The censorship industrial complex

The House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the U.S. Federal Government held a hearing featuring testimony from independent investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger who were involved in the “Twitter Files,” a series of articles on how government agencies and lawmakers interacted with the social media company over content moderation.

On March 9, Matt and Shellenberger were actually sitting there talking about how…….

“we learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.” (Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress)

….… and documenting the coordinated censorship of sources that interfered with certain official narratives, like “Russiagate” and “the apocalpytic virus”.

32. In one remarkable email, the Virality Project recommends that multiple platforms take action even against “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel hesitancy.”

None of the leaders of this effort to police Covid speech had health expertise. pic.twitter.com/UUd50ZaghG

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

So these two distinguished independent journalists who had done all this historic reporting on a story of extreme importance had been invited to Congress to talk about it, and, suddenly, it all went dark and twisted.

Congress hearing turned into a vicious witch-hunt

Stacey Plaskett, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary subcommittee, started badgering, insulting, smearing, and baiting Taibbi and Shellenberger. Trembling with hatred, she accused them of being members of some sort of Substack-based death squad that “poses a direct threat to people who oppose them,” and of stochastically terrorizing Yoel Roth, the former Twitter Censorship Czar, and of unleashing “homophobia and anti-Semitism” on him. Then she launched into a spittle-flecked rant about “January 6” and “threatening our democracy,” until she was restrained by James Jordan, the Subcommittee Chairman. And this was just during her opening remarks!

The other Democrats soon joined in the bullying, and lying, and smearing, and sneering, and generally acting like prosecutors at some hate witch trial. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who, for whatever reasons, is still allowed to serve in Congress after being forced to resign as the DNC Chair for matters related to rigging the 2016 election, staged a whole dog-and-pony show with blow-up photos of Joe Rogan and so on.

Sylvia Garcia, who appeared to be drunk, demanded that Matt reveal his source, and then, when he refused, repeatedly tried to weasel it out of him with all the deftness of a one-legged idiot in a butt-kicking contest. Colin Allred put on a PowerPoint show involving Kanye West’s anti-Semitic tweets, random bigots on Twitter, and the Russian agents who supposedly conspired against him (i.e., Allred), and then lectured Taibbi about the “threats to our democracy” and called him a “conspiracy theorist.” Stephen Lynch went hysteric, demanding that the witnesses affirm they “believe that Russians interfered in the 2016 election.”

And so on. A live, televised demonstration of precisely what the alternative media describes for years: a new totalitarian form of global capitalism that no longer needs to maintain the pretense of upholding (or respecting) our “democratic rights,” because it has no external adversaries, and thus is free to morph into a quasi-Orwellian dystopia where any and all forms of dissent from official ideology can (and must) be delegitimized as “disinformation,” “misinformation”, and even “malinformation”.

Corporate-owned political puppets feel no compunction whatsoever about behaving like vicious little fascists on television because they know they have the fearsome power of the global-capitalist machine behind them, no matter how openly (and badly) they lie, and that their fanatical followers will parrot any propaganda they are given to parrot, no matter how patently false or absurd, and will spew their hatred at whomever they are ordered to spew it at, and otherwise act like a bunch of fascists.

On the other hand, Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart said the FBI violated Americans’ First Amendment rights by asking Twitter to censor speech.

Stewart said the FBI’s actions were analogous to the federal government contracting with a private company to assassinate a foreign leader, which is illegal. He said when the FBI asked Twitter to censor Americans, the agency violated their First Amendment rights.

“They said, well, we can’t do this ourselves. We’ll contract it out. We’ll launder this effort through another company,” Stewart said, before asking Shellenberger if he thought his analogy was accurate in depicting the seriousness of the allegations.

“I think that’s absolutely correct,” Shellenberger said. “What we’ve seen here is the federal government putting extraordinary amounts of pressure on both Twitter and Facebook.”

Shellenburger further testified that his team found evidence of government contractors “demanding” social media companies take down “accurate information” to “advance a narrative.”

What are the ‘Twitter Files?’

Soon after billionaire Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter last year, Taibbi, Shellenberger and other independent journalists began publishing Twitter threads and articles that contained internal emails and other communications between government figures and Twitter executives.

“The ‘Twitter Files’ tell a terrible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential virtual communication platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer,” Taibbi tweeted in his first of many reports.

His first report chronicled Twitter’s controversial 2020 decision to suppress the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the presidential election. But former Twitter executives said they had not blocked the Post’s story at the direction of any federal government agency.

In later reports, Taibbi and others alleged the FBI used its relationship with Twitter to enforce censorship of Americans by proxy by identifying accounts that may have violated the social media companies terms of service.

“The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your virtual communication networks’ content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary,” he tweeted last December.

2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Request to reveal sources causes hearing to erupt

During the hearing, Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas attempted to get Taibbi to divulge his sources.

“I can’t give it to you, unfortunately, because this is a question of sourcing, and I’m a journalist. I don’t reveal my sources,” Taibbi said.

Garcia and Taibbi went back and forth about what the definition of sourcing is before she asked, “So you’re not going to tell us when Musk first approached you?”

Taibbi didn’t budge, saying “Again, congresswoman, you’re asking a journalist to reveal a source.”

Multiple committee members attempted to talk over each other after Garcia said Elon Musk is the source.

Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, interjected by speaking over Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-V.I., the ranking member, saying, “He’s not going to reveal his source and the fact that Democrats are pressuring him to do that is such a violation of the First Amendment.”

Plaskett insisted that Democrats want to know who gave the journalists access to internal Twitter communications.

What is the ‘censorship-industrial complex’?

Stewart concluded his questioning by restating part of Taibbi’s testimony, where he said conservative thought was censored by a factor of 10 to 1 after virtual communication companies fulfilled government requests.

“The federal government cannot contract out suppression of free expression,” the Utah Republican said.

Remember, in his testimony Taibbi said Twitter, Facebook, Google and others “developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.” He said a number of “quasi-private entities,” some funded partially with taxpayer funds, were part of a censorship network that made “lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed to be misinformation, disinformation or malinformation”. The latter term Taibbi claimed is a euphemism the network used for “true, but inconvenient information.”

Shellenberger called this network the “censorship-industrial complex.”

Taibbi said after reviewing the network’s relationships he believes that the “bright line” that should exist between government agencies and private companies was “illusory.”

However, the “censorship-industrial complex” is a much bigger story than just the U.S. division. It is time for other international journalists to cover the same story in countries like Germany, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and so on. Who knows? In another four or five years, we might even find out how the following photo appeared almost simultaneously in every news journal of record on the planet in January of 2020. That is, if we’re not all locked away in “conspiracy theorist” camps by then.

 

yogaesoteric
April 19, 2023