Tag: big tech

Rep. Adam Schiff’s staffers repeatedly asked Twitter to censor memes

The latest batch of Twitter Files, released on Friday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, showed that Rep. Adam Schiff’s office repeatedly contacted Twitter requesting the removal of posts critical of Joe Biden and staff at Schiff’s office.

“Staff of House Democrat @AdamSchiff wrote to Twitter quite often, asking that tweets be taken down,” Taibbi wrote. “This important use of taxpayer resources involved an ask about a ‘Peter Douche’ parody photo of Joe Biden. The DNC made the same request.”

Taibbi said that Schiff’s office pestered Twitter to remove the parody photo after former President Donald Trump retweeted it.

“To its credit, Twitter refused to remove it, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying it had obvious ‘humorous intent’ and ‘any reasonable observer’ – apparently, not a Schiff staffer – could see it was doctored,” Taibbi wrote. “Schiff staffer Jeff Lowenstein didn’t give up, claiming there was a ‘slippery slope concern here.’”

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Campaign funded by Pfizer and Moderna lobbyists sent Twitter weekly lists of tweets to censor

The Public Good Projects (PGP), a nonprofit that has developed several projects to fight so-called Covid “misinformation,” received $1,275,000 from the Pfizer and Moderna lobbying group, Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), to create a content moderation campaign that influenced Twitter’s Covid misinformation rules. As part of this campaign, PGP sent Twitter lobbyists and content moderators weekly emails containing lists of tweets to censor.

Journalist Lee Fang published one of the weekly emails that Twitter received from PGP as part of the latest release of the Twitter Files — collections of internal Twitter communications that have exposed the censorship relationships Twitter had with government agencies and other powerful groups before Elon Musk took over.

The email shows Todd O’Boyle, a senior manager on Twitter’s Public Policy team, sharing “this week’s misinfo report” from PGP. The February 24, 2022 email included a list of top trends the PGP had seen during the week and two attached lists. According to Fang, one of the lists contained tweets the PGP wanted Twitter to take down and the other list contained tweets that it wanted Twitter to verify.

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Adam Schiff continuously demanded Twitter ban, censor, suppress criticism of self, staff, Biden: Twitter Files

A brief batch of Twitter Files dropped on Friday by Matt Taibbi shows that staff of House Democrat Adam Schiff were in frequent communication with Twitter to demand the removal of content from the platform. Documents show that the DNC and Schiff made requests to remove a “Peter Douche” parody photo of Joe Biden after President Donald Trump retweeted the photo. 

Twitter refused to remove the photo, with Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth saying that it had obvious “humorous intent” and that “any reasonable observer” could tell that the photo was edited. 

Schiff’s staff did not lay off, however, claiming that there was a “slippery slope concern” to be had.

Taibbi wrote that even when Twitter did not suspend accounts, they would often act against accounts. “Schiff’s office repeatedly complained about “QAnon related activity” that were often tweeting about other matters, like the identity of the Ukraine “whistleblower” or the Steele dossier.

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Yes, Virginia, There IS a Deep State—and It Is Worse than You Think

Mention the term “deep state” in polite company and most likely no one will want to speak to you the rest of the evening. The deep state is what Wikipedia calls “discredited,” something reeking of conspiracies, false accusations, and the substitution of fantasy for the truth.

After the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home in Florida, Trump alluded to “deep state” actions, which brought predictable ridicule from the mainstream media. Trump was speaking conspiratorially, and if one follows the mainstream media these days, the only conspiracies are on the right. (You know, like the one in which the unarmed, ragtag January 6 rioters nearly overthrew the US government.)

After the recent revelations about how Twitter worked to hide the story of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop, Trump attributed the secrecy to a plot by the “deep state.” However, while the facts of the story really are outrageous, I don’t believe it was as much a secret conspiracy as a case of people being able to engage in certain actions with no political consequences.

Furthermore, journalist Matt Taibbi’s stunning revelations regarding FBI and CIA agents’ outright interference in the 2020 election via Twitter on the pretense that Russian operatives were spreading disinformation has further exposed both the involvement of federal law enforcement agents in partisan activities and the sad fact that those agents need not worry about being held accountable—especially if they are engaged in a “progressive” cause.

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The White House’s most brazen, entitled, social media censorship demands

The latest batch of revelations into the social media censorship directed by the Biden White House reveal a range of broad, often petty, censorship demands, some of which are purely requests to boost President Biden’s image and show him and his family in a better light.

The revelations came as part of the discovery in the ongoing lawsuit against the government for its alleged First Amendment violations, making clear requests to silence American citizens through online platforms.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, shared some of the documents obtained during discovery.

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Biden admin asked Twitter to silence Robert F. Kennedy Jr

A recently published email has provided more evidence of President Joe Biden’s administration asking tech platforms to censor content that challenges the federal government’s Covid messaging.

The email shows the Biden White House’s Digital Director for the COVID-19 Response Team, Clarke Humphrey, requesting that Twitter remove a tweet from environmental health lawyer and author Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP,” Humphrey wrote to Twitter in the January 2021 email. “And then if we can keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same ~genre that would be great.”

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US intelligence community warned Twitter about Ukrainian prosecutor’s book alleging Biden corruption

An internal Twitter document published by journalist Matt Taibbi has revealed that the United States (US) intelligence community warned the tech company about the publicity surrounding a book from a former Ukrainian prosecutor that claimed President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, were involved in corruption in Ukraine.

The book, “True Stories Of Joe Biden’s International Corruption In Ukraine” was written by Viktor Shokin, who served as Ukraine’s top prosecutor between February 10, 2015 and March 29, 2016. In the book, Shokin alleged that Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had Hunter Biden on its board, paid Hunter millions of dollars to prevent prosecutors from taking action against Burisma.

Shokin also claimed that then Vice President Joe Biden had ordered Shokin to be fired before he could take action against Burisma. In January 2018, Joe Biden bragged about withholding $1 billion in aid to Ukraine until Shokin was fired.

Yet despite Biden admitting that he had withheld aid to ensure that Shokin was fired, the US intelligence community warned Twitter that “in the summer of 2020 members of a Russian influence, which is at least partially directed by Russian intelligence” were “aware of a production plan” associated with the book. The US intelligence community admitted that it’s “unclear at this time how involved Russian intelligence might be in the creation or promotion” of the book but cited “previous operations” as justification for highlighting “the potential nexus between this book and Russian intelligence.”

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Summaries Of All ‘Twitter Files’ To Date

It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

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New Twitter Files Reveal How Company Allowed Intelligence Agencies to Influence It

A series of tweets by investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has revealed how Twitter came under the influence of American intelligence agencies after concerns about foreign influence put the company under the spotlight.

Until August 2017, Twitter was not on many people’s radars with regard to the Trump–Russia foreign influence scandal. In September that year, Twitter informed the Senate that its cursory review led to the suspension of 22 possible Russian accounts as well as 179 accounts possibly linked to the initial set of accounts. Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), who was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, called Twitter’s report “frankly inadequate on every level.”

Facing growing anxiety over its public relations problems, Twitter started a “Russia Task Force” to investigate the issue.

“First round of RU investigation … 15 high-risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT,” said an October 2017 Twitter memo shared by Taibbi. RT refers to the television network Russia Today, which is controlled by the state.

“Finished with investigation … 2,500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive … 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today … remaining <$10k in spend,” said a message from the same month.

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This Twitter user looked up all the former feds now employed at Google and you have to read it to believe how incestuous the government and Big Tech are

In case it wasn’t clear after Elon Musk canned James Baker, the former FBI lawyer who became a Twitter lawyer and worked from the inside of the Big Tech platform to protect what you might call the deep state, the government and Big Tech have become one gigantic anti-freedom behemoth.

Big government is squelching speech and protecting Democrats and the cultural hegemony of the Left by planting their former employees in all the tech platforms.

This anonymous Twitter user did some research into several Big Tech companies through publicly accessible info and found some VERY interesting connections.

The government and Deep-State folks are too smart to go the direct route and censor the right through government laws.

But “Google is a private company,” so the government is hiding behind the Big Tech giant to covertly enforce speech codes.

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