Elon Musk’s releasing of Twitter files proves what so many thought

December 13, 2022

It is possible that there is a new person atop the left’s “Most Disliked Person” list. And that person, replacing former President Donald Trump, is the new owner of Twitter, Tesla owner Elon Musk. Or maybe Musk will merely be added to the list below Trump’s name.

Twitter and Facebook have long been criticized for censoring certain kinds of tweets and posts, including those of conservatives and those whose opinions run counter to liberal thinking. Now that Twitter is not owned and operated by someone who believes in censorship, things are changing. And evidence to support the long-held beliefs that social media sites were infringing on free speech is coming to light.

Not only is the censorship of certain topics now shown to be fact, but some, perhaps many, of the items censored were valid and important.

One conservative user, “Stanford University's Dr. Jay Bhattacharya — a longstanding opponent of a COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns" was placed on the site’s secret blacklists, as reported by Fox News, which is as bad to the left was Twitter was good.

This man is no average guy expressing an uneducated opinion. Yet, in its efforts to protect a faulty narrative, Twitter blacklisted him.

Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press, posted on Twitter earlier this month that, “A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics — all in secret, without informing users.”

Her revelations are all based upon information provided by Musk from Twitter files he has released.

"Twitter denied that it does such things," Weiss noted. "In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said, ‘We do not shadow ban.’ They added, ‘And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.’" Former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey said as much in a Congressional hearing.

One technique used is visibility filtering, a senior Twitter employee told Weiss: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.”

 A post on msn.com offered the following: “Liberals on Twitter panned the latest ‘Twitter Files’ revelations from Elon Musk and journalist Matt Taibbi Friday which showed the internal communications of Twitter leading up to the decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the social media platform in early 2021.

“The third ‘Twitter Files’ installment – this time dubbed, ‘THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP,’ presented documents showing that Twitter staff banned Trump not solely based on tweets he made during January 6th, but on the ‘context surrounding’ Trump and his supporters’ actions ‘over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.’”

And more inside information: A member of Facebook’s Oversight Board and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning Schmidt, said, “Free speech is not an absolute human right,” at a Politico Europe event. “It has to be balanced with other human rights.” Schmidt may have said what’s what in Denmark, but that’s not the way things are in America, where free speech is guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And that includes unpopular speech.

What we know and are learning shows that the mindset of Twitter’s boss and employees was one of cheating, censoring speech by deplatforming, suspending users, and other techniques to achieve its liberal/progressive goals, including winning the election of 2020.

“Deplatforming is certainly an effective tool when it comes to countering terrorist and like-minded extremist groups online. But the fact that this tactic is being used against individuals and organizations that do not fit these categories is a terrifying abuse of power,” reported The Washington Times.

“Such a tactic has proven to be just as effective in manipulating mainstream electoral campaigns. One of the most egregious examples of this was when Facebook and Twitter censored the New York Post over the paper’s exposés about Hunter Biden’s emails and corruption. In other words, social media platforms baselessly characterized the Post’s investigative journalism as ‘misinformation’ and blocked it.”

The Times story goes on to say that a news report from the Media Research Center shows that some voters “would not have voted for the Biden-Harris presidential ticket if they knew at least one of the eight news stories that were suppressed by big tech and mainstream media outlets.”

Twitter was and is a platform owned by a private company. According to webopedia.com, “Social media platforms are interactive digital channels that focus on the creation and sharing of thoughts, ideas, and information through virtual networks. These platforms enable users to take part in social networking by creating content, sharing their thoughts, commenting on other user content, and reposting it.”

Twitter and Facebook can control what is on their platform. They can prohibit truly dangerous language. But to take a political side, without a public statement to that effect, and then secretly censor the other political side is dishonest, and un-American.

Elon Musk has a good start to cleaning up Twitter, and hopefully will keep it politically neutral. Maybe Facebook will clean up, too.

Elon Musk buys Twitter, pledging to provide free speech for all

May 3, 2022

Another comment labeled it “racist” for Musk to own Twitter. And 16 “stars” of various types have said they will leave Twitter. Many of these are among those who said they were moving to Canada when Donald Trump was elected President.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” prior to Musk’s offer for Twitter being accepted, co-anchor Mika Brzezinski called his attempted takeover a "very dangerous precedent." On that same program, Business Insider columnist Linette Lopez’ column was mentioned, the title of which is, “Elon Musk's attempt to buy Twitter represents a chilling new threat: Billionaire trolls taking over social media."

Perhaps Lopez is unaware that the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who is apparently not disliked or feared, is himself a billionaire, as is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. 

Interesting that the Twitterites are so afraid of Musk opening their former platform to actual free speech — which Musk has declared he will do — as opposed to the “free speech” as determined and restricted by the Twitter Lefties.

On the brighter side of this event, it was reported on Facebook Messenger by “Chicks on the Right” that “Donald Trump Jr. and many other conservatives noticed they gained a massive number of new followers on Twitter shortly after Musk’s takeover of the company.” Apparently, when Twitter employees knew their work of hassling and censoring conservatives was done, they removed restrictions on these accounts, and hundreds of thousands of people desiring connections were able to connect.

The “Chicks” reported that “Trump Jr. gained 87,296 new followers by Tuesday and another 119,022 by Wednesday morning.” “Conservative radio host Dana Loesch gained 22,163 followers. Tucker Carlson gained more than 141,000. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene saw her followers grow by more than 130,000. Podcast host Joe Rogan’s follower count exploded by nearly 135,000 and Texas Senator Ted Cruz gained more than 112,000.”

Let's keep in mind that Musk has said he will open Twitter up to comments from all political elements, and will not censor any particular perspective, unlike the previous Twitter operators, who claimed to remove misinformation and disinformation while actually providing it.

Twitter permanently suspended still-President Donald Trump in early January of 2021. And in October of 2020, Twitter censored the New York Post. The Post is one of the oldest newspapers in the nation, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801. Twitter censored its exposés about Hunter Biden’s emails, baselessly charging that “hacked materials” were used. The Post story has been confirmed to have been accurate, not misinformation.

In a supportive comment about the Twitter sale that surprised many of us, former CEO Dorsey commented that "Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step."

In earlier comments, Musk has been outspoken about his desire to promote free speech on Twitter, saying that he is “against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

He said, free speech is essential for a democracy. “Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square. So, it’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

According to UK’s The Guardian, Musk commented, “For Twitter to deserve public trust it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.” 

And Musk has argued that his changes would affect all users. “Attacks are coming thick and fast, primarily from the left, which is no surprise,” he said. “However, I should be clear that the right will probably be a little unhappy, too. My goal is to maximize area under the curve of total human happiness, which means the [roughly] 80 percent of people in the middle.”

The First Amendment was first for a reason: because all of what follows depends upon what is in it. And, as African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”

This piece of common sense, and the founding principle of free speech, is poison to the success of the Left’s pursuit of socialist goals.

What the Left doesn’t know — or just doesn’t like — is that a free state depends upon the people having differing opinions about what is going on. But the goals of the Left are quite difficult to achieve when their arguments are forced to stand up against contrary opinions.

Only with a completely open dialogue can the American people be adequately informed to understand what is happening and make sound decisions about critical issues.

Big Tech has grown too big, and is a true threat to our freedoms

America’s Founders recognized that certain rights existed that were absolute and unassailable, and that those rights were fundamental to the nation they had created. Before some states would ratify the new Constitution, they insisted that these rights be specifically detailed. And they were, in the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

Back in the day, we learned important elements of our nation’s founding in school. We studied the Bill of Rights, and learned that the First Amendment cited the five freedoms of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly, and petitioning government for the redress of grievances.

Religion and speech have been under attack off and on for a long time. Religion has been under strong attack lately, and now free speech has also become a target.

In many countries, what the people say and do is controlled by a dictatorial government. In America, where the Constitution limits what the government can do, the current attempt to kill free speech is being carried out by a political faction that has among its members the fat-cats who own the Big Tech companies.

The Big Tech companies whose disrepute has blossomed of late — Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon — have grown too big for their britches. The oligarchs who own and run these giants have gained such riches that their over-fed egos persuade them that they can and should control the rest of us for their own narrow purposes.

The level of control of Big Tech reaches into the news we read, see and hear; information we find online; the ads we see and the things we buy; and discussions in the political sphere.

These platforms gather information on users about their likes and dislikes, the websites they visit, videos they watch, issues they are interested in, and their political party affiliation.

This information is used to make money and to influence how users think about many things. Even the results of online Google searches are determined by this user information.

The arrogance of Big Tech has produced the censoring on their platforms of a story in the New York Post on the questionable behavior of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. Social media platforms Facebook and Twitter banned the now-former President of the United States Donald Trump from their platforms. And Big Tech took down the upstart social media site Parler, which has now been reborn.

There are continuing issues regarding the censoring of political posts and comments by Republicans and conservatives. Things that do not favor the leftist/liberal side of things are frequently blocked or removed on the grounds that they violate some internal policy.

These policies supposedly protect the public from dangerous speech, which is not the job of social media platforms. They originally were available for users to have their say about any topic, except for things like promoting violence or illegal activities.

The vast majority of speech, even that which is highly offensive to some, has been determined through litigation to be protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, Big Tech owners and employees, who should not be the judges of the appropriateness of their users’ comments, continue to do so. And they condemn language like what has been determined by law to be okay. 

Since these “platforms” frequently abandon that realm in favor of behaving like “publishers,” which are expected to control speech to a higher degree, they should lose the protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which protects platforms from lawsuits over content generated by users on their sites. It gives them the right to moderate content, but does not give them the responsibility to do so.

This allows platforms to operate without needing to moderate content, therefore, platforms must not go too far if they do moderate. Despite this, they continue censoring conservative speech.

Allum Bokhari, an author and technology correspondent, speaking to a conference of the Center for Constructive Alternatives at Hillsdale College, had the following comment in his address: “If Big Tech’s capabilities are allowed to develop unchecked and unregulated, these companies will eventually have the power not only to suppress existing political movements, but to anticipate and prevent the emergence of new ones. This would mean the end of democracy as we know it and place us under the thumb of an unaccountable oligarchy.”

Big Tech platforms are such a sham, I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.
They cheat, and censor what people say, but only those who don’t think their way.
They think they are king of what they do, but they must also be red, and not just blue.
Their egos swelled as they gained power, and now Big Tech needs a really cold shower.
They have gained the throne and now they are woke, but justice will be done if they go broke.

Freedom of speech must be protected. Big Tech should be sanctioned, regulated, or broken up into smaller, less powerful and less harmful units with little ability to control free speech. This would allow the public to express all but the most truly dangerous ideas, as platforms originally were.

Do we still have freedom of speech? Well, yes; sometimes we do.

 

Thank goodness for the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects what our Founders viewed as our God-given rights to free exercise of religion, free speech, freedom of the press, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.

However, while efforts to infringe upon those and other rights are not unheard of, the attacks on them currently form a far more serious threat than perhaps at any other time, and certainly the most serious in many decades.

There has been ample news coverage of instances where Christian bakers and florists were forced to bake cakes or produce flower arrangements for gay weddings, contrary to their religious beliefs.

A decorated Army chaplain is facing what his attorneys are calling a “career-ending punishment” after he explained to a soldier that he could not conduct a marriage retreat that included same sex couples, but was willing to find someone else to do it.

Somehow, no matter how many people are available and willing to provide these services, those wanting a particular service view it as a horrible crime if a person refuses to perform it on religious grounds.

These days, certain “preferences” held by relatively small groups are thought to be of even greater importance than those rights set in stone by our Founders.

Some small efforts at balancing these breaches have occurred, but one’s ability to practice his or her religion in the customary fashion is only sometimes protected, these days.

These breaches of the First Amendment’s protections are serious enough, but what is happening on social media, on college campuses and elsewhere regarding free speech and free access to information is much worse, if for no other reason because of its broad swath of free speech encroachments that are being slashed through our culture.

Burgess Owens, a conservative African-American entrepreneur and 10-year veteran of the NFL, appeared at Hobart and William Smith Colleges recently. He told the audience, “I grew up in the Deep South during Jim Crow segregation laws. I can tell you how racism looks, how it feels, and what it means. You guys today can go anyplace you want to — any restaurant, any college.”

Well, that was too much for the audience. A female attendee asked him to repeat his first name, and after he did so, she said, “Oh, I thought it was ‘Tom,’” as in Uncle Tom. Cute.

Student activists at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, made good on their threat to disrupt an address by conservative Christina Hoff Sommers. What makes this one worse is that it was at the Law School. Yes, that’s right: students studying the law denied Sommers her free speech right.

The Leftist operators of Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube social media platforms think the way to persuade people to their ideas is to cheat them out of contrary opinions. 

The Media Research Center has produced a report titled “Censored” on how and to what extent popular social media are trying to “persuade” people to their way of thinking, not through the common sense of their ideas or the power of their argument, but by keeping people from seeing other points of view.

Authors Ashley Rae Goldenberg and Dan Gainor tell us that social media influences our worldview and can even influence elections. “Americans are seeing the results everywhere online. Conservative spokespeople, political candidates, even members of Congress, are falling victim to censors and the top tech firms are to blame.”

The article addresses claims of liberal bias and censorship against Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube individually, listing the claims and evaluating them, showing that the claims are supported by evidence.

These include such things as that Twitter censors conservative tweets pro-life ads, and censors content that governments find objectionable.

Liberal attitudes are at the core of Facebook and it censors pro-life advertising. Facebook’s algorithms filter what things its members can see, and it also blocked the “Diamond and Silk” girls’ posts, calling their content “dangerous.” Have you ever seen Diamond and Silk? Dangerous?

Google’s fact-checking system and algorithm contain an anti-conservative bias, and its News Lab partners with the radical Southern Poverty Law Center to identify “hate.”

Charges against YouTube mirror those previously mentioned for the other three media.

Is it that these folks have so little faith in their way of thinking that they don’t trust it to stand up against contrary ideas? Or do they not want to go to the trouble of actual debate and take a chance on losing in the marketplace of free ideas?

Whatever the motivation, using their ability to control what their customers or users see is truly otherworldly.

Liars, cheaters and cowards, oh my!

Faced with unpopular ideas, so many in our country are convinced that the appropriate reaction is to hold their breath, sob uncontrollably, stomp their feet, run to their safe space and demand that the speaker of these ideas shut up.

Private businesses or organizations can control what their Websites show. No argument there. The question, however, is not whether they can, but whether they should? Politics and business is a bad combination, and in these instances is quite dangerous.