At the rate the legacy media are going, you should be seeing this story appearing on Stuff and the NZ Herald some time around 2030. If at all. After all, it took CBS two whole years to finally start talking about the Hunter Biden laptop and its shocking contents.
But the bigger story of the moment — how social media colluded with the Deep State to censor news that would damage the Democrats — is completely absent from much of the legacy media. The New York Times, CBS News, ABC and The Washington Post are all yet to report on the extraordinary release of the Twitter Files. You won’t find mention of it on Australia’s ABC, either, nor Stuff or the NZ Herald.
What are they so desperately trying to ignore? Once again, BFD readers are at least privy to what low-information consumers of legacy media are completely ignorant of.
Elon Musk suggested that Twitter was acting under government orders to suppress free speech, with his remarks coming hot on the heels of the release of a trove of documents that lift the lid on some of the social media platform’s censorship machinations around the 2020 presidential election […]
After earlier teasing the imminent disclosure of Twitter’s internal files on the company’s “free speech suppression,” Musk on Friday shared a thread from independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who detailed a series of internal Twitter communications that give insight into various actions taken by staff at the social media platform, including around suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Taibbi included a screengrab showing a Twitter executive sharing a list of tweets apparently brought to their attention by the Biden presidential campaign. This is just one of what Taibbi says were “routine” requests from “connected actors” to delete tweets. Connected to whom?
One executive would write to another: ‘More to review from the Biden team.’ The reply would come back: ‘Handled.’”
Musk replied to Taibbi’s tweet with the word “Handled” followed by three “fire” emojis. He later responded to his own post with the statement: “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?”
Some are trying to split semantic hairs by claiming it’s not a First Amendment violation, “because it wasn’t the government”, because Biden wasn’t in power at the time.
Lawyer Jenna Ellis, who represented the 2020 Trump campaign, pushed back on the idea that just because Biden wasn’t in power at the time that pressure on Twitter staff from the “Biden team” can’t be considered a First Amendment violation.
“Lol RIP the replies that assume every elected office was Republican controlled in 2020… ‘government’ is more than one branch and one office, kids,” she wrote in a tweet.
The Epoch Times
In fact, the Twitter Files vindicate Donald Trump’s “conspiracy theories” that a “Deep State” cabal in Washington colludes with Big Tech to rig the game in favour of the Democrat party.
The Twitter files are only one piece of this grim puzzle. Throughout 2020 the FBI had regular meetings with Twitter’s then head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, and other senior executives, according to separate sworn testimony from Roth. “I also learned in these meetings that there were rumours that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden,” he wrote in December 2020 to the Federal Election Commission.
“I was told … that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter.”
The FBI also warned Facebook to take down the Post’s story, based on the same false claim of disinformation, its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, revealed in August.
Yet, the FBI at that stage had had a copy of the laptop data for 11 months by that time. They knew the laptop contents were genuine — unless their computer forensics were utterly incompetent. Which we know they’re not, however biased the agency may be.
Insidious relations between government and social media are part of a growing trend. Separately, the attorneys-general of Missouri and Louisiana are suing the US Department of Health for pressuring social media companies to suppress individuals who spoke out against lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party would be proud; it certainly wouldn’t stand for such criticism.
At the same time that (pre-Musk) Twitter was allowing actual child pornography to proliferate on the platform (hundreds of offending accounts were removed within the first fortnight of Musk’s clean sweep), it was flagging factual reports on the Hunter Biden laptop with the sort of extreme restriction (“unsafe”) as ordinarily would apply to stuff like child porn.
The revelations of the Twitter Files also give the lie to the self-serving garbage of Jacinda Ardern and her lying claims about keeping New Zealanders “safe” from “harmful misinformation”. The only people she wants to keep safe are her government — and she’s been doing so with tools even Mao and Stalin could only have dreamt of.
Governments throughout history have wanted to control the narrative, but they’ve never had the tools to do it effectively. Now they do via social media companies that can monitor everyone’s most private correspondence.
The past few years have given the lie to the siren song of “keeping people safe online”. Much of what the social media giants have censored has turned out to be true and what the government has said has been wrong, or at least highly debatable. Enjoy the Twitter files while you can.
The Australian
There’s much more to come, of course. Musk and Taibbi are promising to release yet more tranches of data on Twitter’s censorship regime.
Just don’t expect to read about it in the legacy media.