We are still just watching, evaluating, seeing how this plays out, without making any determination about motive or intent. However, that said, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is beginning to go to the quiet places that no mainstream media has ever gone before.
Stunningly, with the recent discoveries of Twitter manipulating the free flow of information in the U.S as an example, Elon Musk now engages the discussion of how far social media platforms have gone to support the U.S State Department. Mr. Musk notes the ideologues within Twitter were engaged in tilting the outcome of the election in Brazil:
(Source)
If this direction of inquiry is maintained, it is very likely people will find themselves at the origin of the U.S. Government working with social media platforms to manipulate political outcomes. The origin of that relationship is the ‘Arab Spring’, specifically the uprising in Egypt and neighboring Libya in 2011.
While average Americans were caught up with ObamaCare news in 2010, President Obama was building out a massive influence campaign in Egypt to install a Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi. Almost no-one was paying attention to the State Dept enlisting Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey into using social media to manipulate a population.
Zuckerberg and Dorsey were enlisted in the endeavor by like-minded travelers in Obama’s tight circle. At the time the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was John Kerry, and the Secretary of State was Hillary Clinton. The U.S. State Department was in direct alignment with the White House policy objectives.
It wasn’t until the lambs were directed into the social media trap and took over Tahir Square, that most Western media began reporting in depth what was going on. However, by the time people realized Obama and Clinton had used social media to open the Big Cat cages in the zoo, it was too late.
By the time the young Egyptians realized they’d been snookered by Islamic extremists, Hosni Mubarek was gone, the jails were open, a no-longer-captive Mohammed al-Zawahiri (brother to al-Qaeda’s #2 banana Ayman al-Zawahiri) was stirring up trouble; and the radical Islamists protected by the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood were gang raping CBS correspondent producer Lara Logan just off camera.
After a few months of rising extremism, the crucifixion of Coptic Christians began. The snookered peacenik revolutionaries looked up from their cell phones and realized they’d listened to a manipulated narrative on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, they had elected Mohammed Morsi, a violent extremist in alignment with al-Qaeda (AQIM).
Weeks later President Morsi disbanded the entire Egyptian judiciary and court system. Morsi was only days away from instituting Sharia Law as the national governing legal authority in Egypt when a stunned people cried out for the only possible person who could save them, Commanding General of the military Abdel al-Sisi.
That is how President al-Sisi came to power. Essentially, a populist reaction to the radical Islamists that were installed by President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Facebook and Twitter were two of the tools Obama and Clinton used to manipulate the Egyptian electorate.
In the fall of 2013, the secular majority of Egyptian people begged the military to rid of the Islamist regime which was killing its own citizens. They begged for freedom knowing they were duped into exchanging one form of poor freedom governance in Mubarak, for an even worse loss of freedom in Morsi.
The military listened. They removed Morsi, dispatched the Muslim Brotherood, eliminated radical hardline Islamic extremism, and put al-Qaeda affiliated Muhammed al-Zawahiri back in jail.
After a period of internal turmoil as the military got the radical jihadists under control, the military leaders then moved to hold elections to vote on a constitution to protect freedom. This “freedom constitution” was approved by 98% of those who voted in the election.
From the traditional view of “democracy”, you would think this outcome would be viewed by the U.S. administration as a good thing. However, that was not the case; Secretary Kerry and President Obama’s administration were furious that freedom and democracy gave rise to a true Egyptian democracy that respects the minority. Where Obama praised the rise of Morsi, he soon scorned the rise of freedom with al-Sisi.
In many very direct ways, the uprisings in Egypt and Libya were the beta test for how the United States government could weaponize social media to work in a public-private partnership toward the goals of the Obama administration.
There is a direct thread connecting Tahir Square, Egypt, to Ferguson Missouri, USA.
Fast forward a few years and that exact same influence scenario played out domestically in the 2020 election.