The Twitter files prove government violating constitutional rights through big tech
If Mark Zuckerberg's take on what went down at Facebook didn't convince you, maybe the receipts provided by Elon Musk to journalist Matt Taibbi will.
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Ladies and gentlemen, we got ‘em. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel wholly vindicated in the face of leftists having to eat a bit of humble pie after years of defending corporations that feed into their preferred narrative and stifle free speech for their political opposites.
Elon Musk announced on Friday that he would be releasing in series what he’s calling the ‘Twitter Files’ which proves many of the things we already heavily suspected were going on behind the scenes at Twitter, but validation on this stuff matters. Gaslighting can’t work if everyone is informed. And he chose independent journalist Matt Taibbi to disseminate this information without it getting lost in translation through the spin machines of mainstream press. Taibbi, for the sake of reach and transparency, chose to do so in a tweet thread about the matter.
Twitter’s software and development, like any other tech company, has gone through countless builds and iterations. It’s typical for unique problems to arise amidst the growing pains of a company like Twitter. Issues arise, engineers solve them, a tale as old as time. Spammers and scammers give these engineers the lionshare of their work, as they’re effectively free QA testers for any company by virtue of their dedication to being scumbags.
The tools evolved and developed, allowing moderation staff to do their jobs more efficiently. As Twitter became more and more important as a platform to the public discourse and proved capable of swaying public sentiment on any topic that goes viral, government agencies and political power players naturally took notice.
These corrupt government types then clearly asked themselves a question: what if we made social media work for us? It’s not fair for Joe Blow out there in the world to be able to share something that might be problematic for whoever the corrupt elites have chosen to put into our country’s highest posts, so they clearly felt it was time start clamping down on that little issue of free speech at some point.
They would soon find that the utility of their stranglehold over public discourse through pressing social media outlets like Twitter to remove things that they don’t like, as the Hunter Biden laptop reared its ugly head.
That story began on October 14th, 2020, when the infamous ( and legitimate ) Hunter Biden laptop story was originally published by the New York Post. The conspiracy of silence started almost immediately, with mainstream media refusing to cover it. When they did acknowledge it, they very quickly adopted the ‘Russian disinformation’ line at the behest of federal law enforcement that still gains traction now and then with the most deluded NPCs of the institutional left and their lemmings. And as we see in internal communications, Biden’s team themselves were pressuring Twitter to remove posts they didn’t like — they happily obliged.
This is a rather familiar scenario for me. Personally, I had several Twitter accounts nuked for posting a video of me scrolling the article that I made to bypass the automatic censors. And it wasn’t just small-time people like me getting punished for attempting to proliferate this story, it was prominently-placed individuals as well.
Kaleigh McEnany, who was the White House press secretary at the time, also got locked out of her account on October 14th, which prompted a swift email response from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who demanded answers on why McEnany was locked out of her account, and he lambasted Twitter staff for not being transparent about their intent to suppress news articles.
Ending off the email with an admonishment, Hahn said, “Like I said, at least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”
This prompted Caroline Strom, public policy executive at Twitter, to ask if any staffers could look into it, where she then received a response that the Hunter Biden laptop story and all who attempted to proliferate it were to be subject to removal under the ‘Hacked Materials’ policy.
This whole interaction tells me that it is common practice to censor and suppress things and usually none of these individuals bat an eye at it, like it’s normal to violate 1st amendment rights any other time. As we read on, we find out that that is indeed the case.
Social media companies like Twitter sprang into action to keep this Hunter Biden story on a low simmer at best, some more aggressively than others. According to Taibbi and the internal documents themselves, they used every trick in the book to limit exposure, from punishing individuals for posting it, to blocking its proliferation in Direct Messages between users ( again, something I personally encountered as I attempted to pass my video of the New York Post article along to others ), to hiding external links to stories about it behind warnings about ‘unsafe’ links.
Twitter — as Mark Zuckerberg said in his infamous interview with Joe Rogan — was much more absolute in their suppression of that story. Facebook, while still guilty, didn’t quite gut all discourse on the matter at the drop of a hat, though they did heavily impede the reach of the story on the platform. You can read more about what he said below.
We find as we read on in Taibbi’s tweet thread that former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey seems to have had no knowledge of what those under him were doing, and that Vijaya Gadde, the former head of legal policy and trust at Twitter, was the one orchestrating this whole response to the Hunter Biden laptop story. A successful hyperpartisan effort to tamper with election results, as polls about the matter can attest.
I myself don’t believe that Jack Dorsey wasn’t privy to what was going on earlier than is claimed, but he and Elon seem to be good friends, so make of that conflict of interest what you like. I don’t think it changes much with what went on at Twitter in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, but it’s something to keep in mind as more and more of this information has been disseminated.
These decisions resulted in a state of confusion at Twitter, with employees at the time saying that “They just freelanced it,” implying that the inmates were very much running the asylum at that point.
“Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it,” is what one Twitter employee recalled about the matter.
I don’t totally buy that, either. I don’t think, given the malevolent actors such as the infamous Yoel Roth in the following exchange, that we can truly believe Dorsey knew nothing, but I’m only speculating.
From this exchange we can see that former Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde were the ones insisting on acting outside of Twitter policy to enact the censorship of the Hunter Biden story. The others were less convinced, but ultimately complicit in the scheme, choosing to “err on the side of… continuing to err” as Matt Taibbi hilariously put it.
Furthermore you can see proof that they knew what they were doing was criminal with Ian Plunkett’s insistence that they maintain that they’re interpreting this through the hacked materials policy to mitigate claims of bias that would be immediately made against Jack Dorsey in any hearings that might take place on the matter. Funny also that he abandoned ship at Twitter back in 2021 to move into the crypto space.
In other words, you can say that Twitter’s staff liked the outcome their shady actions gave them, so that was the plan of action they chose. Twitter — at the behest of hyperpartisans like Yoel Roth and Vijaya Gadde — wittingly chose to tamper with news that would have affected the outcome of the 2020 election outright.
If that doesn’t warrant hearings about Twitter’s practices during that time, then don’t fret — there’s more to come.
Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna, representing California’s 17th district since 2017, seemed to be particularly perturbed by the constitutional implications of Twitter’s actions as he discussed it in correspondance with Vijaya Gadde.
This is where it gets particularly interesting when it comes to the arrogance of Twitter’s former head of legal policy and trust, as she seems to believe that Twitter’s policies hold more water than the constitution and that forcing a White House staffer to ‘comply’ with a bullshit policy they made up on the spot is well within the reasonable bounds of their historically unchecked power. This email exchange alone warrants a revision — or abolishment — of section 230 on its own, in my opinion.
Khanna correctly called out how dangerous it is to restrict journalists from doing their job, and in many ways, anyone who is breaking news on Twitter qualifies in some small part as just that. Sharing information is not a crime and it doesn’t make you an accessory to the crime committed by someone who obtained those materials through illegal means. If that were the case then anyone who ever hears a copyright-protected song without paying for it is guilty of at least being party to the pirating of copyrighted music. It’s a slippery slope of the highest order. Khanna even admits to being a “total biden partisan” himself but he saw a lot wrong with the practices that Twitter used during this time, and that it was causing rumblings on Capitol Hill to begin curbing the unchecked power that social media companies like Twitter enjoy.
Too little, too late, in my opinion. I’m sure they’ll be happy to curb Twitter’s power now that it is starting to turn on the Washington establishment thanks to Elon Musk.
And while I agree with a lot of Khanna’s sentiment, he also makes his arguments from a place of concern for the political implications attached to operating in such a blatantly partisan manner. There’s no real ethical concern in what he’s saying, it’s just another example of a Washington snake in his natural habitat, plying his political trade for the sake of himself and his accomplices, and without any concern for the American people who are also harmed by these censorious practices that are commonplace in social media.
Furthermore, any ethics Khanna displayed whatsoever in his concerned correspondance with Gadde was outright destroyed with his request at the end.
”Please keep this communication between just us and Jack and no need to cc the team or forward to them.”
Anyone, such as Ro Khanna, who is in the position to stop partisan manipulation of public sentiment by private companies with a nefarious political agenda who doesn’t do so is guilty of being an accomplice, and should be subject to expulsion from their office, as well as being held criminally liable for their part in it, as this is a gross violation of Ro Khanna’s oath of office by virtue of electing to join in the conspiracy with Twitter through his appeal for silence on the matter and his ‘advisory’ role in all of it.
A day later, Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice reached out to Lauren Culbertson, head of Public Policy. He described how his company reached out to 12 lawmakers — 9 Republicans and 3 Democrats — who were part of the “House judiciary committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office” and inquired about their feelings on the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.
Surprisingly, both sides were upset over the whole situation, and the 9 Republicans in particular referred to it as a “tipping point”. My interpretation is that they correctly prophesied that the privatized tyranny that big tech social media platforms regularly practice would be on the decline from that point forward. They were half-right. It just took a little longer than anyone might have expected.
What Szabo said next chilled me to my core in the sense that there are people that are this dumb that hold public office.
Biden innocent? Hillary did nothing wrong? Ha. Hahahaha. That’s not really the point here but that gave me a good laugh. A cursory glance at the evidence in both cases disproves both assertions.
The laughter stopped, however, when I read the part about Democrat lawmakers believing that social media doesn’t go far enough in their gross violations of the constitutional rights afforded to the American people.
Democrat lawmakers calling for more moderation of speech on social media is tantamount to privatizing enforcement of the Constitution. I remember a day when we called that sort of thing what it is — fascism. These people should be thrown out of office immediately.
I don’t know about you, but the last people I want in control of my rights as an American are Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth.
Our outright refusal to regulate private companies’ overreaches into suppressing the rights of private citizens is how we got to this point, and it’s time to change it before it’s too late. Any lawmaker not onboard entirely with an internet bill of rights that includes unfettered freedom of speech protections on all platforms should not be allowed to keep their office.
It’s blatantly clear that the whole point of all of this was to get revenge for 2016’s election loss. No matter how many laws Democrat operatives and the lawmakers who sanction their illicit activities had to break in the process.
Still, the file dumps from Twitter courtesy of Elon Musk through Matt Taibbi have been nothing short of riveting, and he chose the right person to do it.
Matt Taibbi, as anyone whose keeping score here knows, is one of my very favorite journalists. I cannot stress enough how reassuring it is to know that Elon trusted this task to him, knowing full well that running this info through the filter of mainstream media would dilute it down to impotence and leave it open to nefarious spin and disingenuous interpretation. That or it just wouldn’t see the light of day at all.
The outrage of mainstream media personnel about it is strangely reminiscent of this video showing a bunch of news people reading the exact same nonsense speech across the country. They march in lockstep at all times and it’s disgusting. I’d like to sneak into the meeting, just once.
The basic attack nowadays is to say that Taibbi is “running PR for the world’s richest man”. As this article can correctly attest, this is the new cry of “Russian disinformation” by mainstream media shills who are essentially saying that Taibbi is doing… exactly what they do on a daily basis because it’s their jobs to do so. Strange that it’s meant as an insult when they say Taibbi is running cover for a rich master.
Glenn Greenwald said it best, though.
I couldn’t agree more, and it’s people like that who are the reason why Elon didn’t share this exclusive with any mainstream outlets in the first place, because he knew what would happen to the story: it would disappear entirely thanks to the efforts of traitors whose cushy lifestyles are more important to them than the country in which they live. A country they regularly insult and denigrate whenever it suits their narrative to do so, in order to incite indignation toward the greatest country on earth from ungrateful citizens.
Loyalty to a paycheck should come a distant 2nd place to doing right by your country. So my appeal to the shills attacking Taibbi and this Twitter story is simple: Be a patriot, not a parasite.