The Twitter Files—II

When Elon Musk released The Twitter Files—the first traunch of internal Twitter emails and other documents that clearly indicate what many of us have known for years—that Twitter elevated covert censorship of any view that opposed their preferred political narrative—the left-wing commentariat (including major main stream media sources) acted with laughable predictablilty. 

1.  Prior to the release, they demonized Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, suggesting that he:

• had no right to fire senior executives and pare down twitter's employees (he had every right to do exactly that); 
• was a right-wing stooge (Musk voted for Joe Biden and is one of the strongest advocates for a clean energy future, hardly right-wing positions),
• would foster "hate speech" (e.g., inveterate liar, Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) made up statistics with that claim—all false); 
• that he was a "threat to democracy" (their operative phrase indicating an amusing level of psychological projection)

2.  They demonized Matt Taibbi, who did actual journalism in reporting the contents of The Twitter Files, suggesting that he was "doing PR for a right-wing billionaire." Again, the projection here is comical. Major main stream media sources (including social media) have been doing PR for the Democratic party for more than a decade. With each passing year their efforts to suppress opposing views have become more blatant. In the past few years, they have become proponents of outright censorship, cloaking this authoritarian (and unconstitutional) position as an attempt to eliminate "hate speech" and "misinformation." 

3.  They worked hard to suppress any reporting on the content of the Twitter Files. In the first traunch, there is clear and irrefutable evidence (confirmed by Twitter employees themselves) that Twitter and likely other social media sources) suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in October, 2020. Frankly, no one really cares that Hunter Biden was a drug addict or that his choice of lifestyle was, well, questionable. But the laptop files indicate that Hunter Biden was a bag man for the Biden family; that Hunter essentially was highly compensated by some unsavory characters for providing access to the then-VP of the United States; that family members were enriched by that access with monies offered from countries including China, and that Joe Biden was involved and had knowledge (albeit with plausible deniability) of what was going on.

4.  They worked very hard to convince all Democrats that all of this was a "nothingburger." Just more "dissinformation." Gullible members of Biden's party accepted that claim without blinking an eye. In essence, their position is the evidence is tainted or non-existent even when described in contemporaneous internal Twitter docs written by Twitter employees.

Now, the second Traunch of The Twitter Files has been reported by Bari Weiss (read the whole thread). In it, she provides evidence that secret technical groups within the old Twitter (headed by senior executives) worked to suppress and/or downgrade any trending tweets that conflicted with the narrative du jour. Others outright banned opposing voices.

At the time, Twitter execs denied doing this (as they were doing it). Particularly egregious, was the censorship of medical experts who questioned the government's COVID policies, among them Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (see here, here and here for my early posts on his work).

By suppressing debate of what have now been proven to be ineffective and damaging government policies enacted during the pandemic, Twitter's senior execs and the engineers who did their bidding were complicit in the damage to lives and livelihoods that occurred because Twitter and other social media made it difficult or impossible to question the efficacy of lock downs, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates.

Those who celebrate censorship of opposing viewpoints (note: Dr. Bhattacharya's concerns were neither "hate speech" nor "misinformation") will continue their unhinged demonization of the new Twitter under Musk and the journalists who are reporting the dangerous and truly unAmerican actions of the old Twitter. They will shout "nothingburger" until they are hoarse. But the truth is slowly coming out, just as it did with the COVID debacle or the Hunter Biden laptop. The only real question is whether it will matter.