There's a good Advisory Opinions pod on this, well, as of a month ago. I think the topline summary is Feds contact the private sector all the time and try to ask for help or give information. The line of coercion has to be crossed in order for it to count as censorship, and hasn't been yet (as of a month ago). And I trust Isgur and French's credibility and honest opinions more than 99% of the clickbait out there.
He was just peddling republican bs. It's amazing how folks think elon is somehow neutral when in reality he's a full blown republican troll. He never gave all the evidence but only stuff that made democrats look bad. Elon was just scared of democrats passing their legislation which would have a billionaire tax.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/mehdi-hasan-dismantles-the-entire-foundation-of-the-twitter-files-as-matt-taibbi-stumbles-to-defend-it/ Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It
I watched the interview and it devolved into a mess as top notch cable news media shines in that regard. That article makes better sense out of it though. He presents it as a massive censorship operation, targeting 22 million tweets, with takedown demands from government players, seeking to silence the American public. When you look through the details, correcting Taibbi’s many errors, and putting it in context, you see that it was an academic operation to study information flows, who sent the more blatant issues they came across to Twitter with no suggestion that they do anything about them, and the vast majority of which Twitter ignored. In some minority of cases, Twitter applied its own speech to add more context to some of the tweets, and in a very small number of cases, where it found phishing attempts or people impersonating election officials (clear terms of service violations, and potentially actual crimes), it removed them. There remains no there there. It’s less than a Potemkin village. There isn’t even a façade. This is the Emperor’s New Clothes for a modern era. Taibbi is pointing to a naked emperor and insisting that he’s clothed in all sorts of royal finery, whereas anyone who actually looks at the emperor sees he’s naked.
Because Matt's bread and butter is his substack and Twitter is banning 3rd party links to stop hemorrhaging viewers. I will always respect independent journos and the troubles they face. They're like entrepreneurs without a solid retirement plan. A sisyphean task that most likely ends up as bad as a nascar wreck. Anyways, I read one of his latest articles and agree with it. MSNBC sucks ass and the ex-spook liars they use to circle jerk narratives will further our paralyzed and uncivil downfall.Medhi had points, but he's a straight up cunt. He used home field and knew when to hit below the belt with enough truth bombs to soften viewer impressions. Very Fox-like https://www.racket.news/p/msnbc-sucks?utm_campaign=post ... The Nance situation was symbolic of what happened at the network from the beginning of Trump’s term, really beginning in early 2017. It went from being a place where you had to be at least in the ballpark of demonstrably true to being a place where the factual standard was, “Whatever dogshit drops out of the mouth of any hack or spook.” Moreover the network didn’t just re-report this stuff, it became the favored launching pad for all the most blatant blue-Anon disinformation, like California congressman Adam Schiff saying he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, or former Obama defense official Evelyn Farkas suggesting the Trump administration would try to destroy evidence if they “found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians.” Farkas later testified under oath that she “didn’t know anything” about collusion. You’ll read about this (and see it, in an extraordinary video mashup our own Matt Orfalea prepared for a larger story series coming out in the next weeks), but we found MSNBC mentioned Hamilton 68, the infamous “dashboard” of accounts supposedly linked to “Russian influence activities” outed as a fraud in the Twitter Files, over 100 times in a period between the summer of 2017 and November of 2019. One of those instances came in a typical MSNBC broadcast from that time, on January 19, 2018. It featured a quartet of security-state goblins — former Bush official Nicolle Wallace, Langley-sniffing Ken Dilanian, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, and ex-CIA official Evan McMullin — gang-botching a story about the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag: Note how many things they get wrong in this segment. Vance says there’s nothing to accusations of FISA abuse later proven by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz (“A lot of hullabaloo about nothing at the end of the day”). The CIA’s McMullin touts the Steele Dossier (“Much of it has been validated”). Dilanian rushes at the end to squeeze in the Hamilton hoax (“This release…is the top hashtag among Russian bots and trolls, according to Hamilton 68”). It’s extremely rare that a journalist who’s actually trying to avoid mistakes makes even one factual mistake as big as falling for the Hamilton hoax or the Steele Dossier, or dismissing the Nunes memo. These people managed all three at once. If I’d made even one error of that magnitude early in my career, I wouldn’t have had a career. This kind of thing was basically constant for years, when MSNBC was the staging ground for many lunatic conspiracy theories involving Trump, Russia, and their delicacy item, the Dossier. As I was leaving the set of my last appearance on All In six years ago, Rachel was getting ready to go on and re-frame how the network did news. My shrugging take was that if journalists didn’t have confirmation, they couldn’t report. Rachel argued the opposite, that official silence meant you could assume things: I mean, had the FBI looked into what was in that dossier and found that it was all patently false, they could tell us that now, right? I mean, the dossier has now been publicly released. If the FBI looked into it and they found it was all trash, there’s no reason they can’t tell us that now. They’re not telling us that now. They’re not saying that. They’re not saying anything. As we later found out, among other things via Jeff Gerth’s gigantic piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FBI said nothing about many stories it knew to be wrong, including the influential New York Times exposé, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” The possibility that officials can lie to us in this way — leaking, asking that attribution be limited to uncheckable “sources familiar with the matter,” then saying nothing as stories start taking water — is exactly why we don’t stick our necks out for such people. From that period in early 2017 through the crushing release of the Mueller report — forcing Rachel to cut a trout-fishing vacation in Tennessee short to stammer out, eyes welling with emotion, “This is the start of something, not the end of something” — I do not believe even one person expressing skepticism of the Trump-Russia story came on the channel. That streak ended with poor Chris’s post-Mueller bummer-cast with Michael Isikoff and David Corn, on March 25, 2019. This video should be shown to every J-school student as a “Scared Straight” exercise. In it Yahoo!’s Isikoff, the first prominent journalist to quote Christopher Steele, said of his dossier, “It was endorsed multiple times on this network, people saying, It’s more and more proving to be true. And it wasn’t.” The directors cut away as Hayes started nodding with energy. As blood visibly drained from the face of Isikoff’s unrepentant toad-faced co-author David Corn, the veteran reporter went on to add — you can almost hear MSNBC producers think-screaming, “Stop! Stop!” — that Mueller’s report “undercuts almost everything that was in the dossier”: After this the network doubled down, seemingly hiring as contributors every unemployed prosecutor or natsec official they could find, especially from failed Russiagate probes. They’d already spent on names like ex-CIA head John O’Brennan, former assistant FBI counterintelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi, House Intel Director of Investigations and future congressman Dan Goldman (who met Adam Schiff in an MSNBC green room), and federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. Now, they added cadaverous Mueller sidekick Andrew Weissmann and, astonishingly, Weissmann’s deputy, the fired FBI lawyer Lisa Page. They also began bringing in Page’s lover, fellow FBI firee Peter Strzok, as a commentator. America became familiar with Page and Strzok after their texts — referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as an “insurance policy,” and ripping “sandernistas,” among other things — became public. These were living monuments to press excesses of the Trump era. As Gerth wrote, Strzok quietly reported to bosses after the Times’s “repeated contacts” story came out, saying, “We are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.” Strzok in other words was exactly the kind of person to whom Rachel might have been referring when she rhapsodized about FBI “not saying anything” to dissuade us from believing errors. Page on April 10, 2017 got a text from Strzok, saying he wanted to talk to her “about [a] media leak strategy with DOJ.” This was a day before a Washington Post story that cited “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” in saying the secret FISA court found probable cause to believe former Trump aide Carter Page (no relation) was an “agent of a foreign power.” Whoever leaked this was sabotaging not just the Post, but every downstream media org picking up the story, because the story at its roots was wrong: Carter Page was not an “agent of a foreign power,” as the FISA court had been misled, by Steele and the FBI. MSNBC was one of the first outlets to regurgitate this thing. When sources lie to you, you should be mad. At minimum, you should be ripping their names out of your Rolodex (or modern equivalent). MSNBC did the opposite, hiring seemingly everyone who’d helped them down this reputation-tarnishing path. People in intelligence are trained to lie to your face and hone that practice daily. I don't know why more people don't distrust their lying asses. They're the ones who get other people to die for their causes. Way different than people who serve. I don't know what happened for them to come out of the shadows, but like the old religious right, please get your asses out of the public politics once more...
This would be more exciting if anybody other than @tinman and @AroundTheWorld and @basso and @Commodore etc knew/remembered/cared what the Twitter Files were.. ?
It was foreseeable that there would be an orchestrated campaign to attack the journalists who posted the Twitter files. That's how leftists work. Denounce, mob, defame. That's how Maoists did it, that's how Stalin's gangs did it, that's how it was done in communist East Germany.
I hadn't thought of @SamFisher as a maoist before, but it makes so much sense. it could be used to define the entire statist democratic/progressive/media project.
1) It was disappointing that Taibbi showed up with no comment on Elon Re:India, since that was basically the whole reason he went on. 2) Debating Hasan on his show seems like a suicide mission. If I'm being charitable to Taibbi, I would say that maybe he thought he was going to have a real conversation, the kind he's been having lately on lengthy podcasts where people actually talk like normal people in real life. But he should have known better. However, the idea that Hasan dismantled the entire foundation of the Twitter Files is absurd. Even if Taibbi got the date wrong and the 22 million number is from after the election... that's still insane. Hell, 3,000 is insane. It's unfortunate that people are choosing to overlook the actual issues being highlighted by the Twitter Files. It shouldn't be ok or normal to have our intelligence state working hand in hand with these massive tech monopolies. That can't possibly be good for us as a whole.
