Thread by @jimstewartson

🧵 Twitter, like most “social media,” was built by objectivist sociopaths who saw it as a way to manipulate and control people at scale.

For many years, Twitter operated with a veneer of moderation while underneath it was always a psychological weapon.
#RealTwitterFiles

IMO, it is highly unlikely that w/o psychological operations on Twitter directed by @GenFlynn that Donald Trump would have won the 2016 election.

It was on Twitter that GRU cutout “Guccifer” connected with Roger Stone and Wikileaks, which released Podesta’s GRU-hacked emails.

It was on Twitter that white nationalist trolls took over the narrative and shifted it towards Trump through inorganic amplification.

It was Twitter where the MAGA3X psyop organized and ran its operations, and where @GenFlynn’s “digital soldiers” did most of their work.

From early on, Twitter became a breeding ground, as designed, for a menagerie of inauthentic activity, most of which was ignored — or protected.

Thousands of contractors had access Twitter tools which they were supposed to use to enforce the rules.

But many of the contractors used their access to Twitter tools to “moderate” people that didn’t fit their agenda. Swarms of suicide trolls were allowed to run hate campaigns against individuals.

Groups like The Shed, Troll Army and MAGA3X ran around tormenting people for years.

It became a game of these suicide trolls to get liberals suspended by attacking them with lies and then reporting their reaction. Twitter did nothing about it. In my case, they sanctioned it.

Worse, many people that Twitter relied on as “experts” were allied w/ these trolls.

The reason Yoel Roth and Twitter did nothing about it this behavior is that they wanted it. It creates anger and radicalization, all of which are good for business. Again, coordinated harmful activity *is the point* of this platform.

May, last year:
jimstewartson.substack.com/p/dear-yoel-ro…

In 2017, after Trump was illegally elected, there was a “Resistance” movement on the left. This was mostly authentic people who were terrified of the coming four years.

However, it was deeply infiltrated by chaos operatives who made friends with people, and then turned on them.

Huge blocklists were created by people who were intentionally using Twitter to wall people off from their friends and real information. The “Resistance” was split into segments which were then provoked to go to war with each other.

This resulted in a suicide death.

Here’s an article detailing some of the operations run on Twitter and in the press to both create and destroy “The Resistance.”

Please consider subscribing. 🙏
jimstewartson.substack.com/p/the-resistan…

Twitter was also instrumental in the creation of QAnon. While “Q” itself lived on 4chan then 8chan, the vast majority of the propaganda that came from it was distributed on Twitter and Facebook.

It wasn’t until the insurrection that Twitter did anything about it.

One good thing the January 6th Committee did was help show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the management of Twitter, including @jack, knew what was going to happen and did absolutely nothing about it.
jimstewartson.substack.com/p/j6-committee…

The reason Twitter didn’t do anything about QAnon, is that @jack and the people he works with, like @elonmusk, are sociopaths and believe “free speech” should be absolute because it benefits THEM.

But “free speech” isn’t free when others are involuntarily paying for it.

In the lead up to 1/6, the Big Lie blossomed on Twitter. Propagandists like Ron Watkins, who grew his following from 20k to 500k in three months, were allowed to continually spew lies and made up fantasies with the purpose of radicalizing people to violence.

Twitter knew what was going to happen and did nothing, UNTIL they were forced to by images of the Capitol being ransacked by the people radicalized on this platform.

Then, like a light switch, they turned QAnon off which means they had the switch the whole time. They knew.

But @elonmusk who has become a mentor / cult leader to @jack, was unhappy with the lack of radicalization. Musk is the epitome of an “accelerationist.” He’s fine with pain, death and destruction, as long as it goes FASTER.

So after some performative negotiations. Musk bought it.

Ever since @elonmusk bought Twitter, the true nature and purpose of the platform has been set loose. There is effectively no moderation aside from egregious obscenities.

But the vast majority of the trauma created here doesn’t come from people saying bad words.

There is a massive industry of people collecting in DM groups or on Discord and planning on ways to destroy strangers who are targeted. These groups create narratives and assign roles. They may launch an attack with some accounts, and have others come in to be “rescuers.”

All of this happened before @elonmusk, but now he is *modeling* the behavior through his psyop “Twitter Files” and his Twitter Space where individuals are identified for attack and narratives about them are baked for distribution.

Twitter itself is a psyop now.

If you want to get a sense for the breadth of different operations used against individuals on Twitter, I wrote this article based on my own experiences.

You are in a war zone, behind enemy lines.
And it’s not going to get any better.
#RealTwitterFiles
jimstewartson.substack.com/p/its-time-to-…