Twitter files blacklists
More Twitter files from Matt Taibbi:
Journalist Matt Taibbi is back with perhaps the most bizarre installment yet of the Twitter Files.
Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly endangered by a vast, federally funded Disinformation Industrial Complex…
In 2016, President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13721 to establish the “Global Engagement Center” to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.”
GEC is based in the State Department but also partners with the FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Agency and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
What could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
Thanks to GEC, “America’s information warfare mechanism turned inward, against ‘threats’ in our own population,” Taibbi writes.
Disinformation became the most fashionable crusade.
Disinformation is so perfidious that the GEC tries to keep its operations secret…
GEC alerted Twitter to almost 500 accounts as “foreign” disinformation on ludicrous grounds, such as the users tweeting #IraniansDebateWithBiden — including personal acquaintances of The Post’s op-ed editor.
In June 2021, a GEC contractor sent Twitter a message: “Hi guys. Attached you will find . . . around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior . . . and Hindu nationalism more broadly.”
But the list was full of hapless Americans with no ties to India or its politics.
Maybe GEC’s involvement was a secret, but it was no secret – to anyone paying attention – that vast numbers of Twitter accounts were being censored for fairly ordinary viewpoints, the majority of them on the right. It wasn’t limited to Twitter, either – YouTube was heavily involved.
And of course, it was easy to notice changes in Google’s algorithm. That’s still ongoing.
Censorship has been egregious at YouTube for years under the control of Susan Wojcicki (by some estimates, nearly a billionaire), but her leftist successor Neal Mohan is likely to be no better, perhaps even worse. Far superior are Rumble and BitChute, both thus far being committed to freedom of expression and robust debate.
That’s why I am more circumspect in my comments. I would imagine that I am on some or the other list somewhere. Probably multiples. I think the biggest thing to come out of COVID is the destruction of belief in “experts”. And any Govt agency.
The double-edged scalpel of dual-use executive orders.
Mulder’s Long Fight for Account Reinstatement (@proteinwisdom ) returned to twitter approx Feb. 17th 2023, after close around a year-and-a-half banning (Oct 4th, 2021, last posts prior): https://mobile.twitter.com/proteinwisdom/with_replies
Last post prior:
https://mobile.twitter.com/proteinwisdom/status/1445035206692376578?cxt=HHwWhMCo7aj35Y0oAAAA
Penultimate post prior:
https://mobile.twitter.com/proteinwisdom/status/1445034159362101254?cxt=HHwWjMCq0a265Y0oAAAA
Musk’s Twitter buy was the best $44B anyone ever spent.
Google, leftist propagandists?
Go to the Play Store. Here’s what’s scrolling across the top:
“Empower women and embrace equity”
“Stories of women and wisdom and more”
“Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd”
“Meet the founder: Meggie Palmer”
“Embrace equity in everyday life”
“Celebrate, support and empower”
Yeah.
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Might be a bit too soon to celebrate, though…
(as Heather Mac Donald details how the universities are being hollowed out from within).
“In Loco Masculi;
“The feminization of the American university is all but complete.”—
https://www.city-journal.org/the-great-feminization-of-the-american-university
H/T Powerline blog.
Key grafs (RTWT, if you can stomach it):
‘…When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminized bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity….
‘…In the 2021 FIRE rankings, over 40 percent of students at Barnard and Wellesley (women’s colleges, all) supported the use of violence against dissenters. In a 2018 Knight Foundation survey of over 4400 college students, reported in Quillette, 71 percent of males agreed that protecting free speech is more important than promoting an inclusive society; 59 percent of females agreed that promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech. Two-thirds of male psychology professors from top universities polled in 2021 believed that pursuing truth was more important than pursuing social equity if the two conflict; around a third of male respondents said that the issue was “complicated.” Fifty-two percent of female psychologists answered that the issue was complicated, while only 43 percent prioritized truth. A 2017 YouGov survey of over 2000 U.S. adults found that 56 percent of men said that colleges should not protect students from offensive ideas, whereas 64 percent of females said that they should. Men support the development of knowledge that explains reality, even if such knowledge threatens egalitarian norms, whereas females are more willing to suppress such scholarship if it poses “potential moral threats,” as Quillette put it….’
File under: Hysteria TODAY! Hysteria TOMORROW!! HYSTERIA FOREVER!!!!
Hindu nationalism? Sounds good. I’m in.