Pundits and "Journalists" keep claiming that the Twitter revelations to date are boring and amount to nothing of consequence. OK, then consider Colin Wright's comment:
. . . and why were they hiding that they were doing these things?
Twitter presented itself as a place where the People speak freely, but Twitter was playing a nefarious instrument. By hitting certain keys, Twitter shut down certain opinions. By hitting others, it opened up the floodgates. This makes it look like the People are speaking, but Twitter tilting the tables to make it look like the losers in many debates were the losers.
And I see that Matt Taibbi recently explained the importance of last night's revelations. These are not "Nothing Burgers," as the media elite try their damndest to shout into cyber-space. These hucksters will do their best to avoid addressing Taibbi's indictment head-on, I guarantee you. Here is one of many from Taibbi's writings today:
ELECTION INTERFERENCE? When @BariWeiss proved once and for all that Twitter does indeed engage in shadow-banning, or what they call “visibility filtering,” it was a significant step forward in our understanding of how internet platforms affect our perception of reality. In this batch of Slacks it’s unmistakeable that Donald Trump — whatever you think of him — was being “visibility filtered” even before the election. One of the first things new Twitter chief Elon Musk brought up with me was the question of whether or not Twitter interfered with elections. “For instance, is this candidate actually more popular than another, or did Twitter put a thumb on the scale?” he asked. Even these first document reviews make it pretty clear Twitter the company did do this. Again, it is very hard to look at these internal discussions and not conclude that the firm interfered with elections.Now, what we don’t have (yet?) is proof that federal law enforcement or intelligence was heavily involved with electoral questions. We’ve seen individual reports filed from the FBI about smaller political accounts, and we have a sizable pile by now of communications showing that executives like Roth were in regular contact with those agencies. But so far these are just outlines. Nonetheless, they’re significant.
We now have plenty of evidence that those running Twitter and their allies in the elite media saw their job censoring dissent and feeding red meat to their niche audiences, thereby poisoning our conversations, often making them impossible. And doing it for advertising $. I'm reevaluating who is more excellent at hurting Americans for money, Journalists or Big Pharma?
I encourage readers to go to Taibbi's website to read more, following the link to his source materials on his website but mostly on Twitter.
As I've expressed repeatedly on this site (but more often and with detailed substantiation on my website, Dangerous Intersection), I have no little respect for much of what passes as "journalism" at America's best known legacy media outlets. They have repeatedly preached to us and censored dissenting views on major stories instead of letting the facts fall where they may and inviting us to evaluate those facts on our own. That is why trust in major media is at an all time low: only 11% of us have a lot of confidence in our newspapers and television news. For years, Twitter has been the water cooler for those seeking to shape media narratives and jam them down our throat. That is changing and I am ever cognizant of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with the gaslighting, I am hearing from the increasingly disempowered "journalists" who have been the most active at censoring. I applaud the efforts of Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger and others who are now revealing the many ways in which Twitter has been falsely presenting itself as a forum for free speech.
Today, Matt Taibbi posted background on the ongoing Twitter revelations. I expect that many people will appreciate these revelations but will not comment publicly (though many will applaud these development privately to me, as they have been doing for several years on many contentious issues). I also expect that more than a few people will publicly respond to Taibbi's comments (and my own) with a creative barrage of ad hominem comments--that's exactly what people do when can can't make honest arguments. Every time I see this behavior, I recognize it as stark symptoms of Nietzschean ressentiment. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's most recent article, "Note to Readers on the "Twitter Files"":
A lot has been made about the line about how I “had to agree to certain conditions” to work on the story. I wrote that assuming the meaning of that line would be obvious. It was obvious. Still, the language was just loose enough to give critics room to make mischief, and the stakes being what they are, they of course did. That’s on me, and a lesson going forward. For the record, the deal was access to the Twitter documents, but I had to publish on Twitter. I also agreed to an attribution (“Sources at Twitter”). That’s it.Everyone involved with the project, including myself as well as Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger, has editorial control. We’ve been encouraged to look not just at historical Twitter, but the current iteration as well. I was told flat-out I could write anything I wanted, including anything about the current company and its new chief, Elon Musk. If anything, the degree of openness on that front freaked me out a little initially, being so far from any other experience I’ve had.
In our initial meeting, Musk talked about how he thought a “full confessional restores faith in the company,” and everything I’ve seen since seems to confirm he’s sincere about his desire for full open-kimono transparency with the public. He says we’re “welcome to look at things going forward, not just at the past,” and until I run into a reason to believe otherwise, I’m taking him at his word. I’d be crazy not to, considering the access we’ve already been given. This is a historic opportunity, and I think we’re all trying to treat that opportunity with the appropriate respect, which among other things means staying as focused as we can be on the documents, and trying to make as much sense of them as we can, as quickly as we can....
In this particular instance, the story has to come out on Twitter. There’s the obvious deep irony of using the familiar drip-drip-drip format and uncontrollable virulality of Twitter to roast Twitter itself. We’re also using an inherently destabilizing medium to expose efforts to turn Twitter into an authoritarian instrument of social control. There’s genius in this. Now I would feel wrong even thinking of doing it any other way.
This is especially the case since a major subtext of the Twitter Files project is what a burn it is on conventional/corporate media, whose minions tried for years to turn Twitter into a giant conformity machine, and cheered each new advance in censorship and opinion control. Those same people now have to watch in helplessness as one horrifying revelation after another spills out, guerrilla-style, into what was not long ago their private playground. This, too, couldn’t be scripted better. It’s like sending an intercontinental shit-missile screaming into the dais of the White House correspondents’ dinner at 15,000 m.p.h. If you can’t see the humor in this, you probably never had a sense of humor to begin with.
Eric Weinstein Points out a big problem for Ben Collins and others pretending to be journalists of Legacy Media Outlets:
Ben Collins protests too much:
Weinstein then inserts the dagger (click this image to let it scroll for the full effect):
Collins is such a joke, not a journalist.
Today's pro-censorship crowd doesn't seem to want to understand that the censorship powers they put into place today will eventually be used against them, possibly in the new future. Here's an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's latest post:
It was easy to predict that there would be an all-out war from Western power centers if Musk sought to mildly reduce censorship on Twitter. Still, the media outdid itself.
It is hard to overstate how manic, primal and unhinged is the reaction of corporate media employees to the mere prospect that new Twitter owner Elon Musk may restore a modicum of greater free speech to that platform. It was easy to predict — back when Musk was merely toying with the idea of buying Twitter and loosening some of its censorship restrictions — that there would be an all-out attack from Western power centers if he tried. Online censorship has become one of the most potent propaganda weapons they possess, and there is no way they will allow anyone to dilute it even mildly without attempting to destroy them. Even with that expectation in place of what was to come, the liberal sector of the corporate media (by far the most dominant media sector) really outdid itself when it came to group-think panic, rhetorical excess, and reckless and shrill accusations.
In unison, these media outlets decreed that not only would greater free speech on Twitter usher in the usual parade of horribles they trot out when demanding censorship — disinformation, hate speech, attacks on the “marginalized,” etc. etc. — but this time they severely escalated their rhetorical hysteria by claiming that Musk would literally cause mass murder by permitting a broader range of political opinion to be aired. The Washington Post's Taylor Lorenz even warned of supernatural demons that would be unleashed by these new free speech policies, as she talked to a handful of obviously neurotic pro-censorship “experts” and then wrote about these thinly disguised therapy sessions with those neurotics under this headline: “‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts.”