Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t particularly bright when it comes to evaluating publishers’ compliance with its advertising policies, if the experience of a heterodox economics blog with outsized influence is any indication.
With a megaphone from Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, both darlings of progressives in the “Occupy Wall Street” era, Naked Capitalism accused Google of making “flagrant errors” in its threats to demonetize the 18-year-old site for verboten content.
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Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report” hosts a panel with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “Great Barrington Declaration” co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and NY Post reporter and “Laptop From Hell” author Miranda Devine.
The three were chosen for their bravery in resisting censorship. They discuss the cost of taking a stand as well as the future of free speech and online discourse.
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Reading Matt Taibbi’s summary how the Democrats weaponized the government against Donald Trump, starting before the election of 2016 and proceeding right up to the present moment, I am reminded once again that the issue is not democracy but “Our Democracy™.”
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On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush, exercising “the power vested in [him] as President of the Untied States,” issued Proclamation 7463, a “Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks.” That got the ball rolling on the construction of the surveillance state.
At the time, the extreme measure seemed justified. Three days earlier, the United States had suffered its most devastating terrorist attack in history.
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It’s been nearly six months since the first installment of the Twitter Files — the journalistic effort by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and many others to expose the myriad channels by which the U.S government cooperated with Twitter on content moderation and censorship — was first published. Twitter Files One, perhaps the mildest of more than 20 unique reports, details the social media company’s internal deliberations in the days before the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was removed from the site. Later reports have exposed the tendrils of a governmental apparatus that influenced some of the most significant media distortions in recent American history, from the fraudulent Hamilton 68 misinformation tracking dashboard to the FBI’s intimate involvement with Twitter’s content-moderation practices.
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As this is written, news arrives that a grand jury in Manhattan has indicted former President Donald Trump.
Shocking — not.
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In the 14th installment of the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed how Democrats chose to falsely accuse their opposition of being “Russian bots” even though Twitter directly disagreed with this assessment.
As reported by Fox News, shortly after then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes released his famous memo detailing the efforts that were undertaken to spy on the Trump campaign by intelligence agencies, high-profile Democrats began spreading the lie that Nunes’ information was being promoted by “Russian bots” on Twitter.
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On Tuesday, the eleventh and twelfth installments of the Twitter Files highlighted the role that Congressman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) played in censoring conservative accounts on the platform.
As reported by Fox News, the two back-to-back threads posted by journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter “received an astonishing variety of requests from officials asking for individuals they didn’t like to be banned.” One example was in November of 2020, when Schiff’s office emailed Twitter demanding the banning of several “QAnon conspiracists” on Twitter, which they claimed were responsible for “harassment” against Schiff aide Sean Misko.
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The latest installment of the “Twitter Files” revealed that the FBI acted “as a doorman” for the social media giant to other government agencies, including the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.
“Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track,” journalist Matt Taibbi wrote as he released the ninth batch of internal Twitter files on Saturday evening. “Is today the DOD, and tomorrow the FBI? Is it the weekly call, or the monthly meeting? It was dizzying.”
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Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California said Sunday that Section 230 protections should be repealed if tech companies do not do more to combat “hate and loathing” on their platforms.
“I’m particularly concerned about the practice some of the large tech companies have of, whenever there is a budding, promising new entrant into the market, they buy them out because they don’t necessarily want to develop that product line themself, but they don’t want the competition,” Schiff told CNN host Jake Tapper on State of the Union. “We should absolutely take aim at that and other anti-competitive actions of Big Tech, and I think we’ve got a big problem right now with social media companies and their failure to moderate content and the explosion of hate on Twitter, the banning of journalists on Twitter.”
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The latest “Twitter Files” release, on Friday evening, details the social media platform’s relationship with the FBI and outlined communications between the federal agency seeking takedowns of select posts.
The most recent release is from independent journalist Matt Taibbi, one of several individuals to whom new Twitter CEO Elon Musk has granted access to the company’s internal communications in a bid to highlight the prior management’s efforts to stifle posts that didn’t agree with their world view.
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They got the band back together—to the extent the original members ever broke up in the first place.
Recent disclosures by independent journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed what other reporters have been covering for the better part of two years: According to files obtained by Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media platform protected Joe Biden and his family from a major and potentially election-altering scandal as millions of Americans were voting early for president in October 2020. Years of denials and dismissals related to Hunter Biden’s lucrative shakedown of hostile nations, including Russia and China, were set to explode just a few weeks before Election Day.
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Late Friday, Matt Taibbi used the Twitter platform to publish numerous tweets devoted to the site’s internal deliberations regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story that most major media suppressed during the 2020 election.
The story, which is what it was, is based on documents obtained from the platform’s new owner and is a marketing coup that will drive traffic to the site. It confirms just how savvy Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk, through alternative journalist Matt Taibbi, released a series of internal documents on Friday suggesting that the Biden campaign and Democratic National Committee were able to manipulate speech on the platform through tools that Twitter made available.
That manipulation included the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story first reported by the New York Post. The emails appear to cite requests from “the Biden team” and “DNC” and include confirmations that Twitter “handled” their requests to delete posts.
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The very last op-ed progressive journalist Michael Hastings wrote for BuzzFeed was titled, “Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans.” Ten days later, on June 17, 2013, Hastings emailed his BuzzFeed associates warning them, “The Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates.’ ” He added that he was “onto a big story” and had to go “off the rada[r] for a bit … hope to see you all soon.”
Hastings did not get to see those associates soon or otherwise. In the early morning hours of June 18, his leased Mercedes crashed into a palm tree at high speeds in a residential Los Angeles neighborhood. The car burst into flames upon impact, and Hastings’s body was burned beyond recognition.
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