We in alternative media have known about the manipulation of online content for a long time. We’ve talked about it and been called crazy conspiracy theorists for doing so. Within the past two weeks, however, our complaints were validated when Elon Musk gave a few selected journalists access to huge amounts of data from Twitter, proving definitively how much federal agencies have been involved in the moderation of social media.
The fact is, an unholy goverment-corporate alliance has all but destroyed free speech and deployed a psy-op on the American people.
While Daisy wrote about the Twitter files previously, there are still a few things that I wanted to highlight.
We first learned how visibility was manipulated to fit an agenda.
In Part One of the Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi discusses how in October 2020 Twitter buried the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In Part 2, Bari Weiss discusses how Twitter manipulated feeds to amplify or hide certain voices. “Visibility filtered” figures included popular conservatives like Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, as well as figures like Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a superbly qualified medical expert who publicly disagreed with closing schools during lockdowns.
We found out how Twitter made the decision to ban a sitting president.
Part Three goes back to Matt Taibbi, who posts details about the interactions between Twitter and federal law enforcement agencies in the months before January 6 led to the decision to ban then-sitting President Trump on January 8.
Michael Shellenberger picks up Part 4 and discusses how Twitter banned Trump. They had been under pressure for years, and in 2018 had publicly stated that deplatforming a sitting leader would “hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.” Personally, I couldn’t agree more. However, in the years between 2018 and 2021 the culture at Twitter regarding free speech had undergone changes, and on January 8, 2021, they made history by deplatforming the President of the United States.
In Part 5, Bari Weiss reveals internal messaging from Twitter employees about how they knew Trump actually hadn’t violated any policies or incited violence. But Twitter executive Vijaya Gadde goes through some linguistic gymnastics to convince other employees that Trump was using coded hate speech, and justifies banning him anyway.
Then we learned more about the disturbing involvement of our own government.
Matt Taibbi takes the lead again in Part 6 , discussing the very cozy relationship between Twitter and federal agencies. He provides evidence of regular meetings between Twitter executives and the FBI. He also provides evidence of how minutely the FBI flagged accounts as problematic. Most people, at this point, know about Twitter banning Babylon Bee; however, they also flagged many low-follower accounts for similarly satirical posts.
We live in a country with an out-of-control migrant crisis and skyrocketing crime rates; meanwhile, our tax dollars for federal law enforcement are going to agents flagging stupid jokes online. It’s indefensible.
Part 7 goes back to Michael Shellenberger, who takes us back to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Shellenberger provides quotes from both Twitter’s Yoel Roth and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg about being repeatedly warned by the FBI about Russian interference in the 2020 election. All this despite the fact that no actual increase in Russian online activity had been observed, as the FBI themselves admitted.
One of the most shocking things, to me, was Shellenberger’s #22, where FBI Agent Elvis Chan arranges for Twitter executives to have temporary security clearances starting in July 2020. His reasoning was that he wanted to make data sharing extra-easy in the months leading up to the 2020 elections.
Twitter’s staff is lousy with former FBI agents.
Security clearances are supposed to be a big deal. If you want a career requiring top security clearances, government representatives interview your family, friends, and even prior roommates to get a feel for what kind of person you are. They find out about what stupid stuff you did in college, how much international travel you’ve done, your foreign contacts, any dirty habits you might have that people could potentially blackmail you over, and above all your loyalty to the U.S. government. Security clearance is supposed to be something the government takes supremely seriously, and the FBI issued temporary clearances to the social justice warriors at Twitter?
And maybe they did think twice about it, because by August 2020, Twitter had hired so many former FBI agents that they had their own group within Twitter. Shellenberger provides a great deal of evidence about the increasingly close contact between the FBI and Twitter. Not only has the FBI given Twitter over $3 million since 2019, Twitter’s top executives are full of former FBI employees, as the New York Post recently reported.
Our military is also heavily involved with Twitter.
In Part 8, Lee Fang details the relationship between the U.S. military and Twitter. For years, Twitter had been committed to avoiding interference by state actors. In 2018, they closed accounts related to Russian propaganda efforts. In 2020, they closed almost 1000 accounts associated with the Thai military. The U.S. military has not been so scrutinized; fabricated accounts using deep fakes have been allowed, as long as they serve American interests.
And in a way this isn’t completely unreasonable; Twitter is an American company. Malign foreign actors such as ISIS do recruit online and it is not unreasonable that we would want to counter that kind of activity.
We’re all victims of a legalized psy-op.
However, the average American is not aware that the Smith-Mundt Act, which barred the American government from propagandizing the American people, was repealed in 2013. This means that the average American citizen is no more protected from psychological operations than citizens of places like Iran or Venezuela.
This, I think, is a problem. I’m not anti-military at all; I think most of the people that sign up do so out of a genuine desire to serve. But, as Tolkien (a combat veteran himself) pointed out again and again in Lord of the Rings, soldiers always need to bear in mind what they fight for. What kind of a people will be produced, when they are continually being manipulated without their knowledge?
It’s like small children and Santa Claus. Sure, it’s fun to pretend when they’re little, but at some point you need to let them grow up and understand that Christmas is something Mom and Dad budget for.
Outside the military community, Americans are mostly blissfully unaware of how much intervention goes on, both at home and abroad. It’s time for the American public to grow up; I don’t think the “kidult” phenomenon is a coincidence. The workings of the intelligence community need to be brought to light, not because the intelligence community is full of intrinsically bad people, but because the coddling and manipulation has turned a high percentage of American citizens into the amorphous blobs from Wall-E.
Government and corporate alliances have destroyed free speech in favor of creating narratives.
Many of us have been watching this for years, wondering how things have gotten so bad. The Twitter Files revelations give us a great amount of detail into how this government-corporate online alliance actually functions.
You may be thinking to yourself, so what? I know all these guys are crooks. That’s how I felt with the whole “Russian disinformation” thing back in 2016, when people claimed Russia helped Trump steal the election. I ignored it; I thought my opinion of politicians couldn’t sink any lower.
However, as Matt Taibbi points out in Part 6, it’s important to realize how much the Russian disinformation rhetoric in 2016 set the stage for the massive online manipulation we see now. We in the U.S. like to think that we’re all about freedom of speech, and the Bill of Rights, and so on.
Until there’s some kind of defense emergency. That’s how the U.S. government justified industrial overreach back in the 50s, with the first Defense Production Act, a government program that just doesn’t want to die. That’s how we justified setting up the mass surveillance apparatus via the Patriot Act after 9/11. And since 2016, powerful players have been trying to get the general public to suspect any piece of information not emanating from official channels as being Russian disinformation.
The Twitter Files provide hard evidence of government interference.
The reason the Twitter data dump has been so important is that, it provides hard evidence that those of us who have long suspected a great deal of government interference in the online community were correct in our assumptions.
In July, Daisy wrote about the OP getting downgraded by Newsguard. To sum up: she refused to lie, she refused to declare that this is a left- or right-leaning website, and so we got downgraded. This affects the way search engines display the website; it makes it harder for this site to earn money, and it makes it harder for regular people wanting to research a particular topic to find a wide variety of sources.
It’s easy to ignore what goes on with sites like the OP because we’re small, independent, and no one here has deep pockets. But what goes on here does go on everywhere else, whether or not people realize it. In Bari Weiss’s Part 2, #11, she quotes a Twitter engineer saying, “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”
Now, the evidence has been presented for everyone.
Well, now the information is widely available, for the normies who do want to know how much they do. We need to take advantage of this transparency while we can, because who knows how long it will last. Situational awareness is vital to prepping; we need to be very intentional about where our information comes from.
There will be more to come on this, I’m sure, and we’ll continue to monitor the situation. Our only agenda on this website is to help people help themselves by staying accurately informed, so they can make the right decisions for themselves and their families.
What are your thoughts on this government involvement?
Are you concerned about the power the federal government has had over the visibility of alternative opinions on social media? Do you feel this is blatant propaganda? Did any of the revelations in the Twitter Files surprise you?
Let’s discuss it in the comments.
About Marie Hawthorne
A lover of novels and cultivator of superb apple pie recipes, Marie spends her free time writing about the world around her.
There’s nothing new here, really. The best of our founders, mostly on the Anti-federalist side (e.g. Jefferson, Henry, Lee, etc.), worked hard to ensure the government stayed out of business. But what we have now is simply a progression from the corporate welfare of the early republic, that is, Federalists wanting to go to the public/government trough for subsidizing “internal improvements”, to tax breaks and regulations favouring corporate/business interests (e.g. Wal-Mart), and now to the government actively taking part in supposedly private tech companies.
It’s going to hurt freeing ourselves from the tentacles of the corporate/government alliances (corporatocracy?), but there’s no true liberty without it!
It IS blatant propaganda from our own government, and I think it sucks. This will only get worse.
The key item is/was the repeal of the Smith–Mundt Act in 2013.
The Smith–Mundt Act was signed into law by Truman in 1948. The Smith–Mundt Act prohibited domestic propaganda. The Smith–Mundt Moderization Act of 2012 abolished the prohibition to allow domestic propaganda.
What we have seen since is the silencing of independent media that does not subscribe to the propaganda.
Our only hope for truth in media is to support independent media.
The new world order will be a fusion of government and corporations. This is one of the goals of the great reset. This is going on worldwide, not just in America.
Wait, what?! Corporations??? You mean those big, mean, greedy, nasty, awful things we are supposed to hate? Oh wait, only the conservatively run corporations we’re supposed to hate. Got it.
I am SO sick of the utter hypocrisy of these idiots. And the fact is there are FAR too many oblivious people walking around completely trusting their gov’t. Absolutely frightening.
I greatly appreciate this all coming to light at last, as ugly as it is, however, I feel like the people who *should* know and care to learn about this have largely “picked their side” and are not even looking into this. Those that are not “red pilled” at this point won’t get it until it is impacting them in very painful and direct ways.
There is also a sense of fatigue at the constant latest drama/issue/disaster. So many are simply trying to survive at this point, that concern about who did what in the past 3 years seems less urgent. Corruption goes unpunished and and is blatant, so at some point reacting feels pointless. The anger that should be there is turning into a quiet despair and apathy, which is a sad and dangerous thing.
I would love to be wrong. I am suspicious of Elon Musk, however I do appreciate him bringing all this to light.
Spot on!
My thought is that these demonstrations and evidence have been woefully underreported by the usual media. Unsurprising, perhaps, but telling.
The late comedian George Carlin left us a great and relevant quote:
“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10136102-political-correctness-is-fascism-pretending-to-be-manners
It helps to remember that fascism is all about extremely wealthy organizations or individuals buying or bullying control of governments behind the scenes to serve their own purposes. During the corrupt Woodrow Wilson years the power of state governments to appoint and instantly recall US senators was ripped away so that senate elections became high dollar fund-raising auctions among oligarchs.
One ghastly example of oligarch influence during WWI was the Rockefeller-supplied meningitis vaccine that was forced into US GIs in training for war in Europe. When its effects and subsequent mutations began killing people (eventually between 50 and 100 million people worldwide — including more Germans than combat) wartime censorship covered up the Rockefeller vaccine source with the phoney label of “Spanish Flu” of unknown origin — a lie still being maintained to this day.
Another example was the Rockefeller donation of $4 million to the WCTU to kick off a morals campaign against alcohol as a cover story to justify the 1919 Prohibition Amendment. Its real purpose was to shut down alcohol as an alternate and locally produceable vehicle fuel for such flex-fuel engines as in Ford’s Model-T cars and trucks — to give the Rockefeller gasoline station network a near monopoly across the nation. As a predictable result it was a Rockefeller heir who in mid-1933 announced to the New York media that Prohibition was no longer needed and so by December of that year Prohibition at the federal level was gone.
Not surprising was the mid-1950s TV series “The Untouchables” starring Robert Stack as Elliot Ness running the federal war against alcohol bootleggers during Prohibition — with zero mention whatsoever about the gas station monopoly war behind it all.
Was any of this new in America? Not really. During the falsely labeled “Civil War” of 1861-1865 Lincoln had congressmen who disagreed with him arrested … and disagreeing newspaper editors had their presses seized and destroyed. So government control over what speech is publicly allowed has a disgusting and many-lifetimes long history.
–Lewis
If you can’t see what is happening to us here in the U.S. you are super dumb or you have your head in the ground. We are being screwed big time! The rigged election was a part of this BS. Big money from the big shots is paying off all our enemies. They will sell us out for the bucks!
The question for 2023 is: What do we do to begin to change this odious situation, far more dire than what the “Founding Fathers” faced in 1775?
This is what is called Sedition and Treason. The FBI and CIA are no longer valid, and never were valid or Lawful, being under the control of the British Rothschild banker Cabal from day one. Now they are no less than a Standing Army upon our Land. If We the People do not annihilate them, God surely will. Much sooner than they comprehend. Their little god satan will do NOTHING to stop their destruction.
I think our basic rights have been stripped from us by rogue government agencies to the degree we no longer have fair elections and we no longer have free speech. This is done purposely to destroy the fabric of society. This along with open borders are right out of the communist playbook.
Saul Alensky’s 8 Rules
1) Healthcare — Control healthcare and you control the people
2) Poverty — Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt — Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control — Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare — Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income).
6) Education — Take control of what people read and listen to — take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion — Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools.
8) Class Warfare — Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.
Any of this look familiar?
I guess the question is how are we going to fix it?
Not a surprise at all. We knew something like that was happening.
What it IS–is Treason. They took an OATH to uphold the Constitution and broke their oath = perjury and treason. They need to HANG after being properly tried.
The typical marriage of business and politics. They will never get a divorce. Not even a transgender change but they sure do this on you.
OBAMA and his demonic minions WORKED HAND AND HAND with his DADDY SATAN,yes ,OBAMA is the son of perdition,BUT ALL OF AMERICA LOVES HIM,this is what you call a FATAL MISTAKE…Talk to any dumber then a rat,and they’ll tell you he was the best president america ever had,NOW theres no men to save you women,YOU better learn how to use a rifle or you’ll soon be a SLAVE in a foreign country,america is going DOWN and it can’t be stopped…
Every word of your article is consistent with the revelation of Tucker Carlson’s JFK-files whistleblower:
“It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.”
If they’re going to lie to us this thoroughly, we owe them no fealty whatsoever.
Act accordingly.