Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.
Even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.
In US culture, we're inculcated from childhood that censorship is bad. So of course nobody -- especially journalists -- wants to say: "I favor censorship."
That's why they need euphemisms like "content moderation": to pretend it's about bots, abuse, etc. rather than ideology.
Everyone knows they are lying. Nobody cares about Twitter censoring bots or spam. That's not what this is about.
The social media censorship people care about is 100% ideological: banning dissent on COVID, the Biden emails, culture war debates, etc. That's what's at stake.
Let's put it this way:
On Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, you are free to say the 2000 and 2016 elections were stolen and fraudulent. You can't say that about 2020.
Before the 2020 election, you weren't allowed to post reporting on the Biden emails.
It's all ideological.
Throughout the COVID pandemic, you weren't allowed to question the efficacy of cloth masks. You weren't allowed to interrogate the origins of the virus. You weren't allowed to debate vaccines or lockdowns. No dissent from Fauci/WHO was allowed.
The censorship is 100% political.
You're allowed to spread any lies, propaganda and disinformation you want if it advances the Ukrainian cause (i.e., the US/NATO cause), but will be instantly banned if you say anything that challenges that on the ground of "Russia disinformation." This is all explicit.
Censorship of conservatives gets most attention because it's so common, but censorship of anti-establishment leftists is also frequent: any dissident can be banned.
Pretending this is about bots or spam is fraudulent. This censorship is about control of political information.
Social media was heralded as an innovation that would liberate individuals from centralized control by the state and oligarchical power over their speech.
It has become the exact opposite: the most powerful tool of information control and speech constraints ever devised.
How dumb do you have to be to believe that journalists - who work at Bloomberg and the Bezos-owned WPost or Comcast or CNN - are worried about billionaires controlling media (🤣).
They're only petrified that the *wrong* billionaire, one who may not censor for them, might reign.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of Musk's motives and, even if pure, his ability to restore free speech to Twitter. Way too many powerful interests need this censorship. But the panic reveals so much. My @getcallin show yesterday covered all this:
A residual guardian of GOP establishment foreign policy - @RichLowry - urges rejection of Tulsi by denouncing her support for Snowden.
To do so, Lowrey falsely claims Snowden "handed [NSA docs] over to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks."
Snowden never gave a single doc to WikiLeaks.
This isn't a small error, nor is it an excusable one. Anyone who knows even the most basic facts of the Snowden story -- which should be a requirement for opining so didactically about it -- knows he only gave docs to the Guardian (through me) and WPost (through Laura Poitras).
Lowry also repeats the standard establishment smear against Snowden -- totally false -- that he "defected to Russia."
Even if he had, it'd be understandable - Obama DOJ tried to imprison him for life -- but Ben Rhodes admitted Snowden tried to leave Russia and they trapped him.
Pigs are as intelligent and socially complex -- if not more so -- than dogs. Morally despicable factory farms keep pigs in cases so small they can never turn around, step on their babies, and go insane. The whole industry is a menace to public health, and destroys family farms.
You don't have to be vegan to be disgusted by industrialized abuse of animals. Animals are among the most majestic and beautiful things on earth. They feel pain, suffering and joy from connection.
Most people can't bear to look at what happens inside these monstrous facilities.
Under the past several presidents - including Biden and Trump - the agencies required to regulate factory farms, including to stop abuse, have been run by industry cretins who ignore the law and then get rewarded after.
Beyond that, the letter itself that they fed to their puppet Bertrand (now promoted to CNN as a reward for her service) explicitly referenced claims in the last part of the letter that the materials on the laptop were "Russian disinformation": exactly what Brennan denies.
Indeed, this pre-election lie from CIA goons had only purpose: to protect Biden by deceiving key institutions to believe the materials were unreliable because they were "Russian disinformation."
That's how people like Jen Psaki promoted it, and it's why Big Tech censored it.
The only thing more stunning than watching the US Government forcibly close a speech, information and community social media platform that 170 million of its citizens voluntarily chose to use is seeing that it's Trump, almost alone in DC, fighting to keep it open:
If you think that TikTok was banned was due to fears of China, then you haven't been paying attention. That was the original impetus for it (including under Trump), but everyone involved says the reason it got enough votes was fear of Israel criticism:
A Globo e autoridades brasileiras alegaram que a descrição de Zuckerberg das ordens "secretas" de censura do Brasil eram "sem provas".
Isso é desinformação. Há provas esmagadoras para isso. Em abril, a @Folha publicou um Editorial condenando a censura de Moraes e seu sigilo:
Enquanto a Globo defendeu repetidamente Moraes e suas ordens secretas de censura — da mesma forma que defendeu tudo o que Sergio Moro fez — a Folha, em 2024, condenou repetidamente o esquema de Moraes como perigoso, antidemocrático e inconstitucional: