TWITTER FILES #16
Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment
2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of moderation requests from every corner of government, Feds mistaking both conservatives and leftists for fictional Russians, even Twitter deciding on paper to cede moderation authority to the “U.S. intelligence community”:
3. These and at least a dozen other newsworthy revelations produced exactly zilch in mainstream news coverage in the last two months:
4. Then House hearings were held last week, at which one witness told a story about Donald Trump asking to remove a mean tweet by Chrissy Teigen.
The press went bananas. Now THAT was big news!
5. Purely to show the bankruptcy of media in this area, let’s introduce a pair of loud new data points, and see if any press figures at all cover either of them.
6. If a president freaking out about one tweeter is news, surely a U.S. Senator finking on three hundred-plus of his constituents also must be?
7. Here’s Maine Senator Angus King writing to Twitter to call a slew of accounts “suspicious” for reasons like:
“Rand Paul visit excitement”
“Bot (averages 20 tweets a day)”
Being followed by rival Eric Brakey
Or, my personal favorite: “Mentions immigration.”
8. King’s office declined comment. If Dick Nixon sniffed glue, this is what his enemies list might have looked like: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
9. So as not to focus only on Dems or those who caucus with Democrats, here’s a contribution from Republican Mark Lenzi, a State Department official most famous for offering to donate his brain to science after a claimed brush with Havana syndrome.
10. Lenzi wrote to Twitter bluntly asking to remove 14 accounts distinguished among other things by skepticism of Russiagate: “The below are some Russian controlled accounts that I think you will want to look into and delete.”
11.A government official, writing from a State department email, asks to “delete” 14 accounts that are engaged in legit speech and for which no evidence is shown they're Russian controlled or bots (in fact, we at Racket know some of these people). A clear First Amendment issue.
12. I noted before there were many crazy requests in Twitter records from officials wanting foes taken off Twitter, with Californian Adam Schiff’s effort to ban a reporter and stop “any and all search results” about a staffer making Angus King’s spreadsheet gambit look tame.
13. The fact that mainstream outlets ignored the Schiff story but howled about Teigen shows what they're about. Responses like this are designed to keep blue-leaning audiences especially focused on moronic partisan spats, obscuring bigger picture narratives.
14. The real story emerging in the #TwitterFiles is about a ballooning federal censorship bureaucracy that's not aimed at either the left or the right per se, but at the whole population of outsiders, who are being systematically defined as threats.
15. Beginning in March, we'll start using the Twitter Files to tell this larger story about how Americans turned their counterterrorism machinery against themselves, to disastrous effect, through little-known federal agencies like the Global Engagement Center (GEC).
16. Until then, if you found yourself on King's list, please DM or write in to Racket.News. I'm on vacation next week, but we'll mock up "Angus King Told Twitter I Was Suspicious, And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt" shirts when I get back.
17. Thanks to #TwitterFiles contributors like @ShellenbergerMD and @lhfang, and thanks also to Racket researchers. Searches were performed by a third party and material may have been left out.
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Not only is the @nytimes is totally wrong implying @mirandadevine’s reporting hasn’t held up, the paper ignored its own multi-level failure on that same story in 2020, which included ignoring their own reporting. It’s almost actionable — they owe a huge apology (1/6):
First of all the Times in 2020 tried to use the unprecedented censorship of the story by Facebook and Twitter to call Miranda’s story “dubious,” without saying what was dubious. (The censorship angle they of course ignore entirely.) It got worse (2/6):
Just a few paragraphs down, the Times contradicted itself, saying Twitter didn’t block the story because it was “dubious,” but because it was supposedly “hacked materials.”
The laptop contents were not even “hacked materials,” as Twitter quickly determined. But also (3/6):
1. TWITTER FILES Extra: The Defaming of Brandon Straka and #Walkaway
Smeared as a Russian proxy after founding a movement to "#Walkaway" from the Democratic Party, Twitter documents suggest @BrandonStraka and his followers were set up
2. In Atlanta Monday, I testified before Georgia state Representative @MeshaMainor, in a free speech hearing centered around the censorship of members of the “#WalkAway” Facebook Group, whose 500,000-plus accounts were deleted by Facebook on January 8th, 2021. washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/…
3. The #TwitterFiles contained material about federal interest in #WalkAway, including exculpatory Twitter analyses that contrasted with coverage describing #WalkAway as a “Kremlin operation.” These documents should have been published earlier. I apologize to @BrandonStraka.
You obviously didn't read the reports (@lhfang is a right-wing ideologue?). We went out of our way to show censorship/manipulation taking place across the spectrum, mentioning everyone from the Green Party to the Yellow Vests to Truthout and Consortium News. (1/5)
If you read the reports there was very little about which "side" was suppressed more. There was some chatter within the company about it, and some current and former executives talked about it with us, but mainly we focused on the who/how of censorship (2/5)
The main revelations were about roles the FBI, DHS, GEC, ODNI, DOD, HHS etc. played in flagging content. Lee's reports were about DOD creating fake accounts abroad. Other projects put USG agencies in the middle of flagging election or Covid-related content (3/5)
1. TWITTER FILES (DEAMPLIFIED)
How the Censorship Industrial Complex Case Was Built
2. I made a deal with the owner of this platform to publish new #TwitterFiles material only on this site. However, since this account is denylisted, I don't feel obligated to add the context, since no one will see it. Full explanations for images on Racket.News
1. UK FILES EXTRA:
The Center for Countering Digital Hate, the IRS, and 501 (c)(3) status
2. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, is one of the most powerful players in the global "anti-disinformation" space, with a reputation for successfully pressuring Internet platforms to remove disfavored speech:
3. CCDH is currently being sued by this platform, X, which has accused it of manipulating X data to make it "appear as if X is overwhelmed by harmful content":
1. FOIA FILES EXTRA:
STATE DEPARTMENT "TARGETING AMERICANS"?
2. In late May and early June, 2019, a story hit the news: Donald Trump's State Department had been caught trolling people, including a Washington Post reporter, deemed insufficiently tough on Iran. Outrage was universal:
3. Similar stories at The Intercept and Guardian ripped State's Global Engagement Center for funding @IranDisinfo, which was said to have dubbed critics of of Trump's "Maximum Pressure" policy “‘mouthpieces,’ ‘apologists,’ ‘collaborators,’ and ‘lobbyists’” of Iran: