Free Republic

Ooooh, this is turning out to be such a good show. Before I get into the latest, let’s recap quickly, shall we? The Missouri v Biden lawsuit sprang from underhanded censorship dealings the Biden administration began with the social media companies almost the second they ascended to the throne. Literally 3 days after Biden took office, the government’s censorship operation was flying. The White House immediately launched a pressure campaign on social media platforms to suppress supposed “COVID misinformation.” The Surgeon General launched his signature “disinformation” initiative at a Virality Project event at the Stanford Internet Observatory. And, Biden himself...

A Democratic delegate to Congress appears to have threatened “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi with up to five years in prison for purportedly lying under oath when he testified before Congress last month. Stacey Plaskett (D-USVI) made the threat in an April 13 letter to Taibbi, accusing the Racket News journalist of contradicting his congressional testimony about Twitter in a subsequent interview with MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Intercept reporter Lee Fang. Hasan invited Taibbi onto his show after his March 9 testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of...

The biggest concern is what GEC paid Park Advisors to do: fund and coordinate the censorship of Americans’ speech and our supposedly free press. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center used a cutout corporation headed by a former intelligence officer to fund and promote the blacklisting of conservative media outlets and other censorship endeavors, research by The Federalist reveals. When Elon Musk gave a group of independent journalists access to internal Twitter communications, the resulting “Twitter Files” quickly revealed the existence of a Censorship-Industrial Complex that included an array of federal agencies colluding with social media companies to censor disfavored...

An IRS agent stopped by the home of Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi the same day of his congressional testimony on the weaponization of the government, according to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who’s demanding an explanation over the oddly timed visit. Jordan sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and the Department of Treasury on Monday in hopes of getting to the bottom of why the federal agent appeared at Taibbi’s New Jersey home on March 9 and left a note, according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that cited the letter. The note reportedly instructed...

Matt Taibbi provides more disturbing evidence of how extensive the government’s desire and the outlets’ cooperation were to kill accurate information. Matt Taibbi has just posted the latest batch of internal messages from the social media giant: The Twitter Files #19. This latest release comes just after he and Michael Shellenberger made an appearance before a House Committee regarding the activities at Twitter, and the contentious attitudes and belittling of these reporters by certain House members on March 9 are made even clearer as a result. ... These latest revelations lay out cleanly the organized effort that took place to...

Civil liberties have officially gone out of style, a phenomenon on full display at the Weaponization of Government Hearing at which I just testified. The circus-like scene featured a ranking member calling two journalists a “direct threat,” a Stanford-educated former prosecutor who confused accusation with proof, and a Texas congressman, Colin Allred, who proudly held up the results of an adjudicated criminal case to argue against due process in another arena. When I asked Allred’s permission to point out that he’d just demonstrated that a proper forum for dealing with campaign abuses already existed in the court system, he basically...

“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex. Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing...

The three-hour hearing showed that corporate-government collusion goes far deeper than the major platforms in Silicon Valley. The Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held its second hearing Thursday with a focus on the “Twitter Files” that exposed corporate-government collusion in Twitter’s censorship regime. But the three-hour hearing showed the public-private partnership goes far deeper than the major platforms operating out of Silicon Valley. Lawmakers heard testimony from independent Substack journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, two of the primary reporters who published the series after Elon Musk took over the platform. The pair shared how the...

The battle within cyberspace continues, with mainstream media willing to use every sketchy source possible in order to maintain the great pretending. As many major stories have shown in the past few years, the big battle over human control is taking place on social media platforms as they continue to be manipulated by government agencies. The Twitter Files released have shown just how extensive the government manipulation of information has become. The U.S. State Dept, Dept of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, DOJ, Defense Dept, and a host of ancillary networked agencies and public-private partnership all occupy this space. Essentially, it...

Journalist and author Matt Taibbi noted the U.S. government’s role in creating a “new cottage industry” of “disinformation labs” ostensibly combatting fraudulent online propaganda in the interest of national security in his latest Twitter Files report published Thursday. The “Twitter Files #17” thread focuses on the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a subsidiary of the State Department, and its claimed objective to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.” The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab...

The latest batch of Twitter Files released by Twitter owner Elon Musk blew the lid off a coordinated effort to create “state-sponsored blacklists.” Independent journalist Matt Taibbi, who unveiled the latest batch March 2, pointed to the George Soros-funded Atlantic Council and the government-backed Global Engagement Center as two of the entities responsible for creating blacklists to target Americans. Taibbi reported that “On June 8, 2021, an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab [DFRLab] wrote to Twitter: ‘Hi guys. Attached you will find… around 40k twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior… and...

The Twitter Files show how the FBI deputized Twitter to conduct illegal censorship of American citizens and undermine the First Amendment. ... Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the “Twitter Files” by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The “Twitter Files” story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the “Twitter Files” reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to...

During the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight Committee, Marjorie Taylor Greene went after the former Twitter Executives, specifically Mr. Roth, in a fiery display.

Below is my column in the Hill on the first hearings this week to be held by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It could be one of the most consequential investigations for free speech in decades if it pulls back the curtain on government censorship programs. After the historic release of the Twitter Files by Elon Musk, questions remain on any similar coordination with other social media companies with federal agencies like the FBI to target views considered “disinformation” or “misinformation.” Here is the column: This coming week a new House select subcommittee will hold...

n a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68. Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression. But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the...

In a recent addition to the “Twitter Files,” Matt Taibbi revealed to the public how Twitter — the preferred social media platform of politicians, academics, and journalists — co-opted the algorithmic blacklist of a bipartisan neoliberal propaganda outfit known as Hamilton 68. Hamilton 68 was a digital dashboard that, as my colleague Emily Jashinsky recently discussed, was used to perpetuate and mainstream the myth of Russian interference in American politics through algorithmic censorship and suppression. But it wasn’t just egghead professors, left-wing activist journalists, and the tragically narcissistic (Adam Schiff) who perpetuated the thoroughly repudiated lie that Russia determined the...

Could Google be even worse than Twitter? We don’t use the term ‘bombshell’ lightly. We’ve all been watching as the #TwitterFiles are released bit-by-bit by Elon Musk and his chosen journalists, but this from Kanekoa about the leaked Google files seems like it’s as big of a deal, if not bigger. If nothing else, it just reiterates what Big Tech has been doing (and continues to do) to manipulate what people see, read, believe, and ultimately even how they vote. Used to, when we wrote something like that we’d talk about putting on our tinfoil hats but now, this doesn’t...

Controversial Neoconservative US Diplomat Victoria Nuland, associated with the 2014 coup against Ukraine's Pro-Russian government, is traveling... The latest Twitter Files revelations involve Neoconservatives like writer Bill Kristol and former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Democrat insider John Podesta also... In Washington today Elon Musk meeting Biden Administration officials... US Politics Ronna McDaniel re-elected chair of the Republican National Committee... Trump talking education today saying he has a plan for "ultimate local control"... In Jerusalem tonight a terrorist attack with seven dead... The bodycam video from San Francisco in the incident involving Paul Pelosi... US authorities arresting three people accused...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

On Tuesday, New York magazine published a looooooong hit piece on what a horrible boss Elon Musk supposedly is at Twitter yet the biggest revelation was its admission that it favors censorship. This admission by the authors Zoë Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath appeared in "Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive ranting billionaires — then one made himself the CEO." Before getting around to slamming Musk, the New York authors celebrated the early free speech era of Twitter before absurdly claiming it was somehow ruined by Orange Man Bad.