Elon Musk’s sunlight on Twitter’s backroom censorship dealings has cast a black shadow upon the U.S. Government.
The revelations are called The Twitter Files, and I linked to the first two installments, tweetstormed last week by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, on Monday.
But Musk’s released information to his select set of journalists did not stop there.
The third set was also made public by Taibbi, and dealt with the company’s deliberations and politics of January 2021, and the banning of a sitting president — and Twitter’s most popular user — from the platform.
Michael Shellenberger had the honor of delivering to the public the fourth set, showing how Twitter executives changed policies and made up stuff on the fly to ban the aforementioned Donald J. Trump.
The fifth batch, ushered into our view by Bari Weiss, again, included an especially interesting tidbit: “Internal correspondence shows those assigned to evaluate Trump’s tweets didn’t see proof of incitement of the Capitol riot” but “[t]hat didn’t stop for massive internal calls to ban the president” — quoting The Daily Mail’s synopsis.
“Between January 2020 and November 2022,” Taibbi tweeted in the sixth outing, “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.” Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” team appeared to go out of its way to find excuses to ban accounts, and is egregiously misnamed.
Michael Shellenberger’s contribution in the seventh Twitter File blast is perhaps most shocking of all:
- The FBI was deliberately lying about the status and contents of the Hunter Biden laptop before as well as after the infamous (and suppressed) New York Post story.
- The FBI “wargamed” about the laptop with social media executives before the story broke.
- The FBI “compensated” Twitter for the collusion — to the tune of over $3 million.
- And the FBI apparently has not stopped — its work with Twitter is ongoing.
To top it all off, Lee Fang supplied the eighth set, complete with poop about Pentagon pressure, propaganda, and “concierge service.”
In sum, the federal government made Twitter its b … uh … disinformation agent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Yes, Virginia, “twitterpated” is a word!
Illustration created with DALL-E2, John Tenniel, JG
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1 reply on “Twitterpated by the Feds”
Unfortunately, nothing will ever come of it.