Matt Taibbi’s Commentary on the Tearing Down of Old Twitter and (Hopefully) its Rebirth

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.

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FIRE Comment on Free Speech and Twitter

FIRE comment on Free Speech, Elon Musk and Twitter. An Excerpt: In the neverending debate surrounding Twitter under Elon Musk, the distinction between free speech as a legal right and cultural value can get confused. Free speech culture is a set of norms that support free thought and our ability…

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Russian Spies Hiding Behind Every Tree

Truly, Russian Spies are EVERYWHERE!!!

I understand that many people have grown up reading and trusting NPR/MSNBC/NYT/WaPo, so their instinct is to keep reading and trusting. To be fair, there is still a lot of good information to be had in these places, but objective eyes will find huge swaths of fact-free insanity about Russia, including the apparent belief that every serious thinker who crosses Democrat Party Orthodoxy is a Russian spy or at least paid by the Russians. It's stunning that so many people paid to be "journalists" spout these claims in the absence of any facts. The ends apparently justify the means, however, so lies and censorship are deemed to be warranted to support one's team. These are very sad days for "journalism" in America.

Greenwald:

This is the mental illness with which liberal media outlets and liberal pundits have contaminated millions of American minds. They are trained to believe that, lurking everywhere, there are Americans with whom they disagree because they're paid and controlled by the Kremlin...All of these liberal journalists and pundits -- none of whom has ever broken a significant story, by the way -- know that a large percentage of their followers suffer from this mental illness of paranoia, believing that everyone with whom they disagree is a paid Kremlin spy.

Not a drop of proof is needed to make this false claim, even if you are paid to be a "journalist." Same problem with the "Russian Interference in the 2016 election." Do any of these cheerleaders for the Democrats care about the minimal extent of Facebook ads during that campaign?

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Russian Interference with the 2016 U.S. Election . . .

Matt Bivens describes the extent to which Russian Facebook postings swung the 2016 election:

Chest-thumping about how the FBI needs to drive the dastardly foreigners out of our Facebook and Twitter feeds was, of course, not new. It was always eye-rolling to anyone who looked into it.

For example, we’d been told it was a major national security concern that the Russians were using our own Facebook against us — dividing us from within, with devious and manipulative ad purchases! — because they hated our freedoms. But as summarized in the Columbia Journalism Review, at issue was a mere $100,000 in “Russian” Facebook ads over the entire election season, at a time when Facebook’s advertising revenue per day, much of it political in that pre-election moment, was running about $96 million. So the entire alleged months-long Russian propaganda campaign would have amounted to less than 0.1 percent of a single day’s Facebook ads.

(It gets even more ludicrous. The ads were of no actual coherence — they were obviously nothing more than random, revenue-generating clickbait. As cited by solemn U.S. Congress reports, “the Russians” had spent their $100,000 on a bunch of nonsense — ranging from ads for fake hotlines to get help with masturbation addiction, to banners with the words “Born Liberal!” over a peaceful skycape of birds. So this was almost certainly not a devious Kremlin-directed plot, and instead simply the sleazy-lazy business of spam and clickbait.)

For me, the symbolic pinnacle of this insanity was a cartoon supposedly weaponized against us by our Russian adversaries. It was of a muscular, rainbow-colored Bernie Sanders:

Rainbow Buff Bernie ran for a single day in 2016. It was clicked on 54 times. Yet the U.S. House Intelligence Committee addressed this social media posting as part of a formal report into Russian meddling in our affairs. It was a matter of the highest concern. The House report informed us “the Russians” paid the exchange rate equivalent of $1.60 for this. Buzzfeed at the time solemnly reported these “facts” — $1.60, spent to buy 54 clicks — yet instead of mocking Congress and the FBI for this lunacy, they dutifully tracked down the American citizen who originally drew the cartoon for a pro-Bernie Sanders coloring book, so that she could explain herself! (She told them, “I feel pretty violated and very confused!”)

Clearly by 2020 we needed the FBI and the national media working hand-in-hand to police our social media — because Russia! Iran!

[More . . . ]

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