Lawsuit Depositions and Twitter Files Tell the Tale thumbnail

Lawsuit Depositions and Twitter Files Tell the Tale

By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

There’s an old saying: Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want reported on the front page of the newspaper.  So many stunning revelations have been reported in the last couple days from the release of the Twitter files and the Missouri versus Biden Big Tech censorship case, there’s no room on the front page left.

An FBI agent testified in a deposition in the censorship case that FBI headquarters put its “stamp of approval” on requests to social media companies to block specific information before the 2020 elections.  Requests would get routed through FBI field offices around the country, federal prosecutors, FBI and Justice Department lawyers, and FBI headquarters before being sent to the agent’s “command post” in San Francisco for action.  The agent further testified social media platforms frequently complied with FBI requests to take down posts.

A State Department official testified during his deposition that the State Department has been funding online fact checkers.  He named the Poynter Institute which operates Politifact, a notoriously left-wing fact checker.  You might recall Facebook admitted in a lawsuit these so-called ‘fact checkers’ are really just “opinion”, left-wing opinion your State Department is only too happy to pay for.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk released a first set of files showing how former Twitter executives decided to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Twitter suppressed the story under its policy against “hacked” information, but there was no evidence the information was hacked.

In a second set of files released just yesterday, it was revealed the platform used several means to silence conservatives, including blacklists and shadow-banning, techniques which former Twitter executives had denied using and dismissed as conspiracy theory.  The targets included a well-known opponent of the Covid lockdowns and two conservative radio talk show hosts.  As one Twitter engineer put it, “we control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.”  Twitter was taking down posts or limiting visibility as many as 200 times a day.

The head of the team was Jeff Carlton, a former U.S. Naval Intelligence officer who had previously worked for the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA.  I told you earlier this week Twitter’s deputy general counsel who had advised the company to block the Hunter Biden laptop story had previously worked for the FBI.  Elon Musk fired counsel James Baker this week for suppressing information and for giving an “unconvincing” explanation for why he reviewed the new Twitter files before they were published.

So we have more than just proof of concerted action between the Biden administration and Twitter executives to support the theory Twitter had become an extension of the government to suppress speech.  We have a revolving door that placed former intelligence agency and FBI officials inside Twitter at critical junctures, adding weight to the case Twitter had become a state actor.  Personnel is policy, as they say.

The Missouri Attorney General – now Senator-elect Eric Schmitt who brought the censorship case said:

This is a story of the federal government with all of its vast power and authority colluding with some of the biggest companies in the history of the world to censor Americans to put their thumb on the scale for what’s out there that people can actually read about before an election. It ought to scare the bejesus out of every American, I don’t care about your political stripe.

They suppressed speech and silenced conservatives, but they got caught.  Moral of the Story:  If you can’t do the time on the front page of the newspaper, don’t do the crime.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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