Over the years I have occasionally shared an Imprimis newsletter, or
excerpts from one, with my Friends. But yesterday when I received this
Imprimis newsletter in my snail mail - I knew that I have to share it
with all my FRANS (Friends, Relatives, Associates, Neighbors) and ask you to share it with all your FRANs.
Imprimis Publication, 2023 | Volume 52, Issue 1
By , Senior Editor, The Federalist
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-twitter-files-reveal-an-existential-threat/
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the
subsequent reporting on the Twitter Files by journalists Matt Taibbi,
Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one
of the most important news stories of our time. The Twitter Files story
encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political
scandal of the Trump-Biden era.
Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an
unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle
free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and
propaganda. This should not just disturb us, it should also prod us to
action in defense of the First Amendment, free and fair elections, and
indeed our country.
After Musk completed his acquisition of
Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees,
instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke
corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody. In the
process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a
series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an
array of major political events going back years:
(1) the Hunter Biden
laptop scandal - (2) Twitter’s secret policy of shadow banning - (3) President
Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot -
(4) the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election
disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election - (5) Twitter’s involvement in a
Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign - (6) its silencing of dissent from the
official Covid narrative - (7) its complicity in the Russiagate hoax - and (8) its
gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence
community - with the FBI as a go-between - in content moderation.
As Taibbi has written, the Twitter 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.”
The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but
for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and
their related implications: (1) the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop
story - (2) the suspension of Trump - and (3) the deputization of Twitter by the
FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company
willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a
federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.
Hunter Biden’s Laptop:
On October 14, 2020, the New York Post
published its first major exposé based on the contents of Hunter
Biden’s laptop, which had been dropped off at a Delaware computer repair
shop in April 2019 and never picked up. It was the first of several
stories detailing Biden family corruption and revealing the close
involvement of Joe Biden in his son’s foreign business ventures in the
years during and after Biden’s vice presidency. Hunter, although doing
no real work, was making tens of millions of dollars from foreign
companies in places like Ukraine and China. The Post’s bombshell reporting shined a bright light on what was happening.
According to the emails on the laptop,
Hunter introduced then-Vice President Biden to a top executive at
Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that was paying Hunter (who had no
credentials or experience in the energy business) up to $50,000 a month
to sit on its board.
(BG note: that Hunter essentially gave his laptop to a repair shop by never reclaiming it)
Soon after this meeting, Vice President Biden
pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating
the (Burisma) company. In an earlier email, a top Burisma executive asked Hunter
for “advice on how you could use your influence” to benefit the company.
The Post’s ensuing stories revealed more of the same: a shocking
level of corruption and influence-peddling by Hunter Biden, whose
emails suggest his father was closely connected to his overseas business
ventures. Indeed, those ventures appear to consist entirely of Hunter
providing access to Joe Biden.
Twitter did everything in its power to suppress the Biden story. It removed links to the Post’s
reporting, appended warnings that they might be “unsafe,” and prevented
users from sharing them via direct message - a restriction previously
reserved for child pornography and other extreme cases. In an
extraordinary step, Twitter also locked the Post’s account and
the accounts of anyone who shared links to its reporting, including
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. These actions were
justified under the pretext that the stories violated Twitter’s
hacked-materials policy, even though there was no evidence, then or now,
that anything on the laptop was hacked.
Twitter executives at the highest levels
were directly involved in these decisions. Former head of Legal, Policy,
and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, the company’s chief censor, played a key role,
as did former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth. Oddly, all this seems
to have been done without the knowledge of Twitter’s then-CEO, Jack
Dorsey. And it was done despite internal pushback from other
departments.
“I’m struggling to understand the policy
basis for marking this as unsafe,” wrote a Twitter communications
executive in an email to Gadde and Roth. “Can we truthfully claim that
this is part of the policy?” asked former VP of Global Communications,
Brandon Borman. His question was answered by Deputy General Counsel Jim
Baker - a former top lawyer for the FBI and the most powerful member of a
growing cadre of former FBI employees working at Twitter - who said that
“caution is warranted” and that some facts “indicate the materials may
have been hacked.”
(BG note: Jim Baker was the Chief of Staff for President George Bush, Sr - known along with George W. to be Globalist, i.e., "one world government proponents")
But there were no such facts, as Baker and other top Twitter executives knew at the time. The laptop was exactly what the Post said it was, and every fact the Post reported was accurate. Other major media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post would begrudgingly admit as much 18 months later, after Joe Biden was ensconced in the White House.
If there were no hacked materials in the Post’s reporting, why did Twitter immediately react as if there were? Because long before the Post
published its first laptop story, there had been an organized effort by
the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter
Biden.
The laptop, after all, had been in federal custody since the
previous December, when the FBI seized it from the computer repair shop.
So the FBI knew very well that it contained evidence of straightforward
criminal activity (such as illicit drug use) as well as of corruption
and influence-peddling.
(BG note: the FBI knew this long before the 2020 Election, but suppressed it until after the election was in the books)
The evening before the Post ran
its first story on the laptop, FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten
documents to Roth at Twitter through a special one-way communications
channel the FBI had established with the company. For months, the FBI
and other federal intelligence agencies had been priming Roth to dismiss
news reports about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election as
“hack-and-leak” operations by state actors.
They had done the same thing
with Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much to Joe Rogan
in an August 2022 podcast. As Michael Shellenberger reported in the
seventh installment of the Twitter Files, the FBI repeatedly asked Roth
and others at Twitter about foreign influence operations on the platform
and were repeatedly told there were none of any significance. The FBI
also routinely pressured Twitter to hand over data outside the normal
search warrant process, which Twitter at first resisted.
(BG note: under FBI direction/orders these Twitter executives lied to a Congressional hearing, normally a felony crime)
In July 2020, Chan arranged for Twitter
executives to get top secret security clearances so the FBI could share
intelligence about possible threats to the upcoming presidential
election. The next month, Chan sent Roth information about a Russian
hacking group called APT28. Roth later said that when the Post’s
story about Hunter Biden’s laptop broke, “It set off every single one of
my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.”
Even though
there was never any evidence that anything on the laptop was hacked,
Roth reacted to it just as the FBI had conditioned him to do, using the
company’s hacked-materials policy to suppress the story as soon as it
appeared, just as the agency suggested it would, less than a month
before the election.
Suspending the President:
The erosion of Twitter’s content
moderation standards would continue after the Hunter Biden laptop
scandal, reaching its apogee on January 8, 2021, two days after the
Capitol riot. That is when Twitter made the extraordinary decision to
suspend President Trump, even though he had not violated any Twitter
policies.
As the Twitter Files show, the suspension came amid ongoing
interactions with federal agencies - interactions that were increasing in
frequency in the months leading up to the 2020 election, during which
Roth was meeting weekly with the FBI, the Department of Homeland
Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. As
the election neared, Twitter’s unevenly applied, rules-based content
moderation policies would steadily deteriorate.
Content moderation on Twitter had always
been an unstable mix of automatic enforcement of rules and subjective
interventions by top executives, most of whom used Twitter’s censorship
tools to diminish the reach of Trump and others on the right through
shadow banning and other means. But that was changing. As Taibbi wrote
in the third installment of the Twitter Files: “As the election
approached, senior executives - perhaps under pressure from federal
agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed - increasingly
struggled with rules, and began to speak of ‘vios’ [violations] as
pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.”
(BG note: Shadow-Banning: blocking (a user) from a social media
site or online forum without their knowledge, typically by making their
posts and comments no longer visible to other users. Wikipedia)
After January 6, Twitter jettisoned even
the appearance of a rules-based moderation policy, suspending Trump for a
pair of tweets that top executives falsely claimed were violations of
Twitter’s terms of service.
The first, sent early in the morning on
January 8, stated: “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!!!”
The second, sent about an hour
later, simply stated that Trump would not be attending Joe Biden’s
inauguration on January 20.
That same day, key Twitter staffers
correctly determined that Trump’s tweets did not constitute incitement
of violence or violate any other Twitter policies. But pressure kept
building from people like Gadde, who wanted to know whether the tweets
amounted to “coded incitement to further violence.” Some suggested that
Trump’s first tweet might have violated the company’s policy on the
glorification of violence.
Internal discussions then took an even more
bizarre turn. Members of Twitter’s “scaled enforcement team” reportedly
viewed Trump “as the leader of a terrorist group responsible for
violence/deaths comparable to Christchurch shooter or Hitler and on that
basis and on the totality of his Tweets, he should be de-platformed.”
Later on the afternoon of January 8,
Twitter announced Trump’s permanent suspension “due to the risk of
further incitement of violence” - a nonsense phrase that corresponded to
no written Twitter policy. The suspension of a sitting head of state was
unprecedented. Twitter had never taken such a step, even with heads of
state in Nigeria and Ethiopia who actually had incited violence.
Internal deliberations unveiled by the Twitter Files show that Trump’s
suspension was partly justified based on the “overall context and
narrative” of Trump’s words and actions - as one executive put it - “over
the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.”
That is, it was not anything Trump said
or did; it was that Twitter’s censors wanted to blame the President for
everything that happened on January 6 and remove him from the platform.
To do that, they were willing to shift the entire intellectual framework
of content moderation from the enforcement of objective rules to the
consideration of “context and narrative,” - thereby allowing executives to
engage in what amounts to viewpoint discrimination.
Private companies, of course, for the most part have the right
to engage in viewpoint discrimination - something the government is
prohibited from doing by the First Amendment. The problem is that when
Twitter suspended Trump, it was operating less like a private company
- than like an extension of the federal government.
* * *
Among the most shocking revelations of
the Twitter Files is the extent to which federal law enforcement and
intelligence agencies came to view Twitter as a tool for censorship and
narrative control. In part six of the Twitter Files, Taibbi chronicles
the “constant and pervasive” contact between the FBI and Twitter after
January 2020, “as if [Twitter] were a subsidiary.”
In particular, the
FBI and the Department of Homeland Security wanted Twitter to censor
tweets and lock accounts it believed were engaged in “election
misinformation,” and would regularly send the company content it had
pre-flagged for moderation, essentially dragooning Twitter into what
would otherwise be illegal government censorship. Taibbi calls it a
“master-canine” relationship. When requests for censorship came in from
the feds, Twitter obediently complied - even when the tweets in question
were clearly jokes or posted on accounts with few followers.
Some Twitter executives were unsure what
to make of this relationship. Policy Director Nick Pickles at one point
asked how he should refer to the company’s cooperation with federal law
enforcement and intelligence agencies, suggesting it be described in
terms of “partnerships.” Time and again, federal agencies stressed the
need for close collaboration with their “private sector partners,” using
the alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 election as the pretext
for a massive government surveillance and censorship regime operating
from inside Twitter.
Requests for content moderation, which
increasingly resembled demands, came not only from the FBI and DHS, but
also from a tangled web of other federal agencies, contractors, and
government-affiliated think tanks such as the "Election Integrity Project"
at Stanford University. As Taibbi writes, the lines between government
and its “partners” in this effort were “so blurred as to be
meaningless.”
The Deputization of Twitter:
After the 2016 election, both Twitter and
Facebook faced pressure from Democrats and their media allies to root
out Russian “election meddling” under the thoroughly debunked theory
that a Moscow-based social media influence operation was responsible for
Trump’s election victory. In reality, Russia’s supposed meddling
amounted to a minuscule ad buy on Facebook and a handful of Twitter
bots. But the truth was not acceptable to Democrats, the media, or the
anti-Trump federal bureaucracy.
In 2017, Twitter came under tremendous
pressure to “keep producing material” on Russian interference, and in
response it created a Russia Task Force to hunt for accounts tied to
Moscow’s Internet Research Agency. The task force did not find much. Out
of some 2,700 accounts reviewed, only two came back as significant, and
one of those was Russia Today, a state-backed news outlet.
But
in the face of bad press and threats from Democrats in Congress, Twitter
executives decided to go along with the official narrative and pretend
they had a Russia problem. To placate Washington and avoid costly new
regulations, they pledged to “work with [members of Congress] on their
desire to legislate.” When someone in Congress leaked the list of the
2,700 accounts Twitter’s task force had reviewed, the media exploded
with stories suggesting that Twitter was swarming with Russian bots - and
Twitter continued to go along.
After that, as described by Taibbi, “This
cycle - threatened legislation wedded to scare headlines pushed by
congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to [content]
moderation asks - [came to] be formalized in partnerships with federal law
enforcement.”
Late in 2017, Twitter quietly adopted a
new policy. In public, it would say that all content moderation took
place “at [Twitter’s] sole discretion.” But its internal guidance would
stipulate censorship of anything “identified by the U.S. intelligence
community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” Thus
Twitter increasingly allowed the intelligence community, the State
Department, and a dizzying array of federal and state agencies to submit
content moderation requests through the FBI, which Chan suggested could
function as “the belly button of the [U.S. government].” These requests
would grow and intensify during the Covid pandemic and in the run-up to
the 2020 election.
By 2020, there was a torrent of demands
for censorship, sometimes with no explanation - just an Excel spreadsheet
with a list of accounts to be banned. These demands poured in from FBI
offices all over the country, overwhelming Twitter staff. Eventually the
government would pay Twitter $3.4 million in compensation. It was a
pittance considering the work Twitter did at the government’s behest,
but the payment illustrated a stark reality: Twitter, a leading
gatekeeper of the digital public square and arguably the most powerful
social media platform in the world, had become a subcontractor for the
U.S. intelligence community.
* * *
The Twitter Files have revealed or confirmed three important truths about social media and the deep state.
First, the entire concept of “content
moderation” is a euphemism for censorship by social media companies that
falsely claim to be neutral and unbiased. To the extent they exercise a
virtual monopoly on public discourse in the digital era, we should stop
thinking of them as private companies that can “do whatever they want,”
as Libertarians are fond of saying. The companies’ content moderation
policies are at best a flimsy justification for banning or blocking
whatever their executives do not like. At worst, they provide cover for a
policy of pervasive government censorship.
Second, Twitter was taking marching
orders from a deep state security apparatus that was created to fight
terrorists, not to censor or manipulate public discourse. To the extent
that the Deep State is using social media companies like Twitter and
Facebook to subvert the First Amendment and run information psy-ops on
the American public, these companies have become malevolent government
actors. As a policy matter, the hands-off, laissez-faire regulatory
approach we have taken to them should come to an immediate end.
Third, the administrative state has
metastasized into a destructive Deep State that threatens to bring about
the collapse of America’s Constitutional system within our lifetimes.
Emblematic of the threat is the fact that “the intelligence community”
has proven itself incapable of not interfering in American
elections. The FBI in particular has directly meddled in the last two
presidential elections to a degree that should call into question its
continued existence.
Indeed, the FBI’s post-9/11 transformation from a
law enforcement agency to a counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering
agency with seemingly limitless remit has been a disaster for civil
liberties and the First Amendment. We need either to impose radical
reforms or scrap it entirely and start over.
(BG note: this "signed blank check" which freed the FBI to take
any actions they wanted, first against terrorist, then against American
citizens for political reasons - was set in place by George W. Bush,
Globalist)
The late great political scientist, Angelo
Codevilla, argued that our response to 9/11 was completely wrong.
Instead of erecting a sprawling security and surveillance apparatus to
detect and disrupt potential terrorist plots, we should have issued an
ultimatum to the regimes that were harboring Al Qaeda: "you make war on these terrorists and bring them to justice or we will make war on you."
The reason not to do what we did, Codevilla argued, is that a security
and surveillance apparatus powerful and pervasive enough to do what we
wanted it to do - was incompatible with a free society. It might defeat
the terrorists, but it would eventually be turned on the American
people.
(BG note: and from the information given us in this newsletter, we can
see that has indeed happened under the Democratic Party administration)
The Twitter Files leave little doubt that Angelo Codevilla’s
prediction has come to pass. The question we face now is whether the
American people and their elected representatives will fight back. The
fate of the republic rests on the answer.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Parenthetical emphasis in the newsletter above which begin with (BG note: . . .) are my additions and not in the original newsletter.
I am sharing this
newsletter to those in my Friends Ministry eNewsletter, on our Bill
& Dory Gray Christian Ministries blog site, and on Facebook - so
that you may choose whichever is the easiest for you to share. Yes, it
is that important.
God bless, have a wonderful, blessed day,
Bill Gray
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