The Twitter Files: Consolidated Thread

[maybetoday]

Twitter Employees Cheered When President Trump Was Kicked Off Their Platform as Khomeini and Other Tyrants Remain – Same People Cheered BLM Violence

By Joe Hoft

Published December 12, 2022 at 6:40pm


Twitter employees cheered when President Donald Trump was kicked off their platform. At the same time, Twitter kept Iran’s Khomeini on the platform and backed BLM’s destruction of American cities.



Tonight Twitter reported that the day President Trump, arguably their greatest user ever, was kicked off their platform, employees throughout their company cheered.

The platform was so far left-leaning that they had lost all ability to be honest about what they were doing to censor pro-America speech on their site. The far-left anti-American pro-communist agenda had taken over Twitter.



The site kept radical murdering leaders around the world on their site but was ecstatic when their greatest tweeter ever was kicked off.

Twitter also did little to censor the BLM riots in the summer of 2020.


One Twitter user shared the following tweet this evening. It lays it all out.

Let’s hope the new Twitter team is more honest, objective and knowledgable than the old one.

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[Honoria]

Twitter Files: Donald Trump Was Blacklisted Despite Being Cleared by ‘Trust & Safety’ Review Team


ALLUM BOKHARI
12 Dec 20222,045

4:11

The latest installment of the “Twitter Files,” a series of disclosures lifting the curtain on Twitter’s internal wrangling ahead of controversial censorship decisions, reveals more details on the decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform in January 2021.



The disclosures, given to former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, reveal that members of Twitter’s Trust & Safety department did not believe that the former President violated any rules on the day that he was banned, only for this determination to be overruled following an intervention by arch-progressive Vijaya Gadde.



The disclosures also reveal that CEO Jack Dorsey was involved in the decision to suspend Trump’s account, putting an end to longstanding rumors that Gadde had taken the decision herself while Dorsey was on vacation and unreachable.



But these employees were drowned out by a louder chorus, which demanded, among other things, that Twitter should view Trump as the “leader of a terrorist group.”



On January 8, Donald Trump posted two tweets, which some Twitter employees attempted to characterize as “incitement.”

The tweets were as follows:

The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!



To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.



Even Twitter’s trust and safety department, notorious for being run by far leftists, concluded that neither of these tweets violated the platform’s terms of service.



Anika Navaroli, a Twitter policy official, told employees on Jan 8 that the trust and safety department had “assessed the DJT Tweet above and determined that there is no violation of our policies at this time,” referring to Trump’s tweet about the “75 million great American Patriots.”



The second tweet was also deemed to be a “clear” non-violation of policy. “It’s just to say he’s not attending the inauguration,” said a staff member.



Shortly after this determination by the trust and safety review team, arch-progressive Vijaya Gadde intervened in the discussion to question if, while Trump’s earlier tweet was “not a clear violation on its face,” could be interpreted as “coded incitement to further violence.”



In her Twitter thread revealing the disclosures, Weiss noted that other current and former heads of state had been allowed to remain on the platform despite far more clear-cut violations of Twitter policy.



These included direct incitements to violence, including a former Malaysian Prime Minister who said Muslims had a “right” to kill “millions of French people for the massacres of the past,” and the current Ethiopian Prime Minister’s 2021 call for Ethiopian citizens to take up arms against the country’s Tigray minority.

Following the intervention by Gadde, employees on Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team,” said that the tweet may be a violation of policy if “great American Patriots” was interpreted as a reference to the rioters who committed illegal acts.



Yet just a day earlier, then-President Trump had condemned violent acts at the Capitol, calling it a “heinous attack.”



Two hours after the scaled enforcement team suggested their new interpretation of Trump’s tweets, Twitter executives hosted a 30-minute all-hands meeting in which Dorsey and Gadde took questions about why Trump wasn’t banned yet.



Following this meeting, and amid continued backlash from employees who were angered that Trump had yet to be suspended, Dorsey appeared to cave, requesting language to publicly explain a suspension of Trump’s account.



One hour after Dorsey requested this language, Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”



Inside Twitter, celebrations erupted.

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[maybetoday]

Elon Musk Reacts After “America First Legal” Uncovers Damning Evidence Revealing a Secret Twitter’s “Partner Support Portal” Used by Government to Censor Dissenting COVID-19 Viewpoints

By Jim Hoft

Published December 14, 2022 at 7:00pm


More damning evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to stifle free speech and censor the public was revealed in the fourth batch of explosive documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal (AFL).



Twitter allowed government officials and other “stakeholders” to use a secret portal called, “Partner Support Portal” to report anything they believed to be “misinformation.”



Previously, back in July 2021, TGP reported on Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and his investigation, where he uncovered Twitter’s “partner support portal.”



Dr. Shiva discovered that Twitter built a special portal offered to certain governmental entities so that government officials can flag and delete content they dislike for any reason, as part of what they call their “Twitter Partner Status.”



Now there is more evidence to back up this theory.


According to documents obtained by AFL, one government employee was enrolled in this Portal through their personal Twitter account.



Other publicly available documents indicated that Facebook had adopted a similar strategy for censoring content concerning rigged elections.



According to AFL, “This production also reveals that the U.S. government was actively working to “socially inoculate”–or brainwashing–the public against anything that threatened its narrative. It did so by using aligned Big Tech corporations to monitor and manipulate users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. For example, Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it bragged about censoring more than sixteen million “pieces of content” containing opinions or information the U.S. government wanted suppressed.”



“Finally, the documents reveal the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organization Mafindo” to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia that is funded by Google.”

From America First Legal:



GOOGLE HOSTS “TRUSTED MEDIA SUMMIT” FEATURING CDC EMPLOYEES:



In August 2021, the head of Google’s News Lab for the Asia Pacific region (“APAC”), Irene Jay Liu, emailed CDC Vaccine Confidence Strategist Elisabeth Wilhelm to invite her to the APAC “Trusted Media Summit.” (pg. 404)





CDC’s Vaccine Confidence Strategist then emailed the event planner for Google’s APAC Trusted Media Summit, noting her excitement over being invited to what she referred to as “the coolest misinformation fighting speakeasy.” (pg. 404)




She was then invited to the summit to give a keynote addressing how the CDC was working with WHO and other international organizations to address a so-called “infodemic” and using “social inoculation” to mitigate it. (pg. 425)





TWITTER’S “PARTNER SUPPORT PORTAL” FOR ONLINE CENSORSHIP:


On May 10, 2021, Todd O’Boyle at Twitter recommended Carol Crawford at CDC to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, which he described as “the best way to get a spreadsheet like this reviewed.” (pg. 183)

He also indicated that Tweets sent by Carol had either already been “actioned” and if they had not, he would ask the “team to review.”

Continued at link

[Berean]

'A Dark Alliance': Musk's Twitter Files Exposed The Fifth Estate

WEDNESDAY, DEC 14, 2022 - 11:40 PM

Authored by Mike Solana via PirateWires.com,



Dangerous alliance. In 1787, Edmund Burke said there were “Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there [sits] a Fourth Estate more important than they all." The notion of some vital power beyond our government was imported to the New World, and today constitutes a core belief of the American liberal: there is no free people, we’re often told, without a free press independent of congress, the courts, and our president. But throughout the 20th Century thousands of media outlets gradually consolidated, and by the dawn of our internet era only a few giants remained. These giants largely shared a single perspective, and in rough agreement with the ruling class the Fourth Estate naturally came to serve, rather than critique, power. This relationship metastasized into something very close to authoritarianism during the Covid-19 pandemic, when a single state narrative was written by the press, and ruthlessly enforced by a fifth and final fount of power in the newly-dominant technology industry.



It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.



A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and in a manner that influenced U.S. elections (!), Elon Musk opened his new company’s internal communications to a small handful of journalists. They set immediately to breaking a series of major stories that have rewritten the history of Trump-era tech. Long story short, Twitter leadership lied to the public, relentlessly, for years, and everything the most paranoid among us ever said about the platform was true. “Trust and safety” is a euphemism for political censorship, with “expert” teams comprised almost exclusively of the most radical, joyless grievance studies majors you ever met in college. Their goal is to reshape American politics by dominating the bounds of what the public is permitted to consider American politics. In these efforts, they have mostly been succeeding.



On December 2nd, Matt Taibbi shared conversations from the company’s “trust and safety” team that led to Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. While interesting, Taibbi’s most notable revelation came almost as a side: both major political parties, as well as the White House, maintained direct lines of communication with Twitter, which they used to formally request content be removed from the platform. The company responded enthusiastically to many of these requests, and the examples we have (for now) come from the Democratic Party. Critics have been quick to point out Trump was in the White House at the time, though less interested, for some reason, in what — if anything — he removed from the site.



On December 6th, Bari Weiss and her colleagues reported out proof of Twitter’s secret blacklists, in which both specific topics and, more problematically, people were de-amplified by the “trust and safety” team. The blacklisting was done for a nebulous host of reasons that generally amounted to something like ‘this feels dangerous.’ Danger was, of course, defined by partisan operatives, and exclusively targeted right-coded positions. Skepticism of radical gender ideology, distrust of public Covid policy, and almost anything having to do with the integrity of our last election were at the top of the list.



Separate from any opinion concerning whether such topics, or the purveyors of such topics, should have been “shadow banned,” the revelation that they were is immensely important on account of Twitter’s censors, with their many supporters in the press, have denied the existence of these tools for years.



Finally, over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming, which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done regardless of their own rules.



Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a portrait of clear and inevitable partisan bias at one of the most dominant speech platforms in history. A small handful of very left-wing executives, who naturally perceived most opinion right of center as dangerous, worked tirelessly to limit those opinions from view. Empowered to censor “unsafe” content, and protected by a team of people who shared their political orientation, the executives produced, in a legal and decentralized manner, a key component of our defacto state censorship apparatus. While we don’t know for sure this is also happening at Google, Meta, or TikTok (which is for some reason still allowed to operate in this country), I think it’s a safe bet we’re looking at an industry-wide affliction.



But I do have questions.



Where is the full list of shadow-banned accounts? Which political campaigns, specifically, communicated with Twitter, and what specifically was taken down? What about requests from foreign governments? What about requests from our own government? We need to know which of our government agencies, if any, had content removed from the platform, and we need to know the nature of this content. Taibbi alluded to Trump’s White House — did someone from the Trump administration request a takedown? Who made the request? Who received the request? Was it answered? What, if anything, was removed?



The Trump line of questioning is, in particular, something you might assume attractive to the media, which has waged all-out war on the populist clown king for the last seven years. Alas, the press seems broadly disinterested. Is this because they don’t believe the former president ever made such requests, or is their lack of interest rather stemming from a fear of validating a major story most of them are currently trying to frame — for their own obvious political reasons — as not worth reading?



A brief selection of positions from our cherished Fourth Estate: This entire story is a “dud” (The Washington Post) — no bombshells here! (Forbes). The Twitter Files, in which a handful of committed partisans enthusiastically censor large swaths of the conservative base, including a former president, actually prove the company was not politically biased. It is, however, now biased against Democrats (New York Magazine). Elon’s exposé is a flop that doesn’t matter. It has also placed multiple “trust and safety experts” in mortal danger (The Verge, predictably). Then, my favorite: it is good to finally see the blacklist tools I have been curious about for many years, which we have by the way always known existed, and therefore don’t matter (The Atlantic).



The charge of shadow banning evoked uniquely loud jeering from the press, including Charlie Warzel in particular, a man formerly of the position “Twitter isn’t shadow banning Republicans.” Now, in the face of evidence the company absolutely shadow banned Republicans, the official position is we are using the term “shadow ban” incorrectly.



It’s a game of semantics, in which the public is dragged through the exhausting, useless question of how much invisible speech suppression, precisely, constitutes a “real” shadow ban, rather than the glaringly important questions of both ethics and, frankly, safety. In the first place, is it right to run a decentralized censorship apparatus, and to make your rules invisible? In the second, what happens to a free country when the bounds of acceptable speech are set by a small cabal of unelected partisan cops? Because my sense is the answer isn’t “freedom.”



There have been a few notable, if cautiously dissenting opinions from prominent voices in media. Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos, the Los Angeles Times’ Jeff Bercovici, and the New York Times’ Mike Isaac all took somewhat risky positions in favor of transparency, apparently no longer in vogue among journalists, with Jeff explicitly acknowledging the important nature of the revelations. But I’ve only seen one actual piece, drafted and published by a reasonably mainstream media entity, embrace any aspect of the Twitter Files.



Anthony Fisher, an opinion editor at the Daily Beast, danced around the subject, and awkwardly tried to obscure his overall agreement the story mattered behind many paragraphs demonstrating his conservative-hating bonafides. But in addressing Twitter’s censorship he did include the following important line:



And that lesson is “Don’t trust (or demand) billionaire tech bros to be the arbiters of truth and news.”



It was a flashback to the position most journalists and activists shared in the days before Donald Trump. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before they realized they had a political ally in tech industry hall monitors, and set about a national power grab. In any case, if you were to strip the above position from all its obnoxious tribal language, it would really just be: no few people should control the bounds of acceptable discourse. I agree. But narrowly focused on the “tech bro,” the point not only betrays a bias, but misses a defining aspect of technology.



The Fifth Estate is a fundamentally different kind of power. It’s more difficult to consolidate than media, and more difficult to control than even our government divided by design. Its impact is also far more difficult to predict. This is because technology is above all things defined in terms of newness, which not only makes it disruptive of pre-existing power, but destructive of itself — a sort of anti-power that only guarantees change. The true failsafe. Our ultimate reset. Tremendously empowering of tyranny in times of stagnation, technology is also our most powerful weapon against tyranny in times of innovation.



While many tech giants have gone the way of media in consolidating power, centralizing, and aligning with the state, the future of technology is always change. From encrypted chats and blockchain to artificially intelligent search, every tech giant that amassed power over the last two decades will be facing existential threats in the years to come — not only from the government, but from the industry.



In terms of Twitter, Elon is already leveraging Fifth Estate properties, and not by employing current tools to amplify his own opinions (an emerging conspiracy). He is iterating product more rapidly than we’ve seen from any major, consumer-facing tech company in years. The trial and error here has largely been ridiculed by people who have never built a technology company. But while detractors are obsessed with his censorship abilities, Elon’s platform experiments are the things actually capable of root-changing the national discourse. The medium is the message, and the medium is evolving. Whatever works on Twitter will be cloned. The bounds of acceptable discourse will change, and none of this will have anything to do with Elon’s spicy tweets.



But about those spicy tweets —



As the former lords of Twitter descend into hysterics with outlandish comments declaring Elon a Nazi, or a proponent of the QAnon conspiracy, or whatever other bit of unhinged loser bullshit, he faces two significant threats. First, he’s clearly made an enemy of every other major fount of power, including in particular the Fourth Estate. This will impact all of Elon’s companies, as they all require support from the government and public, and the opinions of our government and public are still shaped, to a large extent, by the media. It’s no coincidence most powerful tech executives, from Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos to Jack Dorsey, share a carefully-crafted language of neutrality. This air of neutrality is how a king behaves, because the air of neutrality is how a king survives. In flaunting his power, rather than obscuring it, Elon is asking to be attacked, and his enemies are happy to oblige, even while more dominant platforms go unbothered.



Something like 80 million Americans are using TikTok, a company hopelessly compromised by the Chinese Communist Party. Do you even know the name of its CEO?


For a man who controls the bounds of acceptable speech for a third of the country’s adults, he sure doesn’t seem especially interested in speaking.



Elon’s second danger is the far more formidable danger of himself. What the Twitter Files prove beyond doubt is censorship in the age of social media is power — a real and dangerous power that corrupts.



Last year, Dorsey appeared before Congress, and declared neither he nor anyone else, and certainly not anyone in government, should be allowed to set the bounds of acceptable speech for the entire country. But with no viable alternative, someone does need to bear the ring. In leaked texts from the recent Twitter legal saga, it’s clear Jack believed Elon a worthy steward of this tremendous power, and, for what it’s worth, I agree. But provided the nation remains free, the rules of the Fifth Estate are immutable. Power comes in dramatic upward swings, and resets the status quo. It will not — it can not — last forever. So change the world, but be mindful of temptation, and make good use of your god mode powers while you have them. Because they never last forever.

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[Midnight]

Jack Dorsey Takes Blame for Twitter’s Failures: ‘This Is My Fault’

Frank BergmanDecember 14, 2022 - 2:31 pm


Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has accepted the blame for the company’s failures, declaring “this is my fault.”



Writing in a Tuesday blog post, Dorsey took responsibility for the mess that new boss Elon Musk inherited at Twitter.



Dorsey says that he took his hands off the wheel when a big investor tried to oust him from the social media company that he co-founded.



Musk, who took over the company in late October after buying it for $44 billion, has been exposing disturbing evidence of Twitter’s censorship practices.



The “Twitter Files” has revealed how Twitter’s ultra-woke senior managers worked with the FBI to silence conservatives and potentially affect the 2020 presidential election.



The public cleansing has confirmed the suspicions of conservatives, who had long believed they were “shadow-banned” or stifled on the platform.



However, Dorsey has always insisted that they were not.



Dorsey even testified before Congress to claim that conservatives were not “shadow-banned” by Twitter, which has now been confirmed to be false.



Now Dorsey says platforms such as Twitter must resist trying to control the public conversation and rely on “algorithmic choice.”



He says that the whims of individuals should not be used to moderate extreme content.



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“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” Dorsey wrote.



“This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020.”


The investor that Dorsey refers to is believed to be the hedge fund Elliott Management.



In 2020, the firm bought a big chunk of Twitter stock and then began trying to oust Dorsey as CEO.



Dorsey finally did step down as CEO in November of 2021.



His resignation came more than a year after the platform had suppressed the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story and well after it banned then-President Donald Trump.



Among Musk’s new revelations is evidence that shows Trump had not explicitly violated any of Twitter’s rules.



Twitter’s former executives changed the company’s policy and twisted hidden meaning into Trump’s posts that didn’t exist so they could justify banning the sitting president.



Elliott sold off all of its stake in Twitter for a hefty profit after Musk initially agreed to buy the company in April, according to the Financial Times.



Dorsey wrote that he regretted that Twitter tried to manage what people said on the platform under his leadership.



“The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves,” he wrote.



“This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets).”



Dorsey said that, under his leadership, Twitter grew to have too much power and lamented the decision to ban Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 riots.



“I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account,” he wrote.



“As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society.”



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[schwartzie]

Documents Uncover Secret Twitter Portal US Government Used To Censor COVID-19 Content


THURSDAY, DEC 15, 2022 - 07:00 PM

Authored by Patricia Tolson via The Epoch Times 

New documents reveal how the United States government used a secret Twitter portal to censor COVID-19 content that contradicted the government’s narrative.



In its ongoing probe into Twitter’s censorship practices, America First Legal has obtained a fourth set of documents (pdf) exposing a secret Twitter portal, which U.S. government officials used to censor dissenting COVID-19 views in violation of the First Amendment. It’s a revelation Elon Musk described as “extremely concerning.”

The documents reveal that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was collaborating with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Mafindo to mitigate “disinformation.”







Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia that is funded by Google, known to have censored searches for keywords like Coronavirus, and COVID-19 as well as blocking information regarding adverse reactions and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines. Facebook started its third-party fact-checking program in 2016, working with fact-checkers from around the world who are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter to rate and review the accuracy of the content on their platform. According to the IFCN website, they believe “nonpartisan and transparent fact-checking can be a powerful instrument of accountability journalism.” However, among their advisory board, U.S.-based representatives appear to be from liberal-leaning outlets such as the Washington Post and PolitiFact, which is owned by Poynter.



The Twitter Portal

On March 10, 2021 email from a US Public Policy employee at Facebook to several CDC employees spoke of the social media giant’s “weekly sync with CDC” and how the CDC was “to invite other agencies as needed.”



A March 24, 2021 email from the same Facebook employees to CDC employees said “this is my regular FB meeting and they would like to discuss 2 misinformation topics” and “misinformation that was removed.”



On May 10, 2021, a Twitter employee recommended to a CDC official to enroll in Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, which he described as “the best way to get a spreadsheet like this reviewed.”



On May 11, 2021, the CDC official enrolled her personal Twitter account into Twitter’s Partner Support Portal, which allowed “a special, expedited reporting flow in the Twitter Help Center.”


A May 19, 2021 Facebook Community Standards manual reveals how the company works with lawmakers and legal council as well as human rights activists in developing policies in their goals of “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” while “combatting COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation” and “overcoming global challenges in vaccination.” Methods used to accomplish this included removing “false information that has been debunked by public health experts” and rejecting ads that violate their policies, “including those that discourage vaccination.” They also reduced the distribution of “misleading claims rated by independent fact-checkers.”



Removed Content

Posts that Facebook would delete—which the CDC or any other public health authority deemed as “false and likely to contribute to imminent violence of physical harm”—included:



Claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the common flu or cold.

Claims that COVID-19 cannot be transmitted in certain climates, weather conditions, or locations.

Claims that for the average person, something can guarantee prevention from getting COVID-19 or can guarantee recovery from COVID-19 before such a cure or prevention has been approved.

Claims that COVID-19 tests cause cancer.

Claims about the availability or existence of COVID-19 vaccines.

Claims about the safety or serious side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.

Claims about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines.

Claims about how the COVID-19 vaccine was developed or its ingredients.

Claims involving conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines or vaccine programs.

Content deemed to have been “debunked” included among other things, “vaccines cause the disease against which they meant to protect, or cause the person to be more likely to get the disease,” that “natural immunity is safer than vaccine acquired immunity,” and “vaccines are not effective to prevent the disease against what they purport to protect.”



Repeat offenders would face restrictions “including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations” or removal from the site.



These punishments were conducted despite evidence that the vaccines do not prevent transmission, that vaccines cause adverse effects and even death, and that more vaccinated people are now dying than unvaccinated. Even the CDC admitted in June that vaccinated people could contract the disease again.



‘The Coolest Misinformation Fighting Speakeasy’

In August 2021, the head of Google’s News Lab for the Asia Pacific region (APAC), emailed a CDC Vaccine Confidence Strategist to invite her to the APAC’s “Trusted Media Summit.” The CDC’s vaccine confidence strategist then emailed the event planner for Google’s APAC Trusted Media Summit, noting her excitement over being invited to what she referred to as “the coolest misinformation fighting speakeasy.”







The same CDC employee was then invited to the summit to give a keynote addressing how the CDC was working with WHO and other international organizations to address a so-called “infodemic” and using “social inoculation” to mitigate it.



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[maybetoday]

FBI Responds to Twitter Files, Pt. 6 – Shows Their Utter Contempt for the American People and First Amendment Law

By Jim Hoft

Published December 16, 2022 at 9:57pm


Elon Musk’s Twitter Files part 6 was released on Friday.



Journalist Matt Taibbi released part 6 dubbed Twitter, The FBI Subsidiary.

The latest release from Twitter on thier private communications reveals the FBI communicated regularly with the social media giant to regulate, censor and blacklist conservative voices in America.



FBI agents communicated regularly with Twitter brass and requested accounts be taken down and removed from the public forum. The Gateway Pundit was removed in February 2021.



The FBI frequently recommended that content moderators look into specific tweets and take action against them if they violated misinformation policies. Many of these tweets were from users with very low follower counts who had engaged in satire or humor.


The latest release also reveals that the FBI had 80 agents working “to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.” And to target anyone questioning the 2020 election results.


The FBI on Friday released a statement following the damning Twitter Files release, via FOX News.



“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”



It was another arrogant statement that shows their utter contempt for the American public.



How many of the thousands of conservative accounts that were taken down were promoting “subversive, covert or criminal activities”?



What utter bullsh*t.





On Friday night Attorney Jonathan Turley weighed in on the smug response from the FBI to this explosive document release.



Jonathan Turley: “People still largely agree, I hope, that while the First Amendment applies to the government it also applies to agents of the government. So if the FBI uses a proxy, uses an agent like Twitter, it’s still censorship. It’s still a violation of the First Amendment.

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[Midnight]

Elon Just Suspended Twitter Accounts Of Major CNN, NYT Journalist After What They Did

by Kari Donovan

December 16, 2022

OPINION: This article contains commentary which may reflect the author’s opinion


CEO Elon Tusk has suspended a number of journalists for using their accounts to ‘dox’ him and expose personal information about his movements, just as Musk has been racing death threats for releasing the Twitter files, saying he had to make that move to protect his family.



“Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk suspended a number of journalists and the liberal commentator Keith Olbermann for reporting on an account that was tracking his private flights,” reported The Blaze, adding:



“The journalists were suspended Thursday evening after Musk said he would be seeking legal action against the college student who ran the tracking account over an incident where a “crazy stalker” accosted a car with Musk’s son inside.



“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info,” Musk explained. “Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”



Hours later, journalists lost access to their accounts.



Among those suspended were Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, and independent journalist Aaron Rupar.



Musk tweeted a series of tweets about the rationale for the suspensions.

“They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service,” he added in a second tweet.



Some critics of Musk pointed out that the action seemed very arbitrary and that it appeared hypocritical against his statements of commitment to free speech. Prior to acquiring Twitter, he said he would allow the account to continue posting his location information.



Then the leftist media got hurt feelings and didn’t care at all about Musk’s safety or the safety of his children, and responded.



“CNN Threatens To ‘Reevaluate’ Relationship With Twitter After Reporter Suspended,”

Daniel Chaitin reported, adding more details from the CNN report:



After one of its reporters was suspended on Thursday, CNN said it will “reevaluate” its relationship with Twitter depending on the explanation given for the suspension.



The statement was issued after CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan was also suspended, among other members of the media, amid a crackdown on those who track the location of private jets, including one owned by Musk.



“The impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising,” CNN’s communications team said in a statement.



“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses the platform. We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response,” the statement added.



“Statement on tonight’s suspension of CNN’s @donie O’Sullivan:” CNN Communications (@cnnpr) posted on Twitter on December 16, 2022.

Other reporters who cover Musk were also suspended on Thursday, including reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Intercept.



Twitter has not commented on any specific accounts as of press time. “Without commenting on any specific accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk,” Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, told The Verge.



O’Sullivan was suspended after posting a tweet about this claim, according to screenshots reported by The Washington Post.



“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted Thursday.



The Daily Wire reported on the situation and added more details:



“On Wednesday, Twitter updated its private information policy and suspended an account that used publicly available flight data to track Musk’s private jet, and Musk said in a tweet that a “crazy stalker” attacked a car in Los Angeles carrying one of his young children.



O’Sullivan was suspended after posting a tweet about this claim, according to screenshots reported by The Washington Post.”



According to the posts about the necessity of the new policy:



We’ve updated our Private Information policy to prohibit sharing someone else’s live location in most cases. Here’s what changed and why.



When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended.



You can still share your own live location on Twitter. Tweets that share someone else’s historical (not same-day) location information are also not prohibited by this policy.



Content that shares location information related to a public engagement or event, such as a concert or political event, is also permitted.



We’re committed to continuing to reduce safety risk on Twitter. Read the full policy here:

Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late October and has promoted the release of “The Twitter Files,” which have shown internal discussions about major decisions within Twitter before his takeover, including efforts to suppress certain accounts and posts.



In November, CBS News said it was pausing its activity on the platform “out of an abundance of caution,” only to resume posting a couple of days later.


link

[schwartzie]

The Censorship Disclosed in the Twitter Files Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

By Brian Lupo

Published December 17, 2022 at 1:20pm


With the recent release of “Twitter Files 6,” avid Gateway Pundit readers and listeners of my podcast know that we have been discussing these very “portals” of government and non-profit censorship that have existed within Twitter and other social media platforms for non-profits like the EIP/CIS/EI-ISAC and government agencies to use for months in order to censor American citizens.



Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai has been talking about the EI-ISAC and CIS since early 2021 when he discovered these connections during his lawsuit against Massachusetts over his election “loss”. ToreSays has also been talking about the DHS contracts with the EI-ISAC/CIS for perhaps even longer.



Prior to Elon Musk spending billions to buy Twitter and passing this intel off to “blue checkmarks” to disseminate “credibly,” you may have looked at the above reporting as “conspiracy theory” or “fake news”. It’s not your fault. Many have been “programmed” to think that way: if it’s not on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, or any of the other Mockingbird Media outlets, it can’t possibly be real. Plus, those very same outlets were telling you that it was “disinformation.”



Well, it wasn’t.



Elon Musk has alluded that these “portals” are still open today, allowing the DHS and other federal agencies to dispel what they consider “mis- or disinformation” regarding COVID, elections, schools, etc simply by submitting a “ticket” through a contracted non-profit that we are paying with taxpayer funds to take away our First Amendment rights.




It wasn’t just the EI-ISAC or CIS though that were colluding with social media platforms and other cohorts alike to censor the American people during the 2020 election. There were household names as well. Non-profits most of us would recognize: Common Cause, the NAACP, Defending Digital Democracy, MITRE, the National Conference on Citizenship, but perhaps, most notably, the AARP.



The AARP? The retirement organization?? Yes, the American Association of Retired Persons. According to the EIP’s Long Fuse Report:



The AARP collaboration was maintained by the Center for an Informed Public and was notable because it involved empowering and training retired adults to identify false or misleading information as part of a “Factcheck Ambassador” training program. The EIP worked primarily with the Washington State chapter of the AARP, but informational training sessions were shared with other chapters around the country.



Continued at link

[shalom]

Twitter Files: FBI Kept Busy Censoring Conservatives Instead of Chasing Crooks
JORDAN DIXON-HAMILTON
16 Dec 2022

In the sixth installment of the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter had a “one-big-happy-family” partnership with the FBI to censor content on its platform.



Taibbi released the sixth installment of the Twitter Files document dump, which he dubbed “TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.”

“The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation,” Taibbi wrote.



For example, Taibbi revealed that former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth exchanged “over 150 emails” with the FBI between January 2020 to November 2022. Further, Taibbi noted that a “surprisingly high number” of the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter were “requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.”


The FBI’s involvement in combatting “misinformation” on social media platforms is a relatively recent development that stemmed from the Democrat narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.



Taibbi said the 2016 Russia collusion hoax was used as a “pretext for building out the censorship machine,” similar to how the September 11 terrorist attacks “inspired the expansion of the security state.”


As Breitbart News reported:



The Foreign Influence Task Force (FTIF) was created in the wake of the 2016 election.



This task force, wrote Taibbi, “swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.”



For example, a March 2021 email revealed that the FBI provided a senior Twitter executive with several “products” to be passed along to the rest of the team.



These “products,” were three Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bulletins that stressed “the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and ‘private sector partners,’” Taibbi reported.



One of the bulletins was titled “(U) Russian Malign Influence Use of Permissive Social Media Platforms.”



“We assess that Russian malign influencers probably will increasingly use US social media platforms that offer more permissive operating environments,” the DHS bulletin stated.



However, Twitter’s contact with federal agencies did not stop with just the FBI. Several agencies, including the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and the DHS, had frequent contact with Twitter about the content posted on its platform.



In a September 2020 email sent by Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille to former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, a former top FBI lawyer, Cardille revealed she participated in monthly calls with “FBI, DOJ, DHS, ODNI, and industry peers on election threats.”



Cardille noted that the monthly calls with those agencies would “soon to be weekly.”



Cardille’s email also revealed that the FBI was “adamant” there were no “impediments with the ability of the government to share classified information or other relevant information with industry.”



“This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI,” Taibbi tweeted. “With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to ‘no impediments’ to classified information?”



As recently as November 6, 2022, the FBI’s “National Election Command Post” (NECP) urged Twitter to censor a long list of accounts, which included Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a conservative news outlet.



As Breitbart News reported:



In the email, dated November 6, 2022, the NECP gave its San Francisco field office a list of 25 accounts “being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election,” a list which included RSBN.



Some of the other accounts listed alongside RSBN included “@trump2017847791,” “@kag2020_2024,” and “@ronsmit49336969.”



As Taibbi noted, “many of the above accounts were satirical in nature,” and nearly all “were relatively low engagement.”



After Twitter received the FBI’s list of 25 accounts to review, the social media platform took action on 16 accounts, including permanent bans, temporary suspensions, or deleting tweets.



Twitter user “@lexitollah,” who had her tweets “bounced for civic misinformation policy violations” after the FBI flagged her account for review, argued the federal government infringed on her First Amendment right to free speech.



“My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?” the Twitter user told Taibbi.



In an email dated November 10, 2022, the FBI provided its “twitter contacts” with a list of four accounts they believed may have violated Twitter’s rules. Ultimately, Twitter suspended three out of the four accounts, with staffers reviewing the fourth account, “@fromma,” for any possible violation of the rules.



Looking closer, the “@fromma” account was a political satirist who jokingly tweeted, “I want to remind republicans to vote tomorrow, Wednesday November 9.”



Taibbi argued federal law enforcement should have used its resources to track down child sex predators or terrorists rather than mass-flagging social media posts.



“Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation,” Taibbi tweeted. “People should not be okay with this.”

Taibbi said he, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger “are moving into a variety of new areas now,” with more information about the previous Twitter regime to come “soon.”



link

[maybetoday]

Trump: FBI’s Relationship With Twitter “Coordinated Effort To Change Election Results”

By ProTrumpNews Staff

Published December 17, 2022 at 4:00pm


Twitter’s connection to the FBI has been exposed through the release of the Twitter files.



The FBI was in constant contact with Twitter – journalist Matt Taibbi said, “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.”



Twitter Thread:



The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.


Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.



Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.



Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.



Donald Trump reacted to Twitter files showing a relationship between Twitter and the FBI.



Trump called the relationship “a coordinated effort to change” the 2020 election results.



Truth Social:



This (the FBI’s wild and crazy relationship with Twitter) is absolutely a coordinated effort to change Election Results! Rachel Campos-Duffy…and it worked, but they got caught. This is why people protested in Washington. Our 2020 Presidential Election was Crooked, Rigged, and Stolen, and yet the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks & Thugs didn’t spend any time investigating this outrage!



The Gateway Pundit has called for all the Twitter files to be released.



TGP’s Joe Hoft has offered to vet the files.



The Gateway Pundit:



Taibbi wasn’t censored and suspended. TGP only yesterday received its Twitter account back (TGP’s Joe Hoft still doesn’t have his.)



Why doesn’t Twitter just release everything? Allow us to see the many actions taken by corrupt government and Twitter officials to curtail our free speech rights.



We’d be happy to vet that for Elon. It’d be an honor.



Trump was right!

link

[Midnight]

Twitter Files: FBI Targeted Right Side Broadcasting Network for Censorship Ahead of Midterms


ALLUM BOKHARI
16 Dec 2022

The FBI’s “National Election Command Post” (NECP) sent an email asking its San Francisco field office to pressure Twitter to censor the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a conservative news channel made popular by streaming Trump campaign rallies, two days before the 2022 midterm elections.



In the email, dated November 6, 2022, the NECP gave its San Francisco field office a list of 25 accounts “being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election,” a list which included RSBN.



The NECP asked the field office to coordinate with Twitter to “determine whether the accounts identified below have violated Twitter’s terms of service and may be subject to any actions deemed appropriate by Twitter.”



The National Election Command Post (NECP) is requesting assistance from SF regarding coordination with Twitter. Specifically, NECP has been made aware of tweets by certain accounts that may warrant additional action due to the accounts being utilized to spread misinformation about the upcoming election. Specifically, NECP is requesting the following:



Coordination between SF and Twitter to determine whether the accounts identified below have violated Twitter’s terms of service and may be subject to any actions deemed appropriate by Twitter.

The issuance of preservation letters regarding the accounts identified below in order to preserve subscriber information and content information pending the issuance of legal process.

Any location information associated with the accounts that Twitter will voluntarily provide to aid the FBI in assigning any follow-up deemed necessary to the appropriate FBI field office.

The emails came to light in another installment of the Twitter files. Elon Musk’s Twitter once again disclosed documents to a journalist, in this case Matt Taibbi, which shed light on the inner workings of censorship at the social media platform.

Taibbi dubbed this installment: “TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY.”



“Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” wrote Taibbi. “Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”

link

[schwartzie]

CNN's 'Twitter Files' coverage involving Hunter Biden laptop story has glaring omissions

CNN, like Twitter, suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News




CNN panel seethes over Musk not giving them Twitter Files: 'Not in the spirit of free speech'


CNN reporter Oliver Darcy trashed Elon Musk’s "Twitter Files" drop on CNN Thursday morning, reiterating claims they provide "no evidence" that Twitter worked with the government.



CNN has dedicated minimal coverage to Elon Musk's Twitter Files that have shed light on the controversial actions the tech giant made before the Tesla billionaire took over.



Of the seven on-air segments that have aired since journalist Matt Taibbi went viral with the first installment of the Twitter Files on Dec. 2, they largely attempted to downplay what was reported. CNN business correspondent Christine Romans suggested Twitter's efforts to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election was not actually about censorship and that Twitter simply aimed to be a "real arbiter of real information" and that the findings should be classified under "m for meh." She also attempted to characterize Taibbi by saying he, like Musk, is "another voice" rather than a journalist who has "disdained the mainstream media before." CNN tech reporter Brian Fung labeled Bari Weiss, editor of The Free Press who has also reported on the Twitter Files, a "former conservative columnist" while summarizing her findings.



CNN correspondent Donie O'Sullivan suggested the framing that conservatives were targeted by Twitter based on what was revealed in the Twitter Files is "selective" and even argued "people who have worked at Twitter at the time" would say action taken against users "who happen to be Republicans" were "often people sharing misinformation, disinformation or hate." O'Sullivan also attempted to frame the revelations as something "we actually knew about for the past few years" and are not "brand new."



On Thursday, O'Sullivan and CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy appeared on "CNN This Morning" to help CNN "examine the truth behind the ‘Twitter Files,'" particularly over Twitter's censorship of the Hunter Biden scandal.


Darcy prefaced the conversation by stressing how former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has already admitted it was a mistake for his company to censor the New York Post's reporting and summarized what was shared in the first installment of the Twitter Files was the "messy content moderation that was happening behind the scenes."



"I will say on this specific Twitter Files drop, I thought what was really noteworthy was that Elon Musk's hand-picked reporter Matt Taibbi said that there was no evidence of government involvement in trying to suppress this story and that was a big claim that Elon Musk had made earlier when he was hyping these Twitter Files. I think that’s very important to point out here," Darcy said.


Well, what Darcy's comments failed to address was the important context surrounding Taibbi's reporting.



Taibbi initially reported "Although several sources recalled hearing about a ‘general’ warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence - that I've seen - of any government involvement in the laptop story."



However, what Darcy did not mention to CNN viewers is that the first batch of Twitter Files were vetted without Musk's knowledge by Twitter's then-deputy general counsel Jim Baker, a former general counsel for the FBI and a former CNN legal analyst. Baker was subsequently fired by Musk.



So it is unclear whether Baker's involvement in vetting the Twitter Files led Taibbi to draw that conclusion and whether Baker omitted files that would have shown the federal government intervening in Twitter's suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. What is clear is that Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, meet weekly with the FBI, DHS as well as the office of the DNI throughout the 2020 election.


Throughout CNN's coverage of the Twitter Files, Baker's involvement in the Twitter Files was mentioned once, when citing Taibbi's reporting showing he was supporting of censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story despite any definitive evidence that it violated Twitter's "hacked materials" policy. CNN anchor Erin Burnett did not disclose to viewers that Baker was a former CNN legal analyst. Baker's firing did not receive any coverage on CNN, according to Grabien transcripts.


"CNN This Morning" co-host Don Lemon offered a frank assessment of the Twitter Files, telling Darcy and O'Sullivan "I honestly don't care," dismissing alleged suppression by pointing to the "loudest, craziest voices on Twitter who are not suppressed."



"Listen, no one has a right to be on Twitter, ok?" Lemon said. "You could be on Twitter or not be on Twitter. It's a private company. And, you know, they can set the rules that they want to set. I just feel like especially this whole Hunter Biden thing, it's like a Rorschach test for political like which side would you believe politically. So for me, it doesn't interest me in that way. But that's me being- I'm selfish."


Darcy went on to accuse Musk of being a "gatekeeper" of the Twitter Files, saying he's "not giving it to newsrooms" but rather "hand-picked journalists" instead.



But perhaps the biggest omission in CNN's coverage of the Twitter Files is the fact that CNN itself suppressed the Hunter Biden scandal during the 2020 election.


CNN was caught spiking the laptop story when it first broke, according to recordings obtained by Project Veritas that were released in December 2020.



"Obviously, we're not going with the New York Post story right now on Hunter Biden," CNN political director David Chalian said during a conference call on Oct. 14, the same day the Post published its first story on Hunter Biden's emails. Chalian later insisted the report was "giving its marching orders" to the "right-wing echo chamber about what to talk about today."


"The Trump media, you know, moves immediately from – OK, well, never mind – the [Michael Flynn] unmasking was, you know, found to be completely nonsensical to the latest alleged scandal and expects everybody to just follow suit," then-CNN president Jeff Zucker told his staff on Oct. 16. "So, I don't think that we should be repeating unsubstantiated smears just because the right-wing media suggests that we should."



Project Veritas releases another batch of damning CNN recordingsVideo

Such attitudes were translated by some of CNN's biggest talents.



"Bakari, the right wing is going crazy with all sorts of allegations about Biden and his family. Too disgusting to even repeat here," CNN anchor Jake Tapper told his Democratic colleague Bakari Sellers in October 2020. "I mean, some of the ones I've seen from the president's son and some of the president's supporters are just wildly unhinged."



"Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter attempted to cast doubt on the Post's reporting by stressing the involvement of Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, as well as questioning the legitimacy of John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repair store owner who first obtained Hunter Biden's laptop.


"There's a lot about this story that does not add up," Stelter told his viewers at the time. "And, I mean, for all we know, these emails were made up, or maybe some are real and some are fakes, we don't know. But we do know that this is a classic example of the right-wing media machine."



CNN ultimately authenticated emails from Hunter Biden's laptop in a report about his finances in July 2022.



Fox News Digital asked CNN whether the network should have disclosed to viewers it had suppressed the Hunter Biden story in 2020. Fox News also asked whether CNN should disclose Jim Baker's ties to the network and whether the network should inform its viewers about his firing from Twitter. CNN did not immediately respond for comment.


Matt Taibbi went viral with the first installment of the Twitter Files which focused on Twitter's internal discussions leading to it censoring the Hunter Biden scandal with some officials struggling to explain how it violated its "hacked materials" policies.



The second installment published by Bari Weiss revealed Twitter's "blacklisting" of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.



Internal communications also reveal Twitter staffers admitting that the popular account Libs of TikTok never violated its "hateful conduct" policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.



The third, fourth and fifth installments of the "Twitter Files" focused on the permanent suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot events in January 2021.



Taibbi reported how Twitter circulated election-related tweets from various users leading up to the 2020 election that were "flagged" by the FBI as being problematic.


Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed that Dorsey was phoning it in as he was on vacation while his deputies were pushing to deplatform Trump with Roth in particularly spearheading efforts to censor other users pertaining to tweets about the 2020 election.



On Monday, Weiss delved into the pressure Twitter management was facing from its employees who called for Trump's permanent suspension, though the Free Press editor also revealed several Twitter staffers who enforce policies did not believe Trump's tweets from Jan. 6 actually violated its rules.



However, it was Vijaya Gadde, then-Twitter's head legal chief, who asked if Trump's tweets could be "coded incitement to further violence." Moments later, the so-called "scaled enforcement team" suggested that based on how Twitter interprets Trump's tweets, it could violate the violence incitement policies.



Musk had been vocal about being transparent when it comes to Twitter's past and present actions curating content on the platform, including censored content.



link

[J.J.Gibbs]

TWITTER FILES Supplemental: How The FBI Bullied Twitter Over Lack Of 'Foreign Influence' Evidence

BY TYLER DURDEN

SUNDAY, DEC 18, 2022 - 06:30 PM


Journalist Matt Taibbi just dropped the latest series of ever-incriminating signals from The Twitter Files, with a supplement to his recent discussion of how Twitter became a de facto Ministry of Truth dissent-killer for The FBI.



As a reminder, this is the fourth topic released under The Twitter Files:



Part 1 - The Removal of Hunter Biden Laptop Story



Part 2 - Secret Blacklists



Part 3 - The Removal of Donald Trump (Parts 1, 2, and 3)



Part 4 - Twitter as an FBI Subsidiary (Part 1 and today's supplemental)



This supplemental to The FBI Subsidiary thread explains how the agency bullied Twitter into dismissing its own findings that "state propaganda" was not a thing on the platform and the stunningly circular media-to-govt agency-to-media circle-jerk that is mis-described as 'sources' for any and every rumor or narrative-confirming lie that is possible.



As Matt Taibbi writes at his Substack: On Friday, I posted a series of exchanges between Twitter and the FBI. One that required a bit too much explaining was left out. But it’s an important document, because it clearly demonstrates that Twitter will not only take requests from the government, it will even act quickly to align its analyses with its “partners.”

2. In July of 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan tells Twitter executive Yoel Roth to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), the inter-agency group that deals with cyber threats.








3.The questionnaire authors seem displeased with Twitter for implying, in a July 20th “DHS/ODNI/FBI/Industry briefing,” that “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.”








4 .One would think that would be good news. The agencies seemed to feel otherwise.



5.Chan underscored this:



“There was quite a bit of discussion within the USIC to get clarifications from your company,” he wrote, referring to the United States Intelligence Community.



6.The task force demanded to know how Twitter came to its unpopular conclusion.



Oddly, it included a bibliography of public sources - including a Wall Street Journal article - attesting to the prevalence of foreign threats, as if to show Twitter they got it wrong.







7.Roth, receiving the questions, circulated them with other company executives, and complained that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we'd get from a congressional committee than the Bureau.”



8.He added he was not “comfortable with the Bureau (and by extension the IC) demanding written answers.”



The idea of the FBI acting as conduit for the Intelligence Community is interesting, given that many agencies are barred from domestic operations.



9. He then sent another note internally, saying the premise of the questions was “flawed,” because “we've been clear that official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter.” Note the italics for emphasis.







10. Roth suggested they “get on the phone with Elvis ASAP and try to straighten this out,” to disabuse the agencies of any notion that state propaganda is not a “thing” on Twitter.



11. This exchange is odd among other things because some of the “bibliography” materials cited by the FITF are sourced to intelligence officials, who in turn cited the public sources.



12. The FBI responded to Friday’s report by saying it “regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”







13. That may be true, but we haven’t seen that in the documents to date. Instead, we’ve mostly seen requests for moderation involving low-follower accounts belonging to ordinary Americans – and Billy Baldwin.

link

[J.J.Gibbs]

Twitter Suppressed Early COVID-19 Treatment Information And Vaccine Safety Concerns: Cardiologist


SUNDAY, DEC 18, 2022 - 09:00 PM

Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times 


Thanks to Elon Musk, the public is now aware that Twitter suppressed early treatment options for COVID-19, and vaccine safety concerns, Dr. Peter McCullough alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14.


Further, thanks to the Twitter Files—a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Musk—the cardiologist said there’s proof that government agencies were working against him (McCullough) personally.



“I didn’t violate any of Twitter’s rules,” McCullough stated. “And what we’re learning is that secret emails between government agencies and Twitter were working to, in a sense, shadow-ban me, censor me, and inhibit my ability to exercise my rights to free speech and disseminate scientific information.”





Dr. Peter McCullough in New York on Dec. 24, 2021. (Jack Wang/The Epoch Times)

McCullough said Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a “welcome change,” especially for healthcare professionals like himself.



“Twitter had become an incredibly biased and censored platform, where the public knew they weren’t getting a fair, balanced set of information on a whole variety of developments—including the early treatment of SARS-COV2 infection and a balanced view of safety and efficacy of the vaccines,” McCullough claimed.



The cardiologist further claimed that he was censored and finally suspended for sharing scientific “abstracts and manuscripts,” which didn’t fit the accepted political view. Plus, McCullough remarked, he wasn’t the only doctor targeted.



Musk lifted the suspensions of McCullough and mRNA vaccine technology contributor Dr. Robert Malone—suspended from Twitter in 2021 after criticizing the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines—after completing his Twitter purchase.



Social Media and Censorship

According to McCullough, when a social media company has a COVID-19 warning or labels a post “misinformation,” that’s a sign of government censorship and control.



“Facebook, Instagram, and the other platforms. … Anytime a message is posted, and it says, ‘See the COVID information center,’ or it labels it ‘COVID misinformation,’ that actually indicates that there’s government interference. There’s government censorship going on,” McCullough asserted.



He added that when a user witnesses the above, they need to call out that platform. Moreover, McCullough believes there needs to be a “complete overhaul” of social media leadership and a “cleansing” of all forms of censorship on social media sites.





Facebook, Google, and Twitter logos are seen in this combination photo. (Reuters)

He said explicitly regarding healthcare that a past U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteed physicians free speech and medical authority, and social media platforms are violating that ruling.



“Physicians, including myself, our rights to free speech were guaranteed in a Supreme Court ruling. We have medical authority, and the public is looking to our analyses and our guidance through the rest of this pandemic.”



Drug and Vaccine Lies

Regarding the safety of vaccines and the pushback he received when he voiced his concerns, McCullough stated, “There is no drug or vaccine that is free of side effects. There’s no drug or vaccine that’s perfectly effective.



“So, when Americans were seeing advertisements that said ‘safe and effective,’ of course, immediately, we were jumping and making the case based on the peer-reviewed literature that that’s not correct.”



McCullough further noted that he and author John Leake have released a book called “The Courage to Face COVID-19″—detailing the true story of the “intentional suppression of early treatment [of COVID-19] by what we call the biopharmaceutical complex.”

link

[leilani]

FBI Gives Dismissive Reply to Twitter Files Revelations of FBI-Twitter Censorship

BY CATHERINE SALGADO 5:38 PM ON DECEMBER 17, 2022


Part Six of the Twitter Files was released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Twitter Dec. 16, revealing just how closely the platform worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to censor Americans prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” Taibbi tweeted.



As PJ Media’s Chris Queen reported, most FBI emails to the platform “consisted of requests for Twitter to review and take action on” election content that supposedly qualified as “misinformation.” However, the FBI seems distinctly unrepentant about its “master-canine” relationship with Twitter, where it would “pre-flag” content for moderation.



In response to the damning revelations, an FBI spokesperson gave the following exculpatory statement to Fox News Digital:



”The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”



This seems ridiculously insufficient to address the serious, potentially Constitution-violating actions revealed in the Twitter Files. According to Taibbi, Twitter and the FBI planned to have weekly meetings and coordinated to quash accounts whose humorous posts the government disliked. That’s hardly routine procedure.


In fact, Taibbi called the FBI statement “disingenuous on multiple fronts” in a Dec. 17 tweet and noted that “flagging the silly jokes of ordinary Americans with low follower counts” has nothing to do with crime, only with “domestic intelligence and opinion control.”

Taibbi later tweeted in an irritated response to a critic, “[E]arlier this year I interviewed an FBI agent literally pulled off a child exploitation detail to chase misdemeanor J6 cases. Here the point is agents flagging social media instead of real work.”



But apparently, the FBI considers censorship of Americans’ free speech to be vitally important work.

link

[schwartzie]

Twitter Files Part 7 Released: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop

By Cristina Laila

Published December 19, 2022 at 10:43am




This is a breaking story. Please refresh page as the Twitter thread unrolls.



Elon Musk’s Twitter Files part 7 was released Monday morning by Michael Shellenberger.



Part 7: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop

Recall, in Twitter files 6, we saw the constant contact the FBI had with Twitter.

“In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.” Michael Shellenberger said.


The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him.

By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time.



In early October, Giuliani gives it to the New York Post.



Continiued at link

[schwartzie]

Twitter Employed So Many ‘Former’ FBI Operatives That They Formed Their Own Private Slack Channel at Twitter

By Jim Hoft

Published December 19, 2022 at 12:50pm




There were so many ‘former’ FBI agents at Twitter that they had their own private Slack group.





On Monday independent journalist Michael Shellenberger published the latest Twitter Files release.



The latest release included several details on how the FBI worked with Twitter executives to ban any mention of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election.



Specifically, today’s release details FBI’s Elvis Chan relationship with Twitter’s Yoel Roth.


In today’s release we found out just how close the FBI was with Twitter. The social media giant had so many ‘former’ FBI agents employed at the company that the FBI agents started their own private Slack channel.


More than a dozen former FBI agents were employed at Twitter.



This included James Baker, one of the architects of Spygate. Baker was fired by Elon Musk at Twitter earlier this month for continuing to hide information from the American public on the dee state’s interference in the 2020 election and their campaign to silence conservative voices in America.



James Baker was certainly NOT acting like a former FBI employee while at Twitter.


More at link

[schwartzie]

After FBI Accused Of Biden Cover-Up – A New Report From Elon Musk Blows The Doors Wide Open

by Liza Carlisle

December 20, 2022


The discovery of Hunter Biden’s laptop at a repair shop began the information pathway to connections that are now just being realized by some. A timeline of events shows that the suppression of conservative voices, including that of the then-President of The United States, and the attacks on conservative Republicans, most notably Donald Trump, align with the attempts to silence and hide the information on the laptop.



When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he made a number of ground-breaking changes, but arguably the most impacting action he has taken is the release of the files recounting how the leaders at Twitter worked with the Biden administration to silence any voices or discussion about the laptop and the Biden family.



Becoming apparent is the fact that the FBI deliberately set out to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story before the story even became public knowledge—they did this through a targeted and concerted effort. That in itself is significant, but the consequences are massive.



A poll states that nearly 20% of Biden voters say that they wouldn’t have voted for him if they knew of the Hunter Biden laptop. That means that the FBI directly interfered in and successfully altered the results of the 2020 Presidential election.



The New York Post writes:



Nearly four of five Americans who’ve followed the Hunter Biden laptop story believe truthful coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.



Have any of those responsible for covering up the laptop story apologized for failing to do their job and verify the story when it mattered? Nope. Have the more than 50 former senior intelligence officials who signed a letter saying the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” issued a corrective statement, admitting their error? Again, no.



As Musk continues to release evidence of the relationship and initiative between the Biden administration and Dorsey’s Twitter, the story is aflame.



WeLoveTrump has been consistently reporting on this, but now that the story has blown open, connects the dots:





Intelligence and government agencies pose the greatest threat to America, domestically and internationally—the quicker we dismantle these agencies, the quicker we can restore confidence in our ‘democracy’.



…Perhaps it will come as a shock to the triple-masked and quadruple-vaxxed individuals running around in society…



Michael Shellenberger revealed the shocking files in this thread, enjoy:

Continued at link

[ExquisiteGerbil]

FBI got Top Secret clearances for Twitter execs to quash Biden story

Bureau had zero evidence of Russian 'disinformation'

Art Moore By Art Moore

Published December 19, 2022 at 2:32pm


The FBI worked with the intelligence community to pressure Twitter and other social media and news media to censor the New York Post's revelations of Joe Biden's knowledge of his family's influence-peddling operation while lacking any evidence of a purported Russian "disinformation" operation.



Factual information about the foreign business dealings was discredited by the FBI and the IC both after and before the Post's blockbuster Oct. 14, 2020, story, according to the seventh Twitter Files release, reported by journalist Michael Shellenberger on Monday.



Significantly, in July 2020, the FBI's Elvis Chan – assistant special agent in charge at the office in San Francisco, where Twitter is headquartered – arranged for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives to enable the FBI to share information about "threats" to the upcoming elections.



Further, the latest release of internal communications revealed, the FBI paid Twitter at least $3.4 million for its work.


Shellenberger recalled that Twitter Files No. 6, released Friday, showed the FBI had a system in place in which it had "constant and pervasive" contact with Twitter executives, acting as if it were a "subsidiary" of the social-media giant.


The seventh release recounts the FBI's involvement with the laptop, beginning in December 2019, when Delaware computer store owner John Paul Mac Isaac contacted the bureau after discovering evidence of criminal activity on Hunter Biden's abandoned machine. The FBI took the computer and launched an investigation. But by August, Mac Issac had not heard back from the FBI, and he emailed Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal lawyer at the time, who was under FBI surveillance. In early October, Giuliani gave the contents of the hard drive to the Post.



During all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Twitter to dismiss reports of the laptop as a Russian "hack and leak" operation, as Yoel Roth, head of trust and safety for Twitter at the time, stated in a sworn declaration in December 2020.



The FBI did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.



Yet, as Chan has admitted, the FBI warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation were not based on any new intelligence.


In fact, Twitter insisted publicly that there was no evidence to support claims by journalists of foreign influence on its platform.



It was after repeated pushback by Twitter regarding claims of foreign interference that Chan arranged for temporary Top Secret security clearances for Twitter executives so the bureau could share information about threats to the upcoming elections.



On Aug. 11, 2020, as Shellenberger reported, Chan "shared information with Roth related to the Russian hacking organization, APT28, through the FBI's secure, one-way communications channel, Teleporter."



When the Post published the laptop revelations Oct. 14, 2020, Roth said in an internal communication that the story "isn't clearly violative of our Hacked Materials Policy, nor is it clearly in violation of anything else," but he said "this feels a lot like a somewhat subtle leak operation."



Jim Baker – the former FBI attorney who was then Twitter's senior general counsel – replied to Roth, insisting the Hunter Biden materials were either faked, hacked or both, and violated Twitter policy.



However, Shellenberger observed it's inconceivable that Baker believed the messages on the laptop were either fake or hacked. The FBI had had possession of the laptop for 11 months, as documented by a subpoena.



It likely would have taken a few hours for the bureau to confirm that the laptop had belonged to Hunter Biden, wrote Shellenberger, arguing it took only a few days for journalist Peter Schweizer to do it.


Shellenberger cited a message from Baker reporting the FBI's payments for the use of Twitter staff time.



"I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!" he wrote in early 2021.


The pressure from the FBI on social media platforms continues, Shellenberger said.



In August 2022, he noted, Twitter executives prepared for a meeting with the FBI, whose objective was "to convince us to produce on more FBI EDRs," meaning emergency disclosure requests.



EDRs amount to a warrantless search.



At the White House on Monday, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked by Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich about the new revelations.


"The latest Twitter Files show that the intelligence community was actively involved in discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop story," Heinrich began. "Does it bother the president and those at the White House that a government agency like the FBI was involved in suppressing a legitimate news story?"



"Again, "I'm just gonna refer you to the FBI," Jean-Pierre replied. "I'm not going to comment from here about that."

link

[OmegaMan]

Ron Paul says it’s time to abolish the FBI following Twitter Files revelations

Wednesday, December 21, 2022 by: Ethan Huff

Tags: big government, Big Tech, Censorship, conspiracy, corruption, deception, deep state, fascism, FBI, FBI corruption, First Amendment, free speech, left cult, Liberty, Ron Paul, Twitter, Twitter Files, Tyranny


(Natural News) If there is anything former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has learned throughout the Twitter Files saga, it is that America’s federal agencies – most notably the FBI – are anathema to the Constitution and the protections it is supposed to afford to We the People.



In Paul’s estimate, the FBI views the Constitution and the First Amendment specifically as “an annoyance and an impediment.” This is why the federal agency embedded itself within the Twitter ecosystem and basically turned the social media platform into one of its many proxy subsidiaries.



“The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter,” Paul wrote in his weekly column.



“We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from U.S. government officials for the ‘private’ social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.”



Numerous other federal agencies joined the FBI in this operation under the banner of the Foreign Influence Task Force, or FITF. This U.S. government entity expressly guided Twitter in its censorship agenda, hand-selecting each account and tweet that it wanted banned, in many cases.



“The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like,” Paul added.



“U.S. federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.” (Related: Paul has long warned that America’s financial system is a Ponzi scheme well overdue for a collapse.)



Brighteon.TV

Two-thirds of America recognizes that Twitter and its deep state handlers censored truth to steal the 2020 election

Had anything close to this large of a scandal been occurring under the presidency of Donald Trump, it would have been plastered all over the global media as the biggest scandal ever to occur.



Since Joe Biden and his cronies are the ones behind it all, the globalists are doing their best to sweep it under the rug as a non-issue. Too many people know about it, though, and it does matter to the tens of millions of Americans who have been watching the saga unfold.



“What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor,” Paul explained. “Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion.”



“But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.”



“Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.”



Try as they might to silence everyone critical of the regime – good luck with that – the FBI, Twitter, and all the rest will ultimately fail. A recent poll found that an astounding two-thirds of the country now believes that Twitter was, in fact, involved in censoring the truth to help the deep state steal the 2020 election.



“Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate / state censorship,” Paul said.



Since it is now undeniable that the FBI and other (un)intelligence agencies have been using “private” social media companies like Twitter to control Americans’ free speech, Paul believes that they should be dismantled as the threat to freedom that they are.



“We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution,” Paul argued. “End the Fed … and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!”

link

[Midnight]

Elon Musk Warns Pelosi and McConnell against ‘Railroading Through a Giant Spending Bill’ That’s Not in the ‘Best Interests of the People’

David Hawkins
December 21, 2022 - 10:10 am


Twitter CEO Elon Musk has warned congressional leaders against “railroading through a giant spending bill” that’s “unlikely to be in the best interests of the people.”



Musk sent the warning to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as Congress pushes through the massive $1.7 trillion package.



As Slay News reported earlier, the spending bill is packed with enormous handouts for “woke” causes and will add a staggering amount to the national debt.



Musk said: “I’m in favor of a small spending bill to keep things running, but common sense suggests that it be the least amount required through the holidays.



“Railroading through a giant spending bill that almost no one has read is unlikely to be in the best interests of the people.



“Whether for or against, please let your elected representatives know what you think about this $1.7 trillion spending bill that they’re trying to pass!”

Musk also took a poll of his Twitter followers about the spending boondoggle.



He asked:


“Should Congress approve the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill?”



The results as of now, out of 2,516,708 votes, are Yes: 27.8%. No: 72.2%.

Meanwhile, Musk has also confirmed he will step down as CEO of Twitter when he finds a replacement.



“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he tweeted.



“After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

According to CNN:



Senate leaders unveiled a $1.7 trillion year-long federal government funding bill early Tuesday morning.



The legislation includes $772.5 billion for non-defense discretionary programs and $858 billion in defense funding, according to a bill summary from Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chair of the Senate Committee on Appropriations.



The sweeping package includes roughly $45 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine and NATO allies, boosts in spending for disaster aid, college access, child care, mental health and food assistance, more support for the military and veterans and additional funds for the US Capitol Police, according to Leahy’s summary and one from Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee.



It also includes several major Medicaid provisions, including one that could disenroll up to 19 million people from the nation’s health insurance program for low-income Americans.



However, the bill, which runs more than 4,000 pages, left out several measures that some lawmakers had fought to include.



An expansion of the child tax credit, as well as multiple other corporate and individual tax breaks, did not make it into the final bill.



Neither did legislation to allow cannabis companies to bank their cash reserves – known as the Safe Banking Act Act – or a bill to help Afghan evacuees in the US gain lawful permanent residency.



Also, there was no final resolution on where the new FBI headquarters will be located.

link

[ExquisiteGerbil]

THE TWITTER FILES: Clandestine Government Agency Edition

BY TYLER DURDEN

SATURDAY, DEC 24, 2022 - 12:31 PM

After writing quite the pre-Christmas reflection Friday, night, Journalist Matt Taibbi has decided to grace us with a Christmas Eve edition of THE TWITTER FILES - which he says details "Twitter's relationship to other government agencies - including some that don't like to see their name in print much."

Continued;



2. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.”







3.They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI. After all, a whole range of government agencies discredit themselves in the #TwitterFiles. Why stop with one?



4.The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.



5.The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which also facilitates requests from a wide array of smaller actors - from local cops to media to state governments.



6.Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track. Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying.











7.A chief end result was that thousands of official “reports” flowed to Twitter from all over, through the FITF and the FBI’s San Francisco field office.



8.On June 29th, 2020, San Francisco FBI agent Elvis Chan wrote to pair of Twitter execs asking if he could invite an “OGA” to an upcoming conference:







9.OGA, or “Other Government Organization,” can be a euphemism for CIA, according to multiple former intelligence officials and contractors. Chuckles one: “They think it's mysterious, but it's just conspicuous."



10.“Other Government Agency (the place where I worked for 27 years),” says retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.



11. It was an open secret at Twitter that one of its executives was ex-CIA, which is why Chan referred to that executive’s “former employer.”



12.The first Twitter executive abandoned any pretense to stealth and emailed that the employee “used to work for the CIA, so that is Elvis’s question.”







13.Senior legal executive Stacia Cardille, whose alertness stood out among Twitter leaders, replied, “I know” and “I thought my silence was understood.”







14.Cardille then passes on conference details to recently-hired ex-FBI lawyer Jim Baker.







15.“I invited the FBI and the CIA virtually will attend too,” Cardille says to Baker, adding pointedly: “No need for you to attend.”



16.The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.



17. These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others. Industry players also held regular meetings without government.



18.One of the most common forums was a regular meeting of the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), attended by spates of executives, FBI personnel, and – nearly always – one or two attendees marked “OGA.”

Continued at link

[schwartzie]

Another Twitter Files Drop: How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate

By Cristina Laila

Published December 26, 2022 at 12:20pm




Elon Musk on Monday released another Twitter files drop: How Twitter rigged the Covid debate:



– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to US government policy

– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed

– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*



1. THREAD:



THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE



– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy

– By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed

– By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*



— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022



TRENDING: Judge Peter Thompson Rules Elections with Broken Machines in 60% of Precincts and No Chain of Custody for Ballots Are Free, Fair and Certifiable



2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.



2. So far the Twitter Files have focused on evidence of Twitter’s secret blacklists; how the company functioned as a kind of subsidiary of the FBI; and how execs rewrote the platform’s rules to accommodate their own political desires.



— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022



3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. This reporting, for The Free Press, @thefp, is one piece of that important story.



3. What we have yet to cover is Covid. This reporting, for The Free Press, @thefp, is one piece of that important story.



— David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022



4. The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.



Continued at link

[schwartzie]

Gross: Musk Reveals “Fauci Fan Club” on Twitter Slack Channel

By Margaret Flavin

Published December 28, 2022 at 11:50am


Dr. Anthony Fauci lied about funding the Wuhan lab’s research on gain-of-function, destroyed millions of lives with Covid lockdowns and promoted the experimental Covid vaccines.



But the left is awash with Fauci fans, and no one idolizes Dr. Fauci more than Dr. Fauci.



In a recent interview he gushed, “It’s nice that some people idolize me and put me on a pedestal.”



It appears former staff at Twitter did indeed put him on a pedestal with a Slack channel dedicated to him called, “Fauci Fan Club.”



Elon Musk shared the news on Twitter.

The Gateway Pundit reported on Musk’s Twitter Files installment that showed how Twitter rigged the COVID debate including:



– Censoring info that was true but inconvenient to US government policy

– Discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed

– Suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

Musk’s December 11, 2022 tweet is spot on.

link