The Twitter files: leftism requires censorship
We on the right knew for years that it was happening. Twitter was not just blocking conservatives outright when they hadn’t actually violated terms of service, but it was also shadow-banning them and subjecting them to a host of other secret machinations – such as a “trends blacklist,” or a “search blacklist” – that inhibited their traffic and stifled their message.
It was widespread and utterly purposeful, and because Twitter has a huge audience and enormous political influence, it mattered. Of course it mattered, and the high-ups at Twitter denied it was happening for the most part.
Yesterday Bari Weiss wrote a series of revealing tweets about the entire process. You can read them more easily than on Twitter by going here, and you can read a discussion of them here.
Bloggers like me have a few thousand readers a day. Even a huge blog like Instapundit probably only reaches something like 220 thousand a day. The New York Times supposedly has close to 11 million subscribers, which is a lot – but nothing like Twitter’s reach, which has 206 million daily active users.
And Twitter administrators have not been shy about shaping the perceptions of those users to fit a leftist perspective, doing it in secret, and justifying it to themselves. Talk about elitist! And the only qualifications they have to do this is that they are employed by Twitter, and they can, and nobody stopped them. They are the arbiters of True and False, Love and Hate, Acceptable and Unacceptable, because it’s a private platform.
Yes, they collaborated with government, but it was voluntary collaboration – always to help the left, because the left is Virtuous – and also because the government might regulate them more if they didn’t. But plenty of their banning and the shaping and secret manipulating was done on their own – for our own good, of course.
One of the funny (although not “funny ha-ha”) things about all of this is that these same people bleat on about “democracy” and its great value and worth. And yet they think of the public as unable to sort out the wheat from the chaff, as children in need of control from – yes – Big Brother Twitter. And they’re not the least bit ashamed about it. They had to do it to save democracy.
Also see this:
I've seen enough. Long story short, Twitter was a fed-run operation. Feds were ultimately running the show, and making a mockery of our constitutional rights. https://t.co/DaL77ua8BW
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) December 9, 2022
In the title of this post I wrote that leftism requires censorship. It cannot stand on its own and must stifle criticism or having its failures pointed out. Orwell knew that and made it the centerpiece of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Twitter is no telescreen; its work was much more clandestine and duplicitous. People were allowed to communicate what seemed to be freely in the marketplace of ideas, except for the most egregious statements. But it wasn’t free at all, and Big Brother Twitter was always watching you and ready to censor and/or suppress wrongthink.
This is the most interesting and important example Weiss provided.
Dr Jay Bhattacharya is not some right wing bomb thrower or provocateur, he is a Stanford professor and he also didn’t even join twitter until August of 2021. That was a year and a half into the authoritarian Covid response. Long after any rational person should have been fearful in any real way but yet he censored or whatever Newspeak term they were using.
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601011428579717121
The reason why this is so important to those who say it’s
‘only Twitter who cares’ is because this same type of thing is almost certainly happening at Facebook, Google/YouTube and the like we just don’t have someone like Musk exposing it.
Griffin:
I noticed it with Google years ago.
The quotes look misplaced here:
Conservative commentator Bari Weiss just dropped “episode 2” of the “Twitter Files.”
Let’s try this: “Conservative” commentator Bari Weiss just dropped Episode 2 of the Twitter Files.
There, fixed it.
As I recall, Alex Berenson got internal Twitter data to support a First Amendment lawsuit on his part against the government, I believe the CDC.
Leftist twaddle about “saving democracy” is nauseating, given their deliberate suppression of dissenting voices.
I think Musk is working with Taibbi and Weiss on this because neither is “conservative,” and therefore their reporting is slightly more likely to be believed by leftists whose minds aren’t entirely closed. So far, we’re not seeing too many of those.
There can’t be a doubt all social media was run like Twitter.
Everything for the State, nothing against the State.
Don’t forget it is censorship for our own good (according to the Left).
Regarding Bari Weiss, anyone to the Right of Stalin is conservative for the Leftists.
Finally something on which we can agree, BrooklynBoy. Anyone on the left who departs even slightly from the party line becomes a target.
Any ideology that “cannot stand on its own and must stifle criticism” in order to keep its failures from exposure is inherently EVIL. To fail to regard it as evil is to enable evil.
There is an early-1950s SF novel which portrays the present threat to liberty and democracy more closely than does either ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World’, though it’s not of the same literary quality. The book is a 1954 pulp novel called ‘Year of Consent’…I reviewed it here:
https://ricochet.com/871838/book-review-year-of-consent-by-kendell-foster-crossen/
See also my post Comm Check:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/64898.html
Banned Lizard links to a website, The Insider, with the headline:
“The ‘Twitter Files’ part 2 claimed to ‘reveal’ that the platform limited some accounts’ reach, but that was already public knowledge — and in line with Elon Musk’s new ‘freedom of speech, not freedom of reach’ policy”
Everything is a-ok according to them since, 1. twitter didn’t violate the 1st amendment as a private company and 2. people were free to post, to bad if no one could see there post.
They ignore the relationship of the administrative state directing whose speech was classified “unreachable”.
Leftists don’t use the same dictionary as conservatives. Never forget they don’t mean the same things about nearly everything (OK, everything). Terms like Free Speech or Democracy have unique meanings to them.
Translated:
“Free Speech” means “Acceptable Speech”.
“Democracy” means “Our Democracy”, where everyone who follows “Acceptable Speech” is welcomed– especially BIPOC illegals and other groups persecuted by all evil people.
The Left is so use to winning and lying that they can’t believe they are being exposed for the liars that they are. That’s why they censor. They don’t want to debate ideas because they can’t. For them it’s ipse dixit.
The Left’s intellectual dishonest and authoritarianism are two of its prime characteristics.
As James Wood wrote on Twitter, “Scratch a liberal and find an authoritarian.”
1984 is a how to manual for them
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601367426129543169
Buy this book. You can now do it via neo’s website AND still get it by Christmas!
https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406
Lies are literally embedded in the philosophy. Words and language are not a route to Truth, they are weapons to be wielded to acquire power. Their “best” thinkers were not the least bit shy in saying so.
I also happen to know the author. In fact, we were once on the same side on a debate team (thank goodness).
I’ve had the good fortune to get to know some insanely smart people in my career and through my hobbies. Stephen is on the short list of the smartest people I’ve ever personally come across.
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Brian E:
Something can be wrong without being illegal. The left is talking about issues that inform whether this was illegal – which rests on the exact role of the government in the whole thing. It’s possible it would not be found illegal in a court of law, depending on the definition of government actor and how involved the government actors were. And of course the left isn’t objecting to the obvious and blatant bias, because the left was the beneficiary. But once again it’s those people in the middle who might – and should – be outraged at the politically-based censorship, even if it wasn’t a crime, especially because the Twitter spokespeople and officials lied about it and covered it up – and also accused those on the right who noticed it of being paranoid conspiracy freaks making stuff up. Those fair-minded people in the middle are the ones who might be reached by these revelations – if they manage to hear them.
They are back at it this time Matt Taibbi about Trump and the lead up to J6.
The thread:
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601352083617505281
The last tweet in Taibbi’s thread (whoops, the third to last tweet in his thread).
After J6 and their actions Twitter was receiving plaudits from ‘our partners’ in Washington.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1601387906492694528
Neo, I’m of your generation and my high school was pretty liberal (anti Vietnam war, etc.) These people were assholes then, and have largely proven to be world class arrogant pricks over the years, especially the last 3.
I hope to see a cumulative analysis of who was sending government instructions to Twitter, on what subjects, and during what administrations. Such a history of the development of these relationships would show us a lot about how our government has become completely corrupted, and by whom. The next step would of course be to identify who in the government was coordinating what were no doubt multiple anti-constitutional efforts.
“Something can be wrong without being illegal. The left is talking about issues that inform whether this was illegal…”
Great! Now let’s do Kiddie Porn a la Twittere…
William A. Jacobson on the illegality of it ALL.
” #Twitterfiles Are About Biden Family Corruption and Media Coverup;
“We must not shy away from the truth that the run-up to the 2020 election was manipulated to bury a story that could have and possibly would have changed the outcome of the election.”—
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/twitterfiles-are-about-biden-family-corruption-and-media-coverup/
Key grafs:
“…Musk made a mistake by portraying this as a First Amendment issue and as government interference. That allowed others, particularly in the corrupt corporate media, to argue over whether it really was a constitutional issue because the government involvement was obtuse (based on what’s been revealed). The government involvement was by the Trump FBI, but anyone with half a brain knows that the Trump FBI was out to get Trump, so the issue is muddy. And Biden campaign involvement was pre-Biden administration.
“So we have this fevered distraction about whether the 1st Amendment applied — it’s reminiscent of the endless debate about whether the gross racialization of education really is “Critical Race Theory.” Arguing over what the meaning of “is” is, is a classic Democrat tactic.
“What the files do show is a deliberate effort by leftists inside Twitter (which was about all of them) to spike the story and any mention of the story on the most important political platform in the country, based on false claims that the laptop was hacked and/or Russian disinformation. It was one of the greatest travesties of media manipulation, amplified across multiple platforms and mainstream media outlets….”
+ Bonus:
Serious reason (for discerning “Atantic Monthly” readers) NOT to vote for Ron DeSantis:
“Latest Media Attack on Ron DeSantis: He’s ‘Not a Fun and Convivial Dude’ ”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/12/latest-media-attack-on-ron-desantis-hes-not-a-fun-and-convivial-dude/
Barry Meislin,
Leftists would rather have their teeth pulled without anesthetics than spend time with DeSantis!
“I’d rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis,” says Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee lobbyist who set sail from the GOP over his revulsion for Trump and his knockoffs. To sum up: DeSantis is not a fun and convivial dude. He prefers to keep his earbuds in. His “Step away from the vehicle” vibes are strong.
To stipulate: None of this is necessarily disqualifying.
Notice it’s not “necessarily” disqualifying! That was close. DeSantis could have been out before he even announced, had The Atlantic not saved him!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/ron-desantis-awkward-trump-2024/672292/
Indeed. Pure (sickening) entertainment
And to think of what “The Atlantic” used to be….
(Or for that matter “The New Republic”…—All of ’em. They’ve ALL gone pffft down the rabbit hole.)
I gave you the skinny on stipanovich im not saying hes lincoln project sleaze but only because he formally hasnt been invited
Mac has his nose so far up shamblings backside well…
Agree with you conclusion about left requiring censorship. But am reminded of Skokie March by KKK and ACLU lecturing rest of America to tolerate. ACLU then was also considered left-wing.
Heck it was not very long ago that one, at least I, could tolerate Chris Matthews. Think it was the infatuation with Barack and the revulsion and surprising Trump victory that crashed everything for them.
DEEBEE:
It’s very very very very simple. The left is for free speech when the left is the one in danger of being marginalized by lack of free speech. Once the left is in charge, though, it gets to do the censoring and goes at it with vigor.
I’ll say it again: the level and proliferation of insanity caused by the combination of TDS mixed with COVID-19 has proven to be one of the most toxic human-made products ever created….
Not sure what the anti-dote is.
Unfortunately, probably some sort of immense/intense—and therefore sobering—military and/or financial and/or social conflagration.
Unfortunately….
Don’t think anything is beneath them. If any leftist believes its necessary to achieve goals by censorship, eventually, (if not immediately) he’ll likely be just as accepting of bald-faced lying.
@thenewneo said – “We on the right knew for years that it was happening.”
When did neo moving to the right happen?
I thought you were more a centrist/classic liberal… but really doesn’t matter since the labels we use are all co-opted for maximum political damage. Right – Left what’s it matter.
Liberty or Authoritarianism is the only choice, freedom or slavery.
How its going
https://twitter.com/kassandraseven
zenman:
My political change occurred during a two-year period from 2001-2003. About twenty years ago now.
I am a classical liberal, which these days places me squarely on the right.
DEEBEE on December 10, 2022 at 6:13 pm said:
Agree with you conclusion about left requiring censorship. But am reminded of Skokie March by KKK and ACLU lecturing rest of America to tolerate. ACLU then was also considered left-wing.
At the time I felt that was mostly about the ACLU virtue signaling how even handed it was. The left would benefit from the KKK speaking out anyhow. For much the same reason the Lincoln Project had some fake neo-nazis pose in front of a Republican candidate’s campaign bus. Or whoever is behind Patriot Front.
Don:
See this comment of mine.