Elon Musk Buys Twitter and Airs its Dirty Secrets

BRIAN SOCKINGTON: Elon Musk was once the darling of the progressive world, inventing things like electricity, cars, space rockets, and machines that can bore into the earth, and your brain. But that all changed when Musk spent $44 billion dollars to purchase social media giant Twitter, outraging users with his promise to restore the open conversation platform to its former state of being an open conversation… platform. Musk said he will reactivate thousands of accounts that were censored or banned under former CEO Jack Dorsey for not being INNformation with mainstream thinking and employing so-called ‘freedom OF speech’. Despite an 11th hour attempt to terminate the deal, Musk is already delivering on his promise, exposing Twitter’s censorship practices and connection to government agencies through the so-called ‘Twitter-files’ – a series of independent exposes posted on the publishing platform Substack. James Plushfoot summarises the significant takeaways from these Twitter files before we forget all about them in around a week or so… 

JAMES PLUSHFOOT:

Intelligence Collusion and Hunter’s Laptop of Doom with Twitter

Seemingly independent to the outside world, internally, Twitter was in direct and constant contact with US government intelligence agencies, including the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security. Twitter received classified information, assisted with state-backed covert operations, and moderated or censored so many flagged accounts that their staff were congratulated for their ‘monumental undertaking’. Former FBI lawyer and Twitter’s deputy general counsel Jim Baker revealed that the FBI even compensated Twitter for their work, to the sum of almost $3.5mil dollars ($3,415,323) including personal censorship requests from politicians like Democrat Adam Schiff, who requested the removal of accounts that were critical of his office, Ukraine, and the now debunked ‘Steele Dossier’ on Trump-Russia collusion. 

Hunter Biden’s Laptop of Doom

Twitter also blocked a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden and the incriminating contents of his laptop (October 2020) despite knowing their ‘hacked materials policy’ didn’t justify the censorship. When members of congress were surveyed about the decision’s impact on freedom of speech, Democrats overwhelmingly insisted more moderation be pursued in the future as free speech was not ‘absolute’. Exactly how more moderation can be applied to a blocked story remains unclear.

Blacklisting, Shadow-banning and Erasing Trump

Twitter received flagged content deemed controversial or too high profile, for it to blacklist and hide, or ‘shadow-ban’. Think tank DFRLab’s – funded by the US government’s Global Engagement Center – provided over 40,000 accounts for Twitter to shadow-ban for containing ‘foreign propaganda’ or opinions from other countries. The friendly term ‘visibility filtering’ was used to hide the posts, and extended to the Tweets of Donald J Trump, beginning well before his presidential election win, and culminating in his account being suspended when Twitter re-wrote its policies after the January 6th capitol protest. Twitter’s own staff described Trump’s suspension as a ’slippery slope’ – ‘difficult to justify’ – and akin to the company declaring itself a ‘gatekeeper of speech for the entire world’. Senior Twitter executives hit back, comparing staff who disagreed with the decision as ‘Nazis following orders’ – for some reason.

Twitter Rigged Covid

Twitter censored and shadow-banned COVID information deemed ‘inconvenient for public health officials’ – discrediting the accounts of doctors and experts, including physician Andrew Bostom whose account was banned for posting the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines. Biden officials were furious that more accounts weren’t being deplatformed, while Twitter worked with Pfizer lobbyist Scott Gottlieb to erase content about the effectiveness of natural immunity, due to its capacity to ‘go viral’ and be ‘corrosive’ to government health advice. Opposition to vaccine passports, mandates or the sharing post-vaccine side effect reports, celebrity deaths or criticism of Dr Anthony Fauci, were also suppressed, a trend that continues today, on sites like this one (Wikipedia), whose summary of this section of the Twitter Files is shown here… 

Russia and the Media Lie Machine 

A project titled ‘Hamilton 68’ (The Alliance for Securing Democracy) tracked 600 Twitter accounts purportedly linked to ‘Russian influence activities’, which the mainstream news media used as a basis for stories about Russia influencing everything from US elections to the gun control debate. However, Yoel Roth of Twitter discovered that ‘Hamilton 68’ was in fact made up of ‘legitimate, right-leaning accounts’ falsely tied to Russia, which was not called out by Twitter due to ‘worrying political consequences’. State-funded ‘anti-disinformation’ movements were elevated on the platform, including a faked campaign (New Knowledge) against Alabama Republican Roy Moore that claimed his Twitter account was influenced by ‘Russian bots’.

BRIAN: Sorry, I was just moving my Twitter account to Mastodon like everyone else!

SANDY: So was I! As soon as I heard Musk was stopping all that censorship, I had to leave before the crazies started posting… 

BRIAN: I did that too, but when I got to Mastodon, most people had already moved back to Twitter?

SANDY: Yeah, that’s true… and I was getting FOMO with all the fights and memes that are happening on there right now.

BRIAN: Yes! Did you see that one with Musk dressed as Hitler?

SANDY: Yes! That was great! What about the one with Musk wearing the tin foil hat?

BRIAN: That was very funny! Oh no wonder the mainstream news totally ignored the umm… the what was that last report about again?

SANDY: No, I can’t remember either…