G.G. says the T.T. and the M.M. are L.L.

Glenn Greenwald says the Tech Titans and the Mainstream Media are Left-Liberal.

And: The alliance between the Democratic Party and Big Tech is not especially healthy for internet free speech.

From his show last night . . .

(excerpt)

The Congressional hearing today revealed not just that the Security State attempted to influence Twitter’s decisions and that Twitter had a systematic regime of censoring conservative voices because the people running Twitter under Jack Dorsey were all left-liberal caricatures. But it also revealed, most importantly, I think, that this version of the Democratic Party believes in censorship, wants more of it, and intends on an ongoing basis to use their union with the corporate media and with the U.S. Security State to demand greater and greater levels of Internet censorship. They were saying all day: we don’t think Twitter’s problem was that it centered too much. Twitter’s problem is that it didn’t censor enough.

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Transcript:

Regarding the context for all the 2020 election — and this isn’t me saying this, there was a very lengthy article in Time Magazine that was remarkably candid in acknowledging that — virtually the entire American establishment was united to ensure Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. They engaged in all kinds of maneuvers and all kinds of tactics that previously would have been unthinkable, the way in which they aligned across political ideologies and political parties to make sure that Donald Trump didn’t get a second term was also highly unusual, essentially, all of American power and institutions of power were on the same side in this election, something that normally doesn’t happen in American elections.

The Time Magazine article was essentially describing what has now become the Sam Harris mentality. As you recall, Sam Harris, in a now notorious podcast, said that he believes that the censorship of this story of the New York Post reporting and anything that was just done to ensure Donald Trump’s defeat was justified: censorship, lying, manipulation. He was honest enough to acknowledge what he thinks, which is that in his mind, Donald Trump is such a unique threat to the American way of life, such a singular evil that, by definition, anything done for the noble cause of ensuring his defeat was morally justifiable. The classic ends justify the means argument, even if the means in question are things like censorship, CIA interference in our elections, all things that are not supposed to happen in a healthy, normal democracy, to Sam Harris — he was expressing the view quite overtly — all of it was justified as long as it was done to stop Trump. And that was clearly the view of the establishment generally. They’d spent all year laying the groundwork for this, and this specific case was an extension of that rotted mentality.

On October 14, right before the 2020 election, The New York Post published an article that at least was relevant and interesting in assessing Joe Biden’s integrity. It described actions that his son, Hunter Biden, attempted to get him to take, and at least some of which Joe Biden did in fact take, to benefit the Burisma, an energy company in Ukraine which was paying Hunter Biden $50,000 a month to sit on the board of something they were doing quite clearly for only one reason. It was not to tap into Hunter Biden’s impressive expertise in the energy industry of Eastern Europe. He had no such expertise. It was because the person running Ukraine since at least 2014 was his father, Joe Biden. He was acting as an imperial overseer or consul of Ukraine.

So, if you were an energy company in Ukraine, like Burisma, facing the possibility of criminal charges and investigations, the person with whom he would want to wield influence most is not a Ukrainian politician, but the one who is actually running Ukraine, which is Joe Biden, when he was the vice president of United States. And then in order to do that, you don’t go and hire or pay the son of an Ukrainian politician, you go and hire the son of the U.S. politician, which is what Burisma did. And Joe Biden was heavily involved in decision-making about whether to fire certain Ukrainian prosecutors. The micromanaging of Ukraine by the United States, right on the other side of the Russian border was so extensive that it went down to the level of which particular prosecutor they wanted to replace, and which ones they wanted remaining, something that obviously had a direct effect on Burisma.

The Biden defense is that the demand that this one particular prosecutor be fired or removed, that Biden demanded and threatened Ukraine to withhold $1 billion in aid unless they did, was the position not just of the U.S. government, but also of the EU. But whatever else is true, when you have an American politician running a country and then an energy company in that country is paying his son $50,000 a month blatantly for influence peddling, that deserves a lot of investigative scrutiny, especially when Joe Biden becomes the presidential frontrunner, which is what he was on October 14, when the New York Post published emails that they said came from Hunter Biden’s laptop — which happens to be true — shedding light on what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine.

On October 15th, the following day, the New York Post published a second story based on the same set of documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop describing what Joe Biden and the Biden family were doing in pursuing profitable business ventures in China, trading on Joe Biden’s name as somebody who wielded a great deal of influence as vice president, who may one day be the American president, and whether or not there were elements in China seeking to funnel money to Joe Biden and his son and his family to garner influence. We can go through all the details about the deal memo that was part of that laptop that described how 10% of the profits was reserved for the big guy, which Hunter Biden’s business partner, Tony Bobulinski, said referred to Joe Biden.

But leaving that aside for now, there’s no question but that these two stories, what Joe Biden was doing in Ukraine, and what Joe Biden was doing in China, were the utmost for journalistic relevance, that’s exactly what you want the media doing. And because those stories were incriminating of the Biden family and of Joe Biden, because they raised doubts about Joe Biden’s integrity and they played into a storyline that had already been emerging, which was that Joe Biden was trying to enrich his son by using his influence to benefit his family, it was an alarming story to people who are desperate to ensure Donald Trump’s defeat, which is basically most of the political establishment. They were petrified by these stories for obvious reasons. It’s very high stakes. Two weeks out from a presidential election, anything and everything is taken very seriously, let alone an explosive archive that comes from Joe Biden’s son shedding all new light on what this family was doing.

Clearly, this posed a danger to the number one priority goal of the American establishment and the U.S. Security State, which was Donald Trump’s defeat, and so when these two articles were published, the establishment immediately sprang into action. There were instant claims that this is a repeat of the 2016 election in which Russia was trying to interfere in the outcome of the election to help Donald Trump get elected. But remember what happened in 2016, regardless of what you think of Russia’s role, was that similarly relevant and authentic documents were released about Hillary Clinton and the Clinton campaign, something that undoubtedly was a public interest.

This was the frontrunner of the 2016 presidential election. All of these documents that were published by WikiLeaks that came from the email inbox of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, shed obvious light on what Hillary Clinton was thinking and doing, which is something you’d want to know as a journalist and as a citizen. And the publication of that, those authentic documents by WikiLeaks obviously played a role in the outcome of the election. That’s what journalism is for: to reveal to the American public secrets about the candidates. And oftentimes that’s how it’s done, through huge archives.

So, the establishment was petrified they were going to do that again. And when they saw this reporting, they instantly blamed Russia, even though they had no evidence to do so. Immediately, on October 14 and then 15, the day the stories emerged, first Twitter announced that they were banning any attempt to link to The New York Post stories. If you tried on Twitter to link to the New York Post stories, you got a message from Twitter before the tweet was posted saying this is an unhealthy or prohibited link. If you even tried to post it in your direct messages and your private conversation on Twitter, the same thing happened. The link was just banned. You could not use any link to The New York Post reporting for either of those first two stories on the Twitter site.

People have forgotten that it wasn’t just Twitter, but also Facebook who censored that story. They announced that decision through their director of communications, who coincidentally happened to be somebody who had spent his entire life working for the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill — Andy Stone. He worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the House Majority PAC, these entities that are designed to ensure that the Democratic Party remains in power. He worked for Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer. He worked for a member of the House who was a Democrat. He was a Democrat through and through.

That was what his whole life was before he got to Facebook. And that’s why Facebook had announced to the public that they were going to tinker with their algorithms to block the spread of that New York Post story to ensure that many people, millions of Americans, would not get exposed to it on Facebook until he said they could conduct a third-party fact check to determine whether the materials were not authentic. And to this day, that fact check has never been provided and the reason is obvious, Facebook, It turns out, banned or algorithmically suppressed a story that turned out to be totally true. So, either that fact check didn’t happen and Facebook lied that it would or it did happen and it concluded that the documents were real and Facebook ended up suppressing the story anyway. But that is a major interference in our American elections.

And then on October 19, just five days after The New York Post began its reporting, 51 former members of the intelligence community, the CIA, Homeland Security, all the same people who are constantly interfering — James Clapper and John Brennan, that whole gang — issued a letter that asserted that the publication of these documents in The New York Post had “all of the trade hallmarks of Russian disinformation”. These 51 intelligence agents admitted they had no evidence to support that claim. They said that explicitly in that letter. And yet the very first reporter to trumpet it was Natasha Bertrand, then at Politico — she’s since been promoted to CNN for her role in spreading disinformation. That’s how you get hired in CNN — was the first to publish the screaming headline that the Hunter Biden laptop and the documents used by the New York Post to do that reporting were “Russian disinformation” and from there, virtually every major media outlet in the country, not all but most, ratified that lie over and over and over and over again.

And then that was what the Tech Titans used as well to justify the censorship decisions. Twitter executives said at the time that they were justifying this because it violated Twitter’s policy against citing hacked materials. They had no idea that these materials whether they were hacked. The Twitter Files reporting that Elon Musk enabled that, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and other people, reporters that we’ve had on our show, Lee Fang and Michael Shellenberger and others, demonstrated that even at the time that James Baker, the former FBI general counsel, was urging that Twitter blocked this story, based on — they had to invent some rule, they couldn’t just censor it because they wanted Joe Biden to win they had to pretend they had some rule that was violated by this story — they pointed to the ban on pointing to linking to hacked materials, even though inside Twitter, they were admitting they had no evidence to make that conclusion that these materials were hacked. And as it turned out, that was a falsehood. That was a lie. These stories, these materials, we’re not hacked.

So, Twitter had no basis for censoring. Facebook to this day has never acknowledged it made a mistake in what it did. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg did go on Joe Rogan’s program, and when asked about that by Joe Rogan, said the reason Facebook did that was because the FBI spent months warning them that something like this was probably going to happen. It was going to come from Russia, which is why they ended up believing the claim that this was a “Russian disinformation campaign” because the FBI was telling them for months, were priming them for months to get ready to censor any information that could have helped Donald Trump win the election by shedding a negative light on Joe Biden.

Twitter, though, has acknowledged it through Jack Dorsey, the CEO and founder, who apologized. And even today at these hearings, these senior Twitter executives repeatedly acknowledged that they made a mistake not only in banning the link to The New York Post stories but also locking The New York Post out of their Twitter account for two weeks. So, all that reporting in The New York Post is based on this archive. The New York Post was not able to post on Twitter and get maximum circulation for it because Twitter was demanding that they delete their original tweet that promoted their first story. The New York Post, justifiably was refusing to do so, saying, Why should we delete our authentic reporting in order to get back onto Twitter? We’re not going to do that.

So, Twitter’s position is that they made a mistake. It’s a pretty huge mistake given that they ended up censoring genuine, authentic reporting about the person who would, just two weeks later, go on to become the president of the United States.

So that’s why the House Republicans — the Democrats, obviously had zero interest in finding out what happened here and investigating any of it — convened today their first Oversight hearing where they subpoenaed the three senior executives who were responsible for that decision and many other censorship decisions, suppressing anti-establishment voices, particularly on the right, though also on the left. And then, the Democrats called this whistleblower who was just there to voice her critique of Twitter that aligns perfectly with the left wing of the Democratic Party: that Twitter should be censoring more, not less. Especially, it should have been censoring Trump more, should have been protecting AOC better.

The big question that we didn’t know for sure before this hearing was how much information we were going to learn about the role that the U.S. government played in those decisions to censor. We have a lot of information that the FBI was trying to influence Twitter’s decision-making when it came to censorship and Big Tech in multiple ways.

Before the Twitter Files, The Intercept, at the end of October, in a story by Ken Bernstein and Lee Fang, obtained secret documents from Homeland Security that revealed the very extensive plan Homeland Security has to ensure they can play a vital role in telling these companies what they should and shouldn’t censor or allow. That was what that whole disinformation czar was supposed to do inside Homeland Security, to formalize the government’s pronouncements about what is true and what is false, with the expectation that Big Tech would almost be obligated to censor anything the government labels false. There was a lot of evidence of Big Tech’s involvement. Mark Zuckerberg’s admission on Joe Rogan was also serious evidence, as was the fact that the Twitter Files revealed all new evidence showing how deeply involved the FBI was with Twitter. There is one example, from Michael Shellenberger, on December 19, 2022, that came from his installment of the Twitter Files. And what he shows here is that pressure had been growing inside the intelligence community for Twitter to censor in anticipation of the election:

We have seen a sustained (if uncoordinated) effort by the intelligence community to push us to share more information and change our API policies. They are probing and pushing everywhere they can (including by whispering to convey to congressional staff).

This was Twitter internally lamenting the fact that there was so much pressure coming from the FBI and the CIA and Homeland Security, trying to get them to censor in a way that would favor the Democratic Party. And we can’t reveal all the Twitter file revelations. We devoted many shows to those revelations. We interviewed many of the reporters. Go back and look at those, what they established. Above all, the most important thing was that these were not autonomous decisions by Twitter to censor the Hunter Biden story, to ban Donald Trump from Twitter, even though he was the sitting president of the United States, to ban Marjorie Taylor Greene, despite being an elected representative. Instead, this is constantly a tidal wave of attempted coercion and influence from obviously very powerful forces inside the government, that if you’re Big Tech and you have big contracts opportunities with the Pentagon, as Amazon does, or the CIA as Amazon does and Microsoft does and Google does, you’re going to take seriously their insistence on what you should censor. And if they tell you that they need you to censor it in the name of national security, you’re going to listen even more closely. So, we know there were all kinds of ties between Facebook and Twitter, and that’s what these executives set out, most of all, to deny today.

So, let’s begin with a statement by Vijaya Godi, the general counsel of Twitter, who has become identified as one of the key players in causing Twitter to censor right-wing voices. And here’s a taste of the kinds of things she had to say today.

(Video 34:52)

Vijaya Gadde: At no point did Twitter otherwise prevent tweeting, reporting, discussing or describing the contents of Mr. Biden’s laptop. People could and did talk about the contents of the laptop on Twitter or anywhere else, including other much larger platforms. But they were prevented from sharing the primary documents on Twitter. Still, over the course of that day, it became clear that Twitter had not fully appreciated the impact of that policy on Free Press and others. As Mr. Dorsey testified before Congress on multiple occasions, Twitter changed its policy within 24 hours and admitted its initial action was wrong. This policy revision immediately allowed people to tweet the original articles with the embedded source materials. Relying on its longstanding practice not to retroactively apply new policies, Twitter informed the New York Post that it could immediately begin tweeting when it deleted the original tweets, which would have freed them to retweet the same content again. The New York Post chose not to delete its original tweets, so Twitter made an exception after two weeks to retroactively apply the new policy to the Post’s tweets. In hindsight, Twitter should have reinstated The Post account immediately.

So, they had to own up to those mistakes, Jack Dorsey did. They can’t sit there and justify what they did. It’s impossible, particularly because the claim that they invoked to justify the censorship turned out to be completely false. It was a CIA lie. But just note how significant that admission is. First of all, even though it’s true that Twitter’s ban on those links lasted only 24 hours, it completely maligned the story in the eyes of the American voter since Twitter found it to be so fraudulent and that it came from Russia. This is Twitter putting its institutional support behind these lies, and it shaped how the American public views these stories. Joe Biden himself, every time he was asked about it by reporters or it was raised in the presidential debate with President Trump, immediately accused whoever asked him of spreading Russian disinformation.

These lies were weaponized over and over and Twitter’s support for it institutionally played a vital role in that. Secondly, none of these accounts for the role Facebook played, a much, much larger platform, and we don’t know to this day how long Facebook’s algorithmic suppression lasted, what effect that had, how many people ended up being manipulated as a result of Facebook’s doing that. But also, again, Facebook joining Twitter for however long and endorsing this outright lie, that this is Russian disinformation, also manipulated the American public and how they thought about it. Beyond that, this is what gave the media the opening that they took eagerly to ratify this lie over and over. We showed you many times before on every news network from NBC and CBS to CNN. They were bringing one member of the U.S. Security State on after the next to repeat the lie that this was Russian disinformation, which not only minimized the importance of the story but played into the Democrat’s narrative, the number one narrative of the Democrats in the media for four years that somehow Trump was a tool of the Kremlin. That’s what this was really designed to do as well. Twitter jumping on board with that just demonstrated how these people who were called before Congress today, who ran Twitter for all those years, were clearly operatives of the Democratic Party and were using censorship, brute censorship in order to do it.

And then that game-playing that she noted at the end where it was kind of a game of chicken. Twitter was saying to The New York Post, “Well, you can come back on to the platform as long as you delete your tweet that we’ve decreed to be in violation of a rule” and the New York Post said, “We’re not going to accept that condition.” I respect the New York Post for doing that. I would do that, too, if I were a journalist, and I knew I had reported the story accurately, and the only way I could use a platform is if I deleted my own reporting, an acknowledgment that I had done something wrong as a condition to being able to get back online.

It took Twitter two weeks to relent and tell The New York Post you can come back to our platform even without deleting that tweet. And of course, that was two weeks of reporting The New York Post is doing at the critical moment with exclusive access to this laptop to report on the Biden family and Joe Biden that Twitter users and therefore millions of people, especially journalists who use Twitter all the time, could not see and were not impacted by.