Elon Musk Unveils Twitter Censorship Machine in 2020

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk and independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday unveiled what drove former Twitter executives to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

Dubbed “The Twitter Files,” Taibbi published his reporting in a thread on his Twitter account, which he said was based on “thousands of internal documents obtained by sources” from the social media platform.

The tweets contained communications amongst Twitter employees as they grappled with how to excuse their decision to censor the Hunter Biden report.

Musk, who has championed transparency at the company he took over in October, retweeted Taibbi’s thread, and questioned whether some of the revelations indicated potential violations of the First Amendment.

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CIA VENTURE CAPITAL ARM PARTNERS WITH EX-GOOGLER’S STARTUP TO “SAFEGUARD THE INTERNET”

TRUST LAB WAS founded by a team of well-credentialed Big Tech alumni who came together in 2021 with a mission: Make online content moderation more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy. A year later, the company announced a “strategic partnership” with the CIA’s venture capital firm.

Trust Lab’s basic pitch is simple: Globe-spanning internet platforms like Facebook and YouTube so thoroughly and consistently botch their content moderation efforts that decisions about what speech to delete ought to be turned over to completely independent outside firms — firms like Trust Lab. In a June 2021 blog post, Trust Lab co-founder Tom Siegel described content moderation as “the Big Problem that Big Tech cannot solve.” The contention that Trust Lab can solve the unsolvable appears to have caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm tasked with securing technology for the CIA’s thorniest challenges, not those of the global internet.

The quiet October 29 announcement of the partnership is light on details, stating that Trust Lab and In-Q-Tel — which invests in and collaborates with firms it believes will advance the mission of the CIA — will work on “a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet.” Key terms like “harmful” and “safeguard” are unexplained, but the press release goes on to say that the company will work toward “pinpointing many types of online harmful content, including toxicity and misinformation.”

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Google, YouTube spend MILLIONS to launch Global Fact Check Fund

On Tuesday, Google and YouTube announced that they will be providing a $13.2 million grant to the nonprofit Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network with the goal of launching a new “Global Fact Check Fund,” set to launch in early 2023.

The move, which marks the companies’ largest fact-checking grant to date, comes as they continue to ramp up their fight against “misinformation” online.

According to Google and YouTube, the grant will “support [the Poynter Institute’s] network of 135 fact-checking organizations from 65 countries covering over 80 languages.”

The companies justified their decision by noting that “helping people to identify misinformation is a global challenge.”

“The Global Fact Check Fund,” they explained, “will help fact-checkers to scale existing operations or launch new ones that elevate information, uplift credible sources and reduce the harm of mis- and disinformation around the globe.”

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“Science” group spent $40 million censoring free speech on social media

As millions of Americans are struggling just to make ends meet, the National Science Foundation (NSF) under fake president Joe Biden is shelling out “nearly $40 million into social media censorship grants and contracts,” according to a new report from the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO).

To keep a lid on what people say online, the NSF is throwing American taxpayer money at all sorts of projects aimed at controlling what gets posted to the internet. Since Biden started occupying the Oval Office, some $38.8 million has been spent by the NSF to battle “misinformation.”

A total of 64 grants totaling $31.8 million were also handed over to 42 colleges and universities to conduct “research” into the concept of “stopping viral ideas” – meaning ideas that people come up with themselves as opposed to the ones being fed to them by the globalist deep state.

The claim is that said research is “neutral” and “scientific” in nature, but the descriptions slapped on some of the grants openly and explicitly indicate that their true aim is to “explicitly target ‘populist politicians’ and ‘populist communications’ to scientifically determine ‘how best to counter populist narratives’.”

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Apple turned off a private communication tool in China just before major protests broke out

Earlier this month, Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China. The file-sharing tool for iOS was used by protesters to communicate freely without the risk of censorship, because the tool uses direct connections between devices, creating a local network that cannot be monitored by government internet regulators.

Initially, people could choose to receive AirDrops from everyone nearby. However, a recent iOS update has made that impossible. The update made a change to AirDrop’s usage that only applies in mainland China, while the rest of the world can still use it to communicate as before.

Users in China can only receive from everyone nearby for only ten minutes, putting restrictions on how it’s used.

AirDrop has been used by protesters in Hong Kong to communicate with other protesters and bystanders, as well as send messages to tourists from mainland China. On the mainland, protesters have used AirDrop to spread protest literature.

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The Left’s Cynical “Speech Is Violence” Ploy

This week, another evil mass shooter unleashed horror at a gay club in Colorado Springs, killing 5 and wounding another 25. The shooter – whose name I refuse to mention in order to disincentivize future shooters, who seek notoriety – was clearly mentally ill: Just last year, the shooter reportedly threatened his mother with a bomb, resulting in his arrest. Yet Colorado’s red flag law, which could have deprived him of legal access to weaponry, was not invoked by either police or relatives. The Colorado Springs massacre, then, is yet another example of a perpetrator with more red flags than a bullfighting convention, and no one in authority willing to take action to do anything about him.

Yet the national conversation, as it so often does, has now been directed away from the question at hand – how to prevent mass shootings – and toward broader politics. Instead of seeking methodologies that might be effective in finding and stopping deranged individuals seeking murder without curbing rights and liberties for hundreds of millions of people, our political and media leaders have decided to blame Americans who oppose same-sex marriage, drag queen story hour, and “family-friendly” drag shows.

Disagreement with the radical Leftist social agenda amounts to incitement to violence, they argue.

Thus, NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny said, “there is a pipeline. It starts from some smaller accounts online like Libs of TikTok, it moves to the right wing blogosphere, and then it ends up on Tucker Carlson or ends up out of a right-wing politician’s mouth, and it is a really dangerous cycle that does have real-world consequences.”

Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times wrote, “it seems hard to separate (these murders) from a nationwide campaign of anti-LGBTQ incitement …. They’ve been screaming that drag events … are part of a monstrous plot to prey on children. They don’t get to duck responsibility if a sick man with a gun took them seriously.”

Brian Broome wrote in The Washington Post that the shooting could not be “blamed on mental illness”; no, he stated, “It’s right-wing rhetoric that sparks these nightmares …. The bottomless list of homophobes and transphobes on the right don’t need to throw the rock and then hide their hands. Instead, they use someone else’s hands entirely.”

The Left’s attempt to lay responsibility for violence at the feet of anyone who opposes the transgressive social agenda doesn’t stop with blame—it extends to calls for full-scale censorship.

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Far-Left Antifa Thugs Still Active on Twitter While Many Conservatives Remain Banned

Elon Musk has mostly championed free speech since taking over Twitter. There are a still a number of conservatives who remain banned, including The Gateway Pundit, while he has ignored leftists supporting violence on the platform.

The case of Antifa ‘journalist” Vishal Singh is a particularly acute example. Independent journalist Andy Ngo documented multiple cases of Singh celebrating and calling for violent actions on Twitter.  His latest post called for deadly violence against Republicans and Libs of Tiktok.

Singh previously celebrated assaults on actual journalists and demanded assaults against law enforcement. 

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Oversight Board tells Meta to stop complying with police requests to censor rap music

Meta’s Oversight Board said that Meta should not have complied with a request from London’s Metropolitan Police to ban a drill music track. Drill music is a rap genre that politicians and law enforcement agencies have associated with gang violence.

In January, rapper Chinx (OS) posted a video of his song “Secrets Not Safe.” Shortly after posting the song on Instagram, Meta received an email from the police requesting the removal of the song. Meta escalated the case to a team for special consideration, and ruled that it violated its policies because it referenced a shooting that took place in 2017 and included what police believed to be a “threatening call to action.”

After the song was removed, Chinx appealed and had it reinstated by a moderator who was not part of the special consideration team. The decision was overruled and the song got banned again after a week, again following a request by the police.

The board questioned whether Meta considered the context, or simply compiled because it was a request from the police.

“Not every piece of content that law enforcement would prefer to have taken down — and not even every piece of content that has the potential to lead to escalating violence — should be taken down,” the board wrote in its decision.

Social media platforms are less transparent about informal requests like the email from the Met.

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YouTube Punishes Journalist for Factual Video Showing Democrats AND Republicans Make Election Fraud Claims

In September, video journalist Matt Orfalea made two videos for TK News that highlighted election denial in the past two presidential elections.

The first video, Memory Holed: “The Election Was Hacked,” was a montage of Democrat politicians and commentators saying that the 2016 election was illegitimate, hacked, or rigged.

The second video, Memory Holed, Part II: The “Rigged” Election, compares the statements made by Republicans after Donald Trump lost and those made by Democrats after he won in 2016.

For instance, when Trump was asked if he’d concede, he said “I have to see.” Orfalea showed Hillary Clinton saying, “No, I would not,” when asked the same question after she lost.

Matt Taibi at TK News highlighted the statements that were made the video:

“This video after all is packed with clips of people like Karine Jean-Pierre saying the 2016 election was ‘stolen,’ Joe Biden saying ‘I absolutely agree’ Trump is an ‘illegitimate president,’ Kamala Harris saying ‘you’re absolutely right’ Trump didn’t really win in 2016, and even Jimmy Carter saying ‘Trump didn’t actually win the election in 2016.’ Old pal Keith Olbermann proclaimed the public wouldn’t stand for this ‘bloodless coup’ called voting, Chris Hayes said Trump ‘cheated,’ and a conga line of officials from Adam Schiff to Elizabeth Warren insisted foreigners had ‘hacked our elections.’”

Initially, YouTube demonetized both videos, then reversed the decision. However, on Friday, Orfalea announced that the second video had been removed. YouTube also gave his channel a strike which is a more serious YouTube punishment as getting strikes eventually results in a channel being permanently removed.

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Musk’s Free Speech Moves On Twitter Have So Far Been Unimpressive

When Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was first announced this past April I said that the purchase likely wouldn’t go through if the empire thought it posed a threat to its information interests. I said that any reduction of censorship protocols which Musk implements on the platform would probably not be of the sort that make any difference to the powerful, but would instead just amplify vapid partisan culture war nonsense.

So far since Musk’s takeover, this does appear to be the case.

In recent days Twitter has reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, Jordan Peterson, Project Veritas, Kathy Griffin, and the Babylon Bee. This to date is as close as Musk has come to honoring his stated intention of making Twitter a haven of free speech where people have a “digital town square” to debate and discuss ideas.

And it’s not enough. Un-banning a few famous people will drum up a lot of headlines and online chatter and make it look like you’re really doing something, but in the end all you’ve done is reinstate a handful of Twitter accounts. You haven’t done anything to meaningfully scale back the speech restrictions on your platform.

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