http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57387.htm
The Twitter Files
The Mechanism for Terminating Free Speech on the Internet has already been Put in Place
“The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future.” Elon Musk, Free Speech Absolutist
“By opening up Twitter’s own internal documents, they have the opportunity to detail how Twitter users have been secretly manipulated, managed, and muzzled — for years — around the world — on multiple topics of first-order significance.” Matt Bivens M.D.
Did Twitter executives censor a story that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election? Did they deliberately suppress information the public needed to make an informed decision about how to cast their ballot? Was candidate Trump damaged by Twitter’s meddling? Did it cost him the election?
It did cost him the election, at least the American people think so. Check out this excerpt from an article at the New York Post:
Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll.
A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.
On the subject of the 2020 election, 79% overall said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that “a truthful interpretation of the laptop” would have resulted in the reelection of former President Donald Trump instead of the election of President Biden.
The poll results, derived from an initial survey of 1,335 adults, have a “credibility interval” of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points, according to the TIPP.” (“79% say ‘truthful’ coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop would have changed 2020 election”, New York Post)
Some readers will recall that in 2016 when FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails 11 days before the election, Hillary’s public approval ratings plunged dramatically and never recovered. That’s how seriously Americans take the charge of “corruption”. So, we can assume that wider circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story would have produced the same result. The suggestion that Joe Biden may have been implicated in a multi-million dollar influence-peddling scam would likely be enough to torpedo his prospects in the general election. Fortunately for Biden, Twitter opted to squash the story and prevent anyone from even linking to the original article at the New York Post. Thus, the allegations of corruption passed mostly under-the-radar allowing Biden to squeak out a victory. What the incident shows is that censorship can be used to derail democracy which should concern us all. Check out this brief recap from an article at Opindia:
‘The Twitter Files’ contain internal communications, pertaining to the censorship of the Hunter Biden story on the social media platform. Following the revelation, it became clear that (the former Legal Head of the social media platform Vijaya) Gadde was at the helm of the censorship exercise under the garb of vague and arbitrary rules.
Ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections, the New York Post published an explosive story about Hunter Biden’s problematic emails with a Ukrainian gas company executive from Burisma… The report had several documents and mentioned a video that proved that Joe Biden met a high-profile businessman from Ukraine when he was Vice President of the United States.
Reports suggested that Biden might have helped his son Hunter using his influence as the VP of the United States in his business in Ukraine… it was eventually confirmed that the laptop’s contents did really belong to Hunter Biden.” (“Americans demand ex-Twitter Legal Head Vijaya Gadde be sent to prison, accuse her of rigging 2020 US Presidential elections“, Opindia)
Check out this 2 minute clip of Former Twitter Safety Chief Yoel Roth explaining why the satirical website Babylon Bee had to be censored by Twitter.
Video Link
The laptop article was well-researched and made no spurious claims about Biden’s possible involvement. Even so, Twitter execs considered the implications too explosive to ignore so they cobbled together a makeshift tale about “Russian disinformation” (a claim for which there is not a scintilla of evidence.) and then conducted a de facto purge of anyone alluding to the original article.
Behind the scenes, however, the Twitter team knew the “hack” story was a fraud from the get-go but pushed it anyway for purely partisan reasons. Here’s Glenn Greenwald commenting on Twitter’s response:..
“Not only is there no evidence that the documents used by the NY Post were the by-product of “hacking” by Russia or anyone else — Twitter’s false excuse for banning discussion of the story — the NYT has confirmed that the laptop was left and never picked up at the repair store.” Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald
And, here’s Aaron Mate who is even more blunt:
The claim that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” was a blatant lie that resulted in blatant censorship… @aaronjmate
What this incident tells us, is that Twitter’s executives were not only censoring responsible, well-researched journalism for purely political reasons, but were also working with their allies in the government who assisted Twitter in identifying stories or people who they wanted silenced. The fact is, no one disputes the cozy relationship that now exists between the social media giants and their partners on Capitol Hill or the White House. They are two wheels on the same axle. Here’s an excerpt from a article by Johnathan Turley at The Hill:
As many of us have long suspected, there were back channels between Twitter and the Biden 2020 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to ban critics or remove negative stories. Those seeking to discuss the scandal were simply “handled,” and nothing else had to be said….
…The documents do not show a clear role or knowledge by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, the censor in chief appears to be Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer who has been criticized as a leading anti-free speech figure in social media.
There also is James Baker, the controversial former FBI general counsel involved in the bureau’s Russia collusion investigation. He left the FBI and became Twitter’s deputy general counsel….
at the apparent request of the 2020 Biden campaign and the DNC, Twitter seems to have routinely stopped others from discussing or hearing opposing views. The internal company documents released by Musk reinforce what we have seen previously in other instances of Twitter censorship…
These documents show a back channel existed with President Biden’s campaign officials, but those same back channels appear to have continued to be used by Biden administration officials. If so, that would be when Twitter may have gone from a campaign ally to a surrogate for state censorship. As I have previously written, the administration cannot censor critics and cannot use agents for that purpose under the First Amendment.
That is precisely what Musk is now alleging. As the documents were being released, he tweeted, “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.” (“Censorship by surrogate: Why Musk’s document dump could be a game changer“, The Hill)
The implication is clear, the government and its agencies are now working hand-in-hand with the social media companies in an effort to shape narratives so they align with the political agenda of the people in power. This is a war on ordinary people who depend on the free flow of information to make informed decisions on matters critical to their own survival. The greatest proponent of that war on free speech is the government itself which is progressively merging with the social media companies in order to control what people say, hear and think. Naturally, the moneyed interests behind the politicians and deep state operatives, take great interest in the outcome of this struggle. There has always been a significant group of elites in America who believe that individual freedom must be sacrificed to create a more orderly society. The relentless attack on free speech suggests that this element now has the upper hand and will use it to their own advantage.
Here’s another short video of Yoel Roth justifying the banning of Donald Trump based on emotional “trauma” which Roth inexplicably sees as legitimate reason to silence the president of the United States.
An article by Matt Bivens at Substack provides a window into the goings-on at Twitter and how the cozy relationship between the executives running the platform and their allies in the national security state grew even cozier as time passed. Here’s a clip from Bivens piece titled Twitter Is Fun Again:
As the 2020 election loomed, the FBI was hosting weekly meeting with executives from Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants to discuss, essentially, how to police social media. …
Yoel Roth, who at Twitter carried the Robespierrean title of Head of Site Integrity, has testified that he and other industry peers in the months before the 2020 election had “regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI … regarding election security.”
“During these weekly meetings, [Roth testified] the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October … I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has also said the FBI was giving his social media platform a similar warning.
Let this sink in. Weeks before the story of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop broke, FBI officials were laying the groundwork — at Twitter, at Facebook, and no doubt beyond — to squelch it.” (“Twitter Is Fun Again”, Matt Bivens M.D., Substack)
Bivens timeline helps us to understand exactly how the social media companies began their collaboration with the national security state. Inquiring minds will wonder why the executives of these organizations were meeting regularly with “ the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI”. The answer, I think, is fairly obvious. The vast majority of critical thinking people now get their news on the internet which means that elites are more determined than ever to corrupt that ecosystem in the same way they destroyed mainstream news. That is why agents of the state have infiltrated the various platforms in order to use their coercive powers to shape a narrative that garners public support for unpopular, elitist objectives, like war and tax cuts for the wealthy. In short, the tentacles of the state now extend across the social media landscape which is impeding the free flow of news, opinion, research and commentary. Elites have never been more determined to quash the free exchange of ideas on the social media sites and to transform the Internet into another rancid institution that reiterates the same false narratives and propaganda one hears daily on the cables news channels. The Biden laptop story gave us a chance to see how quickly these agents can swing into action when a brushfire they hadn’t expected suddenly breaks out. The story was buried in a matter of hours which illustrates how adept they have become at stomping out the truth. Here’s more from Bivens:
“… when The New York Post … broke the bizarre story that…Biden’s son had abandoned a laptop at a computer repair shop; that it had all sorts of embarrassing and incriminating material on it…. Twitter, moving swiftly to suppress The New York Post’s story, immediately shut down the entire newspaper’s Twitter account. It stayed shut down for two weeks — in a 21st century equivalent to the old game of smashing presses, and gathering up and burning newspapers…. If ordinary Twitter users tried to share links to the story, Twitter removed them.
Taibbi picks up the story:
Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography. Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi.” (“Twitter is Fun Again!”, Matt Bivens M.D., Substack)
The response of Twitter’s executives to the Hunter Biden laptop story can lure one into thinking that that it was an ‘isolated incident’ that probably won’t happen again. But that misses the point entirely. What we are seeing is the installation of a new security infrastructure that is explicitly aimed at preventing the free exchange of ideas. The government has gone to great lengths to implement this repressive system, mainly because, among elites, there is nearly-universal support for rolling back the First Amendment and impeding the uninhibited circulation of ideas, viewpoints and critical analysis. All of these pose a significant threat to the political agenda of the people in power. They don’t want to deal with that, which is why they have dispatched their lackeys at the FBI and the other agencies to use their coercive influence to persuade honchos at the social media companies to censor those journalists, critics or dissidents who veer from the “official narrative” or who dare to expose truths that they do not want exposed.
Bottom line: All the pieces are being put in place to ensure that free speech won’t survive the decade. The Twitter Files help us to see what is going on, but they do not provide a plan for fighting back.
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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/12/12/a-hair-trigger-on-endgame/
A Hair Trigger on Endgame
The insouciance of Washington and its European puppets toward the dangerous situation they are provoking with Russia is frightening. The Western world is now led by people who have made it clear that they will risk nuclear war in their pursuit of American hegemony. Evil has clearly triumphed in the Western world.
Russia’s nuclear doctrine is based on the “launch on warning” concept, which envisions nuclear weapons’ use in the face of an imminent nuclear attack spotted by its early warning systems.
“When the early warning system receives a signal about a missile attack, we launch hundreds of missiles that are impossible to stop,” he said, smiling. “Enemy missile warheads would inevitably reach the territory of the Russian Federation. But nothing would be left of the enemy too, because it’s impossible to intercept hundreds of missiles. And this, of course, is a factor of deterrence.”
“We are just thinking about it. They weren’t shy to openly talk about it during the past years,” Putin said, referring to the U.S. policy, as he attended a summit in Kyrgyzstan of a Moscow-dominated economic alliance of ex-Soviet nations.
For years, the Kremlin has expressed concern about U.S. efforts to develop the so-called Conventional Prompt Global Strike capability that envisions hitting an adversary’s strategic targets with precision-guided conventional weapons anywhere in the world within one hour.
“Speaking about a disarming strike, maybe it’s worth thinking about adopting the ideas developed by our U.S. counterparts, their ideas of ensuring their security,” Putin said with a thin smile, noting that such a preemptive strike was intended to knock out command facilities.
He claimed that Russia already has commissioned hypersonic weapons capable of carrying out such a strike, while the U.S. hasn’t yet deployed them. He also claimed that Russia now has cruise missiles that surpass their U.S. equivalents.
While Putin appeared to refer to conventional precision-guided weapons when he talked about possibly mimicking the U.S. strategy, he specifically noted that the U.S. hasn’t ruled out the first use of nuclear weapons.
“If the potential adversary believes that it can use the theory of a preemptive strike and we don’t, it makes us think about the threats posed by such ideas in other countries’ defensive posture,” he said.
In Washington, advisers to President Joe Biden viewed Putin’s comments as “saber-rattling” and another veiled warning that he could deploy a tactical nuclear weapon, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of the anonymity.
The official noted that Russian military doctrine has long stated that Moscow reserves the right to first use of a nuclear weapon in response to large scale military aggression....
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https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/14/patrick-lawrence-in-ukraine-the-autumn-of-oligarchs/
In Ukraine, the Autumn of Oligarchs
The nice thing about being an oligarch is that you are so wealthy it doesn’t matter that you are looked upon as a predatory pariah. The nice thing about being an American oligarch, such as Jeff Bezos, is that America does not have oligarchs: It has highly successful business executives and entrepreneurs. Jeff Bezos can build Amazon into something that looks very like a monopoly, he can own The Washington Post and sign contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, he can have a net worth of $114 billion. But he is still a highly successful businessman, not an oligarch. He is a “job-creator,” a phrase of which I have long been fond.
The new fashion among government officials, economists, think tank inhabitants, bankers, investors, multilateral bureaucrats, and the journalists who faithfully copy down what they say is to forecast what kind of place Ukraine will be once the war is over. And here’s the thing: Ukraine has oligarchs, and the postwar Ukraine these people have in mind cannot have oligarchs. Highly successful business executives and entrepreneurs with vast holdings, the same holdings from which they now profit, O.K. But they have to be executives and entrepreneurs, not oligarchs.
Nomenclature is all when it comes to postwar Ukraine, you see. Jeff Bezos and the reporters whose checks he signs understand this very well.
The working assumption among the people given to big think is that the Kyiv regime and its Western backers will prevail against the Russian Federation and have their way in postwar Ukraine. We can leave the wisdom or otherwise of this prognosis for another time. Of immediate importance is that those beginning to plan for the future anticipate “a new, strong, European Ukraine,” a Ukraine that “will follow a European or U.S. model,” a nation with “more lawyers and less [sic] bribers,” “a free-market Ukraine.”
These phrases can all be found in a long takeout The Washington Post published Dec. 8 under the headline, “War has tamed Ukraine’s oligarchs, creating space for democratic change.” This is The Post’s contribution to the conversation about what Ukraine will look like and how its economy will work once Russian forces have been beaten back across Ukraine’s eastern border. In 4,200 words, Jeff Bezos’s newspaper wants to tell us that all will be well in postwar Ukraine, where oligarchs will be no more and the business executives they have become will make Ukraine democratic, modern, and—a neoliberal code word here—efficient.
Ukraine’s crop of oligarchs, like the Russian Federation’s, date to the years immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union. What the inebriated Boris Yeltsin, tool of neoliberal Clintonians, did to post–Soviet Russia, Leonid Kuchma did to Ukraine. Kuchma’s presidency, from 1994 to 2005, was a godawful mess of fraud, corruption, and media censorship. Among much else, he set in motion and oversaw the same sort of rapacious, free-for-all privatization schemes Yeltsin got going in Russia. Your typical Ukrainian oligarch active during the Kuchma years will have paid taxi fare for state-owned and–operated assets worth billions.
In Ukraine’s case, a weak central government and underdeveloped institutions meant that corruption per capita, let’s say, was often worse than in the Russian Federation. It ran to the very foundations of society and government. The people policing corruption were corrupt. Those who assumed high office were corrupt. Petro Poroshenko, who replaced the corrupt but duly elected Viktor Yanukovych after the U.S.–orchestrated coup in 2014, made an oligarch-sized fortune in chocolate candy.
The Post piece offers a useful example of how this worked. In 2004, Kuchma’s penultimate year in office, an oligarch named Rinat Akhmetov and another oligarch named Viktor Pinchuk paid $800 million for Kryvorizhstal, a major state-owned steelmaker. Pinchuk had married Kuchma’s daughter two years prior to this transaction.
Everyone savvy in these matters knew the price Akhmetov and Pinchuk paid for Kryvorizhstal was preposterously low, a brazen rip-off of an asset rightfully the property of the Ukrainian people. Viktor Yushchenko canceled the deal after he replaced Kuchma as president in 2005. The government then sold Kryvorizhstal to Mittal Steel, an Indian company now part of Netherlands-based ArcelorMittal, for $4.8 billion.
“The transaction was clearly corrupt,” The Post quotes Yushchenko as saying, presumably in a recently conducted retrospective interview. Yushchenko came to power as a reformist in consequence of the late–2004, early–2005 Orange Revolution—this after he was poisoned and badly disfigured with dioxin by nobody knows who. Still popular among Western liberals, he is occasionally quoted in support of the Zelensky regime’s war against Russia.
Yushchenko did not have an oligarch problem and wasn’t one himself. But neither did he manage to tame them, to take The Post’s phrase. Volodymyr Zelensky, the current president, has had an oligarch problem the whole of his political career. As a TV comedian who became president, he was more or less invented by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch (media, banking, diversified businesses organized as the Privat Group) with long tentacles reaching into government and politics.
Kolomoisky is among the richest of Ukraine’s oligarchs and apparently among its most corrupt. Last year the Justice Department banned him from entering the U.S., and, in apparent response, Zelensky began to distance himself from his former (let us assume former) patron. First, he stripped Kolomoisky, who resides in Israel, of his Ukrainian citizenship.
And then something interesting. Zelensky went on to introduce what he called his “de-oligarchization” bill in the Rada, Ukraine’s legislature. It passed easily into law a year ago last month. You haven’t read much about this law—if you have read anything of it, indeed—because it does not seem to have made any difference. So far as I can make out, Zelensky saw a political opportunity when his sagging support indicated he needed one: Being seen to act against the nation’s parasitic oligarchs is a surefire boost among the ordinary Ukrainians whose assets many of them have stolen.
The most interesting thing about the de-oligarchization law is not its ineffectiveness but its definition of an oligarch. Here we begin to approach the true point of The Post’s piece about these people. In The Post’s words:
The new law defines an ‘oligarch’ as anyone who meets at least three of four criteria: influence in politics, media holdings, economic monopolies, and minimum assets of $100 million.
Let us use the Zelensky law as a mirror. In it we find that oligarchs are too visibly and directly influential among Ukrainian politicians and holders of high office, they make political use—again, too visibly—of overly concentrated media empires, and they steamroll competitors in the industries where they dominate. We can leave out the monetary threshold, given how low the law sets the bar.
Why now, after 31 years as an independent nation and nearly as many with the most oligarch-ridden economy in Europe, do these criteria matter? I do not find this a difficult question to answer. It is because the Ukraine that is supposed to graduate into the ranks of the European Union and NATO has to look good. And it will not look good so long as oligarchs carry on with their crude intrusions in national politics, their indifference to legal statutes, and their incessant bribery, graft, and other sorts of corruptions.
It is time, in short, for Ukraine to clean up its act. It can be an act, indeed, but the oligarchs have to be sent back to makeup, and then to wardrobe, and altogether recast as modern business executives. They have to be worthy of straight-faced profiles in Forbes or BusinessWeek, to put this point another way. They have to look more like Jeff Bezos than the shameless crooks and greedheads they actually are.
The war, the de-oligarchization law, and public discontent have oligarchs on the run, The Post reports, but I couldn’t find a single oligarch on the run in this story.
Ihor Kolomoisky doesn’t live in Ukraine anymore and comes over as indifferent to the allegations against him in reports I have read. Of the other oligarchs mentioned, Serhiy Taruta co-founded and runs a metals-industry group based on privatized state assets, has held several political offices, has had a seat in the Rada since 2014, and seems to entertain presidential ambitions.
Not exactly a man on the run.
Taruta is good friends with the aforementioned Rinat Akhmetov, he of the foiled steel company swindle, and speaks very highly of him. “He was not a member of a criminal group, but he knew and he was friends with people who were,” Taruta tells The Post. This kind of thing counts in oligarchic Ukraine.
Akhmetov is the son of a coal miner, founded a coke-processing plant soon after Ukraine gained independence, and made it big in metals during the Kuchma years, the Kryvorizhstal bust notwithstanding. At its height prior to the current war, his fortune was worth $7.6 billion; he has taken a hit since the outbreak of hostilities: He is now worth a mere $4.3 billion, poor fellow.
Akhmetov gets an inordinate proportion of the Post’s linage in its report on the state of the Ukrainian oligarchy. The piece reads in part like a personal profile, indeed. Why is this?
Akhmetov is precisely the kind of oligarch The Post wants to show us, in my read. Dominant in the metals sector, politically powerful, elected to the Rada in 2006, friends among crime bosses, he represents all that was wrong about the oligarchs. And now he has seen the light. He has bailed out of politics, at least directly. He has seen the future of the Ukrainian economy, and it shines brightly with none other than highly successful business executives and entrepreneurs.
“I am not an oligarch,” He tells the Post. “I am the biggest private investor, employer, and taxpayer in Ukraine.” And later: “Competition in the economy means market economy. Competition in politics means democracy.”
There is this from Rostyslav Shurma, one of Zelensky’s top advisers and—I love this part—previously a senior executive at Metinvest, a steel producer Akhmetov owns: “It is absolutely essential we have strong businessmen, we have national champions, global champions. But they should not interfere in politics.”
Yes! The Post report urges us to conclude.
I read all this against the background of the not-much-reported deliberations of those on the international scene planning the future shape of the Ukrainian political economy. High among the groups involved is the Ukraine Recovery Conference, which has met annually for the past five years. Last summer’s gathering, in Lugano, Switzerland, included five heads of state, 40 government ministers, 60 international organizations, and a large Ukrainian delegation.
Patricia Cohen, a New York Times economics correspondent, wrote a creditable piece last week—creditable for its forthright honesty—describing this discourse under the headline, “Away From the Spotlight, a Debate Rages Over a Postwar Ukraine Economy.” As Cohen makes clear, two things are going on at present. Abroad, all the talk is of how to reshape Ukraine into another specimen of neoliberal savagery with all the inequality, social dislocation, and disparities, and the unbridled corporatization this model brings with it. In Ukraine, the Zelensky regime is hard at work laying the groundwork for this objectionable transformation—stripping workers of rights and protections, cutting regulation, opening the gates to foreign resource exploitation, shutting down the press, forcing the political parties to conform or close.
Please consider the above list of things to come in Ukraine should the West win this war: inequality, corporatization, the absence of regulation to curb excess, abuses of labor. Does this remind you of anything? The America that made Jeff Bezos a highly successful business executive, maybe?
Ukraine’s task is simply to get this done by way of the fiction that, in a neoliberalized political economy, there is some imagined distance between government and the corporate sector. There is none in America and there shall be none in Ukraine.
The kicker at the end of this dismal piece of Washington Post propaganda leaves us precisely where Jeff Bezos would want us. It quotes a financial journalist in Kyiv named Yurii Nikolov. “I hope the businessman Akhmetov will remain with us,” he tells The Post, “and oligarch Akhmetov will not be reborn.”
It is all a question of nomenclature, nothing more.
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