I’d Like to Be a Fly on the Wall at Google These Days

First, a Tweet from Glenn Greenwald, noting what I have been noticing:

Taibbi's revelations should outrage every American. Since when is it the proper role of the U.S. Government to guide and filter conversations of Americans? Taibbi has arguably helped to reveal millions of violations of civil rights, per Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan (1963). The Court’s decision was in favor of group of book publishers who sued a purportedly private "commission" created to “to educate the public concerning any book . . . or other thing containing obscene, indecent or impure language” that could corrupt youth. The Supreme Court held that through its threats of prosecution, the commission engaged in censorship. The Court further held that the commission's actions constituted acts of the state under the Fourteenth Amendment because the commission operated “under color of state law.” The government cannot use private intermediaries to engage conduct that the government cannot do on its own due to U.S. civil rights laws.

Also consider Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., Inc., 500 U.S. 614 (1991): "Although the conduct of private parties lies beyond the Constitution's scope in most instances, governmental authority may dominate an activity to such an extent that its participants must be deemed to act with the authority of the government and, as a result, be subject to constitutional constraints."

Now consider this  follow-up Tweet by Elon Musk:

My thought at this moment. If we had caught merely one FBI agent meddling with a few acts of censorship at Twitter, it would have been a big deal and it would have caused much outrage. Are these disclosures too big, too many to absorb by most Americans? This overwhelming lawlessness brings to mind the quote attributed to Joseph Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

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Twitter’s COVID Censorship

David Zweig's new article at The Free Press: "How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy." An excerpt:

The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods.

And it wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.

When the Biden administration took over, its agenda for the American people can be summed up as: Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.

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Stanford University Attempts to Dismantle Harmful Language

Stanford University has launched an initiative to protect us from harmful language. This language is so incredibly harmful that after the link to the website started getting passed around, Stanford shut down public access. Now only Stanford students will get to know the language that purportedly harms all of us.

Heather Heying had been poking around at the Stanford website that was designed to protect her (and me and you and everyone else) from certain terrible words and phrases, but before she could finish reviewing the website, Stanford closed off public access. Here's some of the information that Heather can report at her website, Natural Selections:

Finally, I grabbed a single screenshot of one of the recommendations on the site before access was restricted4. Here it is:

[More . . . ]

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The Clouds Part and the Twitter Disclosures Stream In

For the past couple weeks, I've been following the release of the Twitter files closely, reading them, piece-by-piece on Twitter (here is Part I of the nine parts so far released). I'm not reading the tamped-down, strategically-filtered and papered-over characterizations of the Twitter files published by self-interested legacy media.

Most people I know are refusing to read the actual Twitter files being dug out of the Twitter archives for us by Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and her team, Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang. They don't understand or care to understand the difference between independent journalists and the big corporations that pretend to employ only serious journalists. Most people I know refuse to read the Twitter files with their own eyes, arguing that they are sure these disclosures are groundless/false/uninteresting/ even though they have not read them. I can understand their hesitancy, given the extent to which they have been misled and betrayed by the "news" outlets they have been trusting. Mark Twain once commented on this challenge: "It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”

Again, I have read the Twitter files. Every last one of them. Based on these detailed disheartening revelations that our own government has fully and secretly embraced the role of virulently pro-censorship nanny-state, my emotional reaction has been similar to way Matt Taibbi describes his own reaction:

Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

I'll end with the purported mission statement of Twitter during this lengthy period of abject corruption, government malfeasance and censorship:

The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.

In how many ways did Twitter violate its own mission statement. Let us start counting the ways . . .

Continue ReadingThe Clouds Part and the Twitter Disclosures Stream In