try to represent challengers. Cancel Culture is the terra cognita of the USA police state.
The reason the Left hates Elon Musk so much is because his purposeful purchase of Twitter proved – with copious receipts – what has become an adage written by M. Stanton Evans that “No matter how bad you think things are, if you look closer, you’ll inevitably find it’s worse.” We knew Twitter was a putrid pile of leftist offal, but Musk had the effrontery to go and prove it beyond any doubt at his own enormous expense and by so doing jeopardize by projection a paragon of the left, the Tesla. They thought he was one of them. To true believers, real hate is reserved most for heretics.
The government of the United States of America has violated the constitutional rights of its citizens. You can point fingers at Twitter, Facebook and Google but the common denominator is the US government infringing on the rights of all the people regardless of whether they used these social media platforms. The government needs to answer to the people for these infractions.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the amount of chicanery and evil being done to We the People by our own government. All the alphabet agencies and departments work together to make our lives miserable.
The key that people still seem to be missing is that the problem was that the government was censoring Twitter. Twitter wasn’t doing the censoring.
Twitter was indeed doing the censorship, and was in some ways like a USA government subcontractor. The USA government did not have the means to directly do the Twitter censoring or account bans itself. Thus, the USA government had to act via “persuasion” and embedded stooges (e.g. ex-FBI lawyer James Baker and Fauci’s daughter) to do the actual dirty work of censorship and banning accounts. Plus, the USA government paid Twitter money for its censorship work. A case can thus be made that Twitter was like a censorship prostitute for hire.
Fauci/CDC had a direct line to Fauci’s daughter embedded in Twitter as an employee to carry out Fauci/CDC directives to ban doctors and scientists with differing COVID and vaxx viewpoints. Twitter’s mostly anti-conservative employees were very predisposed to censorship. It did not take much effort, just a gentle nudge, for FBI lawyer James Baker embedded as a Twitter employee to get Twitter to do what the DNC-controlled FBI brass wanted. Similarly, the DNC and Dem-White House had direct lines to submit censorship requests to a compliant Twitter. If the CIA and NSA connections to Fakebook and Google ever see the light of day, a similar story of embedded “former” CIA/NSA personnel directing search algorithms, censorship, bans, and shaping propaganda narratives is likely to emerge.
>>’A case can thus be made that Twitter was like a censorship prostitute for hire.'<<
The better case is made that Twitter was like a galley slave forced to row for its master.
Galley slaves are forced against their will and are not paid. The Twitter employees openly said they were opposed to free speech, and unlike slaves were compensated lavishly. More like high-paid prostitutes than slaves, IMHO. They were also censoring and banning many accounts on their own just because they felt like it, with no government prodding because they were given the unchecked power to do so. They could have walked away, gone public, etc. There were no chains. They did what they did because they loved doing it; and many quit when Musk removed their censorship powers.
>>’Galley slaves are forced against their will and are not paid.'<<
"Big Tech" execs are often hauled before Congress (and not paid for it) to be threatened with government punishment/regulation.
Very true: While GOP sits silently, congressional Democrats threaten and cajole, and big tech execs carry out censorship that they are ideologically predisposed to do anyway. An example of Big Tech’s ideological predisposition: Fakebook/Meta’s Zuckerberg went beyond censorship and banning of Trump and conservatives, spending $500 million in key states to defeat the GOP in 2020. Congress will have hearings and pass laws saying government officials cannot call Big Tech with censorship requests. The Dems/DNC, who are behind the government censorship requests, will then simply direct 3rd party operatives to do it (much like Hillary/DNC paid a law firm to pay Fusion GPS et al. to create the phony Steele dossier linking Trump and Russia). This is not about government per se, it is about a communist-style totalitarian ideology being imposed upon the USA.
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Twitter has never had the kind of power that is necessary for censorship. The government cannot 'give away' that power.
This particular discussion is censorship — which is probably the key ingredient to the Republican/Democrat drive toward imposing totalitarian government in the USA.
Private people and groups are being falsely accused of “censorship” in order to justify more government controls on our economy (including actual censorship).