The Twitter Files

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Probably why the Fauci files haven't been released in full

Musk’s Father: “I’m Really Afraid Something Might Happen to Elon”​


Says son is “a bit naïve about the enemies he’s making.”

PJW.jpg

23 January, 2023
Paul Joseph Watson

Elon Musk’s father says he is afraid “something might happen” to his son, asserting that the billionaire is “a bit naïve about the enemies he’s making” in relation to the release of the Twitter files.

Over the past several weeks, Musk has spearheaded the release of innumerable internal communications proving the White House, the federal government and giant pharmaceutical corporations worked directly with the old guard at Twitter to censor information and ban prominent users.

Although the legacy media has done its best to ignore the bombshell revelations, the Twitter files have nonetheless embarrassed many powerful individuals.

Retired engineer Errol Musk told the Sun newspaper that he thinks his son is being rather blasé about the potential backlash he may receive for exposing the establishment.

“I’m really afraid that something might happen to Elon, even though he has about 100 security guards around him,” Errol warned, noting that his son was being “a bit naïve about the enemies he’s making, especially with the Twitter Files.”

It appears that the feeling is very much mutual, with Elon Musk fearing that someone may try to harm or kidnap his father as revenge for his political stances.

The younger Musk “decided, after the recent threats against him, that I need protection as well,” Errol told the Sun, revealing that his home has undergone a “first class” security system upgrade.

Having had his home broken into four times in the last year alone, the property is now “completely secure,” with an electric fence, nine security cameras rolling 24/7 that Musk can access from his phone, as well as “around-the-clock monitoring by guards who are armed to the teeth.”

“If they kidnap one of us, it will be the quickest $20 million anybody’s ever made in their life,” said the 76-year-old, who previously shot three armed home invaders in 1998.

“The risk of something bad happening or literally even being shot is quite significant,” said Errol, adding, “It’s not that hard to kill me if somebody wanted to, so hopefully they don’t.”

As we previously highlighted, last month Musk revealed that he has increased his personal security in response to concerns over his safety following the release of the first dump of ‘Twitter files’.

“The risk of something happening to me is quite significant,” said the billionaire.





summit.news

Musk’s Father: “I’m Really Afraid Something Might Happen to Elon”

Says son is
summit.news
 



thread reader

threadreaderapp.com

Thread by @mtaibbi on Thread Reader App

@mtaibbi: 1.THREAD: Twitter Files #15 MOVE OVER, JAYSON BLAIR: TWITTER FILES EXPOSE NEXT GREAT MEDIA FRAUD 2.“I think we need to just call this out on the bullshit it is.” 3.“Falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate rig...…
threadreaderapp.com threadreaderapp.com
 

Twitter execs acknowledge mistakes with Hunter Biden laptop story but say no government involvement​


Former Twitter executives acknowledged to lawmakers Wednesday that the social media company erred when it temporarily suppressed a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, but the officials emphasized there was no government involvement in the decision.

Republicans grilled the social media executives – including former Twitter deputy counsel James Baker – over Twiter’s handling of the laptop story and broader complaints about censorship at the first high-profile hearing in front of the House Oversight Committee for the new Republican majority investigating President Joe Biden’s administration and family.

While Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk has suggested that the internal communications released as part of his so-called “Twitter files” show government censorship – suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the laptop story – the executives told Congress they did not receive any requests from the government to temporarily suppress the story.

More:

www.cnn.com

Twitter execs acknowledge mistakes with Hunter Biden laptop story but say no government involvement

Former Twitter executives acknowledged to lawmakers Wednesday that the social media company erred when it temporarily suppressed a New York Post story regarding Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020, but the officials emphasized there was no government involvement in the decision.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com
 

Jamie Raskin drops the hammer on Republicans after their Oversight hearing turns up 'absolutely nothing'​


In a fiery statement concluding today's Twitter testimony at the House Oversight Committee, ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the entire premise of the hearing and chided Republican members for failing to focus on more serious problems in social media.

The hearing, which included three former Twitter executives, focused on the decision by the company to briefly suppress a New York Post story detailing information about Hunter Biden's laptop ahead of the election as disinformation — a decision the company has freely admitted was a mistake, as many of the details of the story subsequently proved to be true. Republicans have claimed, without any evidence, that the FBI or the Biden campaign pressured Twitter into suppressing the story.

More:

 
One more................

news.yahoo.com

Democrats blast GOP for ‘wasting our time’ in hearing over ‘Twitter Files’

Democrats formed a united front Wednesday, painting Republicans as staging a distracting political stunt during the GOP’s first hearing targeting social media companies’ content policies. Republicans grilled former Twitter executives at a hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability...
news.yahoo.com news.yahoo.com
 

Jordan, Gaetz Decry FBI, DOJ ‘Censorship Campaign’ to Manipulate 2020 Election​

During an appearance on Thursday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Hannity,” Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) acknowledged the impact of the Department of Justice and FBI on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

According to the two Republican congressmen, it was clear the agencies were using pressure tactics to force censorship of some political views.

“Exit question, Chairman, I’ll ask you first,” host Sean Hannity said. “Was there a well-designed and orchestrated censorship campaign to influence the 2020 election? Is that a fact at this point?”

“Yeah, and I like the term that Professor [Jonathan] Turley used, censorship by surrogate. Here’s a fundamental question, Sean, why is the FBI sending a list of accounts to Twitter and telling Twitter we think these accounts, we think these tweets violate Twitter’s terms of service?” Jordan replied. “Why are they doing that? If that’s not pressure, if that’s not coercion to take down free speech, to take down political speech, I don’t know what it is. So I like that term ‘censorship by surrogate’ because that’s what took place, and we know that because of the Twitter files.”

“Matt Gaetz, do you agree censorship influenced the outcome of the 2020 election?” Hannity asked.

“Undeniably, on the laptop story alone,” Gaetz replied. “But we are just starting to learn all of the different features of shadow banning and trying to shape political thought for people in this country. I just want an FBI that goes and stops the bad guys from committing crimes and holds them accountable when they do, not an FBI and Department of Justice that’s trying to shape the political thought of our fellow Americans. We can do that for ourselves. We can decide who we want to vote for without the FBI and the DOJ trying to manipulate the digital marketplace of ideas.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

www.breitbart.com

Jordan, Gaetz Decry FBI, DOJ 'Censorship Campaign' to Manipulate 2020 Election

During an appearance on Thursday's broadcast of FNC's "Hannity," Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) acknowledged the impact of the Department of Justice and FBI on the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. | Clips
www.breitbart.com www.breitbart.com
 

Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists​

Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project​

Matt Taibbi

A new #TwitterFiles thread will be dropping in a few hours, at noon EST. It follows up the Hamilton 68 story of a month ago with examples of state-funded digital blacklisting campaigns run amok. It’s self-explanatory, but some advance context might help:

In 2015-2016, during the brief, forgotten period when Islamic terrorism was fading as a national obsession and Trumpian “domestic extremism” had not yet become one, Barack Obama made a series of decisions that may yet prove devastating to his legacy.

The short version is he signed Executive Order 13271, establishing a “Global Engagement Center” (“GEC”) to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.” This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.

In the bigger picture, however, a lame duck president kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment’s focus from counterterrorism to “disinformation.” Whether by malfunction or design, this abrupt course change of Washington’s contracting supertanker would have dramatic consequences. In fact, the tale of how America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against “threats” in our own population, might someday be remembered as the story of our time, with collective panic over “disinfo” defining this generation in much the same way the Red Scare defined the culture of the fifties.

This is a complicated story and it would be a mistake to jump to simplistic conclusions, like that the Global Engagement Center (humorously nicknamed “GECK” or “YUCK” by detractors in other agencies) is an evil Orwellian mind-control scheme. It isn’t. But for a few crucial bad decisions, it could have fulfilled a useful or at least logical mission, much as the United States Information Agency (USIA) once did. However, instead of stressing research and public reports, as the USIA did when responding to Soviet accusations that Americans had caused the AIDS crisis, GEC funded a secret list of contractors and employed a more surreptitious approach to “counter-disinformation,” sending companies like Twitter voluminous reports on foreign “ecosystems” — in practice, blacklists.

GEC was not conceived as a partisan mechanism to defang conservative media, despite the recent true and damning series of reports by the Washington Examiner, outlining how a GEC-funded NGO in England used algorithmic scoring to de-rank outlets like The Daily Wire and help papers like the New York Times earn more ad revenue. The blacklisting tales you’ll be reading about later today on Twitter also primarily target American conservatives, though GEC and GEC-funded contractors also target left-friendly movements like the gilets jaunes (yellow vests), socialist media outlets like Canada’s Global Research, even the Free Palestine movement.

The scary angle on GEC is not so much the agency as the sprawling infrastructure of “disinformation labs” that have grown around it.

Underneath America’s love affair with “anti-disinformation” in the Trump years — which expressed itself in the seemingly instant construction of a sprawling complex of disinformation studies “labs” at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Clemson, UT, Pitt, William and Mary, the University of Washington, and other locations — lay a devastating secret. Most of these “experts” know nothing. Many have skill, if you can call mesmerizing dumb reporters a skill, but in the area of identifying true bad actors, few know more than the average person on the street.

This is described repeatedly in the #TwitterFiles. In one sequence Twitter was contacted by Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times, who was writing a hagiographic profiles of “disinformation” warrior Renee DiResta, who’d achieved some renown as a campaigner against vaccine misinformation. Frenkel wrote Twitter to ask why they hadn’t hired “independent researchers” like DiResta, Jonathan Albright, and Jonathon Morgan — coincidentally, all hired witnesses of the Senate Intelligence Committee — to help Twitter “better understand” its own business.

At the sight of Frenkel’s provocative note, some Twitter execs lost it.

“The word ‘researcher’ has taken on a very broad meaning,” snapped Nick Pickles. “Renee is literally doing this as a hobby… Of those three only [Albright] is the most credible, but... the bulk of his work is Medium blogs.”

“Like CVE before it, misinformation is becoming a cottage industry,” agreed comms official Ian Plunkett, referencing “countering violent extremism,” a.k.a. counterterrorism.

Today’s thread among other things will detail crude digital blacklisting schemes dreamed up by this new cottage industry. Each features the same design “flaw,” in which giant lists of supposed foreign disinformationists somehow also come to include ordinary Americans, often with the same political leanings.

In one ridiculous case, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), a GEC-funded entity, sent Twitter a huge list of people they suspected of “engaging in inauthentic behavior… and Hindu nationalism more broadly.” You’ll see the list to judge. As was the case with the “Hamilton 68” story, in which a spook-laden think tank purported to track accounts linked to “Russian influence activities” while really following the likes of @TrumpDyke and @TimeForTrumppp, this DFRLab list of “Hindu nationalists” is weirdly packed with real septuagenarian Trump supporters.

One, a woman named Marysel Urbanik who immigrated from Castro’s Cuba in her youth, struggled to understand why a Washington think tank had sent Twitter a letter ID’ing her as either “inauthentic” or a Hindu nationalist.

“They say I’m what?”

“A Hindu nationalist,” I said. “Well, suspected.”

“But I’m Cuban, not Indian,” she pleaded, confused. “Hindu? I wouldn’t even know what words to say.”

Such listmakers are either employing extremely expansive definitions of hate speech, extremely inexact methods of identifying spam, or they’re doing both in addition to a third thing: keeping up a busywork campaign for underemployed ex-anti-terror warriors, who don’t mind racking up lists of “foreign” disinformationists that just happen to also rope in domestic undesirables.

In his book Information Wars, the original nominal head of GEC and former Time editor Rick Stengel explained an epiphany he had that allowed him to tie the fight against “foreign” disinformation to matters domestic. It happened when Stengel watched a YouTube video of Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin:

more
www.racket.news

Twitter Files: GEC, New Knowledge, and State-Sponsored Blacklists

Americans have been paying taxes to disenfranchise themselves, as government agencies and subcontractors undertake a massive digital blacklisting project
www.racket.news www.racket.news
 

LIVE: Weaponization Committee Hearing on Social Media Censorship​

Streamed on: Mar 9, 10:03 am EST
2:45:00
 
The discovery phase would be fun.
 
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit held that Twitter did not act as the government by banning a user months after a government agency flagged for Twitter one of his tweets on alleged election fraud. O’Handley v. Weber is the latest decision rejecting social media users’ attempts to hold platforms liable for deleting, demonetizing, and otherwise moderating their content.

Twitter is a private entity, so the government and the courts cannot tell it what speech it must remove or what speech it must carry. The First Amendment restricts censorship only by the government, not private entities, unless those entities are using government power or otherwise effectively acting as the government. But in O’Handley, even if Twitter and the government were “generally aligned in their missions to limit the spread of misleading election information[, s]uch alignment does not transform private conduct into state action.”
...
Click to expand...

More:

www.eff.org

Victory at the Ninth Circuit: Twitter’s Content Moderation is Not “State Action”

Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit held that Twitter did not act as the government by banning a user months after a government agency flagged for Twitter one of his tweets on alleged election fraud. O’Handley v. Weber is the latest decision rejecting social media users’ attempts to hold...
www.eff.org www.eff.org
 
Clearly, as long as the gov't (with offices in your actual company store) just asks your outfit to censor someone specifically... that is not government censorship.

And if the gov't hands your outfit a long list of politically-defined people they want censored... and they merely ask you to specifically silence them... that is not government censorship. To some people without thought.

All it takes is a treasonous, paid-off judge who wants to keep breathing.

And there will be instant supporters of the judge-in-the-pocket's outrageous blind eye. Reality be damned, the Bought Owned Court has ruled.

There was nothing amiss in Arizona either. The still-breathing judge said so. Despite facts. No problem with five hundred people all having the same vacant lot for an address... not a problem. Legit, sez the judge.
 
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Unca Walt said:
Clearly, as long as the gov't (with offices in your actual company store) just asks your outfit to censor someone specifically... that is not government censorship
Click to expand...
The “implied” threat is apparent.
 

Twitter's open source code reveals US government can 'intervene' with recommendation algorithm​

"When needed, the government can intervene with the Twitter algorithm."

On Friday, Twitter released the recommendation algorithm portion of its code by publishing it on GitHub, where developers post open source software data. Developer Steven Tey dug into the code and found that there is a mechanism through which the US government can "intervene" with the code.

"When needed, the government can intervene with the Twitter algorithm," Tey wrote. "In fact, @TwitterEng (Twitter Engineering) even has a class for it – 'GovernmentRequested.'"



thepostmillennial.com

Twitter’s open source code reveals US government can ‘intervene’ with recommendation algorithm

“When needed, the government can intervene with the Twitter algorithm.”
thepostmillennial.com thepostmillennial.com
 
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