But sometimes it’s possible to tell. And X has just made it a lot easier by rolling out a feature – first temporary but which supposedly will become permanent – that reveals the location of accounts as well as other facts such as where they were first created. And it turns out not just that there were some imposters in the political sphere, there were a ton of them:

And it turns out that some of the most “pro-American” American First or America Only accounts are located in the patriotic states of Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. …

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that the most aggressive Jew-hating “America First” accounts are actually based in Islamic countries. …

“Counter-AIPAC,” which rails against foreign Jews subverting American politics through AIPAC, turns out to be, get this, an Egyptian subverting American politics by representing himself as America First. …

Other accounts seeking to subvert American politics are owned by leftists in Canada. But they claim they’re rootin’-tootin’ American patriots. …

One odd thing: There are apparently a lot of “Native American” accounts calling for hatred and violence against the white man for stealing their land. They turn out to be based in… Bangladesh.

Lots more at the link, as well as here and here and well, just about everywhere on the right. This is my first post on the subject, and I don’t plan for it to be my last. There is so much food for thought here it will take some time to digest it.

It’s clear that a great deal of what transpires online, especially in social media such as Twitter (“X”), is fake. We already knew that – but the question has always been, how much? And what are the forces behind this? And what’s to be done about it?

One thing I strongly believe is that although many of the accounts may be fake, they do influence real people to think a certain way and to think they are part of a larger movement (a partly illusory one). Again, we’ve all known this, but the proportions of fake to real are important and that is unknown as yet. Will it ever be known?

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Prior to the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, it was easier for governments (or, during the time of the Trump administration, anti-Trump government agencies such as the FBI) to muzzle Twitter through a combination of suggestions and threats, as well as deceptions. Now that it’s much more difficult to do, they may resort to outright blocking of the platform – as did Brazil recently.

From Jonathan Turley:

Brazil has not just banned X (formerly Twitter) from the entire country, but citizens will now be fined $9000 a day (more than the average salary in the country) for using VPNs to access the platform. X is the main source of news for Brazilians, who will now be left with government-approved sources or face financial ruin in seeking unfettered information.

The Guardian is reporting that the confiscatory fines are part of a comprehensive crackdown on efforts to get news through X, including ordering all Apple stores to remove X from new phones.

The move puts Brazil with China in the effort to create a wall of censorship between citizens and unregulated information.

For the anti-free speech movement, Brazil is a key testing ground for where the movement is heading next. European censors are arresting CEOs like Pavel Durov while threatening Elon Musk.

However, it is Brazil that foreshadows the brave new world of censorship where entire nations will block access to sites committed to free speech values or unfettered news. If successful, the Brazilian model is likely to be replicated by other countries.

The current administration in Brazil is leftist.

Here’s some reaction from our own left:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison responded to the ban with a posting declaring “Obrigado Brasil!” or “Thanks, Brazil!” Ironically, he did so on X.

Ellison previously praised the virulently anti-free speech group Antifa and promised that it would “strike fear in the heart” of Donald Trump.

And this from Kamala Harris is ominous:

This is what she actually believes.

Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and the Democratic Party (Kamala is just a puppet) wants to destroy it. https://t.co/kntGcq2WnK

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 3, 2024

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Special Counsel Jack Smith hunted information on X users who liked or retweeted posts published by former President Donald Trump, according to redacted search warrants and other documents released Monday. …

it wasn’t just Trump’s Twitter account that Smith and his cronies were targeting. The special counsel’s warrant also sought data on Twitter users who interacted with the former president’s account. Among the information Smith sought was a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” during the aforementioned timeframe. Smith similarly demanded that Twitter, which has since rebranded as X, fork over a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account.

Smith and his team went even further, seeking to acquire data on Twitter users who engaged with Trump’s tweets in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. This included “all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by [Trump], as well as all tweets that include the username associated with [Trump’s account] (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).”

Out of control. And half the country probably approves.

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Musk has announced a new Twitter policy that is sure to rile the left:

“Yesterday, after posting a Tweet saying that I reject the word ‘cis’ and don’t wish to be called it, I receive [sic] a slew of messages from trans activists calling me ‘cissy’ and telling me that I am ‘cis’ ‘whether or not I like it’,” James Esses, co-founder of Thoughtful Therapists, tweeted.

In his original tweet, Esses declared his rejection of the term. “I formally and publicly declare that I reject the label of ‘cis’. I don’t believe in gender ideology. I don’t self-identify as ‘cis’. Using this term makes me feel unsafe and is demonstrative of your hatred towards me. Anyone who uses the term ‘cis’ to describe me is a bigot.”

It’s an interesting and appropriate tactic, using the left’s identity-group tactics against them. The approach bore immediate fruit, as Musk declared that cis will now be considered a slur on Twitter and might possibly cause suspension, at least temporarily.

By the way, I’m familiar with Esses’ work, from several podcasts I’ve watched. Here is his backstory:

I am a trainee therapist who was expelled from a university course over email for launching a public petition trying to safeguard therapy and counselling for vulnerable children with gender dysphoria.

He is suing. His website can be found here, and this is his Twitter page.

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To me, these events are a reminder that there still are probably plenty of Twitter employees who are aching to go back to their old leftist ways, and who will do so unless forced to abandon these practices by Musk or someone else. On the other hand, as a blogger, I know how out-of-control things can get if it’s a complete free-for-all on a website. Some way to filter out spam is necessary, but not just that. Egregious racial and sexual insults as well as porn and obscenities and death threats will actually take over if some standards aren’t set.

But misgendering is certainly not anywhere near where I think the line should be drawn. It’s a reflection of the leftist “words are violence” mantra – that is, any words with which they don’t agree. The trans movement has declared that not using a person’s preferred pronoun is tantamount to actual violence against that person, which is an absurd claim. But it’s an important one, because censorship is one of the left’s main tools – one to fight when they are the ones being censored, and one to implement once they get into power.

Jordan Peterson first rose to prominence by sensing the danger of compelling a person to use certain pronouns. To many people, it seemed a minor issue at the time: why not be polite and call someone what he or she – or they – want? Here’s a video from about five years ago in which Peterson addresses the subject:

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Twitter crashed from the stress, and the MSM is headlining that rather prominently.

According to the PJ post I just linked:

It was part traditional Q&A and part three guys shooting the breeze…

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this innovative platform, but so far, I really like what I see. DeSantis came across as very knowledgeable, articulate, and likable.

I didn’t watch it. Maybe later I’ll see if a clip is easily accessible.

The post DeSantis declares as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate appeared first on The New Neo.

And it wasn’t just Room 101 and the rats that scared me – although they certainly did scare me. It was the pervasiveness of the thought control and the replacement of truth with lies. In fact, Newspeak – the language of Orwell’s dystopia, which may just have been his most brilliant and insightful invention – was designed not only for thought control but for using words that meant the opposite of what they purported to mean. And the society depicted by Orwell not only instituted Newspeak but also was engaged in overwriting truth with falsehood, in particular regarding historical events. There was no news and no history that was not propaganda.

We have gotten very close to that obliteration of truth and its replacement by propaganda, and the internet – originally thought to help foster truth – has facilitated that propagandist process, especially through the dominance of social media. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, here and here. But I’m revisiting it, in the light of the most recent Twitter files episode, which is discussed here by Andrew Lowenthal, who is a somewhat old-fashioned leftist (in other words, a free speech advocate). The article focuses on the campaign against “disinformation,” which is often a form of “disinformation” itself:

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing…

Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon…

Twitter emails show consistent collaboration between military and intelligence officials and elite “progressives” from NGOs and academia. “They/them” signatures mingle with .mil, @westpoint, @fbi and others. How did the FBI and the Pentagon, once the avowed enemies of progressives for their attacks on the Black Panthers and the peace movement, their war-mongering and gross over-funding, begin to fuse and collude? They join together in election tabletop exercises and share hors d’oeuvres at conferences put on by oligarch philanthropists. That cultural and political shift was once a heavy lift, but now it is as simple as cc’ing each other…

The Twitter Files also show just how much the NGO and academic set had been absorbed into the inner Big Tech elite, upon whom they pushed their new anti-free-expression values…

The Files make plain egregious acts of censorship were enabled or ignored by NGOs and academia, often not because they were wrong, but because the ideas came from the wrong people.

Lowenthal goes on to add that the left used to champion free speech, and needs to do it again because:

The shoe will one day again be on the other foot. When that day comes free speech will not be the enemy of liberals and progressives, it will be the best possible protection against the abuse of power.

Here Lowenthal shows that he’s naively living in a dream world. He’s a leftist, but – if he is sincere in what he wrote, and I believe that he is – he doesn’t seem to understand the nature of the left, although Orwell (also a leftist, by the way – see this) certainly did. The hardcore left is not for truth or for free speech; that was just a pose, necessary until it took power. The left is interested in power, and it intends to obtain it and change the rules so that it will never lose it and the shoe will never be on the other foot. Then it will control the flow of information and can smother truth entirely if it is threatened by that truth.

As Orwell wrote:

‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ [Winston] said feebly. ‘You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-‘

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should know better than to say a thing like that.’

He pulled the lever back and continued:

‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’

This is a very bleak vision of the future. I think many on the left still tell themselves that their motives are good; in fact I know many who, like Lowenthal, do tell themselves that. The trouble is that those people will not be in charge when the transition happens, as it is already happening. The hardcore ones will be in charge, the ones who are only interested in power for power’s sake. That’s what gives them their utter ruthlessness.

I will add one more thing: even those hardcore people actually are interested in ‘wealth or luxury or long life” – it’s just that the wealth and luxury and long life in which they’re interested is their own.

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Journalist Matt Taibbi is back with perhaps the most bizarre installment yet of the Twitter Files.

Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly endangered by a vast, federally funded Disinformation Industrial Complex…

In 2016, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13721 to establish the “Global Engagement Center” to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.”

GEC is based in the State Department but also partners with the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.

Thanks to GEC, “America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against ‘threats’ in our own population,” Taibbi writes.

Disinformation became the most fashionable crusade.

Disinformation is so perfidious that the GEC tries to keep its operations secret…

GEC alerted Twitter to almost 500 accounts as “foreign” disinformation on ludicrous grounds, such as the users tweeting #IraniansDebateWithBiden — including personal acquaintances of The Post’s op-ed editor.

In June 2021, a GEC contractor sent Twitter a message: “Hi guys. Attached you will find . . . around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior . . . and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”

But the list was full of hapless Americans with no ties to India or its politics.

Maybe GEC’s involvement was a secret, but it was no secret – to anyone paying attention – that vast numbers of Twitter accounts were being censored for fairly ordinary viewpoints, the majority of them on the right. It wasn’t limited to Twitter, either – YouTube was heavily involved.

And of course, it was easy to notice changes in Google’s algorithm. That’s still ongoing.

The post Twitter files blacklists appeared first on The New Neo.

Fabrications:

But according to Taibbi, there was a big problem in the claim about the “Russian” accounts. Hamilton 68 had a list that they refused to put forward–and the proof of how they were supposedly “Russian” accounts.

The kicker here? When Twitter investigated, they found they weren’t Russian accounts at all; this was all nonsense, according to Twitter…

What Twitter found was the accounts were mostly real American, Canadian, and British accounts.

Twitter Safety head Yoel Roth said that they were essentially calling right-wing accounts Russian bots and right-wing conversations “Russians.”

You may recall that the left also smeared the WalkAway campaign as being composed of Russian bots. That seems to be their all-purpose ploy. Russia, Russia, Russia:

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