You could tell that platforms like Facebook and Twitter were grist for the government disinformation mill. Flagged, tagged, or canceled, the gig was fixed. The Twitter Files have revealed just how bad things were. But alternatives like Gab, Telegram, Signal, and Getter were not immune.
I’m not saying they censored content on those platforms because I never saw any of that, but they were milked. The censorship machine had its surveillance fingers in every pie, which it then used to define disinformation narratives spread not just on the larger controlled platforms but echoed in the media.
The trending topics or conversations on sites like Gab, Gettr, and Telegram were used to feed progressive propaganda mills.
A few pull quotes from a piece at The Federalist on Matt Taibbi’s latest Twitter Files.
These outside partnerships played an aggressive role in pushing Twitter censorship. Taibbi calls this group the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” A 2020 internal email from Nick Pickles, then public policy director at Twitter, set up a working group with nine disinformation non-governmental organizations (NGOs): First Draft, Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), International Republican Institute (IRI), Atlantic Council/DFRLab, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), Brookings, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
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To add another layer to this sordid story, the glue that binds this fusion of government, NGOs, and the media together are the billionaire investors funding the NGOs. Chief among these is [Craig]Newmark (founder and CEO of Craigslist0. His fingerprints, and financial backing, are all over the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
This matters because,
[Craig] Newmark’s largest individual donation to any of the NGOs in the Censorship-Industrial Complex went to the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO). He donated $5 million dollars to fund the department in 2019. Newmark put his money behind one of the most controversial figures in online disinformation studies — Renée DiResta.
Newmarket was a prominent funder of the surveillance machine that fed the narrative mill, which massaged all the messaging by defining the message and deciding what was misinformation or disinformation. Twitter and others then used these tools.
Note: If you use Craig’s list for anything, you should stop. You are laundering money into the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
Twitter Files
You can cruise this entire Twitter File here, but I’ve grabbed more than a few items of interest.
1.TWITTER FILES #19 The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories”
2. “The release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Spring 2020 emails… has been used to exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci.” “Increased distrust in Fauci’s expert guidance.”
3.“Reports of vaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway”; “natural immunity”; suggesting Covid-19 “leaked from a lab”; even “worrisome jokes”:
4.All were characterized as “potential violations” or disinformation “events” by the Virality Project, a sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billons of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs.
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7. Though the Virality Project reviewed content on a mass scale for Twitter, Google/YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest, it knowingly targeted true material and legitimate political opinion while often being factually wrong itself.
8.This story is important for two reasons. One, as Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success. Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.
9.Two, it accelerated the evolution of digital censorship, moving it from judging truth/untruth to a new, scarier model, openly focused on political narrative at the expense of fact.
10.THE BEGINNING: On February 5, 2021, just after Joe Biden took office, Stanford wrote to Twitter to discuss the Virality Project. By the 17th, Twitter agreed to join and got its first weekly report on “anti-vax disinformation,” which contained numerous true stories.
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12. March 2, 2021: “We are beginning to ramp up our notification process to platforms.” In addition to the top-7 platforms, VP soon gained “visibility” to “alternative platforms such as Gab, Parler, Telegram, and Gettr” – near-total surveillance of the social media landscape.
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14.VP told Twitter that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” including things like “celebrity deaths after vaccine” or the closure of a central NY school due to reports of post-vaccine illness, should be considered “Standard Vaccine Misinformation on Your Platform.”
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16.VP routinely framed real testimonials about side effects as misinformation, from “true stories” of blood clots from AstraZeneca vaccines to a New York Times story about vaccine recipients who contracted the blood disorder thrombocytopenia.
20.The Virality Project helped pioneer the gauging of “disinformation” by audience response. If the post-vaccine death of a black woman named Drene Keyes in Virginia went unnoticed inspired mostly “anti-vaccine” comments on local media, it became a “disinformation” event.
21.VP warned against people “just asking questions,” implying it was a tactic “commonly used by spreaders of misinformation.” It also described a “Worldwide Rally for Freedom planned over Telegram” as a disinformation event.
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24.The VP in April 2021 mistakenly described “breakthrough” infections as “extremely rare events” that should not be inferred to mean “vaccines are ineffective.”
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27.In a chilling irony, the VP ran searches for the term “surveillance state.” As an unaccountable state-partnered bureaucracy secretly searched it out, the idea that “vaccines are part of a surveillance state” won its own thoughtcrime bucket: “conspiracy.”
28.After about a year, on April 26, 2022, the VP issued a report calling for a “rumor-control mechanism to address nationally trending narratives,” and a “Misinformation and Disinformation Center of Excellence” to be housed within CISA, at the Department of Homeland Security.
29. The next day, April 27, 2022, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced in a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing that a “Disinformation Governance Board” had been created, to be headed by the singing censor, Nina Jankowitz.
And we know how well that went over…
38. In the last #TwitterFiles thread, we posted a video of EIP Director Alex Stamos describing that project as Stanford trying to “fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally. (h/t Foundation for Freedom Online).
Had enough because there’s more, all summed up nicely by Dr. Meryl Nass:
I hope my readers grasp the enormity of the censorship. They don’t need arcane forms of mind control when the censors can infiltrate every single thing you experience online. They remove the facts they don’t like and up-code the narratives they do like. Simple. Effective. Real value for money.
