Twitter Files Reveals Blacklists and Shadowbanning – Elon Musk Is Embracing the Same Tactics
In the latest Twitter Files exposé, it was revealed that Twitter shadowbanned accounts to suppress their reach and virality, especially prominent conservatives. There’s just one problem — these tools are almost identical to Elon Musk’s current policy of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.” Based on Musk’s comments, it seems unlikely any of the freshly exposed tools are going to be dropped from the platform, leaving Americans seeking free speech at the mercy of nebulous terms like “hate speech.”
Forbes reports that according to former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, Twitter created “secret blacklists” and conducted a covert operation to reduce the visibility of certain tweets, accounts, and topics. This information comes from the second round of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” which were released on Thursday. These practices, reported on for many years by Breitbart News, are just now being proven true with the release of insider information from the left-wing company.
Hannibal Hanschke-Pool/Getty Images/BBN Edit)
Many have also noted that Twitter’s previous moderation actions mirror Musk’s own Twitter policy of “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” meaning that the platform will continue to shadowban and reduce the reach of certain users and posts. In fact, Musk has bragged about lowering the impressions of tweets containing “hate speech,” likely using the exact tools described in the Twitter Files. “Hate speech” is a word seemingly described differently by every person asked, for example, former Twitter leadership banned women under the hate speech policy for saying that men cannot be women.
Twitter employees allegedly blacklisted a number of accounts, including Stanford health policy professor Jay Bhattacharya, conservative figures Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, and the controversial right-wing TikTok account “Libs of TikTok,” according to Weiss. These are just a few examples of what was clearly a common moderation practice for the leftist anti-Trump platform.
It is unclear why the accounts were blacklisted and who made the final decision to throttle them, but according to internal documents, the Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team (SRT-GET) often handles up to 200 cases per day.
Twitter’s downranking efforts, characterized by Weiss as secretive and nefarious acts of censorship, resemble Musk’s own moderation policies for the platform. When Musk took over the platform he promised that the social media site would be one focused on free speech. But in a tweet he has since deleted following significant criticism, Musk says that the “new” Twitter policy is “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
On Thursday night, Elon Musk announced that Twitter is working on a new software update that will allow users to see if they have been shadow banned, the reason for the ban, and how to appeal. The update will also show tweet view counts, similar to how video view counts are currently displayed on the platform. This is an explicit acknowledgment that shadowbanning, search blacklisting, and other techniques are here to stay. Conservatives are left hoping that their enforcement is applied equally regardless of politics, an idea that can’t be taken for granted because Elon Musk will not always be around to micromanage the entire company, which is likely to have the same leftist Silicon Valley bent it always had.
Biden Administration Persecutes Musk for Opening Up Twitter
When free speech and transparency represent kryptonite.
Mr. Musk has a target on his back for acquiring Twitter and opening it up to diverse points of view. His sin, in the Biden administration’s eyes, was to turn a social media platform the Left claimed as its own plaything into a public town square for the free exchange of ideas. Free speech and transparency do not sit well with the Biden administration and the left-wing progressive base of the Democratic Party.
The Biden administration is weaponizing its federal law enforcement powers to trample on the First Amendment. It is trying to intimidate Mr. Musk so that he will do its bidding and censor speech posted on the Twitter platform that the administration considers to be “disinformation” or “hate speech.” So far, the Biden administration’s hardball tactics are not working.
Twitter’s new CEO is exposing how Twitter’s former management and Biden campaign officials colluded to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. Former senior managers at Twitter decided to censor postings of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election. They used the false pretext that the information upon which the story was based was “hacked” and was possibly disinformation spread by a foreign government. These baseless accusations were apparently fed to the Twitter censors by the FBI, which had the laptop in its possession since December 2019 and had the opportunity to verify its contents.
The New York Post story that Twitter had blocked from its site was published on October 14, 2020. It revealed, among other things, how Hunter Biden introduced one of the key Ukrainian businessmen with whom Hunter Biden had business dealings to his father while Joe Biden was vice president. It showed that Joe Biden was lying when he claimed that he has “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”
We are now learning how the FBI put its thumb on the scale to help the Biden campaign at a critical time before the election. FBI agents warned Twitter and other social media platforms to be on guard for disinformation allegedly spread by a foreign government and mentioned Hunter Biden’s laptop specifically in this connection. Twitter’s former senior management took the hint and dutifully suppressed the New York Post story.
Daniel Greenfield aptly entitled his FrontPage Magazine article regarding the collusion among Big Tech, leftists, and the government to get around the First Amendment, “Twittergate and the Plot Against Free Speech.”
The plot thickened even more when Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker (the former FBI General Counsel before joining Twitter) was caught slowing up the release of Twitter’s internal fileswithout Elon Musk’s knowledge. He was supposedly “vetting” the files before approving their release. “Vetting” is a polite term for deep-sixing e-mails in Twitter’s internal files that could expose wrongdoing by Mr. Baker himself while he was at the FBI and by other FBI officials.
When Elon Musk found out about this ploy and did not receive a satisfactory explanation from Baker, Musk fired Baker. Good decision. Baker would have continued running interference for the FBI and the Biden administration inside of Twitter had he been allowed to stay. This is the same James Baker who was involved in the Russia collusion hoax while he was the FBI’s General Counsel. And it is the same James Baker who assured Twitter’s former management, in his capacity as Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel, that it was “reasonable for us to assume” that the information in the New York Poststory was hacked. Twitter’s management at the time then ran with the ball and used the fallacious hacking assumption as a justification for suppressing the story.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tried to dismiss Mr. Musk’s release of internal Twitter e-mail files regarding the former management’s censorship of the New York Postlaptop story as “not healthy” and a “distraction.” Ms. Jean-Pierre’s job is obviously to distract attention from a major scandal that undermined voters’ right to know about information highly relevant to their choice of which presidential candidate to vote for.
Instead, the White House Press Secretary demonstrated the Biden administration’s indifference to First Amendment protections when they get in the administration’s way. She said that “Twitter is facing very real and very serious questions” about the content that Twitter is now allowing on its platform, which the administration regards as “hate speech” or “disinformation.”
Ms. Jean-Pierre had previously said that the Biden administration was watching closely the situation at Twitter after Elon Musk acquired ownership of the company. In other words, the administration is monitoring a particular media company that publishes content the White House does not approve of. It is the administration’s way of pressuring Twitter to take down the “offensive” posts while being able to say that the ultimate decision is up to Twitter, a private company, and thus get around the First Amendment. However, depending on the nature of the interactions between government officials and Twitter, there may well be a First Amendment issue. Mild inquiries are one thing. Government demands and warnings are something else.
In any event, Big Brother at the White House is doing more than just watching Twitter and making its unhappiness with certain posts known to Twitter’s current management. The Biden administration is using the full weight of its law enforcement powers to intimidate Elon Musk and threaten punishment for not submitting to the administration’s demands.
In response to a question at a presidential press conference last month whether he thought that Elon Musk was a threat to U.S. national security, the “Big Guy” called for federal investigations of Mr. Musk’s business dealings with foreign countries. “I think that Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries is worthy of being looked at,” President Biden said. “Whether or not he is doing anything inappropriate, I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that it’s worth being looked at.”
President Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reversed herself on whether it would be appropriate to investigate Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, bringing herself into line with the president.
“I misspoke,” she told an audience at the New York Times DealBook Summit on November 30th, referring to her earlier statement that she saw no reason to investigate the transaction. “Let me say to the extent that there are international investments there, we have an agency within Treasury called CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] that does look at transactions that involve foreign investment in the United States to see if they create national security risk.”
Funny how the Biden administration is slow-walking a decision about what to do with Chinese-owned TikTok’s U.S. operations. TikTok poses obvious national security concerns as a result of the Chinese regime’s access, through TikTok’s Chinese parent, to the personal information of U.S. citizens who use TikTok’s services. Yet nearly two years after President Biden took office, TikTok’s Chinese owner has not been required to sell its U.S. operations to a U.S.-owned company and ensure that all U.S. citizens’ data would be solely controlled and accessible by the new U.S. company. But President Biden and his Treasury Secretary did not hesitate to threaten an investigation of a U.S. citizen’s acquisition of a U.S. company on the phony pretext of national security concerns.
How about also taking a look at the Biden family’s own business dealings with China, Russia, and Ukraine, which have enriched them – most likely including the “Big Guy” – while jeopardizing national security in the process? President Biden dismissed questions about his own family’s business dealings in which he may well have had a part as “almost comedy.” He said that the “American public wants to move on.”
Not so fast.
Now that the Republicans will be taking control of the House of Representatives in January, they will be issuing subpoenas to get some answers regarding the Biden family business enterprise trading access and political influence for money. They also intend to investigate the whole Hunter Biden laptop saga, which Twitter and other Biden-friendly media tried to hide from the voters. Mr. Musk’s decision to make public the internal machinations of Twitter’s prior management will certainly provide fodder for the hearings that may affect whether Joe Biden runs for re-election in 2024.
Therefore, the White House and its allies are preparing for an all-out information war to discredit the Republican House hearings in advance as the work of extreme MAGA Republicans aided by a superrich plutocrat who cannot be trusted. The calls following the mid-term election by President Biden and his Treasury Secretary for investigations into the Twitter acquisition are an indication of what is to come.
There is also the latest reported investigation of another Musk-owned company. Not an investigation of Twitter in this case, but still one targeted at damaging Musk’s business holdings.
Reuters reported that “Elon Musk’s Neuralink, a medical device company, is under federal investigation for potential animal-welfare violations.” Some staff members have complained that Mr. Musk pushed them hard to conduct the tests too quickly, which they claimed have resulted in “needless suffering and deaths” of test animals.
Neuralink’s facilities have passed all of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s regulatory inspections. The company is attempting to develop a brain implant that one day, according to the Reuters article, could “help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments.” Elon Musk is known for demanding a sense of urgency from his staff to achieve quick positive results.
Using animals for testing in pursuit of medical breakthroughs to help neurologically disabled human beings is certainly more constructive than using taxpayer money to fund multi-million dollar marijuana experiments on monkeys. Or than authorizing experiments that included de-barking beagle puppies and then conducting drug toxicity and infected fly infestation tests on the dogs before killing them, as Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has reportedly done.
Rather than conducting a full-scale investigation of how such cruel animal experiments could have been authorized and funded by the federal government, the Biden administration has other priorities. It would rather go after an Elon Musk company that is working on technologies to help human beings with serious neurological disabilities enjoy much better lives.
The Biden administration is hounding Elon Musk to pressure him into doing its bidding or, if that does not work, to make him pay dearly for daring to stand up for free speech. But Elon Musk can take heart from a famous Frank Sinatra quote: “The best revenge is massive success.”
Joseph Klein
Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer, and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, The United Nations & Radical Islam
PROFILE OF A SOCIOPATH PARASITE GAMER LAWYER:
Saying Joe Biden has substance is like saying a toilet that doesn't flush is still a working toilet. Joe Biden has no substance, he's an empty shell of a man, a creature who has changed his beliefs the way normal people change their underwear, a puppet for the billionaire class and its radical left-wing allies, as well as teachers' unions, united in their elitist desire to keep the little guy down.
MONICA SHOWALTER
DID OBOMB USE THE I.R.S AGAINST THIS POLITICAL ENEMIES?
Bombshell report alleges Biden family had 150+ suspicious bank activity flags
Rudy Giuliani sums up what ultimate elite capture looks like, stating: “The Biden Family is owned by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Start your Investigations
Report: Washington Post Lost Half a Million Subscribers Since Biden Took Office
Trump was right. He was 'the best thing to ever happen' to the Bezos-owned paper.
Former president Donald Trump often said he was "the best thing to ever happen" to the Washington Post and other mainstream news outlets.
He was right.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Jeff Bezos-owned publication has lost 500,000 subscribers since Trump left office in January 2021, which amounts to a decline of roughly 20 percent. The Post is on track to lose money in 2022 after years of profitability. The New York Times reported in August that the Post‘s business has "stalled" since President Joe Biden was sworn in, and layoffs are being discussed amid management's frustration with "numerous low performers in the newsroom."
Trump called it as early as December 2017, when he predicted that "newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I'm not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes." The Post is hardly the only media outlet suffering in the post-Trump era. BuzzFeed, Gannett, and CNN announced significant layoffs this month in an effort to cut costs.
The bottom line: Media outlets (and the anti-Trump grifters at the Lincoln Project) stand to financially benefit if Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Assess their coverage of the GOP primary with this in mind.
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