Orwellian Spy Tools Alert: The ‘Convenience’ Is a Trap

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Big Data, Transhumanism and Why the Singularity May Be Faked.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

  • Silicon Valley is essentially fused with the national security state. Silicon Valley is now also entering into joint ventures with medical companies, and many of these ventures are financed by groups like In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm
  • There’s a concerted effort to frame transhumanism — which is really the new eugenics — as health care. Joint ventures involving Big Tech, Big Pharma and the security state typically focus on products and services that normalize and further the transhumanist agenda
  • Food and agriculture are also being tossed into the mix. The U.S. government has launched a “Food is Medicine” program, which is yet another way for the government to seize control of the population. Food as medicine will be used to get you into their control system, and keep you there
  • In 2023 and 2024, watch for the rollout of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). It’s crucial that as many people as possible refuse the system during the initial voluntary phase. Once it becomes mandatory, it cannot be stopped and all freedoms will be lost
  • If the singularity cannot be achieved, technocrats may end up faking it, because if they can blame eugenics, depopulation and other unethical decisions on artificial intelligence running the government, they can do whatever they want, with no repercussions

I recently interviewed investigative journalist Whitney Webb about her two-volume book series, “One Nation Under Blackmail.” She’s been on tour, promoting the books in dozens of interviews.

Here, we discuss some of her experiences since the release of her books, and delve deeper into the disturbing merger of the intelligence state, Silicon Valley and medicine, and how transhumanism — eugenics rebranded — is being rolled out under the guise of health care.

We also talk about censorship and other tactics used to mold public perception, and how artificial intelligence may be overhyped to give technocrats and eugenicists carte blanche to do whatever they want without having any accountability.

The Encroaching Surveillance State

Her book tour brought her back to the U.S. for the first time in eight years. When asked about her first impressions after being gone for such a long time, she expresses surprise at how willing Americans have become to embrace spy tools like Ring cameras on their front doors.

“This is actually troubling,” she says, “because a lot of those tech companies, Google included, are contractors for the military and for intelligence. I think it would be naive to assume they don’t have backdoor access to those devices, knowing when you’re home and when you’re not and all of that.

I think it’s interesting, the willingness of so many people, so many households, to invite that type of technology into their homes. I didn’t see inside people’s homes much, but a lot of people, as I understand it, have things like Amazon’s Alexa. Numerous stories have come out that they’re recording you without your consent, even though they say they’re not.

But people still continue to use the product, and I really wish people would wise up about inviting that type of technology into your house. So much of what we’re being sold today is being marketed as convenience, but really a lot of it is really just the building blocks for the infrastructure of a very dangerous and Orwellian system of control.”

How the Transhumanist System Is Being Pushed Forward

As a former contributor to Mint Print Press News, which provides a lot of great coverage on the encroaching surveillance state, Webb knows a thing or two about Orwellian systems of control. Much of her work there focused on the intersection of intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley.

“Even after I left and started to do my own thing, I maintained a lot of that focus,” she says. “I guess a theme of my work would be the structure of power and how it really works. If you’re looking at Silicon Valley today, it’s very clear that it’s essentially fused with the national security state …

One thing we’ve seen happen, specifically during the COVID era, is that Big Pharma is now getting in this mix. There’s a lot of merging happening between Big Pharma and Silicon Valley. You’re seeing this with a lot of joint ventures into the health care space of Silicon Valley companies. A lot of it’s through wearables and these efforts to normalize technology like CRISPR or nanotechnology injectables.

You’re seeing them all come together, and a lot of these joint ventures or companies in this particular space that’s spanning big pharma in Silicon Valley tend to have a lot of funding from groups like In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm.

I think we’re seeing, in the effort to push through this technocratic transhumanist system, a lot more overlap between the power structure of the national security state in Silicon Valley with Big Pharma. And that’s very, very bad. I don’t know how else to put that.

It’s awful. I think more people should be paying a lot more attention to that specifically … [There’s] an effort to frame transhumanism — which is really the new eugenics — as health care, and that’s what a lot of this is about.”

The Coming Food Coup

Food and agriculture are also being tossed into the mix. In early December 2022, I wrote about how John Rockefeller eliminated food from medicine 112 years ago and how, now, The Rockefeller Foundation is working with the White House to bring nutrition back in. While it sounds like a great idea, the real purpose is the same now as it was a century ago. It’s all about controlling the population. As noted by Webb:

“If these people take over the food supply, they’ll be framing it as a return to ‘food is medicine,’ but it’s not. Well, it’s not exactly food as medicine as people would think of it when someone like you talks about that concept …

This idea, for example, of putting vaccines in your food, like in tomatoes. Eating one of these GMO tomatoes is the equivalent of taking a vaccine and stuff like that … It’s taking this age-old adage and twisting it to fit their purposes. Food as medicine is only convenient to them when it’s not something that actually heals you, but [rather] something that keeps you in this new system they’re creating.”

Predictions for 2023

As we record this in late November 2022, we seem to be in a bit of a lull, in terms of tyrannical overreaches. It’s a bit like being in the eye of a hurricane. You know the storm will be upon you yet, again, it’s only a matter of time. The question is, what comes next?

“I think there’s a couple things to watch really closely in the next year,” Webb says. “One is how this World Health Organization Pandemic Treaty, which tries to [supersede] the Constitution, not just of the U.S. but pretty much every country that signs it.

That’s definitely something to pay close attention to, because if that does get passed, I think it’s likely we’ll see an effort to repeat a lot of what we saw during COVID 19 from these particular groups. And if it’s not signed, I think they’re going to wait …

They’re waiting to get that type of new authority so they don’t have to deal with so much dissent, whether it’s from nation states or from particular domestic populations that have had enough and are unlikely to believe all of this a second time.

I think they’re really counting on having that WHO super-national authority in order to go forward with the biosecurity agenda, in terms of a repeat of what we saw in recent years.

The other thing I think is really important is the central bank digital currency (CBDC) agenda. Almost every country in the world at this point — there are exceptions, but I think it’s a majority — have some sort of CBDC pilot program going on right now. In the U.S., they’ve even announced they’re doing pilots of [CBDCs] with commercial banks like JP Morgan and some of the big financial giants of Wall Street.

I would say that either 2023 or 2024 is likely to be the year of the CBDC. In countries where they’ve already launched a CBDC, or have a very advanced pilot program, it’s framed first as voluntary, and then of course, once enough people start using it, it becomes the only form of legal tender in use. At least that’s the end game for CBDCs in any particular country.”

Programmable CBDCs Mean Someone Else Controls Your Money

As explained by Webb, CBDCs are programmable money. The Central Bank will decide when, where and on what you’re allowed to spend your money. You also cannot save when and however much you want, because some of the CBDCs have expiration dates. Use it or lose it. You don’t get to decide when you spend your money, the state does.

CBDCs can also be programmed to only work for certain types of items, including certain types of food. If your health records indicate you have a health problem, your CBDCs can be programmed such that you cannot buy foods deemed unhealthy for you. Purchases can also be blocked based on your carbon footprint score, and they can be blocked based on geofencing parameters.

“If they declare a lockdown, for example, and you’re not allowed to go five miles beyond your home, your money won’t work five miles beyond your home. That’s basically why CBDCs are attractive to the powers that be. But they’re going to frame it as voluntary first, before it moves into involuntary.

We’re going to see it pop up in a lot more countries over the next two years. And obviously, that is the phase to mass reject CBDCs in any way you can … I’ll go back to COVID for a second to explain where I’m trying to go here.

I understand and have empathy for people that didn’t want to lose their jobs and were worried about being thrown into a position of poverty, so they took the vaccine because of the mandates. But the more steps you take down that path of, ‘It’s convenient,’ the harder it will be to go on the alternative path later on.

For people that were in that situation with COVID 19, that should have been a huge wake up call to start doing something different and think about how to get off that path …

… if you went down that path, and then go down the CBDC path just because it’s more convenient for now, there’s going to come a point where, if you make enough compromises, it’s going to be almost impossible, if not entirely impossible, to redirect and go towards a different outcome.

These are things that are very important for people to pay attention to right now, in terms of developments, and plan how to keep your family independent of these types of systems and resilient in the face of all the shocks to the system that we already see coming.”

The Poor Will Be Squeezed First

As noted by Webb, those who will feel the squeeze of tyranny first are the poor and lower-middle class. We’re already seeing how they’re planning to encourage mass adoption of CBDCs through various assistance programs such as food stamps.

As food and energy prices continue to soar, more and more people will qualify for government assistance and be forced into those systems. Webb also suspects that any future stimulus checks, if there are additional long-term lockdowns, may be paid out only in CBDCs.

“It’s a very insidious plan,” Webb says. “They’re trying to reduce the standard of living of people, and then in order for them to maintain their standard of living, they’re forcing them to adopt a control system disguised as a monetary system …

They’re going to frame it as voluntary before it becomes involuntary. That stage where it’s voluntary is when it’s critical for people to act [and reject it] … I don’t think we can prevent them from implementing it, but you can prevent yourself, your family and your community from adopting that system, and use a parallel economic system [instead].”

While some have speculated that decentralized digital currencies such as Bitcoin might work as a parallel economic system, the problem with that idea is that government could easily make it illegal. They’ve already promised to implement new regulations of that space.

The safest alternatives are those that government cannot regulate or make illegal (at least not easily). This includes trading and bartering of goods and services, without any type of currency, with the exception perhaps of physical gold and silver.

“So, so we have to think about these sorts of things when countering the CBDC agenda,” Webb says. “That voluntary stage is the time to make those plans so you don’t get swept up when it moves from voluntary to involuntary, which they are definitely going to do, or attempt to do.

But it will only be successful if there’s mass adoption. The more people who opt out and do some sort of parallel system for their economic activity at the neighborhood or community level, the less successful that agenda will be.”

People Are Waking Up to the Social Media Manipulation

While it seems we’re headed into a dystopian future that cannot be avoided, and with no clear means of escape, Webb feels there is still reason to be optimistic. Importantly, more people than ever before are now getting wise to the globalists’ agenda, and are hungry for explanations about what’s really going on.

People who want the truth are more likely to search for it, and are ready to take it in. They’re less likely to stick their head in the sand and write everything off as a baseless conspiracy theory.

“I think a lot of people on a visceral level know something is really wrong. And I think that’s why there are so many efforts to censor that type of information. I also think there is a major investment by the state in efforts to make us think we are a minority when we are not.

More than anything else, what social media is used for by the powers that be is to make us think certain ideas are more popular than they really are. [Take] the bot situation on Twitter … a lot of those bots serve to promote ideas that many people don’t necessarily have, or make certain figures or ideas look more popular than they are …

When you combine that with the censorship, removing ideas that otherwise would be popular with real authentic accounts … you’re manipulating people’s perception of how the rest of the country feels … A lot of what’s going on right now on social media is to completely change how we perceive a particular situation or agenda, in the hopes that change in perception will cause a change in behavior.

If you’re censoring an idea, you’re trying to take it out of the public mind and have it just not be part of the discourse anymore. That obviously causes a change in perception, because you’re only having one idea, or a very small spectrum of opinion about a particular idea, out there.

That’s all people are going to engage with if you censor all the other takes. The idea is to completely wipe out dissent so that everyone has a rather homogenous perception of events, people, ideas and agendas, and then from there, behavior will be molded to the benefit of these particular powers.”

Is Elon Musk Pulling the Wool Over Our Eyes?

When it comes to Twitter, with Elon Musk now at the helm many are hoping it will become a bastion of free-speech. Webb, however, is skeptical. She suspects Musk is promoting free speech and reinstating banned accounts because he wants to turn Twitter into a U.S. version of WeChat, an “everything app” that’s connected to digital ID, CBDCs and the social credit system. The more users he has, the more people will be lured into the digital prison system.

“We’re in this paradigm shift, where we’re going from an oil-based economy to a data-based economy. Data is the new oil, and whoever owns the ‘everything app’ in this new system is going to be the king of the castle of the new economy. They’re going to be the Rockefellers of the data age,” she says.

“There’s nothing good about that. I think what we’re seeing right now is an effort to coax people back Twitter, and there might be some benefits to that. But ultimately, what Elon Musk is interested in is the data and getting more people on Twitter than before, with the goal of turning it into WeChat, which is a segue to this ‘everything app.’

And it’s worth pointing out that the company behind WeChat, Tencent, is one of the most active advisors to Tesla and a major shareholder in Tesla. There is a relationship there.”

Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of ‘Smart Dictatorship’

Webb and I also discuss the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI), and the role of social media in feeding AI with data for programs relating to pandemic outbreak detection and pre-crime. But while AI and its successor, artificial general intelligence (AGI), has impressive capabilities, Webb believes there’s a lot of false hype, and that this hype will be used to shield human powerbrokers from accountability.

“A lot has been said about the role of AI in our lives once it reaches a particular point referred to as the singularity, which is where AI intelligence allegedly outpaces human intelligence so extensively and so rapidly that it’ll basically take over. If you ask me, based on everything I’ve seen, I don’t think the singularity is actually possible. Or if it is possible, I think it’s very far away.

But if you are the people behind … this agenda — people like Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger who just put out their ‘New Age of AI’ book, which has a lot about AI and its role in government, basically having AI become the government — all you really need to do is convince people … that the singularity is here and … that it’s so far superior to human intelligence that we should outsource all our decision-making to it.

Then, there’s a Wizard of Oz type guy … behind the curtain who makes the decisions. If you look at what Schmidt and Kissinger and these guys say about AI and government, they say it’s going to be so far above our intelligence that there’s no way for the AI to explain its decision-making. It’ll just be ‘The computer says this.’

And if you’re basically organized crime, running the government, which I would argue is the situation today, and you don’t want to have to explain the reasons for your policy because it’s a horrible reason that no one would agree with, what a great curtain, what a great facade to have for your smart dictatorship.

They just have to say that it was the AI’s decision. They have plausible deniability about everything, don’t they? And a lot of the stuff they say in that context is very unsettling. Stuff like, AI may decide to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, if not millions of their own population to win.

If the goal given is winning, then AI is willing to make all sorts of sacrifices that humans wouldn’t make. But if you look at people like Kissinger and Eric Schmidt, they’d be very happy to kill a bunch of people and then blame it on AI for the decision.

They don’t care about killing millions of people. They care about expanding their money and power infinitely. How do you have plausible deniability about that and get away with mass murder, eugenics programs and population control? You say ‘There’s this new super intelligence thing that’s going to take over government because it’s so superior. It’s going to churn out policies and we’re just going to follow them.’

It’s the new god basically. It’s superior to us and it can’t explain how it got to this conclusion because it thinks so differently from us. So, we just have to follow what it says, but we’re not responsible for what it says at the same time …

People like Ray Kurzweil said the singularity was going to happen a long time ago and it didn’t happen. And if you look at programs like Welcome Leap … where they’re trying to map baby brains and child brains by forcing kids to use very invasive, biometric technology … because they think that will create the singularity — that, to me, says they are grasping at straws.

They have no way of producing something equivalent to the human brain. They can mimic stuff very successfully with AI and they have done so, but in terms of creating consciousness? These are the most unconscious people on the entire planet trying to recreate consciousness in their image. Good luck … I think they’re going to try and fake it.

And, here’s the other thing. This whole inevitability of AI narrative is a major marketing narrative necessary to get transhumanist technologies widely adopted … The super intelligent singularity stuff is most likely a PSYOP to get you into the transhumanist box that you’re not going to get out of. Once you get a brain chip, there’s no going back.”

What You Can Do to Prepare

Clearly, we all face enormous challenges in the years ahead, regardless of where we live, as this is a global takeover. So, what can you do to prepare? Here are some of Webb’s recommendations:

  • Build community and local parallel economies.
  • Build your knowledgebase on how to grow and raise food, even if you’re not in a position to grow food right now. There are many free videos online that you can peruse. Ideally, download them so you can watch them offline, even if the internet goes down. Books on homesteading and basic survival skills are also a valuable investment. “Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills” is one option. As a general rule going forward, you’ll want hard copies or copies on external hard drives of any information that you want to have access to in the future, as the internet is becoming increasingly scrubbed of important information. If using an external hard drive, make sure you store it in a faraday bag to protect the information from electromagnetic weapons.
  • Stock up on backup supplies such as food and energy generators. Also have a plan for how to secure potable water. Since the economy is collapsing and inflation skyrocketing, your money is not doing you much good in the bank. You’re losing purchasing power with each passing month, and a bank bail-in could wipe you out completely. So, if you need survival items, buying them now might be one of the better investment strategies out there.
  • Do everything you can to avoid entering the CBDC system when it rolls out.
  • Go back to using more cash if you don’t do that already. Also, consider cutting back on your online usage, social media in particular. “If things get really bad and the war on domestic terror gets underway and there’s all this profiling going on, I would stay as far away from the online world as you can,” Webb says.

More Information

In closing, Webb is now investigating the FTX scandal. Could we end up seeing a Volume 3 in her “One Nation Under Blackmail” series? Perhaps, but she’s not making any promises. She’s also working on an investigative series with Ian Davis about the United Nations sustainable development goals, showing point by point “the agenda under the hood.”

To stay abreast of Webb’s work, sign up for her newsletter at Unlimited Hangout. There you will also get the best price for her two-volume series “One Nation Under Blackmail.” I couldn’t recommend her site more strongly. She’s a world-class investigator, and is willing to take deep dives into crucial topics few others dare to touch.

EDITORS NOTE: This MERCOLA column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TWITTER FILES VIII: DoD’s Covert Online Psyops Campaign & FBI’s ‘Belly Button’

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1.THREAD: The Twitter Files Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”

2. Here is a great thread on Pfizer. Not sure if its part of the Twitter Files dump or just someone putting together public source, but either way, its good things to be reminded of. Like Pfizer’s stunning criminal history and the hundreds of people they killed by covering up bad medical products.

3. Twitter Files part VIII

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EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog commentary posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

TWITTER FILES: FBI, CIA, DoD, Et al. Actively Worked With EVERY Social Media Platform to Control and Censor Speech

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A Christmas eve Twitter drop.

In this latest drop we see the FBI, CIA, DoD, State Department, Pentagon, et.al. dictating censorship to Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest, and many others.

This is so vast, so deep, it’s …… the whole of the state.

The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.

.The government was in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm.

We live in a surveillance state.

Here is the whole thread:

 

AUTHOR

 Pamela Geller

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Previous Twitter files (scroll here).

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Regime to Drop Half a Million on Artificial Intelligence That Detects ‘Microaggressions’ on Social Media

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Full on police state.

Biden Admin to Drop Half a Million on Artificial Intelligence That Detects Microaggressions on Social Media

President Biden On His Administration’s New Actions On The Economy

By: Philip Caldwell • Washington Free Beacon •  December 21, 2022:

The Biden administration is set to dole out more than $550,000 in grants to develop an artificial intelligence model that can automatically detect and suppress microaggressions on social media, government spending records show.

The award, funded through President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, was granted to researchers at the University of Washington in March to develop technologies that could be used to protect online users from discriminatory language. The researchers have already received $132,000 and expect total government funding to reach $550,436 over the next five years.

The researchers are developing machine-learning models that can analyze social media posts to detect implicit bias and microaggressions, commonly defined as slights that cause offense to members of marginalized groups. It’s a broad category, but past research conducted by the lead researcher on the University of Washington project suggests something as tame as praising meritocracy could be considered a microaggression.

The Biden administration’s funding of the research comes as the White House faces growing accusations that it seeks to suppress free speech online. Biden last month suggested there should be an investigation into Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter after the billionaire declared the social media app would pursue a “free speech” agenda. Internal Twitter communications Musk released this month also revealed a prolonged relationship between the FBI and Twitter employees, with the agency playing a regular role in the platform’s content moderation.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton likened the Biden administration’s funding of the artificial intelligence research to the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to “censor speech unapproved by the state.” For the Biden administration, Fitton said, the research is a “project to make it easier for their leftist allies to censor speech.”

A spokesman for the National Science Foundation, which issued the research grant, rebuffed criticism of the project, which he said “does not attempt to hamper free speech.” The project, the spokesman said, creates “automated ways of identifying biases in speech” and addresses the biases of human content moderators.

The research’s description doesn’t give examples of what comments would qualify as microaggressions—though it acknowledges they can be unconscious and unintentional. The project is led by computer science professor Yulia Tsvetkov, who has authored studies that suggest the artificial intelligence model might identify and suppress language many would consider inoffensive, such as comments praising the concept of meritocracy.

Tsvetkov coauthored a 2019 study titled “Finding Microaggressions in the Wild,” which categorized microaggressions into subcategories, one of which was the “myth” that “differences in treatment are due to one’s merit.” Examples of microaggressions laid out in the paper included statements like “Your mom is white, so it’s not like you’re really black,” and questions including “But where are you from, originally?”

Tsvetkov also coauthored a July article that analyzed the “prominence of positivity in #BlackLivesMatter tweets” during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Tsvetkov and her colleagues determined positive emotions like “hope, pride, and optimism” were prevalent in pro-Black Lives Matter tweets, evidence they said contradicts narratives framing Black Lives Matter protesters as angry.

Conservative watchdog groups raised alarm over the Biden administration’s funding of the research, telling the Washington Free Beacon the project represents a White House effort to curb free speech online.

“It’s not the role of government to police speech that some might find either offensive or emotionally draining,” said Dan Schneider, vice president of the Media Research Center’s free speech division. “Government is supposed to be protecting our rights, not suppressing our rights.”

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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The Final War–The 100-Year Plot to Defeat America

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Attempting To Discredit The Agency’: FBI Responds To ‘Twitter Files’

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a new statement Wednesday following the latest “Twitter Files” dump.

The FBI accused the “Twitter Files” release as an attempt “to discredit” the agency by disclosing information on the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter in October 2020. Journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that the agency warned the previous executives at Twitter of a “hack-and-leak” by “state actors” surrounding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop to influence the 2020 presidential election.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public,” the statement began.

“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” the agency concluded.

The “Twitter Files” revealed that the FBI and Twitter worked closely in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. Internal documents published Monday found that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 for managing its financial burdens caused while complying with the agency’s requests.

Taibbi reported he found no evidence that the FBI had involvement in Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, though new reports released by author Michael Shellenberger indicated they may have, in fact, been involved.

Former FBI Deputy General Counsel James Baker argued Twitter’s then-head of trust and safety Yoel Roth’s claim that the Post’s report did not violate the social media site’s policies on October 14, according to Shellenberger. The agency had already been in possession of Biden’s laptop since December 2019, indicating that the agency knew the Post reported the story accurately.

Musk announced Dec. 6 that he fired Baker for allegedly withholding the release of documents related to the suppression of Biden’s laptop.

The agency also flagged certain tweets for Twitter to remove from the platform, the files found. Some agents were even employed at the social media company.

Republican Kentucky Rep. James Comer, the incoming House Oversight Chair, said Tuesday that Congress should block funding of the FBI until it disclosed the alleged involvement in Big Tech censorship.

“In the beginning, I thought that there were probably two or three rogue employees who were orchestrating this cover up of the Hunter Biden laptop story, but now we know the FBI had a division of at least 80 agents,” Comer said. “We also know that the FBI paid Twitter over $3 million for their time, all the time they took over the past couple of years in telling them who to suppress, who to ban. You know, it’s just things that the government has no role in.”

“The FBI was never granted the authority to create any type of disinformation task force that policed the social media sites. Now this we know with Twitter,” he continued. “We’ve heard similar stories from Zuckerberg. Who knows what went on at YouTube and Google. This is an agency that’s out of control.”

AUTHOR

NICOLE SILVERIO

Media reporter. Follow Nicole Silverio on Twitter @NicoleMSilverio

RELATED ARTICLE: Twitter Gave ‘Special Protection’ To Pentagon Propaganda Accounts, Docs Show

RELATED VIDEO: Miranda Devine: The FBI Was Paying Twitter $3.4 Million ‘to Help Censor Americans’

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Hackers Tied to China’s Government Steal $20 Mil in U.S. COVID Relief Funds

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Nearly a year after Judicial Watch launched an investigation into the theft of U.S. COVID relief funds by foreign hackers, the Secret Service confirms that cyber criminals connected to China’s government stole $20 million in benefits. This includes Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and unemployment insurance money in multiple states, according to a national news story that identifies the perpetrators as a APT41, a hacking group based in Chengdu. The report cites U.S. law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts who believe the multi-million-dollar theft of government pandemic funds by the Chinese faction “may just be the tip of the iceberg.”

Back in February Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the SBA as part of an ongoing investigation into the pervasive fraud associated with the government’s COVID-19 cash giveaway. Specifically, Judicial Watch requested memoranda, reports, email communications, investigative reports, and other communications or data concerning the following: COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) deposits originating from a foreign Internet Protocol (IP) address, account holders attempting to transfer funds to foreign accounts of any type and loans approved utilizing a fraudulent social security number. On February 23, the SBA acknowledged via electronic mail that it received Judicial Watch’s FOIA request and issued an official tracking number. So far no records have been provided to Judicial Watch and the SBA is in violation of the federal deadline—20 working days—to produce the information.

Most government agencies practice similar stonewalling tactics and Judicial Watch has repeatedly been forced to file lawsuits to compel the release of records. Our goal as a nonpartisan educational foundation is to promote transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics, and the law. Pandemic relief has been a colossal multi-billion-dollar debacle rife with fraud and corruption. The problem is so bad that the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to “enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud.” The special unit has been quite busy prosecuting a multitude of scams, false statements, and money laundering related to pandemic relief. Earlier this year House Republicans issued a report documenting 500 days of massive waste, fraud, and abuse in the American Rescue Plan. It includes more than $783 million in stimulus checks for convicted prisoners including the Boston Marathon bomber, $40 million to expand libraries in Delaware, $2 million for a Florida golf course and $16 million for electric vehicle charging stations in Maine and $20 million to modernize the state’s fish hatcheries. The list goes on and on.

The SBA got on Judicial Watch’s radar because it has disbursed approximately $390 billion to nearly four million small businesses and nonprofits under its COVID-19 EIDL. The program provides up to $2 million in financial assistance to help small businesses recover from the economic impacts of the pandemic. Like many of the other COVID relief initiatives, the government made it way too easy to obtain cash and failed miserably to implement adequate vetting protocols. Officials cited in the recent news article confirm that other federal investigations of pandemic fraud also seem to point back to foreign state-affiliated hackers. The Secret Service admits there are over 1,000 ongoing investigations involving transnational and domestic criminals defrauding public benefits programs and Chinese hackers are key among them. As if it were not serious enough that Chinese hacks are stealing American taxpayer funds, one senior Justice Department official points out the cybercrimes also have serious national security implications.

Besides the SBA’s EIDL, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, passed by Congress to provide over $2 trillion in “fast and direct economic aid” to Americans negatively impacted by the pandemic, also launched another fraud-infested initiative known as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). In addition to the DOJ’s special task force, federal prosecutors across the nation have charged dozens of individuals with crimes associated with PPP scams. A recent example includes a father and son convicted of illegally obtaining $1.7 in loans. A federal jury in North Carolina convicted the men of money laundering and other offenses with the father sentenced to four years in prison and the son three years. This month the top federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of Virginia revealed that in 2022 her office has charged more than 50 defendants in 26 cases of fraud schemes connected to COVID relief that defrauded the government out of nearly $125 million.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

President Trump reacts to Twitter Files: Musk is a ‘hero’

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In his first interview since the release of The Twitter Files, 45th President Donald Trump spoke with OAN’s Chief White House Correspondent Chanel Rion. Here’s part of that discussion as well as Trump’s reaction to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files release.

©One America News Network. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Elon Musk Sticking By His Word

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VIDEO: President Trump Outlines His Restoring Free Speech Plan—America’s Digital Bill of Rights

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President Donald J. Trump sent a clear message on what his primary focus will be when he is reelected POTUS in 2024.

Watch: Trump vows to dismantle the “censorship cartel” when reelected,

In a December 15, 2022 Forbes article titled Trump Vows To Dismantle ‘Censorship Cartel’ If He’s Re-Elected—An Apparent Nod To Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Release Sara Dorn reports,

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday promised to upend all forms of social media content moderation if he’s re-elected, in what he framed as a bid to “reclaim the right to free speech” while describing a plan that seems targeted at the previous management of Twitter, whose new owner Elon Musk has become a recent ally to the right.

KEY FACTS

  • In a seven-minute video posted on Truth Social, Trump said if he’s re-elected in 2024, he would “shatter the left-wing censorship regime” by banning any federal agency from “colluding with” businesses, organizations or people who attempt to censor any forms of speech.
  • Trump also said he would order the Justice Department to investigate all forms of censorship and revoke federal funding for nonprofits, colleges and universities that engage in content moderation, including flagging misinformation and disinformation.
  • The former president called on Congress to take immediate action toward executing his planned investigation by issuing “letters of preservation” to the Biden Administration and big tech companies ordering them not to destroy evidence of practices he called censorship.

In promoting his agenda, Trump highlighted “bombshell reports” he said “have confirmed that a sinister group” of “Silicon Valley tyrants,” among others, colluded to “silence the American people,” an apparent nod to Musk’s release of internal Twitter documents that show how the company made content moderation decisions prior to Musk’s ownership.

Read more.

President Donald J. Trump On Free Speech

If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple. Just like dominos, one by one.

That’s why today, I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans and reclaim is a very important word in this case because they’ve taken it away.

In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people. They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed and it must happen immediately.

Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly… all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified…

From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230, if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness and non-discrimination… “When users of big online platforms have their content or accounts removed, throttled, shadowbanned or otherwise restricted, no matter what name they use, they should have the right to be informed that it’s happening, the right to a specific explanation of the reason why and the right to a timely appeal.

The Trump Free Speech Plan for 2024

The “Restoring Free Speech” Plan:

  1. Ban federal agencies from colluding to censor American citizens.
  2. Ban taxpayer dollars from being used to label speech as “mis-” or “disinformation”.
  3. Fire every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship.
  4. Immediately send preservation letters to the Biden administration and Big Tech giants.
  5. Order the DOJ to investigate all parties involved in the online censorship regime and prosecute any and all crimes identified.
  6. Revise Section 230 to drastically curtail big tech platforms’ power to restrict lawful speech.
  7. Stop federal funding for all non-profits and academic programs engaged in censorship.
  8. Suspend federal dollars to any university that has engaged in censorship support activities.
  9. Enact criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to violate your Constitutional rights.
  10. Impose a 7-year cooling-off period before former intelligence and national security officials can work at Big Tech platforms.
  11. Pass a Digital Bill of Rights.

President Donald J. Trump has hit the nail on the head. Passing a a Digital Bill of Rights insures that federal bureaucrats stop colluding with big tech to censor Americans.

This is a priority as there is a reason that the First Amendment is first.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

Musk’s Twitter Buy ‘The Best $44 Billion I’ve Seen Spent in My Lifetime’: Congressman

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If Elon Musk won’t suppress the news, CBS, ABC, and NBC News are more than happy to. While the Twitter files continue to drip out damning evidence of the company’s pre-Musk bias, three of America’s biggest outlets refuse to cover the story that’s riveting people the world over. In an ironic twist, the media is so beholden to Big Tech that it is suppressing a story about suppression. But don’t think the truth won’t get out, Congressman Pat Fallon (R-Texas) warns. The GOP is weeks away from House control, and no amount of coordinated media blackouts will protect Silicon Valley then.

“Get ready for Republican oversight” was the message of incoming soon-to-be committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.). Like the rest of his conservative colleagues, he’s ready to dive into the last two years of criminal mismanagement under Democratic rule — on everything from the border and COVID to Afghanistan, energy, and Hunter Biden. But this latest wrinkle, this proof of widescale, devastating, conservative censorship will be priority #1.

Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) may have been unsurprised by the revelations at Twitter, but he’s outraged nonetheless. “…[O]ur worst fears and suspicions have been confirmed,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “Really. I mean, you had the head of their legal department, Vijaya Gadde, admitting that the FBI told him, ‘Hey, listen, you’re going to get probably a hack and leak story in October dealing with Hunter Biden. So just be aware of that and take action.’ That’s very troubling.” Add that to the suspicions that Google “magically” made 70% of GOP campaign emails redirect into spam, and Fallon warns that this is a much bigger, more sinister problem than people realize.

“Now we’ve confirmed that Twitter, I suspect Facebook, and other Big Tech firms are doing the same thing. We’ll get them under oath, because they claim that they’re not biased — which I find laughable, being that I’ve been… a victim of their shadow-banning for years. So let’s ask them… and see what they say. And if they want to commit perjury, well, then, they’re going to have to pay the consequences — and then they might do a perp walk after all.”

Perkins pointed out that while Twitter might be a private company, “they’ve become the public square. … They’re like a public utility… like a telephone company. And can you imagine the telephone company refusing to do service with one person because they don’t like their politics? But that’s essentially what we have with Big Tech.” And worse, he explained, since the Biden administration was colluding with these platforms to squelch “disinformation.”

“If you’re on the government clock,” Fallon argued, “… and using taxpayer resources to meddle in politics and campaigning — you’re breaking federal law. And it seems to us [from] what we’ve uncovered thus far, that’s exactly what went on. That’s why another [reason] we need to call some of these former executives and current executives of Big Tech [before Congress and ask], ‘Have government officials [been] pressuring you and telling you to edit political free speech?’”

Asked if Twitter violated election laws, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who served on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from 2006-2007, replied, “The answer to that is yes.” But, he told Perkins, “In September of last year, the Federal Election Commission, which has authority over investigating violations of our federal campaign finance laws, actually dismissed complaints that have been filed against Twitter — not only for shadow-banning Republican elected officials and candidates, but also for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

Twitter executives claimed they hadn’t coordinated with the Biden campaign. But also, von Spakovsky, explained, Jack Dorsey’s team insisted they had “a bona fide commercial reason for suppressing the Hunter Biden story, which was their internal policy against publishing hacked materials.” But now that we know they were lying, the FEC needs “to reopen that file, reconsider the case, and potentially make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for any Twitter executives who committed perjury in their testimony to the FEC,” he insisted. After all, it’s “a potential violation of campaign finance law,” the former commissioner pointed out.

The lawyers who filed the original complaints need to go back to the FEC and say, “You might need to reconsider your decision to close the file based on this newly uncovered evidence,” von Spakovsky urged. At the end of the day, the FEC has civil authority, “so they can impose fines and … penalties on anyone violating campaign finance laws, including a corporation.”

In the meantime, expect an intense, in-depth investigation of Twitter and all of the social media platforms suspected of cracking down on conservative or politically inconvenient messaging. “This is the best $44 billion I’ve seen spent in my lifetime,” Fallon insisted. “I mean, thank you, Elon Musk. It’s like the Wizard of Oz, and he’s pulled back the curtain, and we find that all of our suspicions have been confirmed.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Ex-Twitter Manager Slapped With Three-Year Prison Sentence For Spying For Saudi Arabia

EDITORS NOTE: This The Washing Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Twitter Files: Chinese Employee Told Coworkers Censorship Is Bad, Got Shut Down

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“Maybe because I am from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” 

Twitter Files: Chinese Employee Told Coworkers Censorship Is Bad, Got Shut Down

By ALANA MASTRANGELO

Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions on Monday, which revealed that an employee from China tried to warn fellow Twitter employees that censorship is wrong. The employee was then shut down by a coworker who bizarrely retorted: “censorship by a government is very different than censorship of the government.”

“Maybe because I am from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation,” a Chinese Twitter employee said to colleagues during an internal discussion about whether or not to ban then-President Donald Trump’s account.

A fellow Twitter employee responded to their Chinese coworker saying, “I understand this fear, but I also think it’s important to understand that censorship by a government is very different than censorship of the government.”

Keep reading….

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Twitter Still Has MANY Ex-FBI/CIA Agents in High Ranking Positions

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“Why, after Trump was elected, did Twitter hire over a dozen ex FBI/CIA agents and place them in Senior Management roles?”

It gets more sinister by the day. We thought we knew, we knew nothing.

Read this thread:

Elon Musk, Your new company @Twitter has many ex FBI/CIA agents in high ranks. Should probably do a little housecleaning.

  1. Kevin Michelena – current Twitter Sr. Corporate Security Analyst. Ex FBI Intelligence Analyst 12 years
  2. Doug Hunt – current Twitter Senior Director. Ex FBI Special Agent 20 years.
  3. Mark Jaroszewski – current Twitter Director Corporate Security/Risk. Ex FBI 20 years
  4. Douglas Turner – current Twitter Senior Manager, Corporate and Executive Security Services. Ex FBI 14 years. Ex Secret Service 7 years.
  5. Patrick G. – current Twitter Head of Corporate Security. Ex FBI Special Agent 23 years.
  6. Karen Walsh – current Twitter Director – Corporate Resilience. Ex FBI Special Agent 21 years 
  7. Russell Handorf – current Twitter Senior Staff Technical Program Manager. Ex FBI 10 years.
  8. Michael B. – current Twitter Senior Corporate Security Manager. Ex FBI 23 years.
  9. Vincent Lucero – current Twitter Senior Security Manager. Ex FBI Special Agent 22 years.
  10. Kevin L. – current Twitter Corporate Security Manager. Ex FBI Special Agent 25 years.
  11. Matthew W. – current Twitter Senior Director of Product Trust, Revenue Policy, and Counsel Systems & Analytics. Ex FBI 15 years.
  12. Claire O. – current Twitter Senior Corporate Security Analyst. Ex FBI 8 years.
  13. Bruce A. – current Twitter Director, Corporate Security. Ex FBI 23 years.
  14. Jeff Carlton – current Twitter Senior Manager. Ex FBI & CIA
    Intelligence Analyst 3 years.

What do all of these Twitter employees have in common? They were ALL hired since @realDonaldTrump was elected.

Why, after Trump was elected, did Twitter hire over a dozen ex FBI/CIA agents and place them in Senior Management roles? 

@elonmusk – how many “Jim Bakers” are imbedded in Twitter, possibly working against you? or…..”watching” you. I’d advise you to do some investigating and clean house. 

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Twitter Execs Were Looking for Any Excuse to Ban Trump

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Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions on Friday night, which revealed that executives at the social media giant established a “framework” for banning former President Trump’s account before the events of January 6, and used the Capitol chaos as their excuse to finally blacklist him.

The documents posted to Twitter by journalist Matt Taibbi is the first release of documents pertaining to President Trump’s account ban in January 2021. In a lengthy Twitter thread, Taibbi explained that the internal communications at Twitter between January 6 and January 8 2021 suggest that even the employees of the social media company understood the move to censor a sitting U.S. president would have a historical impact.

“Is this the first sitting head of state to ever be suspended?” one Twitter user asked in internal communications.

After banning Trump, Twitter executives appeared to relish their newfound power, and even flirted with banning future the official @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts, but ultimately decided the accounts “will be transitioned over to the new administration in due course and will not be suspended by Twitter unless absolutely necessary.”

With regards to their reasons for banning Trump’s account, one Twitter executive said in an internal chat: “the narrative that Trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly the last 4+ years must be taken into account.”

In addition to these revelations, Taibbi also published damning internal documents pertaining to Twitter execs “getting a kick out of intensified relationships with federal agencies” like the FBI during the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter

28 Known Connections

Twitter Employees Donate 99% to Democrats

On April 27, 2022, Fox News reported:

“Twitter employees are maintaining their torrid pace of 99 percent of their political donations pouring into Democratic campaigns and committees for the midterm elections, filings show. The partisan skew of Twitter employees’ donations illustrates the uphill battle facing Elon Musk, who has pledged to make the company ‘politically neutral’ in order to maintain trust.

“Individuals employed by the social media giant have disbursed 1225 donations through ActBlue, the Democrats’ central fundraising platform, totaling $72,296, Federal Election Commission records show. Meanwhile, just ten donations from Twitter employees were pushed through WinRed, the Republicans’ fundraising platform, for $505 through the end of March, according to the filings. This means that Twitter employees have maintained their astronomical pace of 99 percent of their contributions going towards Democratic campaigns and committees with just over six months until the 2022 elections.”

To learn more about Twitter, click here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Twitter Files: My Paranoia Has Been Vindicated

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‘Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,’ says Elon Musk, its new owner.

In October, following months of speculation and controversy, Elon Musk closed on his deal to acquire Twitter.

Among the most valuable assets Musk obtained in the US$43 billion purchase were reams of secret internal communications amongst Twitter executives.

Musk made those communications public over the weekend, and summed up their contents by tweeting: “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”

Musk has tasked three independent journalists with unpacking that crime scene to the public, providing they publish their findings on Twitter first: Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss.

The Taibbi-Shellenberger-Weiss reports, since dubbed the Twitter Files, have set the internet on fire.

It is now without question that Twitter executives colluded with the FBI to systematically censor the speech of American citizens and a sitting American President. Their motives were political: a conclusion that is inescapable since Twitter’s leadership did their dark deeds in violation of the platform’s own policies.

Major figures at Twitter played their dystopian games while lying to the public. “We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints,” former CEO Jack Dorsey claimed during the Trump presidency.

At Senate hearings, Dorsey repeatedly and explicitly told Congress that he and his employees did not let their political viewpoints interfere with Twitter’s commitment to free speech.

Dorsey and his underlings — like former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and Yoel Roth, former Head of Trust and Safety — insisted that any censorship they enacted flowed from safety concerns for users, not the political whims of Twitter staff.

They told users that they intended Twitter as a place to break and discuss news, a free megaphone available to all, a global town square.

Behind closed doors, Twitter executives were shadow banning users they did not like, hiding their tweets, and making their profiles unsearchable via Twitter’s search bar. Users were censored arbitrarily and in secret, with no way to know they were being censored, much less protest or appeal the vindictive bans.

What Twitter did was the equivalent of Telstra putting static on the phone lines of Greens voters, or AGL feeding remote townships intermittent power as a punishment for voting National — all the while claiming innocence. Twitter’s secretive measures were far more widespread than the many outright suspensions the public knew about at the time.

As Glenn Greenwald, another independent journalist, has since commented:

Yoel Roth, meeting with FBI weekly, and his little censorship minions absolutely degraded Twitter into little more than a full-on Democratic Party activist machine, all while lying to the public about its function. This was a massive public fraud and 2020 election interference.

Stanford University epidemiologist Dr Jay Bhattacharya was one of Twitter’s many victims. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Bhattacharya earlier this year in Sydney. It would be hard to find a more polite, measured, and thoughtful academic.

One of the original drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration,  Bhattacharya’s great sin was to speak out against Covid lockdowns and school closures from 2020 onwards.

“I spent the afternoon yesterday at Twitter HQ at the invitation of @elonmusk to find out more about the trend ‘blacklist’ that twitter placed on me,” Bhattacharya today tweeted. He continued:

Twitter 1.0 placed me on the blacklist on the first day I joined in August 2021. I think it was my pinned tweet linking to the @gbdeclaration that triggered the blacklist based on unspecified complaints Twitter received… Twitter 1.0 rejected requests for verification by me and @MartinKulldorff. Each time the reasoning (never conveyed to us) was that we were not notable enough.

The most high-profile personality to be censored and ultimately suspended by Twitter was of course President Donald Trump.

“In this specific case, we’re changing our public interest approach for his account…” was how Yoel Roth justified the decision. It was a case of making up new rules on the fly to censor conservatives, delivering verdicts first and updating Twitter policies later — all while in open communication with FBI officials.

As one critic puts it: “Twitter didn’t enforce their rules, they sat around and discussed how they could interpret their rules to silence their enemies.”

For years we were told that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. It appears that in reality, the FBI was colluding with Twitter with the aim of stealing the 2020 election from Trump.

A Big Tech insurrection? A digital January 6?

I began writing about social media censorship in mid-2019. At the time, I was laughed down by many followers and even friends. I was told not to be so paranoid, not to indulge in conspiracy theories.

Pre-Musk Twitter has now been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar.

The wokerati can claim that the United States government colluding with Big Tech to tilt elections and censor conservative Americans is good, but they can no longer claim it didn’t happen.

And for all those upset with Elon’s takeover of the little blue bird, I have a message for you: Twitter is a private company. If you don’t like how it’s being run now, go build your own social media platform.

AUTHOR

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

RELATED ARTICLE: Election-fraud corruption is deeper than anyone can imagine

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Twitter Exec Pushed To Ban Matt Gaetz’ Account After Jan. 6

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Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, pushed internally for the company to ban Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, despite messaging another employee that such a decision did not align with the company’s policies, according to the company’s internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Friday as part of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”

An employee, whose name was redacted, messaged Roth around noon on Jan. 7, 2021, asking “What’s the latest on Antifa claims?” — seemingly in reference to a Jan. 6, 2021, tweet by Gaetz alleging that members of the anarchist movement Antifa had “infiltrated Trump protestors who stormed Capitol” — and noting that another employee, identified only as “C,” was “yelling from the other room that we should just ban Gaetz,” Shellenberger reported. Roth responded that Twitter had employees “working on that.”

“It doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” Roth said, prompting agreement from the unnamed employee before he continued, according to the messages posted by Shellenberger. “But I’m trying to talk safety into treating it as incitement … I think we’ll get over the line for removal as a conspiracy that incites violence … [then-head of Legal, Policy and Trust] Vijaya [Gadde] was directionally okay with it.”

Gaetz’ account was ultimately never banned, despite the internal discussions.

The discussion occurred roughly seven hours before Roth would inform a sales executive that Twitter was “changing [its] public interest approach for [Donald Trump’s] account to say any violation would result in a suspension,” Shellenberger reported. Twitter policy protects tweets from elected officials that would otherwise violate its rules under so-called “public-interest exceptions,” which allow tweets to remain live so that the public may be aware of and discuss the users’ “actions and statements.”

Gaetz later had a June 1, 2021 tweet that read “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” hit with one such public-interest label for violating Twitter’s rules regarding the glorification of violence. At time of writing, Twitter users cannot share, like or comment on that tweet, but can still “quote tweet” it.

“This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence,” the label reads at time of writing. “However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

Neither Twitter nor Gaetz’ office immediately responded to a Daily Caller News Foundation request for comment.

AUTHOR

JOHN HUGH DEMASTRI

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.