The Censorship Business

The Censorship Business

Written by Peter Boykin on January 5, 2023

The Censorship Business

Shared By Peter Boykin – American Political Commentator / Citizen Journalist

The Censorship Business

The latest installment of the Twitter Files highlights how “every conceivable wing” of the intelligence cartel “was in the censorship business,” swarming Twitter with censorship requests.

[‘Deep state’ and ‘intelligence community’ are too kind a term. Moving forward I’m going to start referring to them as the ‘intelligence cartel’.]

It is illegal for the government to violate your First Amendment by suppressing free speech.

The latest batch of Twitter Files, released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi, came in two batches:

How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In

Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”

The first batch is the more consequential one, so it’s what we’ll focus on today…

How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In:

This batch focused on how starting in 2017, the Intelligence Cartel, along with Senate Democrats, began swarming Twitter with censorship requests for accounts allegedly tied to Russia.

Recall this was the height of the Russiagate witch hunt initiated after Trump won the 2016 election.

Internal Twitter e-mails from the time show the company “did not see a big correlation” with what the Intel Cartel was telling them.

One Twitter executive at the time remarked via e-mail that Washington was “taking cues from Hillary Clinton”.

To overcome Twitter’s initial apprehension, the Intel Cartel started leaking to the press about their alleged Russian-linked Twitter accounts, using the media to pressure the private company.

Twitter eventually created a “Russia Task Force” which manually vetted 2,500 accounts the Intel Cartel had flagged as Russia-linked, only to find 17 were actually connected to Russia.

In the end: through years of threats of legislation against them, continued leaks to the press of cherry-picked data, and constant bombardment from the Intel Cartel, Twitter updated its terms of service allowing the company to remove content “at our sole discretion.”

Twitter and the FBI “Belly Button”: This second batch goes into the details of how the Intel Cartel slowly sunk its teeth into the company, with smaller “fledgling analytic/intelligence arms” like the State Department’s ‘Global Engagement Center’ demanding time from the company. You can read the full thread here.

[Source: Matt Taibbi]