Twitter files

An Unethical Quote Spectacular!

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

There are a lot of really unethical people saying some astounding things lately. Such as…

1. Incompetent Elected Official Of the Month Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), who completely beclowned herself in the The House Weaponization Subcommittee examination of Twitter Files heralds Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. She was determined to discredit them for daring to reveal the efforts by her party and its allies to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and censor critics, and apparently did no research into te topic of the hearings at all, announcing that she didn’t know what “a substack” was and showing complete ignorance regarding Bari Weiss. (Ah, if only she read Ethics Alarms!) Meanwhile, all of a sudden Democrats oppose journalists’ desire to protect their sources.

2. Not included in the video above was an offensive question by serial unethical House hack Debbie Wasserman Schulz, the former DNC chair who rigged the 2016 primaries for Hillary Clinton. She accused Matt Taibbi of profiting from authoring the “Twitter Files” reports, implying that he was motivated by persoanl profit, saying: “After the ‘Twitter Files,’ your followers doubled … I imagine your Substack readership … increased significantly because of the work that you did for Elon Musk.”

These people really lash out when they’re exposed, don’t they?

3. Over to the Republican side: Jenna Ellis, one of President Trump’s lawyers in the post-election push to have the results examined, admitted in Colorado Bar disciplinary proceedings that she deliberately engaged in the following misrepresentations “for selfish reasons”:

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Catching Up On The Twitter Files, Part 8: So Twitter Basically Has Acted As An Agent Of The U.S. Government!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

From now on, I’m going to use that clip from “The Naked Gun” for all of the Twitter Files reports.

The fact that the mainstream media still is determined to bury this story that has serious implications for health of our democracy, public trust in the government, the apparent independent agendas of government departments and agencies, the threats posed by the “Deep State” and social media’s efforts to control whose opinions  and what information the public is able to receive and assess is itself a major revelation, making the “Twitter Files” one of the most urgent and important news stories of the year.

And it is being ladled out on Twitter in short tweets, which is why the mainstream media thinks its efforts to suffocate the story may work.

The messenger this time is Intercept reporter Lee Fang. This is Part 8; Part 9 came out on Christmas Eve, and I’ll get that posted later today.

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Comment Of The Day: “Still More Twitter Ethics: Musk’s Cynical Poll And Another Twitter Files Summary”

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I’m a bit behind in posts covering the Twitter Files; I’m also behind in posting Comments of the Day. Ethics Alarms veteran Glenn Logan authored one more than a week ago, and had it not been for a recent comment that rang my “Glenn Logan” alarm, this one might have been lost.

Here is Glenn’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Still More Twitter Ethics: Musk’s Cynical Poll And Another”Twitter Files” Summary”…

***

Jack wrote:

“Musk can’t run Twitter by poll, though, if he is truly devoted to promoting free and open public discourse.“

No, you’re right about that. It needs to stop. The optics are very poor to anyone not invested in Twitter at the expense of rational thought.

“The past seven years (or more) make the conclusion unavoidable that the FBI is untrustworthy, partisan, corrupt,dangerous, and a threat to undermine the Republic. That is not a news that easy to process or accept, but it can’t be ignored or shrugged off any more…”

The FBI has always been a problematic venture. It was corrupt nearly from birth, and we are surprised that it somehow has changed its spots over the decades? Sure, there have been a few stretches where it was less corrupt than at others, but at its core, it is a functioning federal bureaucracy with a law enforcement component, largely governed by political partisans.

That partisanship has clearly been allowed to filter down to at least middle management and even the rank-and-file. Throw in the “You’re either with me or against me” politics of the social media age, and how can you not have a corrupt catastrophe?

Disbanding the FBI root and branch would be a huge public service. Continue reading →

The FBI’s Rationalization For Its Twitter Content Manipulation: “We Do This Kind Of Thing All The Time!”

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Well alrighty then! All is well!

The Federal Bureau of Investigation  issued a supposedly exonerating statement today following the latest “Twitter Files” dump, which disclosed information detailing the FBI’s correspondence with Twitter in October 2020. Substack’sMatt Taibbi revealed that the agency warned the previous management at Twitter of a “hack-and-leak” by “state actors” surrounding the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop to influence the 2020 presidential election. The “Twitter Files” also revealed that the FBI and Twitter worked closely in the lead up to the election, with documents published this week showing that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021 for  the expenses entailed by complying with the FBI’s demands/requests. The FBI also flagged certain tweets for Twitter to remove from the platform, the documents show, and FBI agents were  even employed at Twitter during this period.

If I were a publicity experts advising the FBI, my recommendation would be that no comment would be preferable to this statement, which is desperate and damning:

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous detailing companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

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Twitter Files VII: Here’s More News That’s Fit To Print That The NYT Won’t, And Sunlight That The WaPo Will Block To Keep Us In Darkness…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

The latest document drop from Twitter is reported by Michael Shellenberger. I shouldn’t have to do this: real journalists, if there were any, should do it. Yes, I know there’s a Twitter app that will collect tweet-burts like this, but I’m not on Twitter yet and won’t be until I’m certain where this wheel-of-chaos will stop.

As ought to be apparent by now, there are three separate but interlocking ethics matters here. One is, of course, the dastardly and fair election-staining conspiracy by the mainstream news media, social media and the “deep state” intelligence and law enforcement agencies to ensure that Joe Biden won the Presidency in 2020. (No, it is irrelevant that he probably would have won anyway. That is like saying that Barry Bonds deserves to be in the Hall of Fame because he was good enough that he didn’t have to cheat.) The second ethics issue is the implications of the convincing evidence of government agencies using their power and influence to work around the First Amendment and censor speech (and specific individuals) they found inconvenient to their political agendas.

The third is the ongoing refusal of the mainstream media to report this. I regard this the most serious of the three, and the other two are very serious indeed.

Here is “Twitter Files,” part 7. As before, you’ll need to go to the link to see the attachments, which are helpful. A lot is repetitive, but this quote alone is worth reviewing the material: “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — “Bu alumni” — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.”

In Twitter Files #6, we saw the FBI relentlessly seek to exercise influence over Twitter, including over its content, its users, and its data. In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.

The story begins in December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him On Dec 9, 2019, the FBI issues a subpoena for, and takes, Hunter Biden’s laptop. By Aug 2020, Mac Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had discovered evidence of criminal activity. And so he emails Rudy Giuliani, who was under FBI surveillance at the time. In early Oct, Giuliani gives it to@nypost.

Shortly before 7 pm ET on October 13, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, George Mesires, emails JP Mac Isaac. Hunter and Mesires had just learned from the New York Post that its story about the laptop would be published the next day. At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter.The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans. Why is that? What, exactly, happened?

On Dec 2, Matt Taibbi  described the debate inside Twitter over its decision to censor a wholly accurate article. Since then, we have discovered new info that points to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms. First, it’s important to understand that Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China’s government, for which Hunter offered no real work. Here’s an overview by investigative journalist  @peterschweizer

And yet, during all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian “hack and leak” operation. This is from a sworn declaration by Roth given in December 2020:

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Ethics Quote Of The Week: Dinesh D’Souza

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

“The mainstream media can’t risk covering the Twitter Files. If they admit rampant collusion between govt agencies and Twitter, they’ll have to inquire about Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Google. The whole censorship regime would unravel. Better to pretend nothing’s happening!”

—-Conservative scholar and author Dinesh D’Souza, via Twitter, of course.

Whatever one may think of D’Souza, and wherever one may fall in the partisan divide, I don’t see what other explanation there is for the stubborn, self-destructive refusal by the mainstream media to acknowledge what the Twitter files’ reporting by Matt Taibbi et al. has revealed. (Once again today, the New York Times contains no mention of the issue at all.)

It’s a mass, extended Jumbo. Continue reading →

Still More Twitter Ethics: Musk’s Cynical Poll And Another”Twitter Files” Summary

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh. The 6th installment of the “Twitter Files,” this one tweeted out by Matt Taibbi (your host just had to copy and paste 31 damn tweets together to be readable, always what I love doing before a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. This might have something to do with why I just spilled orange juice on my modem…You’re welcome.). It is the most alarming of the installments so far. I can’t wait to read how the Washington Post and the other complicity proto-totalitarians in the news media try to spin this one as a “nothingburger.” It is a given that the main methodolgy will involve simply not reporting on it, as has been the primary response to the earlier “Twitter Files” revelations via substack’s rebel journalists. Let’s see: I haven’t checked today’s digital Times yet: Any mention?….

NO!

The only mentions of Twitter involve Musk’s suspension of journalists (BAD Musk!) discussed here yesterday. The embargo on the Twitter revelations are at least as sinister and outrageous as the Hunter Biden laptop media/social media conspiracy; I confess that I’m surprised at the audacity of the Times and the rest (almost everyone but Fox News and the New York Post, and the conservative websites. Well, the ethics blogs, of course)

A few observations before you commence your assignment as an informed citizen:

  • Musk cagily backtracked on the suspensions using the “poll” devise he employed to justify restoring Trump’s tweeting privileges. He was facing threats by the EU (it was going to be expensive and time-consuming to tell the Europeans “bite me,” though that’s what they deserved and it may have occured to him that Ethics Alarms was right: the banning of so many progressive reporters looked like payback even if it were justifiable. Musk can’t run Twitter by poll, though, if he is truly devoted to promoting free and open public discourse.
  • The past seven years (or more) make the conclusion unavoidable that the FBI is untrustworthy, partisan, corrupt,dangerous, and a threat to undermine the Republic. That is not a news that easy to process or accept, but it can’t be ignored or shrugged off any more.

  • In a complete reversal of positions from what was routine in my youth, Republicans are targeting the FBI for criticism and investigation while Democrats appear to be saying by their silence, “What’s the big deal?” The Republican House Judiciary Committee account tweeted, “Does anyone still trust the FBI?” (“republicans pounce!”)  Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo), speculated that  the FBI’s alleged interactions with Twitter could suggest they were working with Google and Facebook as well. Gee, yah think?

  • Again, because it can’t be over-stated, the mainstream media is deliberately trying to keep the public in the dark about all of it.
  • But the major effect of this seems to be only the further erosion of public trust in the news media. The truth is out there, as Mulder and Scully would say, and it’s sinking in. The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll  finds that nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship.
  • What is described below is, in fact, the U.S. government violating the First Amendment by proxy:

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Further Ethics Observations On “The Twitter Files”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

1. Wow. The mainstream media is really determined to die on this hill. It really believes that if it pretends that there is nothing sinister, undemocratic or dangerous about how a bunch of snotty, self-empowered progressives conspired—and succeeded!–to manipulate public opinion, access to information and public discourse to advance a partisan agenda, eventually everyone will forget about it as if it didn’t happen. This is exactly the approach it took with the Hunter Biden laptop story in the first place, and clearly, it has learned nothing and changed nothing. Bury, deny, and “It isn’t what it is” are still the tactics of choice. And they are certain that the public is, most of it anyway, lazy, apathetic, gullible and stupid.

That, they may be right about.

2. However, this unforgivable attempt to deny an important news event indicts the media as much as the Twitter files indict Twitter. I find it impossible to believe the virtually unanimous reaction to this story hasn’t been coordinated. Continue reading →