The #TwitterFiles So Far
How a Cabal of Pharisees Sought to Control All Human Interaction On Twitter
“This makes one deride the stupidity of people who believe that today’s authority can destroy tomorrow’s memories. On the contrary, repressions of genius increase its prestige. All that tyrannical conquerors, and imitators of their brutalities, achieve is their own disrepute and their victims’ renown.” - Tacitus [Annals, IV.35]
On December 2nd, after weeks of speculation and innuendo, Elon Musk announced that at 5 PM ET we would be given the information about Twitter’s decision to censor the true Hunter Biden laptop story. From the start, Democrats did everything to downplay this story of Hunter Biden’s brazen corruption, but nothing they could say could change the fact that Twitter censored a true story from The New York Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, and wholly suspended their account right before an election. This is, in and of itself a major story, idiotic claims like “Hunter Biden isn’t running for office” notwithstanding. We were on Musk time, so after more waiting than anyone wanted, we were greeted with the most joyous of revelations: Musk selected the great journalist Matt Taibbi to tell the story. The revelations were slow at first- apparently because notorious former FBI general counsel James Baker was then employed by Twitter and unknown to Musk was preventing the release of key documents against the will of his employer. It turned out that Musk gave both Taibbi and Bari Weiss unprecedented access to Twitter’s internal files, and they put together a team of journalists to release the information to the public- not just about the laptop, but anything they deem of public interest regarding the internal machinations under Twitter’s former owners [an unusual percent of which were “institutional investors,” in and of itself suspect as the company was never reliably profitable.] Much was made by the NPCs over Taibbi’s initial statement that he had to agree to “certain conditions” to get this information [as if that is not always the case when a journalist gets internal information, that is no different than “the condition of anonymity”], but these requirements were simply to publish on Twitter first and use the attribution “sources at Twitter” for unnamed internal sources. Besides those basic conditions, Taibbi stated he has been given free access he has never experienced in his long career. He did say, however, that he and the other journalists have been respectful to Musk and Twitter’s current team, in response to the fact that they themselves are being treated with a great deal of respect.
This is yet another situation that functions as a “Rorschach Test” for if a person believes in free thought or worships at the feet of institutional power. Yet again, the NPCs are using the line of argument we have seen since at least the Snowden revelations, where they say something [in this instance, shadowbanning, etc] is a conspiracy theory until it is proven true, at which point the argument is, “we always knew that was happening, why are you surprised? Also it’s necessary and a good thing.” Really, my hatred for this group of people knows no bounds, and it never ceases to amaze me how they can jump from one thing to another as if truly programmed, with their overweening theme being manipulability and a hatred of free thought. [I would encourage you to look back at Suzi Weiss’s piece “Kony 2012 Never Ended,” showing how that campaign appears to have been the “proof of concept” of manipulating this faction, which later went all-in on Russiagate, Covid, BLM, Ukraine, etc and now on saying Matt Taibbi is “doing PR for the world’s richest man.”] Whether you think the information released has substantial political implications, or is a “nothingburger” [a term I have always hated which has been widely used regarding this story] this is a fascinating look into how a cabal of over-educated useless people sought to control all discourse in service to institutional power. They truly are our modern Pharisees, obsessed with nothing more than controlling thought, asinine rules, their own power, and their proximity to temple revenues. Taibbi perfectly summed up their insane goals at Twitter in thread #3 of what is now known as “The #TwitterFiles”:
To start with we should take a brief look at Elon Musk’s tenure as Twitter’s new owner. It has been nothing if not entertaining, though disappointing at times and leaving users with much anticipation for what is to come. No one has ever done what he is doing before, taking a massive social media company private- it has only gone in the other direction, and clearly people like Zuckerberg and Dorsey have not been competent to move from website creators to managers of huge corporations. Musk had many challenges ahead of him taking over Twitter, as I outlined in a piece in the spring:
Of course, Musk did not read my piece, however, he has still inadvertently followed some of my advice, most notably “causing injuries all at once” with his massive layoffs, and he did indeed punitively purge the prior ruling class, which it was not clear he would do. What I have been most impressed by, and did not consider, is Musk’s penchant for plebiscites- in this instance making decisions by public polling- something which has got a warm response from his supporters but is hated by those who purport to believe in “democracy.” Most notably, he held a poll on unbanning Donald Trump, which he promptly did upon an affirmative result, though Trump has not returned to the platform. He further held a poll on “general amnesty” for accounts which were not involved in illegal activity or egregious spam, something he has failed to implement. He has also brought back some, but not nearly all, prominent banned accounts, and has even interacted with them, which greatly upset those who loved the prior censorship regime. Still, Musk being who he is, things have been erratic, with him making random, poorly thought-through decisions on an ad-hoc basis.
And then, on a great and glorious day, he shone light on Twitter’s prior regime, beginning with their notorious decision to ban The New York Post. I will go over these thread by thread. Three things need to be noted before I start:
1) Twitter is indeed a private company, but it is well established that it is a First Amendment violation for the government to pressure companies to censor where it would be illegal for the government to do so- IE all legal speech.
2) The internal workings of large corporations are indeed of public interest, and the idea that they shouldn’t be held to standards is some bootlicking nonsense that liberals made up when they lost all principles but devotion to power.
3) User agreements go both ways, and these companies are actually obligated to follow their own stated guidelines, especially given the impact that Twitter censorship can have on income [with Musk’s erratic behavior and lack of discipline, he may be causing himself future problems in this regard.]
This starts with confirming what we all knew: from its beginnings as an incredible tool of free mass communication, Twitter became ever more controlled, particularly in the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory when social media heads began to get hauled in front of Congress and there was a panic about Russian “disinformation.” By 2020 various political actors were routinely contacting Twitter and asking for this or that to be taken down. There are direct communications showing them removing content at the request of the Biden team. When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, the internal communications show a lot of uncertainty about the decision to remove the content. There were many concerns about the precedent being set and how Congress, among other people, would view the decision. But they all just kind of went along on the dubious grounds that it was “hacked content.” However, they did not just remove the “offending” post, they wholly banned The New York Post and went as far as to prevent the article from being transmitted via direct message.
The main takeaway is that an internal “Trust and Safety” team, headed by gay hook-up expert Yoel Roth had established a large amount of control within the company, and were acting outside of any established guidelines. One former employee stated, “They just freelanced it. Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.” “Former” deputy general counsel Jim Baker suggested they show “caution,” a seeming endorsement of keeping the story suppressed despite the lack of a clear reason to do so. All of these decisions were made without the knowledge of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who was on the relatively more free speech side of the company.
Of course, the NPCs defended all of this as showing necessary caution about material whose provenance they were uncertain of. The problem is the information was from a major newspaper with its own legal team, and thus the obviously correct decision was to let The New York Post face any consequences for what may have been wrong with the story. It really would have been a different matter if it was posted by an anonymous account. In essence a secretive inner circle at Twitter redefined the company’s role as a platform for disseminating information with this move, including the role of banning major newspapers for reporting information of public interest.
This is all very significant, as polling has shown the laptop story could have swayed the election if it was allowed to air and wasn’t subject to a massive campaign of “former intelligence officials” claiming evidence-free that it was Russian disinformation.
However, Taibbi said he had seen no evidence that the federal government was involved, which would make this just a biased decision by a private company, and not a First Amendment issue. What we didn’t know at the time, is there was a reason Taibbi hadn’t seen such evidence.
Taibbi ended his thread for the night, and Musk told us to expect more the next day. We waited, and waited, those of us who cared living our lives on Musk time. And then, days later, we got a reason for the delay, and it was a doozy:
It turns out, though Taibbi had referred to Baker as the “former” deputy general counsel of Twitter, he was still working there, something which may have entirely escaped Musk’s notice. A lawyer close to Musk had been tasked with delivering the documents to Taibbi and Weiss, but there was a problem with the delivery. Some figure named Jim had taken it upon himself to “vet” the documents before giving them to journalists. That is to say, without Musk’s permission this swamp creature was choosing which internal files they were given access to. Taibbi writes,
“The process for producing the “Twitter Files” involved delivery to two journalists (Bari Weiss and me) via a lawyer close to new management. However, after the initial batch, things became complicated. Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.” “My jaw hit the floor,” says Weiss.”
Even after Musk’s purchase the FBI apparatchik who was deeply involved in the most egregious “Russiagate” lies was still managing to use the platform to control public access to information which could benefit Republicans and harm Democrats. Baker was unceremoniously “exited” from the building, and will most likely soon be telling us the line at the unemployment office is a Russian plot [just kidding, I’m sure he will find another cushy job where he can peddle disinformation while suppressing real information.] Of course, the NPCs justified this as just a lawyer doing his job, we are crazy to think there is anything sketchy about this career spook acting against his boss and in the interests of the elite class and the national security state .
With Baker out of the way, the saga was able to continue.
This thread was very much what we already knew, however, we did not know how formal their process was, and got our first look at their internal shadowbanning apparatus [we also learned that Bari Weiss didn’t know how to take screenshots and was photographing her computer screen, something she fixed by the next thread.] Here is renowned doctor Jay Bhattacharya, a signer of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” which advocated a targeted approach to covid management based on the 2019 understanding of epidemiology. This is a leading medical scientist being censored by a sociologist of promiscuous gay sex on the spurious grounds that he is promoting harmful medical “misinformation.”
A more extreme example is provided by the notorious page Libs of TikTok, one of the most suppressed things on Twitter to not have been outright permanently removed:
Twitter, including Jack Dorsey under oath before Congress, had sworn repeatedly that the company did not shadowban, despite that everyone knew this was untrue. As well all know, to the class of people with institutional power in our society, it’s not a lie if you have a fancy euphemism, to wit:
“What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches. All without users’ knowledge. We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.”
This truly was an information war, where a specific class of people ensured that their ideology was boosted and all dissent was suppressed. Their internal communications show they knew Libs of TikTok didn’t break their stated rules. What’s more, as with the Club Q shooting, Libs of TikTok was, without evidence, blamed for putting hospitals at risk of violence by accurately reporting on their depraved genital mutilation of children. Meanwhile, when page-runner Chaya Raichick was “doxxed,” that is to say her home address was released on a post that got over 10,000 “likes,” Twitter determined this was not a violation and apparently didn’t constitute a threat to her personal safety.
Having covered the Hunter Biden laptop and Twitter’s widespread use of shadowbans, the revelations moved into an even more egregious realm of doing whatever they want: banning the sitting President of the United States for spurious reasons despite having a standing policy of not banning world leaders. Their cause, of course, was alleging that Trump “incited” the riot on January 6th, which they call an “insurrection.” The reality is the ban actually suppressed clear evidence that Trump called for peace and to respect law enforcement.
As Taibbi explains, the groundwork for removing Trump was already in place as Twitter executives were increasingly using violations, or “vios” as they call them, to do whatever they wanted to do anyway. It is clear that Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” team was in near-constant contact with federal law enforcement, who were ostensibly working for the Trump Administration but quite clearly have no master or nation and did everything to destroy him. Here is Yoel Roth explaining his schedule:
It should be no surprise that people this enamored with power itself should feel flattered to receive this attention from federal agencies. A lower level safety operations team appears to have had some concern about following their own rules, but they were overpowered by a small panel headed by Roth and the head of Twitter’s legal department, Vijaya Gadde. They knew the risks they were taking in showing extreme bias in the moderation process while also working with federal agencies, but regardless proceeded to use their power to politically shape the country as they saw fit. This includes taking action which was directly instigated by the FBI:
It’s notable that these requests were coming from both the FBI and from Biden’s team, but not from Trump’s Whitehouse or Trump’s campaign, as far as we currently know- and anything that did come from Trump was in a much smaller volume:
This part of the story also begins to prominently feature a man named Patrick Conlon, who is another spook whom Twitter hired for unclear reasons:
Here this gentleman can be seen explaining that they have invented new enforcement tools specifically to deal with Trump:
This brings us back what I quote at the beginning, where Taibbi explains their impossible goal,
“This is all necessary background to J6. Before the riots, the company was engaged in an inherently insane/impossible project, trying to create an ever-expanding, ostensibly rational set of rules to regulate every conceivable speech situation that might arise between humans. This project was preposterous yet its leaders were unable to see this, having become infected with groupthing [sic], coming to believe – sincerely – that it was Twitter's responsibility to control, as much as possible, what people could talk about, how often, and with whom. The firm’s executives on day 1 of the January 6th crisis at least tried to pay lip service to its dizzying array of rules. By day 2, they began wavering. By day 3, a million rules were reduced to one: what we say, goes”
By the time of the riots, any semblance of sense and fairness had gone out the window in Twitter’s internal communications, and to the extent they showed any restraint it was simply a matter of how they might have to explain it to the press or Congress, and some tepid concern about backlash making it worse, there was no genuine concern for fairness, honesty, the company’s original goals, or the agreements they claimed to be in with users. January 7th was a frantic day as they prepared to ban Trump:
From Trump’s initial announcement of running for President, where he said the thing about how Mexico was “not sending their best,” the general political and economic establishment had not known how to handle him, and decided on a regime of constant panic. Twitter had faced calls to ban him for years over his various zany statements that generally did not break any meaningful rules. After the January 6th riots, they felt that they had full cause, and by January 8th he would be disappeared from social media while still residing in the Whitehouse. Dorsey was on vacation in French Polynesia, leaving Roth and Gadde largely in charge of the situation. As was pointed out by many, Twitter’s staff was overwhelmingly Democrat, and Roth had referred to Trump as an ACTUAL NAZI in 2017. The internal pressure to “finally” ban Trump was enormous. Dorsey encouraged them to stick with their actual policies, which was not satisfactory for Twitter’s other leaders:
With all the excitement about the possibility of banning Trump, Roth felt compelled to remind people to actually consider the consequences of their actions. Then he excitedly announced that they had gotten permission to proceed on banning Trump on “civic integrity” grounds. They proceeded to discuss how to also ban QAnon and “Kraken” related content [“Kraken” being the never-materialized “information” promoted by lawyer Sidney Powell, which was meant to somehow keep Trump in office.] They put Trump on a status where they could ban him for any “vio” [and as we’ve already established they were using “vios” however they wanted.] From there, it was just a matter of waiting for Trump to be Trump so they could make something up. They even worked on banning Trump-supporting Congressman Matt Gaetz despite Roth acknowledging directly that it “doesn’t fit, duh.” At this point Roth stated that the world changes faster than Twitter policy so they would just do whatever they want:
One junior employee pointed out that if they do this, users would [correctly] perceive a conspiracy theory where they all sit in backrooms and decide what people can and cannot see, which of course is exactly what happened, and we did all realize it. Twitter, did the same as Facebook, and threw out its own rulebook, all for the sake of banning Trump. This brings us to the act itself.
On January 8th Trump Tweeted two things, one calling those who voted for him “patriots” and another saying he would not attend Biden’s inauguration. Though everyone who was still operating at such a level where their job was observing and enforcing Twitter policy saw these things were not violations ,there was enormous pressure from below, and desire from above, to ban Trump. Most notably, an open letter from 300 employees was published in the oligarchy mouthpiece rag The Washington Post. This is particularly interesting as they publicized what they should have had the sense to keep behind the curtain and had no shame about their complete lack of interest in fairness, precedence, and free public discourse. Less than 90 minutes after it was determined that Trump had not violated policy, Gadde started pushing the notion that Trump’s tweets were a “coded” incitement to violence. Twitter employees began to say ridiculous things like that Trump should be viewed as the leader of a cult or terrorist organization. This is when we get to what, in my view, is the most funny part of this whole thing:
“Multiple tweeps have quoted The Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders — which, as someone responsible for our policies who had direct family members in Auschwitz, is not exactly an environment I want to wade into.”
Even this doesn’t discourage Roth, nor make him think transparency is necessary, as he goes on to say of Dorsey’s desire to simplify their reasoning, “Which god help us makes me think he wants to share it publicly.”
They very clearly knew they were doing something wrong which would not be acceptable to the public. This is an actual conspiracy by a private corporation to suppress the sitting President of the United States in favor of a political opponent, in contravention of all of their own policies and alleged values. Of course, as many including Weiss pointed out, several world leaders have remained on Twitter when they have literally called for war and violence against various opponents [Weiss lists several examples in her thread.]
So, they banned Trump for spurious grounds, and there was great joy within Twitter, which is amusing now that most of them lost their jobs. It was indeed historic, though not in the way they wanted it to be:
And from there, they were immediately ready to use this new power in all of the ways, most notably, the censorship cause of the time, the covid scam:
Across the world, many prominent leaders saw the dangers of Trump’s ban at the hands of a powerful tech corporation with great influence in global communications, but it was roundly cheered by American “progressives,” who seem to think they can live by censorship alone.
This is what we have learned so far. Seeing their censorship interface was perhaps the most interesting to me, and Musk has hinted at us all being allowed to see our own status. However, Musk is still being wildly erratic, playing things by ear, and making random promises he has no apparent intention of keeping. Still, this saga has been incredible. We rarely get an insight into how this class of people who have so much influence in society function. You can be assured that Facebook, Google, and other tech corporations are as bad or worse, and that our chances of ever seeing inside of them are minimal. This is the new elite trying to create a sort of “Newspeak” where they restrict what we say and do and decide what language is required and what is forbidden. They are sad, hateful people who hate the human spirit, and see the internet as an instrument of control instead of liberation. It’s noteworthy that Dorsey in a way holds less blame and tried to steer Twitter towards remaining a sort of neutral town square, but he completely lost control of his creation and it turned into a sort of monster of unhappy, emotionally fragile people who held unclear jobs that involved little work. Twitter was basically controlled by Gadde and this “Trust and Safety” cabal who were completely untrustworthy and cared little about real world safety instead caring only that the most ridiculous and neurotic people in our society were reassured in their delusions and kept in their insulated bubble- as evidenced by the fact that all of the liberal journalist types say Twitter has turned into a right-wing hellscape but to right-wing users the site is basically the same. It’s not clear how this rot began, but some exposure is perhaps the only way it can end.
What is even more distressing, is the sycophants who actually believe that Roth and Gadde were indeed on a noble crusade to protect public discourse from the general public. This elite group are truly as were the Pharisees, and have convinced many of the unwashed masses that they can be a source of salvation if they will just follow the “law” as the Roths and Gaddes of the world describe it.
To me, what we’ve seen so far is not even going to be the most interesting part, as we truly did all know there was a vast conspiracy to silence conservative [and dissident leftist] no matter how they denied it. These journalists are still going through vast troves showing the malfeasance or this group that has penetrated every power center in our society in concert with the so-called “intelligence community. Now it is time to see what they did with covid, especially given Fauci’s admission that his daughter worked for Twitter, something we only found out in a deposition. Musk has very clearly “hinted” that Fauci directly influenced Twitter’s censorship policy during the fake “pandemic,” which would be a direct First Amendment violation which could potentially lead to criminal charges:
Hopefully this is where the journalists go next, because I am sure the insane covid censorship regime makes suppressing conservative voices look like nothing by comparison. Sadly though, those who can be “awakened” already know all of this, and the NPCs are beyond reason. Still, those of us who value truth want to, nay, must, see it.
And just before publishing, Musk posted this:
I wait with bated breath. Will we get the #CovidFiles soon?
Update: Part 6, presumably what Musk was referring to, was posted shortly after publication. It shows that the FBI routinely requested Twitter take down specific legal content, including obvious jokes from low-follower accounts. This is a clear First Amendment violation and is unquestionably illegal:
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main content will always be free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. [Payment in dogecoin preferred.] I have a tip jar at Ko-Fi where generous patrons can donate in $5 increments. I have started a Telegram channel The Wayward Rabbler. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler, though of course those bastards don’t show posts to anyone. You can see my shitposting on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.