One could not move, one could not even dream; it was dangerous to give any sign of thought -- of the fact that you were not afraid; on the contrary, you were required to show that you were scared, trembling, even when there was no real ground for it -- that is what those years [1848 - 1856] have created in the Russian masses. Perpetual fear -- that is the root of the truth about life... panic was then in the air, and crushed the public consciousness and robbed it of all desire or capacity for thought... the atmosphere was full of terrors; 'You are lost', cried heaven and earth, air and water, man and beast -- and everything shuddered and fled from disaster into the first available rabbit hole.
— Isaiah Berlin, Russia and 1848, The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 26, no. 67, 1948, pp. 341–60. JSTOR
I've never joined Twitter and have always had a hard time taking it seriously. Seeing heads of state and captains of industry 'tweeting' gives the impression of canaries in a coal mine, singing mournfully of their imminent expiration. True, there is something brilliant about a platform that confines all remarks to bumper-sticker length, presided over by a (now-former) CEO who looks like either Rasputin or a homeless person. Although I've done my best to ignore it, I've been forced to concede that free speech on Twitter, ridiculous as its bot-ridden, troll-farmed-out brawls may be, represents something important about freedom in the United States and in the world.
Such is the terminal absurdity of American political life circa 2023 that the enormous amounts of time, and taxpayer Dollars, devoted to the endless task of identifying, suppressing, and banning posts that offend someone in authority, merits the equally enormous effort of ending censorship not only on Twitter, but wherever it may be practiced. So lawyers will argue endlessly over whether this or that tweet was dangerous to national security due to Russian machinations or to plots against public health.
And the high-serious yet studiously casual IT jargon of these Twitteratti and their lawyers, believe they have the right to silence anyone, only to find that they have unwittingly transferred that nonexistent right to the Government. They know nothing, and presumably care less, about the founding principles of the American Republic, the Constitution, or basic decency. Lost in algorithms inevitably used by arbitrary authority, they never even suspected that they were mere tools for the aggrandizement of their governmental masters.
Ancient civilizations built pyramids, aqueducts, astronomical observatories, graceful monuments, temples, and gardens. When America has completed the destruction of its freedom, and therefore its innovation and prosperity, will it be left with nothing more than a set of kludgy algorithms designed to fit the requirements of a senescent regime? Will that be the monument its successors unearth? Thanks to Elon Musk, the doors to this vast information highway of sludge traversing the communications between Twitter and the Federal Government have been opened for public viewing. 'If there is one information source that breaks ranks', Musk says, 'then I think it ultimately forces others not to have the same narrative. If even one organization competes hard for the truth, others will have to follow'.
Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson, Bari Weiss, Martin Kulldorf, Michael Shellenberger and others are compiling a useful record. History shows that these periods of glasnost are short-lived, so it’s best to explore these revelations while we can.
Another bird, the Prothonotary Warbler pictured above, also played a key role in unmasking an American traitor, Alger Hiss. Here is an annotated slog through a few of the Twitter revelations, in the style of the Timeline. The portrait of Government / Tech mind-meld at work is chilling, and might inspire remedial action. Mass surveillance in its current form can be traced back to 2008, before the heyday of social media. The explosive popularity of social media, along with users' propensity to discard their own privacy, provided unprecedented opportunities for far more finely targeted spying. After about 2015, Deep-State officials made progressively more insistent demands on purportedly private companies to provide information on users, to restrict expression, and to ban those deemed unacceptable by authorities. The items below, dating back to 2017, relate primarily to these new exercises of Government power, with explicit censorship demands and servile compliance.
Sept 6, 2017: Twitter Public Policy VP Colin Crowell advises staff of end-Sept meeting with Sen Mark Warner, who is under financial pressure to get funding for his re-election campagn. Twitter informs Senate 'it suspended 22 possible Russian accounts, and 179 others with 'possible links' to those accounts, amid a larger set of roughly 2700 suspects manually examined'. Warner denounces these results as 'frankly inadequate on every level'. || Source
Sept 29, 2017: Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett sends, to Crowell, Warner's appeal for '$5 or whatever you can spare to help Mark hit his quarterly fundraising goal'. Crowell reports to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that Rep Adam Schiff demanded 'significant forensic work... on the depth and breadth of Russian activity during the [2016 presidential] campaign'. Crowell also notes 'Warner has significant political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and rest of industry to keep producing material for them, and generate interest for the Nov 1 hearing that is planned'. The same message notes 'Democrats also taking cues from Hillary Clinton, who in her 'What Happened' book tour is pointedly talking about role of Russian propaganda and dirty tricks that were pushed through social media had in her demise. She has specifically called out FB 'and other social media' for not doing enough to address state-sponsored mischief in the election'. || Source
Oct 13, 2017: Politico writer Josh Meyer accuses Twitter of deleting material 'of potentially irreplaceable value to investigators probing Russia’s suspected manipulation of the social media platform during the 2016 election. Federal investigators now believe Twitter was one of Russia’s most potent weapons in its efforts to promote Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, the officials say, speaking on the condition of anonymity'. Johns Hopkins Strategic Studies Professor is quoted as saying 'Were Twitter a contractor for the FSB [the Russian spy agency], they could not have built a more effective disinformation platform'. || Source
Oct 13, 2017: Twitter forms Russia task force, searches for signs of Russian activity on Twitter, finds 'No evidence of a coordinated approach, all of the accounts found seem to be lone-wolf type activity (different timing, spend, targeting, <$10k in ad spend)'. A second try with a more inclusive search finds nothing. || Source
Feb 14, 2020: State Dept cites descriptions of covid as an engineered bioweapon, and identifying the Wuhan institute as the source of covid, as 'Russian disinformation'. || Source
June 9, 2020: Inter-agency squabbling turns Twitter into an unlikely referee of who in Government gets to participate in censorship requests. Originating in a fervent desire by the State Dept to join in the censorship action (during the Trump Administration), a unit called the Global Engagement Center (GEC) hastily self-assembled, like a self-assembling nano-particle, to try to get a seat at the table. This GEC, the new kid on the block, used time-tested methods of upping its status, issuing press releases, lobbying Congress, goosing academics to write alarming reports, and generally making a pest of itself. Finally the FBI tried to shoehorn State into the weekly Govt/Twitter censorship meetings. Twitter Censor Yoel Roth, in a June 9, 2020 message to Twitter public policy legal flack Stacie Cardille, suggests excluding State because of 'the relative lack of candor and discretion from senior GEC leadership in sharing reports/analysis based on a shaky methodology, and a limited track record of successful collaboration with industry'. Roth is also concerned about upsetting the clubby camaraderie that has developed among the cozy little group of Twitter and Government censors: 'Especially as the election heats up in the coming months, introducing an actor like GEC into what has to date has been a stable and (relatively) trusted group of practitioners and experts poses major risks, and could undermine a channel of significant importance to our election security efforts'. || Source
Sept 17, 2020: A message from FBI's irrepressible SF station chief Elvis Chan indicates which agency is the arbiter in this inter-agency squabbling. He suggests, in a manner like it has already been decided, that State/GEC be allowed to listen in to the weekly censor sessions, but not talk. || Source
Oct 28, 2020: Twitter exec Stacia Cardille sends message to Twitter colleagues seeking help prioritizing the numerous election-related 'escalation' (top-management attention) requests from govenment agencies including FBI, CIA, HHS, and others. 'As you know, with the adoption of the Unified Escalation Tool and the deprecation of the go/electionescalations, we have been sending all elections related requests directly to GETSupport for review. We are having some issues with the backlog impacting our elections efforts. The folks on this email represent the DC Public Policy, Legal, and Comms teams working on elections. Generally we are the ones escalating the high priority content, whether it is high profile or coming directly from government partners. Specifically, PubPolicy and I escalate reports from the FBI, Depatment of Homeland Security, and state election officials, or the Election Integrity Project run by Alex Stamos. Is there some way we can figure out an accommodation to prioritize the reports we escalate?' || Source
Nov 3, 3030: Twitter lawyer Stacia Cardille sends memo to Twitter General Counsel Jim Baker (former FBI attorney) complaining about the volume of censorship requests from the FBI Baltimore field office. The FBI's censorship requests are tailored to asserted violations of Twitter's Terms of Service: 'Re: FBI Report on Possible Violative Content. They have some folks in the Baltimore field office and at HQ that are just doing keyword searches for violations. This is probably the 10th request I have dealt with in the past five days'. || Source
Nov 12, 2020: Rep Adam Schiff demands Twitter ban journalists Paul Sperry and Greg Rubini for promoting unspecified 'conspiracy theories' and 'suppress any and all search results about Committee staff'. The redoubtable Stacie Cardille (name redacted, but inferred from context) refuses, writes 'we don't do this'. Sperry was later banned, however. || Source
Jan 23, 2021: White House digital supervisor Humphrey Clarke asks Twitter to censor (remove) a post by Robert Kennedy Jr on home run record-holder Hank Aaron's sudden death 18 days after his injection with a Moderna product. Kennedy observed that 'Aaron’s tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of COVID vaccines'. Aaron, who had been persuaded by Andrew Young to get the injection, had said 'I don’t have any qualms about it at all, you know. I feel quite proud of myself for doing something like this. It’s just a small thing that can help zillions of people in this country'. The Aaron family refused to have an autopsy done to determine the cause of death. Clarke asks Twitter to 'get moving on the process for having it [Kennedy's post] removed ASAP'. Twitter complied. || Source
March 15, 2021: Twitter flags as 'misleading' a statement by Dr Martin Kulldorf (Harvard Medical School Prof) that covid-vax is of use only for 'older high-risk people, and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.' Twitter's label meant 'This tweet can't be replied to, shared or liked'. An anonymous Twitter moderator decided Dr Kulldorf's judgment had to be censored because it 'goes against CDC guidelines'.
to be continued…