Maybe you have heard about it, maybe not yet, but recently something big has happened regarding the discussion about the power that social networks have to influence who gets power or not, and how power influences them. Unfortunately this is not being discussed enough, if you didn't know about it today I bring you a summary and a small glimpse of the implications of this.
Hello friends, I hope you are very well, since December last year, Elon Musk handed over to a group of independent journalists 44,000 files of internal communications made in recent years of his newly acquired company, the social network Twitter. This has generated a debate and the exchange of accusations within the United States Senate, with minimal coverage by international media networks, which, if the twitter files are true, is no coincidence, the importance of this issue goes far beyond these domains, in fact, the Twitter files show us a little bit how the world works, governments and social networks, and show us that the actions of a company can change the fate for better or worse of millions of people, and perhaps even the whole world.
Starting at the beginning, what are Twitter files?
In early December of last year, and according to the testimony of journalist Matt Taibbi during a nearly 3-hour conversation with Joe Rogan on the latter's podcast, Matt woke up to find a message from Elon Musk, in which Elon proposed to Matt to contact his team to deliver large amounts of internal information from the social network Twitter, such information is usually classified and would never have been known to the public if the company still had the same directive. Matt Taibbi with a group of colleagues including Lee Fang and Bari Weiss among others, coordinated with Elon Musk's team to start publishing the information, which consists of about 44,000 emails, memos, conversations, newsletters, notices and other Twitter company, its employees and managers, some of these conversations are with important figures in the corporate media, lobbyists, congressmen, spokesmen and staff of the FBI, the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, CENTCOM, CIA and others...
And the nature of the conversations is very very worrying, the simple fact that government and private companies discuss such issues is already a problem, and although you may think it is a purely American problem, its consequences are felt all over the world, and there is evidence of that in the same files, as you will see shortly, evidence that the decisions of a company may or may not put us on the road to nuclear war for example, or help cause the worst humanitarian tragedy of our time.
The group of journalists who took on the task of publishing the story did it, ironically, through the social network twitter, and although they are in the process of investigating all the evidence, follow the thousands of clues and discover the thousands of implications in each post or conversation, they have published 15 different threads with internal twitter conversations about censorship or misrepresentation of certain publications, people or trends in the social network for the benefit of a political, media or governmental actor, below I will leave links to each of the threads and a brief summary of what it contains.
This thread shows evidence of how Twitter, at the request of political figures, made great efforts to suppress the story of the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of current President Joe Biden, about which I wrote some time ago, it is basically a laptop that the son of biden, in the middle of a binge, left in an electronics workshop to be repaired and forgot to go get it, when the information it contained was leaked to the public, It generated a pandemonium especially in an election year, in it there was information about illegal business of the Biden family, and even acts that can be considered treason, at first the FBI denied that the device existed, then had to admit that yes, but that its origin was doubtful, then they admitted that yes it was Hunter Biden's and then decided that everything related to it was confidential and could not be known by the public. Politicians and government agencies contacted Twitter and they censored people, applied the so-called Shadowban to others, prevented the spread of trends about it, all to prevent it from being used as a weapon by the Republicans in the elections. When questioned and enlightened about the right of Americans to know the truth about politicians, they denied that they had to adhere to such standards.
This thread shows how Twitter uses the different tools at its disposal to control information that harms different allied power groups, suppressing information communicated about COVID by real experts in the field, or censoring influential political spokespersons in whole or in part, the ways they do this can range from the most subtle "limiting coverage'' to the most forceful total closure of an account. Although it may seem like a technical discussion, this point is very important when discussing the company's right to do so.
The ban on Donald Trump, basically, tells us how Twitter, with warnings from the FBI began to plan the removal of the current president-elect from the platform, although the legal framework did not exist even within the company, Twitter modified and made a great exercise of mental gymnastics to justify internally the decision to remove the president, the employees of the social network had problems processing the magnitude of what they had to do, but after the initial shock, the machinery was put into operation to have it ready to use it against other heads of state.
More about the legal framework used to close Donald Trump's account, the internal discussion about it, and the search for methods to suppress those who continued to broadcast the former president's words.
Internal drama on Twitter, some employees raise questions on the danger to democracy of taking away the voice of some and favoring that of others.
Twitter's relationship with the FBI, apparently there was constant communication, and the FBI was holding the reins of the relationship because some communications seem like orders, the FBI on a regular basis which profiles Twitter should sanction, without building a concrete case, just suggesting that they may violate the rules, a conscientious campaign to silence certain narratives, where even accounts with a couple of hundred followers and posting mostly memes are pursued.
The FBI and the manipulation of information about the Hunter Biden laptop story, this time with verifiable evidence, the name of one of the agents in charge of the operation, the testimony of Mark Zuckenberg of Facebook alleging that the FBI also contacted him to suppress the story, and also the evidence that the FBI lied when they said it was a Russian disinformation operation, and Twitter knew it, but due to external pressures they proceeded to censor even the New York Post report about it.
Perhaps the most worrying of all, seeing it as someone who is not American, Twitter supports the psychological operations and war propaganda of the Pentagon and its allies, the U.S. government requested that it support such operations in the Middle East, either by giving more reach to the accounts they use for those purposes (these are, by the way, accounts that pretend to be real communicators in the region when in reality they are false identities so well crafted that it is almost impossible to discover that they are accounts managed by the CIA or other organizations). Or by offering them something called Whitelisting, which is basically verified account status, with these accounts favorably exposing drone strikes or other military actions in the region, and even more chillingly, supporting the genocide being perpetrated by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, which experts consider the worst humanitarian disaster today. Twitter representatives had already testified that it is part of their company's policy not to support any government in military operations, yet, here we are.
The CIA, Homeland Security, DoD, The number of government agencies are so many with so many requests that Twitter employees have a hard time keeping up, but not only that, communications show that meetings between Twitter executives and intelligence agencies became so common that a structure with a planned weekly agenda was created, and by taking a look at this agenda, you can see that Twitter operations in support of these agencies are around the world, Iran, Venezuela, and most worryingly, Russia.
Twitter rigged the covid debate on its platform. Censoring opinions contrary to the government of the day, censoring doctors and experts who disagreed with such measures, and even going so far as to censor doctors with a great reputation who used the same CDC data to refute recommendations that benefited the pharmaceutical industry.
both reveal more about the relationship between Twitter and intelligence agencies. That relationship became routine and symbiotic. But the intelligence agencies were demanding more and more every day, lists of thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of accounts they wanted to censor around the globe, many were in fact Chinese propaganda bots or other accounts for malicious activity, but it did not escape the notice of Twitter staff that there were also political rivals of the administration of the day or people with anti-government views.
Twitter actively helped suppress CORRECT information about COVID. Under pressure from pharmaceutical executives who made billions of dollars from the pandemic, Twitter suppressed information about the Immunity of people who had already had the virus, which was higher than that of those vaccinated who had not yet contracted it, therefore, requiring vaccination for someone who had had covid was unnecessary, but the pharmaceutical companies wanted to sell more vaccines, so such information could not be spread (and in fact I just found this out by writing this post).
The whole issue of the influence of Russian bots in the RUSSIAGATE case was a lie. There was no army of bots, and Twitter employees tried to warn the media about it, but such information would not benefit certain power groups, so it was suppressed.
Complementary information. More about the procedures and different censorship actions ordered to Twitter.
Implications
Currently, with the change of administration at Twitter, it could be expected that such things like the ones we saw before stop happening, however, there is always the possibility that evil persists, Elon musk may be the richest man in the world, but there are much greater powers.
About what happened, we can assume several things, what we see on social networks about critical issues, such as politics, health or other things can and surely are manipulated, and I'm not just talking about what you see on Twitter, if you paid attention to the threads, you surely saw that Google, Facebook, Youtube and others were subject to the same pressures.
Although it may seem an American debate, and certainly they are being greatly affected by the collusion between states and Social media, as both parties have benefited from that relationship, we can see that the influence of Twitter and its masters covers the whole world, who knows how many governments fell because of their censorship policies, or how many tyrants they help to stay in power, how many massacres hide platforms like Facebook or how many wars they helped to start ? this partnerships between governments and social networks is everyone's problem.
There is an argument that Twitter was a private company and could choose what to broadcast and who to partner with freely, and who to serve and who not to serve, if this were the case, they would also be vulnerable to lawsuits, and trump or kayne west could have sued Twitter for discrimination, but this was not the case because the company is protected in the united states and other countries by a law that prevents them from being sued by users since they supposedly have no control over what appears on their platform, the files that Musk leaked prove otherwise, so we can add fraud to the list of crimes.
Surely now that Elon Musk will try to stop cooperating with government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and other powers that be, he will lose this legal protection.
As you can see dear friends, conspiracies do exist, and there are hidden powers pulling the strings of the world. This must be known, fortunately we still have platforms like this one where we can expose the reality without fear of censorship. Thank you for reading me and happy night.
Sources
https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web