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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Dec 21 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
The media say "misinformation" is more rampant on X than on their websites, but it's not. The mainstream media got every major story of the last several years wrong. The real reason the media are attacking X is because they are losing so many readers to it.Image
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The main sources of disinformation and hate speech are governments and corporate media. They have waged a series of hateful disinformation campaigns and spread wild conspiracy theories to undermine democracy & cover up their failures, eg Covid's origin, Hunter Biden's laptop. Image
Politicians, news media, and advertisers have entered into an unholy alliance to destroy X as a free speech platform.

Their desperate efforts to maintain censorship show the alarming degree to which they controlled information & thought before 2023.

The efforts by the media/corporate advertiser/politician blob are positively maniacal.

They're working through the EU to control the whole of the Internet. They even opened an office in downtown San Francisco to try to control X & other tech companies.

Every week brings a fresh disinformation campaign from the media/corporate advertiser/politician blob.

The message of the counterpopulist blob is always the same because it's aligned with their financial and political interests.

Their problem is that once their disinformation strategy becomes visible to the people, it loses its power. Image
The media is in a vicious downward spiral.

It spreads disinformation ---> Loses public trust ---> Loses readers/traffic ---> Loses money ---> Layoffs.

"Over 20,000 media jobs have been eliminated this year... The figure is also six times higher than the number of job losses in 2022 when several large media companies including Warner Bros.

"Discovery and Disney and others had undergone a series of layoffs impacting thousands of media workers." — ForbesImage
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We have big battles ahead of us. Ireland is seeking to pass legislation that would allow the police to enter people's homes and read their phones & computers.

But as long as X remains a free speech platform, free speech & democracy will prevail.

/END

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 20
Trump can't be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection, says Colorado's Supreme Court. But he didn't. Jan 6 was a riot, not an insurrection. Behind the Democrats' turn against democracy is years of planning, including a secret effort to undermine the 2020 election. Image
Years Of Planning Behind Democrats’ Turn Against Democracy

War on Trump shows that the most dangerous people are often those who consider themselves incapable of evil

by @ZaidJilani & @galexybrane
Donna Brazile (left), John Podesta (center), and Rosa Brooks (right) led a 2020 scenario-planning exercise, the “Transition Integrity Project,” aimed at undermining the election.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald J. Trump cannot be on the 2024 primary ballot in the state. The Court found that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is therefore disqualified from running for president. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was originally intended to keep Confederate officials from holding office.

Yet Trump has never been criminally convicted of participating in an insurrection. Even special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Trump, chose not to indict Trump under the federal statute that criminalizes inciting an insurrection or rebellion, even though this charge was part of the referral from the January 6 committee. Smith could not build the legal case to include the charge, likely because of the First Amendment issues that would come with it.

The Colorado Supreme Court skirted both due process and First Amendment concerns and chose to equate Trump’s political speech with sedition in the American Civil War that killed over 600,000 people.

It’s true that Trump has at times adopted extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, including most recently saying that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

But one need not agree with anything Trump says to recognize that in a democratic society, voters still have a right to see him on the ballot. Over one million people voted for Trump in Colorado in 2020. What will those people think when they see that judges are essentially trying to take away their right to vote for the candidate of their choice? Will they really see themselves as included in our democracy, or will they continue to lose faith in the American political system? The answer is obvious.

Democrats’ argument that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy has little basis in reality. Trump’s election denial and machinations were not qualitatively different from the actions of many Democrats. As for the January 6 riot, it was largely the result of security failures, including leaders’ alleged refusal to call in the National Guard.

The court decision comes on the heels of years of panicked warning from Democrats and their allies that it’s Trump who seeks to end American democracy and establish a dictatorship.

In a lengthy essay for The Washington Post that quickly went viral last month, Robert Kagan argued that the United States is a “few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship” led by none other than Donald Trump.

The problem with this prediction is that we already know how Trump responds to all of these things: he was president between 2017 and 2021. When, for instance, the judiciary ruled against Trump – as it did many times during his presidency – he was more likely to send a Tweet than troops.

For instance, when a federal judge temporarily paused Trump’s travel ban targeting visitors from a range of countries in February 2017, Trump took to Twitter to lament, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned.”

At the time, Trump took heat for singling out a judge for condemnation. “The President’s attack on Judge James Robart, a Bush appointee who passed with 99 votes, shows a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the Constitution,” intoned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

But while Trump’s frequent verbal attacks on the judiciary may have been seen as impolitic by his critics, they ultimately didn’t amount to much — certainly not anything like an actual attack. Trump, throughout his presidency, ultimately preserved the separation of powers, and you could even argue that having an adversarial relationship between different branches of government and different parts of political society protects democracy rather than subverts it.

For instance, Kagan warns that “in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be ‘enemies of the state,’ the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”

But if the media’s lives were unpleasant thanks to Trump, it’s hard to detect that in their pocketbooks. Newspaper subscriptions soared under the first Trump presidency, and reporters who went out of their way to antagonize the president became instant celebrities with generous book deals.

Even when Trump did take a rare tangible step against press freedom, it didn’t amount to much. When the Trump White House temporarily suspended the press pass of a reporter who engaged in a lengthy verbal dispute with an administration staffer, the courts ruled that the reporter’s due process rights were violated. Whatever names Trump called the press, there is little evidence that he used his powers as president to suppress their critical coverage of his White House.

Meanwhile, his predecessor, Barack Obama, vigorously pursued whistleblowers with the full force of the federal government. As CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, the Obama administration “used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists . . . more than all previous administrations combined.”

One report from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard estimated that 80% of the media coverage during Trump’s first 100 days had a negative tone. That’s hardly a sign that the media was cowed by the presence of Trump in the White House, Tweets and all.

This adversarial relationship between the press and the president is good for democracy, not bad. When the media serve as handmaidens for those in power, we get less scrutiny of policies that we later come to regret – such as excessive COVID-19 policies like school shutdowns and the Iraq war.

One sign that the Republican Party would be moving in an autocratic direction would be if they stopped respecting electoral results and clung to power despite losing elections.

It is true that Trump refused to concede his own defeat, and his rhetoric helped contribute to political chaos around the election and the January 6th riot. Much of the Republican Party, too, has been reticent to admit that Trump lost that election.

But being sore losers about an election isn’t equivalent to being tyrants. Following the 2000 election, many Democrats, too, felt that Bush was unfairly made the president. Gallup polling from after that election found that “just 15% said he won fair and square.”

And, as noted above, some Democrats have similarly refused to admit defeat. While both Republicans and Democrats have a handful of gubernatorial candidates who refused to concede – Stacey Abrams in 2018 for the Democrats and Kari Lake for the Republicans in 2022 – for the most part, the parties have been proceeding as normal after defeat.

But Democrats and their allies were quick to predict that the 2022 election would produce a repeat of Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020. The Post surveyed a range of Republican candidates in battleground states about whether they’d respect the results of their election. When most of those candidates failed to respond to the paper’s questions, the Post ran the alarming headline: “Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results.”

Yet after the election came and went, every candidate except for Lake had accepted the results of their election. It turned out that it was less that the Republican Party had stopped accepting elections and more that they didn’t want to talk to the Post.

As NBC News wrote in an article shortly after the midterm election: “From Maine to Michigan, Senate to state legislature, Republican to Democrat, most high-profile candidates who fell short in the 2022 midterm elections are offering quick concessions and gracious congratulations to their opponents.”

That was a far cry from what was predicted by California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who warned in a Tweet in January 2022 that “every politician says this is the most important election of our lifetime. It may be. But it could also be the last one.”

During an appearance with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Swalwell expanded on what he meant in the Tweet. “I’m worried that if Republicans win in the midterm elections that voting as we know it in this country will be gone…if they are able to win the House, the damage they could do to permanently make it difficult to vote and to alter the way that we participate in the democratic process may be irreversible,” he said.

But Republicans did win control of the U.S. House in the 2022 election. And yet nobody thinks there won’t be another election – campaigns across the country are preparing to spend billions on it. Yet now we’re being told that maybe the next election will be the end of democracy as we know it. Why is that?Image
Please subscribe now to read the rest of this barn burner by @ZaidJilani and @galexybrane !

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Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 12
Government-funded Stanford researchers said they didn't demand censorship, but they did. They even created this handy little graphic in a grant proposal. It shows how their disinformation "Incidents are routed to platform partners... for... takedowns" @mtaibbi Image
Last March, after @mtaibbi and I testifed before Congress, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) said it “did not censor or ask social media platforms to remove any social media content regarding coronavirus vaccine side effects.”

That was a bald-faced lie.

@mtaibbi While we learned that SIO demanded censorship last month, today @mtaibbi discovered, thanks to his FOIA request, that SIO had put its creepy little censorship flow chart in its own grant proposal.

In the name of "fighting disinformation," SIO spread disinformation about itself. Image
Read 8 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 10
Crime is out of control in San Francisco because it is short 540 police officers. Now, the city's top progressive Democrat wants to cut $100 million from the police budget. The reason? He views criminals as victims and the police as oppressors propping up the capitalist system. Image
Progressive Democrat Calls For Defunding Police In San Francisco

City Supervisor Dean Preston calls for cutting $100 million from police budget, despite city being short 540 officers

by @shellenberger

San Francisco’s largest police district, by size and population, only has three to four officers on duty every night. In February, the city’s Deputy Police Chief told Public the city was 540 officers short, but the Department only had funding to hire 267 officers.

Now, in an interview with British journalist Freddy Sayers of Unherd, the leader of San Francisco’s progressive Democrats, Supervisor Dean Preston, has called for cutting $100 million from the city’s police budget.

Preston: What gets publicized a lot is my views around the police budget. Whether it's used well, whether it's making people safer or not.

Sayers: Because you supported defunding the police, is that fair?

Preston: I think we have a very, very bloated police budget. All kinds of waste in the police department. I mean, I could cut a hundred million dollars out of the police department.
Please subscribe now to support Public's ground-breaking journalism and to read the rest of the article!




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Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 7
Last week, an expert told Congress we had spread "conspiracy theories" about censorship, but we hadn't. And now, yet another whistleblower has come forward with new files showing direct US Defense Department involvement in a mass censorship scheme. They're explosive. Image
Pentagon Was Involved In Domestic Censorship Scheme, New CTIL Whistleblower Files Show

Slack messages show direct involvement of FBI, DOD, and DHS employees in a mass online censorship scheme deliberately misrepresented as “cybersecurity”

by @galexybrane
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testifes before the Senate on October 31, 2023 (Photo by Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Last week, Public and Racket published the first CTIL Files, which revealed the origins of the Censorship Industrial Complex in offensive tactics developed by US and UK military contractors.

Now, a second whistleblower has come forward with Slack messages showing far greater government and military involvement in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) than we had previously discovered.

The CTIL Slack “disinformation” channel and the “law enforcement escalation” channel included current and former FBI employees, as well as personnel from the Michigan Cyber Command Center, the US Defense Digital Service (DDS), and at least one European government.

DDS is headquartered in the Pentagon and was founded by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in November 2015. DDS’s website states, “The Department of Defense has a secret weapon.”
The Department of Defense told Public that it combined DDS with other agencies. “DDS merged with three other organizations to form the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) back in Feb 2022. CDAO is not currently involved with CTI and we do not have situational awareness on project participation which predated that merger,” a spokesperson said.

As for the CTI League, it claimed to serve an essential function, cybersecurity, protecting hospitals and healthcare systems from serious threats.

However, according to the new whistleblower, “The essential function of CTI League was largely duplicative of other free and paid threat services available to health care defenders.”

Justin Frappier, who worked for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), wrote on his profile, “The opinions expressed here are my own as an analyst, and not those of CISA, or the US Government unless otherwise stated.”
But Frappier put the CISA seal as his profile image and was an eager participant in the CTI League. When he first joined CTIL, he asked if the group was “consolidating a list of disinformation resources to validate.” A CTIL member replied, “Yes, we are working on that. There is a whole Disinfo gathering [and] analysis operation happening in another group connected to CTI-League, which we’re working to incorporate as a threat stream.”

Responded Frappier, “That’s awesome, I think it’s amazing to see this happening at scale, long overdue but massive effort.”

Note: we redacted the files to protect identities of individuals who did not appear to play a leadership role.

These messages suggest that a government employee explicitly sought out a way to use the group for anti-disinformation activities and initiated access to these activities. Frappier contributed 573 messages to the “disinformation” channel of the Slack group.



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CTIL’s disinformation team referred to using the “law enforcement escalation” channel. This channel had an FBI Cyber Crime employee and Montana’s Chief Information Security Officer (who now works as a Director at the Center for Internet Security, a CISA-funded non-profit that manages information sharing for DHS). It is unclear how often CTIL’s disinformation league sent escalations to this channel.
One member of the disinformation team, Andras Iklody, worked for a Luxembourg government computer security initiative at the time of CTIL’s activities, according to his LinkedIn. Iklody previously worked for NATO. Iklody appears to have set up a disinformation channel for CTIL in the Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) that he helped develop.

MISP is funded and sponsored by the European Union, and the Covid disinformation channel CTIL used was vetted by MISP. According to Sara-Jayne Terp, a leader of CTIL’s disinformation team, the Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques (AMITT) framework was added to MISP. The group, Terp said, was also inputting the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Lab’s disinformation taxonomy.
When Terp explained that the group would be using MISP, Frappier responded, “I can’t tell you how exited [sic] I am that we got this up and running. I am really looking forward to what this is going to be. I think it has been long over due, and many as you said are working on similar issues, however tying it into MISP is INGENIOUS. I can’t believe I never thought of it before, and have been working with MISP for like 5 years.”
The new whistleblower’s files provide insight into the group’s inner workings, which Terp described as a “parallel effort.” Neither we nor the whistleblower know what the “parallel effort” refers to.



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Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 7
The mainstream media insist governments didn't censor us, but they did. Not only that, military & intelligence agencies waged disinformation and psychological operations against us on Covid's origins, vaccines, Hunter Biden's laptop, etc. Counterterrorism became counterpopulism.
Here is the proof that the US and UK militaries and intelligence agencies, fearing populism, turned the tools of counterterrorism against people in the US, Britain, and around the world:

US and UK military and intelligence agency, agent, and asset involvement in mass censorship was illegal, which is why they tried to hide it as "cybersecurity."

Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 4
World leaders say they care about climate change, but they don't. If they did, they wouldn't be shutting down nuclear plants and blocking natural gas production. In truth, they're in the grip of an anti-human ideology and profit from keeping energy scarce & expensive.
John Kerry says he wants to shut down coal plants to reduce carbon emissions, but doing so will force Africans, Indians, and others to burn wood and dung, which is far worse than coal. What's more, he opposes cheap natural gas, even though it's what reduces carbon emissions



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US emisisons declined 22% between 2005 - 2020, with 61% of the reduction from the switch from coal to natural gas.

Natural gas reduced carbon emissions too much, so "environmentalists" fought to stop it.

The question of whether emissions rise or fall depends on natural gas

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Read 9 tweets

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