We’ve seen a lot of big Twitter bombshells lately. The latest dropped on Tuesday, with the announcement of the firing of James Baker, the former FBI official involved in every turn in the Russiagate probe and the Steele dossier. According to journalist Matt Taibbi, it was discovered that Baker had been viewing the “Twitter files” before their being released to Taibbi.
Elon Musk termed it as his “possible role in the suppression of information.” That raises all kinds of questions of things that might have “disappeared” before Taibbi or Musk saw them. But it also raises a huge red flag that the new owner is looking at because he thinks some things could be harmful to the powers that be.
Now, there’s more news, this time not from Musk or Taibbi, but from America First Legal. They’re saying they have concrete evidence of collusion between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and social media companies to censor “misinformation” in the public square. This included a “Partner Support Portal” – that Twitter ran for government employees and other “stakeholders” – to flag things on Twitter for removal as “misinformation.”
Here’s America First Legal’s thread, which has many of the 600 pages involved in the evidence of collusion.
A couple of highlights from the thread include setting up the portal with Twitter and a CDC official.
They actively removed anything that questioned the narrative on COVID or vaccines.
Setting up a “portal” for the specific reason of flagging accounts surely sounds like it’s screaming First Amendment issues, for all those on the left who were screaming that there was no evidence of Biden/ government involvement. It looks like that’s exactly what it is.
Documents obtained by AFL show Twitter enrolling one government employee, through their personal Twitter account, into this Portal. We know from other publicly related documents, that Facebook has copied this approach for election-related censorship.
This production also reveals that the U.S. government was actively working to “socially inoculate”–or brainwashing–the public against anything that threatened its narrative. It did so by using aligned Big Tech corporations to monitor and manipulate users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. For example, Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it bragged about censoring more than sixteen million “pieces of content” containing opinions or information the U.S. government wanted suppressed.
Finally, the documents reveal the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organization Mafindo” to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia that is funded by Google.
Looks like Elon is going to have even more to look into with all this.