(WATCH) The Twitter Files


When Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized last October, he quickly instituted sea changes in Twitter’s operations, which had become notorious for censoring off-narrative information and views. In the three months since, Musk has released an incriminating stream of internal documents, revealing what some experts assess to be proof of shocking government censorship at the highest levels. Today, we examine one of the most significant stories of the information age.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

On October 5, 2020, President Trump had just recovered from Covid. Before leaving the hospital, he tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”

That triggered behind-the-scenes intrigue at Twitter.

A top Twitter lawyer named James Baker weighed in. Baker happened to have been the FBI’s lead attorney, once criminally investigated for alleged leaks against Trump.

Now at Twitter, Baker suggested that Trump’s urgings, “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” violated Twitter’s policy against misinformation. Twitter’s then-head of Trust and Safety told Baker that optimism didn’t qualify as misinformation.

But internal documents show Twitter often working at the government’s insistence to punish those who were off the Covid narratives, even if it meant rejecting truthful information.

August 11, 2022: A tweet wrongly implied that Covid was killing a lot of children. Twitter didn’t touch that disinformation. But when another user replied that Covid wasn’t even close to a major killer of kids — and cited the government’s own data from CDC — Twitter labelled that Tweet “Misleading.”

Other documents show that Twitter, pre-Elon Musk, aided government censorship campaigns. The social media company often accommodated U.S. government demands to push tweets that fit government narratives, and suppress dissenting tweets, even if true.

March 15, 2021: Harvard Medical School epidemiologist and professor Dr. Martin Kulldorff tweeted his expert opinion, shared by many scientists, that “those with prior infection” and “children” did not need the Covid-19 vaccine.

Internally, Twitter ruled that to be “sharing false information,” slapped a “Misleading” label on it, shut off people’s ability to reply to or “like” it, and suppressed its visibility.

June 19, 2022: Twitter permanently suspended another medical expert, Dr. Andrew Bostom, after deeming his tweets to be misinformation. That included one that simply referred to a peer-reviewed study finding Covid vaccines temporarily reduce “semen concentration” and sperm count in men.

Beyond Covid, documents show there were plenty more topics the government and Twitter coordinated on to stifle free speech. You may already know about the case involving President Biden’s son Hunter. Twitter worked with the U.S. intelligence community and FBI to discredit a story about the shocking contents on Hunter’s computer as “Russian disinformation.” That’s despite the fact that the FBI had possession of the computer and knew the story was true.

The Twitter Files also show federal agencies devoting extensive time and personnel, on the taxpayer dime, to manage the public message and silence dissenters.

A May 11, 2020 email references a “monthly [US Government] USG/industry call.”

The FBI’s Elvis Chan coordinated regular sit-downs between numerous government agencies and Twitter — here, emails refer to meetings July 16, July 30, and August 14, 2020.

And Twitter apparently facilitated the Pentagon’s vast network of accounts deployed to distribute propaganda.

On July 26, 2017, an arm of the U.S. military gave Twitter a list of 52 Arab-language accounts used to “amplify certain messages.” The military asked Twitter to give special treatment and visibility to the accounts, and Twitter agreed.

Before the 2020 election, the FBI asked Twitter for “user IDs and handles” of conservative Twitter accounts listed in an article by the liberal publication Daily Beast, and Twitter’s response implied it was good with the request.

But perhaps the most important takeaway is that the revelations found in the Twitter Files are just a sampling of broader censorship trends.

Documents revealed through a lawsuit against President Biden show that managing information on Covid vaccines was a near-obsession in the Biden White House.

The lawsuit was filed by Missouri and Louisiana. Emails show that White House Digital Director Robert Flaherty and his team lobbied to shut down or censor what they called “misinformation” — which often turned out to be true information — on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, all while getting paid with your tax dollars.

For example, in January of 2021, baseball legend Hank Aaron died less than three weeks after getting the Covid vaccine. Though many claimed his death was unrelated to the shot, vaccine safety advocate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said that Aaron’s death was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly” shortly after vaccination.

The next day, the White House team asked Twitter to censor Kennedy.

March 22, 2021, the White House’s Flaherty pointedly pressured Facebook to step up its game on shaping vaccine information and influencing users, such as “promoting content from their friends who have been vaccinated.”

“We have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation,” Facebook assured the White House, noting, “This is often-true content.”

On April 22, 2021, the White House was grappling with reports of dangerous blood clots after Covid shots, and the CDC and FDA had put a pause on Johnson & Johnson’s version. That day, Flaherty wrote to Facebook that “misinformation around the vaccine” is “a concern shared at the highest (and I mean highest) level of the [White House] WH”

And on May 12, 2021, the day CDC made the controversial recommendation for children to get the Covid vaccine, Flaherty again demanded that Facebook step up operations on “removing bad information” on vaccines.

Sharyl (on-camera): Some of the big questions raised by all of this: if the government is engaging in unconstitutional acts of censorship, who has the power to stop it? And how did the government’s actions impact everything, from our elections to the way Covid was mismanaged? We’ll keep on it.

Watch story here.

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5 thoughts on “(WATCH) The Twitter Files”

  1. This article ? I wonder if that’s what Joe Biden was talking about ? I mean the Former owners of Twitter who got All those Billions from Elon Musk not paying there fair share and other Social Media people making money keeping you and your kids online clicking on things so they cash in turning you and your kids into social money Bots market windfall, talked about on the Dr. Phil show episode the other day ?

  2. This article and previous post on taking advantage of people and kids = Be Gone Satin ! ” We have child labor laws in this country from exploiting children for profits ? ( Prostituition is illegal in 50 states excluding Las Vegas ? )

    1. Bill Andrews,

      Re : “Be Gone Satin !”

      Forwarded Message :

      Dear Naomi Wolf et al.,

      The Holy Bible is a compilation
      of tens-of-thousands of years of
      human trials, mostly bloody and
      painful, for passing from gener-
      ation to generation what works
      and doesn’t, in keeping Good
      Civil Society ( keeping good health
      and prosperity—both mental and
      physical Good HEALTH ).

      Yes, human history has been
      recorded – LESSONS learned ? –
      for many, many millennia—both
      those oral and scribed lessons
      ( study Aristotle, who had had
      millennia of written records of
      past civilizations—as he listed,
      in his “POLITICS,” some societies
      pushed toward bloody revolution
      due to race-mixing, as the in-
      herently less capable tribe comes
      to revolt over its seemingly unfair/
      “unjust” social conditions ).

      Watching public television re-
      package Norman Lear as some
      cultural – even spiritual – GOOD—
      with Mel Brooks and other
      TRIBAL folks of his ilk having
      praised him for using humor to
      wreck high-cultural civilization,
      by denigrating WHITE Christian
      men and their MORALITY and
      traditional FAMILY values at every
      turn, bodes ill for all of Western
      Civilization ( modeling what that
      TRIBE had done to post-WW-I
      Christian-Germany—giving rise to
      PAGAN Hitler’s horrific reprisals,
      as that TRIBE – as it does to this
      very day – had sought installation
      of International Communism while
      Pagan Nazism sought to preserve
      Germany by using National
      Socialism ).

      Lear’s “All in the Family” TV
      series was a CLEVER – even
      demonic ! – reprogramming of
      the American Christian Mind,
      of the GOOD and the TRUE—
      of what constitutes the idea,
      “MORALITY.”

      Lear and buddies sought to
      DESTROY moral TRADITIONS,
      such as SACRED Sexuality
      couched within sacred matri-
      mony—within nuclear families.

      Humor is the DEVIL’s WORK-
      BENCH. If Lear and Brooks and
      buddies can get you to laugh
      at the idea of raping babies, as
      they had done during a ROAST
      a few years ago—you’ve been
      BADLY reprogrammed ( SNL is
      a BULLYING production, and
      weekly reprograms us—towards
      Libertine Liberalism using humor ).

      Here’s what you may not know
      about the bad side of that TRIBE
      —while the good side FIGHTS it to
      no avail, such as Torah-Jew Rabbi
      Daniel Lapin, who has tried but
      failed to do it for decades ( Lear
      and his buddies had destroyed his
      Jew/Christian “Toward Tradition”
      organization, because of Rabbi
      Lapin’s Truth-Telling about
      Lear & Company & Hollywood & TV :

      https://www.rense.com/general62/deb.htm ) :

      – SNIP –

      -Rick

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