A deep dive into 'Twitter Files 8'
CNN’s Tapper: Schumer, McConnell, Pelosi, McCarthy Protecting ‘Anti-American’ Big Tech Monopolies..... BUT ISN'T THAT BECAUSE THEY PROTECT THE BIDEN CRIME FAMILY, AND IN FACT, GOT JOE ELECTED DESPITE HIS 50 YEARS OF WHITE COLLAR CRIME??? AND IN RETURN, HIGH TECH GETS 'NO LEGAL NEED APPLY' AND BOATLOADS OF INDIANS WHO BRING THEIR EXTENDED FAMILIES BUT WORK 'CHEAP'
CNN’s Tapper: Schumer, McConnell, Pelosi, McCarthy Protecting ‘Anti-American’ Big Tech Monopolies
CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Tuesday on his show “The Lead” that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) were protecting “anti-American” big tech monopolies.
Tapper said, “It can be more telling in what the congressional leaders left out of the massive $1.7 trillion spending bill unveiled today than what they included. I’m thinking of specifically two pieces of the bipartisan anti-trust legislation to try to rein in the big tech monopolies. One of the bills was bipartisan from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley. It would stop companies like Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, which critics say are clearly monopolies, from giving preference to their own products, and burying other products.”
He continued, “There is another bill from Marsha Blackburn that would loosen the stranglehold that comes to apps that allows them to crush competition.”
Tapper added, “Neither of these bills even got a vote on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Similar bills in the House were also denied votes on the floor of the House. The app store bill on the House did not even get marked up in its committee. Why? Well, often, the leaders deny the opportunity for votes for bills that they are afraid will actually pass. Sources familiar with this fight tell me that the congressional leaders, Democrats and Republicans seemed eager to run out the clock. Now it might be cynical to note the number relatives of members of Congress and former top staffers who have coincidentally found lucrative jobs in the tech sector, but it is certainly relevant to observe that these tech companies represent one of the biggest sources of campaign funds for the Democratic Party, which fancies itself as standing up for the little guy against corporate behemoths, but in this case not so much. It might also be worth observing that despite all the anti-big tech rhetoric we hear from Republicans, who are currently casting themselves as populists, very few Republicans, Grassley, Blackburn and Congressman Ken Buck excepted, seem at all interested in standing up to monopolies.”
He continued, “For these two bills, this was a ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ type slaughter. Everyone’s fingerprints are on the knife…The fingerprints of the leaders Schumer and McConnell, Speaker Pelosi, Leader McCarthy, plus a bunch of California House Democrats that represent big tech.”
Tapper concluded, “These big tech monopolies and their anti-competition, and dare I say anti-American way they govern the businesses, and I’m not talking about Twitter, but Apple, Google, and Amazon, and what they are doing is arguably a more important and significant story.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Media reports on Friday were speculating about the possible collapse of the social media platform Twitter following the resignation of another 1,200 employees the previous day in response to a recent ultimatum given to them by Elon Musk.
The New York Times reported in an article entitled “Elon Musk’s Twitter Teeters on the Edge After Another 1,200 Leave,” that the billionaire owner sent a flurry of urgent all-hands-on-deck email messages on Friday morning to the remaining staff members.
In one message, Musk said, “Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” and, in another message 30 minutes later, he said he needed to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” a term that describes the social media company’s core software infrastructure.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk told the employees that he “planned to be at Twitter’s headquarters himself until midnight, and then back again Saturday morning, and suggested employees based in other locations should fly to San Francisco.”
In departing the company, employees said Musk pushed people to work well over 40 hours a week, but they did not think there was vision to justify it. One worker told the Journal, “Long hours doing good work is awesome, but not with a gun to your head.”
Peter Clowes, a software engineer, posted a lengthy explanation for his decision to leave Twitter, including, “If I stayed, I would have been on-call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in. Maybe for the right vision I could have dug deep and done mind numbing work for awhile. But that’s the thing…
“There was no vision shared with us. No 5 year plan like at Tesla. Nothing more than what anyone can see on Twitter. It allegedly is coming for those who stayed but the ask was blind faith and required signing away the severance offer before seeing it. Pure loyalty test.”
The mass exodus from Twitter was in response to a Thursday deadline Musk had given to staff members early Wednesday morning in an email with the subject line, “A fork in the road.” Musk told employees that “to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore.”
For Musk, being “hardcore” means “working long hours at high intensity.” The email went on to say, “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” and finished with the ultimatum, “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.”
The fact that more than 1,000 employees rejected Musk’s provocation is an indication of the hatred for the world’s wealthiest billionaire and his management tactics. The Wall Street Journal expressed astonishment at the response of the Twitter workers to Musk’s “management playbook,” given that he has previously gotten away with similar fascistic methods at his two other properties, Tesla and Space X.
In 2012, for example, the Journal reported that Musk threatened Tesla workers in an email with the subject line “Ultra hardcore” that they needed “to prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before” and that “revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.” According to the Journal, “He wasn’t wrong.”
The present dire situation at Twitter, a social media company with 400 million active users internationally who have grown to depend on the platform for critical communications and news updates, is the latest in a series of convulsions connected with the private takeover of the company by Elon Musk in a $44 billion acquisition that became official on October 27.
After removing the company from the stock exchanges, Musk fired Twitter’s executive leadership, dismissed its corporate board of directors and proceeded to cut one half of the staff or 3,700 people after a catastrophic decline in advertising revenue. The resignation of 1,200 more people who rejected Musk’s “fork in the road” decree is clearly a blow to the organization that may well prove to be fatal.
In a lengthy op-ed in the New York Times on Friday, former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote that he chose to leave his position “at Elon Musk’s Twitter.” Roth added that the wave of employee resignations, “caused the hashtag #RIPTwitter to trend on the site on Thursday—not for the first time—alongside questions about whether a skeleton crew of remaining staff members can keep the service, now 16 years old, afloat.”
In response to the question “why does everyone think Twitter is doomed?,” a Twitter user named Mosquito Capital identifies himself as a site reliability engineer with more than a decade of industry experience and tweets an extensive list of scenarios that are “real threats to the integrity of the bird site over the coming weeks.”
A report in the Guardian on Friday explored the potential for catastrophic system failure at Twitter and said, “There are now concerns that the site will be vulnerable to technical failures and bugs, amid signs that the complex system underpinning Twitter is already creaking. Two-factor authentication has already been affected and there have been issues with retweeting.”
The Guardian goes on to explain that Musk himself had warned earlier this month, following the the departure of top figures from the company and prior to his ultimatum, “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription.”
Throughout the crisis, Elon Musk has maintained and deepened his sophomoric cynicism and contempt for critics through his Twitter account. Following the resignations on Thursday afternoon, Musk replied to the tweets of others with, “Don’t wanna jinx it, but there’s a chance we can keep Twitter alive …” and, “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.” Later that evening, Musk tweeted, “And … we just hit another all-time high in Twitter usage lol.”
These are the comments of a deranged billionaire oligarch who has wreaked havoc on one of the most important social media forms to emerge out of the intersection of the Internet and World Wide Web with wireless broadband and smartphone technologies that took place in the first decade of the 21st century. By their very nature as global communications platforms utilized by billions of people, social media platforms are incompatible with control by a single individual dictator with more money than anyone else on the planet.
Musk continues to ban from Twitter journalists who criticize him
In a tweet early Saturday morning, Elon Musk claimed that the accounts of prominent journalists which he suspended on Thursday had been restored. After he ran a Twitter poll and nearly 60 percent of the 3.6 million respondents said the accounts should be unsuspended, Musk cynically tweeted, “The people have spoken.”
While Reuters confirmed that several of the suspended accounts had been restored, others remain shut down. The retaliation of Elon Musk against journalists who criticized his wrecking operation at Twitter took place on Thursday evening. After reports circulated that the journalists had been kicked off the platform, the billionaire owner of Twitter tweeted an acknowledgment of the suspensions.
Responding to others on Twitter, Musk claimed the journalists had been suspended because they violated new rules against sharing location information, or what is known as doxxing, of individuals such as himself.
At 9:12 p.m. on Thursday, Musk tweeted, “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” and at 10:24 p.m. he tweeted, “7 day suspension for doxxing. Some time away from Twitter is good for the soul …”
The journalists with Twitter accounts that were shut down on Thursday included CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, the New York Times’ Ryan Mac, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, Mashable’s Matt Binder, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, as well as independent journalists Keith Olbermann, Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.
The suspensions also included the shutdown of the Twitter account of a competitor social media platform called Mastodon. Each of the suspended accounts were labeled with a message that said the users had violated Twitter rules.
All of the journalists have maintained that they did not violate any Twitter policies and did not engage in sharing Musk’s location or anyone else’s. There is no evidence that they have done so.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar said he “didn’t post anything remotely controversial today or anytime recently.” The Intercept’s Lee said his suspension came shortly after he posted on Twitter about the shutdown of Mastodon’s account. Lee also wrote: “While my reporting may not have provided the direct impetus for my suspension, it’s clear Musk was taking aim specifically at journalists who have covered him critically.”
In the case of Olbermann, his suspension occurred shortly after he criticized the shutdown of the Twitter account of some of the other journalists. The Washington Post’s Harwell said he did not share information about Musk’s private jet or personal location but simply previously posted a link to the @ElonJet account in his stories. Harwell had also written a report about the resurgence of fascistic QAnon conspiracy theories on Twitter following Musk’s takeover of the company.
The reporters’ suspensions were carried out one day after Twitter shut down more than two dozen accounts that tracked the planes of government officials, billionaires and other high profile people. Among these suspended accounts was @ElonJet, created by 20-year-old Jack Sweeney who persistently tracked the location of Musk’s private jet and published it on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Truth Social, Mastodon as well as Twitter.
Previously, Musk had offered Sweeney $5,000 to shut down the account which he had set up in June 2020. The @ElonJet account uses publicly available ADS-B flight details about takeoff and landing times combined with an automated computer program known as a Twitter bot to report Elon Musk’s flights.
Although Musk acknowledged the suspensions in his late night tweets, no official statement has been issued by Twitter explaining the action. There has also been no response by the company to demands from the New York Times or CNN for a rationale to be provided.
Also, late Thursday evening, Musk defended the suspensions during a Twitter Spaces conference chat hosted by journalist Katie Notopoulos of Buzzfeed. When Musk was asked to explain his decision to ban a “handful of journalists,” he maintained the fiction that the journalists had engaged in doxxing.
He said, “There’s not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists or so-called journalists and regular people,” and added, “Everyone’s going to be treated the same.” Musk continued, “So no special treatment. You dox, you get suspended. End of story.”
Due to a technical glitch, some of the journalists with suspended accounts were able to participate in the Twitter Spaces conference with Notopoulos. When they spoke up to contradict Musk’s false claim that they were involved in doxxing, the billionaire abruptly left the call.
Shortly thereafter, the Twitter Spaces conference itself was shut down. Notopoulos tweeted, “Sorry it appears the Space cut out, screen went suddenly blank on my end and everyone got booted.” It turned out that the entire Spaces feature of Twitter had been disabled and was not restored until 5:00 p.m. on Friday, when Musk tweeted, “Spaces is back up,” with no further explanation of what happened.
On Friday, The Daily Beast published a report about the suspension of Insider journalist Linette Lopez’s Twitter account. Lopez said she never tweeted anything about the location of Musk’s jet but had been writing since 2018 about his hypocrisy over doxxing and targeting private citizens.
She said, “I was just trying to highlight the fact that he talks about bullying and doxxing and all this stuff. … And he’s a pro at it.” Lopez continued, “He harassed me back in 2018, he talked s**t about me in the court of law, he sued my source. Like, I’ve been through the ringer with this guy. Nothing he does surprises me.”
Musk’s censorship and bogus justification for attacking his liberal critics comes less than a week after he called on Sunday for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the White House and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Musk tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” in a political environment where fascistic Republicans and paramilitary alt-right elements are calling for violent attacks on Fauci and others within the public health establishment.
His attack on journalists also comes three weeks after Twitter began shutting down the accounts of left-wing journalists and bloggers, who have exposed the activities of fascist and right-wing groups. A report on November 29 by The Intercept noted that Musk had used the posts of right-wing extremist Andy Ngo to identify the accounts of the left-wing journalists Chad Loder, Vishal Pratap Singh and others as “Antifa accounts” and shut them down.
According to Shane Burley, a journalist for Al Jazeera and The Daily Beast, “Andy Ngo’s bizarre vision of ‘antifa’ seems to be the metric used to delete the accounts of journalists and publications, most of which engaged in verifiably good journalism and done so completely above board and TOS [terms of service] observant ways.”
Twitter Files: Company Allowed Government to Wage Influence Operations Abroad
Twitter maintained a strict ban on foreign influence operations over the past half-decade — except in the case of the U.S. government, which was permitted to use the platform for “psychological influence operations” abroad, according to a new installment in the Twitter Files.
The Twitter Files are a series of disclosures of internal documents to journalists, a project championed by the platform’s new owner, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The latest batch was published by Lee Fang, a journalist at the Intercept.
According to Fang, despite public pledges to shut down all government-backed platform manipulation, Twitter made an exception for the U.S.
“Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops,” wrote Fang. “Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active.”
“In 2017, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) official sent Twitter a list of 52 Arab language accounts ‘we use to amplify certain messages.’ The official asked for priority service for six accounts, verification for one & ‘whitelist’ abilities for the others.”
According to Fang, the accounts were immediately added to a special whitelist that gave them heightened visibility on the platform, and exemption from spam and abuse filters.
While the accounts’ ties to the U.S. government were initially disclosed, the accounts later tried to mask those ties. In one case, a “deepfaked” image was used to bolster one of the accounts’ fake identities.
According to Fang, the DoD-linked network of accounts “relentlessly pushed narratives against Russia, China, and other foreign countries.”
While the network was eventually exposed by external researchers and banned by the platform, this was years after Twitter was made aware of the network, as well as the attempts to hide its U.S. government ties.
“Twitter actively assisted CENTCOM’s network going back to 2017 and as late as 2020 knew these accounts were covert/designed to deceive to manipulate the discourse, a violation of Twitter’s policies & promises,” wrote Fang.
“They waited years to suspend.”
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.
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