Tag: elon musk

Elon Musk Names Obscure Agency as ‘Worst Offender’ in US Government Censorship

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has pointed to a little-known government agency as the “worst offender” in terms of U.S. government censorship and media manipulation, alleging that it flagged Twitter accounts for suppression based on dubious criteria like promoting the lab leak theory of COVID-19 origins.

In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Musk named the U.S. State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) as a “threat to our democracy” and pointed to independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s extensive Jan. 3 thread that delves into the agency’s interactions with Twitter on content censorship.

Taibbi’s thread that Musk pointed to for more details on the GEC’s activity includes internal correspondence among Twitter executives that indicates that even they took a dim view of engagement with the GEC, considering it “political” and “press-happy” and as having a “track record of actively advancing specific ideological agendas.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the GEC with a request for comment but received no response by publication.

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Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech

Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.

From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.

Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.

“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”

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Elon Musk endorses Church-style committee to probe FBI’s engagement in social media censorship

New Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday endorsed the idea of creating a commission, similar to the historic Church Committee, to probe why the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community are involved in online censorship.

“Hear, hear!!” Musk tweeted in response to a tweet from venture capitalist David Sacks, who said: “We need a new Church Commission to investigate why the FBI and Intelligence Community are engaged in social media censorship, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden story.”

The so-called Twitter Files have revealed federal law enforcement’s questionable involvement in suppressing news stories, such as the one about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Sacks’ tweet was in response to a video from 1975 posted by Blaze Media CEO Tyler Carditis. The video showed Idaho Sen. Frank Church telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. … Now that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies we must know. At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left.”

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NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC Have Spent Just 14 MINUTES Combined Covering The ‘Twitter Files’

The major left leaning U.S. news networks have spent only 14 minutes between them covering Elon Musk’s ongoing release of the Twitter files, which have highlighted a policy of censorship based on the partisan political alignment of woke former company executives and employees.

The data drops, which have also revealed that former Twitter execs, were regularly meeting with U.S. intelligence officials and policing content at their behest, have been almost completely ignored by the likes of CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.

Fox News reports that Grabian’s analysis of news transcripts shows the term “Twitter files” has only been used six times by anchors.

The report notes that “CNN covered the story for three minutes, only on Dec. 9, while MSNBC spent two minutes on the story the same day, as well as five minutes on Dec. 11 and four minutes on Dec. 12.”

“CBS News, ABC News, and NBC News have not discussed the Twitter files in the last week,” it adds.

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Deep State interference was a conspiracy theory, until it wasn’t

Under the direction of Elon Musk, troves of files regarding Twitter’s dealings have been made public. We’re seeing just how much government bureaucrats colluded with the tech company to justify the suppression of stories which detailed the extent of the Biden family corruption. We can safely assume that government officials also had discussions with other media outlets because the suppression of the story was almost universal. Any journalist worth a lick would have known about the kickbacks to Hunter from Burisma, and would have been aware of the video which recorded Joe Biden dangling $1 billion of taxpayer money to coerce the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor looking into the corruption.

Now, most media outlets are also suppressing the Twitter Files. These agencies are clearly more outraged at Musk’s transparency than with government interference in elections, which just illustrates the media’s willingness to aid and abet. They are clearly out to silence Musk.

When Trump and other conservatives talked about a “Deep State” of government bureaucrats, the complicit media called the claim a conspiracy theory — yet when bureaucrats seek to control the narrative and talking points and subjugate what should be a free press, that is exactly what we’re talking about.

The media and other government officials claimed that everything Dr. Fauci said was gospel, no matter how much he got wrong. They squelched people who disagreed so the public wouldn’t challenge government edicts. They falsely labeled the theory that the Wuhan lab was the origin source as a disproven conspiracy theory.

The Washington Post ran a story mocking the notion there may be nefarious actors in our unchecked federal agencies which was titled, “The ‘deep state’: From scholarly critique to toxic conspiracy theory”. The piece read:

Even Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, who has become America’s Doctor in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, has been accused of being a deep state actor.

One of the silliest efforts to discredit the entrenchment of a “Deep State” was made by CNN, which declared:

President Donald Trump is deeply invested in the idea that there is a ‘Deep State’ embedded within the government bureaucracy – and centered in the Department of Justice – which actively worked to defeat him in 2016 and then sought to undermine him once he won the presidency.

That conspiracy theory, which has never had much merit, suffered a near-fatal blow Friday afternoon when the Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.

That might be the most ridiculous circular logic I’ve ever read — there’s no “Deep State” because a corrupt government bureaucracy failed to find fault in one of their own. Gee, that’s convincing.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX Developing Military Version Of Starlink Satellites

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced that it would expand its Starlink satellite system into the military sphere with a new national security line called Starshield.

The new program, unveiled on Dec. 2, will build on its launch and satellite communications technology and provide additional capabilities to provide a secured satellite network for government entities.

“Starlink is designed for consumer & commercial use, Starshield is designed for gov use, with focus on three areas: Earth Observation, Communications, Hosted Payloads,” said Sawyer Merritt, a Tesla investor, and analyst in a tweet.

The “hosted payloads,” system allows users to utilize a satellite bus, which is the body of the spacecraft, as a flexible platform.

The most likely customers of Starshield would appear to be the U.S. military and intelligence community, which have already invested heavily into SpaceX’s satellite technology, with key stakes in the Starlink system.

“While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use,” wrote the company on its website.

“SpaceX’s ongoing work with the Department of Defense and other partners demonstrates our ability to provide in-space and on-ground capability at scale.”

The Ukrainian military relied heavily on Starlink’s constellation network of more than 3,200 communication satellites, which provides broadband internet access, but Musk attempted to terminate funding for Kyiv’s use of the Starlink system in October.

However, he later reversed course after the U.S. Department of Defense offered to negotiate to pick up the tab for the effort and partially due to online threats by Ukrainian officials, reported Defense News.

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Former top intel chiefs silent after Musk Twitter disclosures

America’s top former intelligence officials were mostly mum Saturday after the release of internal Twitter documents detailing how The Post’s bombshell revelations were censored by the social media company.

Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary, John Brennan a former CIA director, Mike Hayden, a former CIA director, and Jim Clapper, a former director of national intelligence — who all once said The Post’s reporting had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” — declined or did not respond to request for comment about whether the latest disclosures had changed their opinion.

The quartet made their allegations as part of an open letter denigrating The Post’s reporting as Russian misinformation which was signed by dozens of other longtime intelligence hands.

“Our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter read. “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”

Of the four, only Clapper has ever publicly addressed the letter, offering a vigorous defense to The Post in March.

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