Elon Musk Releases THE TWITTER FILES: How Twitter Collaborated With “The Biden Team” To Cover Up The Hunter Laptop Story

Elon Musk Releases THE TWITTER FILES: How Twitter Collaborated With “The Biden Team” To Cover Up The Hunter Laptop Story

In a greatly anticipated Friday night drop of what has was expected to be a cache of information involving the censoring of Hunter Biden’s notebook story days ahead of the 2020 presidential election, moments ago Elon Musk – who worked in collaboration with the notoriously independent gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi of “Vampire Squid” fame – has published the “Twitter Files.”

Shortly before their release, Matt Taibbi sent the following email to his substack subscribers:

Dear TK Readers:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on Substack first. I’d be angry, too.

The last 96 hours have been among the most chaotic of my life, involving multiple trips back and forth across the country, with a debate in Canada in between. There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

Those of you who’ve been here for years know how seriously I take my obligation to this site’s subscribers. On this one occasion, I’m going to have to simply ask you to trust me. As it happens, there may be a few more big surprises coming, and those will be here on Substack. And there will be room here to to discuss this, too, in time. In any case, thanks for your support and your patience, and please hold me to a promise to make all this up to you, and then some.

Moments later Elon confirmed that he did, in fact, work with Taibbi:

And this is what Taibbi has been tweeting in the past few minutes (link here):

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

2. What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

3. The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.

4. Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

5. In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

6. As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.

7. Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

8. By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another:  “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”

9. Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

10.Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:

11. This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.

12. The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.

… Okay, there was more throat-clearing about the process, but screw it, let’s jump forward

16. The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

17. On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:

18. 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.

19. White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”

20.This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:

21. Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy:  https://web.archive.org/web/20190717143909/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materials

22. Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem…

23. The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.

24. “They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

25.You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”:

26. By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.

27. Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”

28. To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”:

29. A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:

30. In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.

31. Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:

32.Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:

33.Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.”

34.NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it’s a “tipping point,” complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.”

35.Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”:

36.Twitter files continued:  “THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE” 

Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it’s “not absolute”

37. An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get “unfucked” (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.

38. While reviewing Gadde’s emails, I saw a familiar name – my own. Dorsey sent her a copy of my Substack article blasting the incident

39. There are multiple instances in the files of Dorsey intervening to question suspensions and other moderation actions, for accounts across the political spectrum

Developing

*  *  *

The release was telegraphed one week ago, when Musk acknowledged that revealing Twitter’s internal discussions surrounding the censorship of the New York Post‘s Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 US election is “necessary to restore public trust.”

Recall that the Post had its Twitter account locked in October 2020 for reporting on the now-confirmed-to-be-real “laptop from hell,” which contained still-unprosecuted evidence of foreign influence peddling through then-Vice President Joe Biden – including a 2015 meeting with an executive of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma.

Users who tried to share the link to the article were greeted with a message saying, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

Then, days after Musk’s tweet, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, admitted it was a ‘mistake’ to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.

In his first public appearance since becoming an ex-employee, Roth suggested that the Hunter Biden laptop story was simply ‘too difficult’ for Twitter to verify. Alternatively, the company could have perhaps simply trusted the Post, one of America’s oldest publications that doesn’t have a reputation for fabricating bombshell stories – like Twitter does with countless anonymous bombshells from other major publications.

We didn’t know what to believe. We didn’t know what was true. There was smoke,” Roth said during an interview at the Knight Foundation conference, as noted by the Epoch Times. “And ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter.

“It set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 ‘hack and leak campaign’ alarm bells,” he said, referring to a notorious team of cyberspies affiliated with Russian military intelligence. “Everything about it looked like a hack and leak.”

When asked whether if it was a mistake to censor the story, Roth replied, “In my opinion, yes.”

Would Roth have suppressed the story if it was a Don Jr. laptop full of incriminating evidence?

* * *

Finally, it will be very interesting to see which “independent”, “impartial” and “objective” members of the Mainstream Media cover the Twitter Files, which unlike all that Russia collusion bullshit, was a real and actionable attempt to interfere with US democracy by covering up one of the most explosive political stories of a generation, not to mention an event that would have swayed the 2020 presidential election. 

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/02/2022 – 19:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/LgvhKWP Tyler Durden

LA County Experiences 1,200% Increase In Fentanyl Overdose Deaths Over 5-Year Period

LA County Experiences 1,200% Increase In Fentanyl Overdose Deaths Over 5-Year Period

Between 2016 and 2016, Los Angeles County experienced a 1,280% spike in overdose deaths from fentanyl, according to a recent report from the county Department of Public Health.

Brightly colored counterfeit M30 oxycodone pills. (Courtesy of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration)

In a joint statement, the LA County District Attorney’s Office (which regularly refuses to charge drug dealers) and the health department announced the creation of a working group to address the situation “through prevention, education and enforcement.”

The ‘enforcement’ part will of course mark a radical departure from DA George Gascón’s ‘catch-and-release’ policy when it comes to criminals.

According to the health department, there were 104 deaths in 2016 attributed to fentanyl, which ballooned to 1,662 in 2001.

Los Angeles County fentanyl overdose deaths from 2010 to 2021, according to a County of Los Angeles Public Health report. (Sophie Li/The Epoch Times)

According to City News Service, black residents had the highest overdose rate based on the population, at 30.6 per 100,000 residents. White residents are overdosing at a rate of 22.5 per 100,000, while Latinos are at 11.1 per 100,000 residents.

The overdoses also occurred much more frequently in less affluent areas – which came in at 38.4 deaths per 100,000 vs. 12.3 per 100,000.

“Fentanyl overdoses are a significant and growing public health problem across the United States and in [the county], across sociodemographic groups and geographic areas,” reads the report, which adds “The increases among youth and the widening inequities between under-resourced and more affluent groups underscore the need to target prevention efforts to those at highest risk to decrease fentanyl overdoses and advance health equity in [LA County].”

Gascón, acting like he isn’t a huge part of the problem, said in a statement that the working group is “bringing together the county’s public health experts, education leaders, community advocates, and law enforcement professionals to support and utilize evidence-based and effective approaches to stopping the toll fentanyl is taking,” Gascón said in a statement.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/02/2022 – 18:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/esTIqWc Tyler Durden

Antifa Defendants Arrested In Attack On Trump Supporters Take Plea Deals

Antifa Defendants Arrested In Attack On Trump Supporters Take Plea Deals

Authored by Brad Jones via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Six of 11 alleged assailants connected with Antifa, a far-left extremist group, have taken plea deals and pled guilty to charges related to violent attacks on supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump at a “Patriot March” in San Diego shortly after the 2020 election.

Counter-protesters, some carrying Antifa flags, wait to confront a “Patriot March” demonstration in support of then President Donald Trump in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego on Jan. 9, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Five defendants pled guilty on Nov. 18, just over a week after Erich “Nikki” Louis Yach was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for his role in the violence near Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach on Jan. 9, 2021. Yach was the first of the 11 to be sentenced.

Yach earlier pled guilty to charges of conspiracy, assault, and the unlawful use of tear gas.

At his sentencing hearing, GG Hubbard, Yach’s spouse, urged the court to send Yach—a biological male who identifies as female—to a women’s prison. Yach has spent nearly the last two years in a men’s prison and will be credited for time already served.

I want to make sure she gets put in the correct facility according to her gender,” Hubbard told the court.

Hubbard claimed Yach is “not violent” and said incarceration in anything but a women’s facility was “violating the law” and “political and fascist nonsense.”

San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan announced in June that a criminal grand jury had two weeks earlier delivered 29 indictments against all 11 defendants, including “conspiracy to commit a riot, use of tear gas, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury.”

Counter-protesters attack demonstrators during a “Patriot March” demonstration in support of then President Donald Trump in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego on Jan. 9, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Antifa uses force, fear, and violence to further their interests and suppress the interests of others. The objective of this conspiracy was to incite and participate in a riot,” the district attorney’s office said at the time.

The defendants named in the indictments are from Los Angeles and San Diego counties and are all “affiliated with Antifa” according to a statement from the district attorney’s office last December. The named are Alexander Akridgejacobs, Jesse Merel Cannon, Brian Cortez Lightfoot Jr., Christian Martinez, Luis Francisco Mora, Samuel Howard Ogden, Bryan Rivera, Faraz Martin Talab, and Jeremy White.

Antifa supporters posted on social media on Jan. 2, 2021 calls for a “counterprotest” and “direct action” against Trump supporters, and then a week later gathered with other “uncharged co-conspirators” dressed in black garb with Antifa insignia to confront those participating in the Patriot March, the office stated.

According to the district attorney’s office, such alleged action included “assault, battery, assault with deadly weapons, arson, and vandalism.”

Videos posted online showed one of the masked, black-clad protesters carrying an “Antifascist Action” banner and another with a sign saying “No Nazis in PB”—a reference to Pacific Beach—as the group of about 100 shouted “Racists go home!” at Trump supporters.

Counter-protesters spray demonstrators during a “Patriot March” demonstration in support of then President Donald Trump in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego on Jan. 9, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

“Antifa uses force, fear, and violence to further their interests and suppress the interests of others. The objective of this conspiracy was to incite and participate in a riot,” the district attorney’s office said.

The indictments accused the Antifa-affiliated group of planning the attacks and using a baseball bat, flagpole, stun gun, and tear gas on their victims. They were also accused of throwing a wooden lawn chair at a woman.

Prosecutors also allege some Antifa members in the crowd chased down several minors whom they thought were part of the Patriot March, sprayed them with mace, and pushed one to the ground. The victim was later transported to a hospital for treatment of a concussion.

Other “victims included a journalist [taking] photos, a dog that was maced and a business that was also vandalized,” prosecutors said.

The San Diego Police Department reported a total of 16 separate attacks on eight people.

The Antifa rioters allegedly threw eggs, rocks and bottles and sprayed mace at officers after police declared the dueling protests an unlawful assembly and tried to disperse the crowd.

All the defendants pleaded not guilty in June.

None of the Trump supporters or other bystanders were charged with any crimes.

“Video evidence analysis shows that overwhelmingly the violence in this incident was perpetrated by the Antifa affiliates and was not a mutual fray with both sides crossing out of lawful First Amendment,” the district attorney’s office stated in June.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/02/2022 – 18:12

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Gxzfkja Tyler Durden

Minneapolis Settles With 12 Injured George Floyd Protesters, Police Barred From Arresting Lawful Protesters

Minneapolis Settles With 12 Injured George Floyd Protesters, Police Barred From Arresting Lawful Protesters

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

The city of Minneapolis on Wednesday reached a $600,000 settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota (ACLU-MN) over alleged police mistreatment of protestors following the death of George Floyd.

The lawsuit was filed in 2020 by ACLU-MN, Fish & Richardson P.C., and Gustafson Gluek PLLC on behalf of 12 protesters who were injured when they took to the streets to peacefully demonstrate.

According to ACLU-MN, the class action lawsuit awards a $600,000 payment, to be split among the plaintiffs, and includes “numerous reforms.”

Specifically, it bans the city from “arresting, threatening to arrest, or using physical force,” which includes the use of chemical agents, flash-bang or concussion grenades, and foam-tipped bullets to stop people from engaging in lawful protests or demonstrations.

It also limits police use of chemical agents to disperse peaceful protests and requires that officers deployed to protests are wearing body cameras that are recording and are “unobstructed.”

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit claim to have suffered an array of injuries, including bruising, “lingering respiratory issues from tear gas, and psychological trauma “due to Minneapolis police using “unnecessary and excessive force” to suppress the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights to protests, including tear gas and rubber bullets.

A police officer stands amid smoke and debris as buildings continue to burn in the aftermath of a night of protests and violence following the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minn., on May 29, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Protesters face police as the latter move in with tear gas to take over the chaotic streets outside the Minneapolis Police 5th Precinct during the fourth night of protests and violence following the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minn., on May 29, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

They also alleged that officers often fired without warning or orders to leave.

The plaintiffs claimed that the psychological trauma they suffered as a result of this “excessive force” had quashed their desire to protest in the future.

Peaceful vs. Violent Expression

Demonstrators gather for a rally in memory of George Floyd and Daunte Wright outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis, Minn., on April 18, 2021. (John Minchillo/AP Photo)

Wednesday’s agreed settlement and injunction resolve two lawsuits filed in 2020 against the City of Minneapolis, Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, and various Minneapolis Police Department officers. Those lawsuits were later consolidated into one lawsuit.

The settlement dismisses claims against individual officers.

“People who are demonstrating peacefully should never be met with police violence as they were in Minneapolis during protests over MPD’s murder of George Floyd,” said ACLU-MN Legal Director Teresa Nelson in a statement.

“Tear gas, foam bullets, and pepper spray became weapons for intimidating and hurting protesters, making it dangerous for people to exercise their First Amendment rights. We hope this settlement sends a message to law enforcement across Minnesota that this violation of our constitutional rights will not be tolerated.”

A poster with George Floyd’s picture and a sign reads that “I Can’t Breathe” hang from a security fence outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Minn. on March 31, 2021. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty Images)

Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in May 2020 by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin during an arrest after Floyd allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to purchase cigarettes.

Chauvin held his knee against Floyd’s neck and back for approximately nine-and-a-half minutes as Floyd lay handcuffed and face-down on the pavement while, another officer, Thomas Lane, restrained his lower body and J. Alexander Kueng knelt on Floyd’s back.

Video of the incident quickly went viral online, sparking protests across the country, in which thousands of peaceful protesters but also many non-peaceful rioters participated, resulting in damage to some businesses from looting and arson. Many of the protests continued into early 2021 and prompted calls to defund the police.

A destroyed building still smolders near the Minneapolis Police 3rd Precinct the day after it was attacked and burned by rioters following the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minn., on May 29, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

State Police stand guard as smoke billows from buildings that continue to burn in the aftermath of a night of protests and violence following the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Minn., on May 29, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

According to a report from Axios, the destruction that occurred as a result of the demonstrations was estimated to see at least $1 billion to $2 billion of paid insurance claims.

Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter charges in Floyd’s death in April 2021, and sentenced to more than 22 years in prison.

The Epoch Times has contacted Minneapolis Police for comment.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/02/2022 – 17:22

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/aMBmgnf Tyler Durden

California Governor’s Reparations Committee To Recommend $223,200 Per Descendant Of Slavery

California Governor’s Reparations Committee To Recommend $223,200 Per Descendant Of Slavery

California taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $223,200 for each descendant of slavery living in the Golden State, in order to compensate them for “housing discrimination,” according to the New York Times.

A mural honoring the history of Russell City in what is now Hayward, Calif.Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The nine-member Reparations Task Force, formed by California Governor Gavin Newsom, has been focusing on ways to counter the claimed housing discrimination. Overall reparations would cost approximately $569 billion to compensate the roughly 2.5 million black Californians for ‘setbacks’ between 1933 and 1977 – eclipsing the state’s $512.8 billion expenditure in 2021.

We want to see the land and economic wealth stolen from Black families all across this country returned,” said activist Kavon Ward.

The panel is still mulling how payments should be made – with some suggesting tuition and housing grants, while others are suggesting cash. Final figures will be released in a 2023 report, which would then be up to the state Legislature to act upon the recommendations and figure out how to fund them.

They have also identified four other reasons for reparations – mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of black businesses and health care. The $223,200 figure only applies to housing discrimination.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” task force member Jovan Scott Lewis, a Berkeley professor, told the Times.

Every year for almost three decades, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan introduced legislation that would have created a commission to explore reparations, but the measure consistently stalled in Congress. After Mr. Conyers retired in 2017, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas began championing the measure, which passed a House committee for the first time last year, but stalled on the floor.

Underscoring the political hurdles, opinions on reparations are sharply divided by race. Last year, an online survey by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that 86 percent of African Americans supported compensating the descendants of slaves, compared with 28 percent of white people. Other polls have also shown wide splits. -NYT

The Times points to Russell City, California as an example of housing discrimination. The city, once home to many black families who fled racial terror, was bulldozed and repolaced with an industrial park. Former resident Monique Henderson-Ford told the Times she was paid $2,200 for her home – less than 1/3 of what she paid.

“Imagine if the houses were still here,” she said, adding “We would all be sitting on a fortune.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/02/2022 – 16:50

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/mnus10i Tyler Durden

Quinn: We Are Trapped In ‘A Truman Show’ Directed By Psychopaths

Quinn: We Are Trapped In ‘A Truman Show’ Directed By Psychopaths

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 in 1949

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” ― Aldous Huxley

When I step back from the day-to-day minutia and trivialities flooding my senses from all directions and media devices, it almost appears as if I’m living in a highly scripted reality TV program where the characters and plots are designed to create passions and reactions to support whatever narrative is being weaved by those directing the show. Huxley really did foresee the future as clearly and concisely as anyone could, decades before his dystopian vision came to fruition.

Orwell’s boot on the face vision is only now being initiated because a few too many critical thinkers have awoken from their pharmaceutically induced stupor and begun to question the plotline of this spectacle masquerading as our reality. The mass formation psychosis infecting the weak-minded masses; relentless mass propaganda designed to mislead, misinform, and brainwash a dumbed down and government indoctrinated populace; and complete control of the story line through media manipulation, regulation, and censorship of the truth; has run its course. As Charles Mackay stated 180 years ago, the masses go mad as a herd, but only regain their senses slowly, and one by one.

My recognition that the world seems to be scripted and directed by Machiavellian managers, working behind a dark shroud, representing an invisible governing authority, molding our minds, suggesting our ideas, dictating our tastes, and creating fear, triggered a recollection of the 1998 Jim Carrey movie – The Truman Show. The movie, directed by Peter Weir (Gallipoli, Witness, Dead Poet’s Society), had the surreal feel of Forest Gump, while beckoning the horrendous introduction of reality TV (Big Brother, Survivor), which poisons our shallow unserious society to this day. The plot of the movie focuses on individuality versus conformity, consumerism, voyeurism, reality versus manipulation, false narratives, the truth about the American Dream, and the dangers of surveillance in a technologically advanced society.

Truman Burbank is the unsuspecting star of The Truman Show, a reality television program filmed 24/7 through thousands of hidden cameras and broadcast to a worldwide audience. Christof, the show’s creator seeks to capture Truman’s authentic emotions and give audiences a relatable everyman. Truman has been the unsuspecting star of the show since he was born 30 years prior. Truman’s hometown of Seahaven Island is a complete set built within an enormous dome, populated by crew members and actors who highlight the product placements that generate revenue for the show. The elaborate set allows Christof to control almost every aspect of Truman’s life, including the weather. The picture-perfect home, with picket fence and plastic people, is an attempt to convince Truman he is living the American Dream rather than in an inescapable dystopian techno-prison.

To prevent Truman from discovering his false reality, Christof manufactures scenarios that dissuade Truman’s desire for exploration, such as the “death” of his father in a sea storm to instill aquaphobia, and by constantly broadcasting and printing messages of the dangers of traveling and the virtues of staying home. One cannot but acknowledge the plotline to keep Truman under control, obedient, and locked down in his controlled environment, with no escape hatch visible, as exactly the plotline used by our overlords during the Covid scam. Using fear to regulate your subjects is a familiar theme used by those controlling the narrative and pulling the strings behind the scenes of our glorious democracy of dystopia.

The first task was to instill fear into the masses through fake videos, fake medical experts spewing fake “facts”, denying the reality masks, social distancing, and locking down the world did not stop a microscopic virus, while suppressing treatments which were clearly safe and effective (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) and forcing Fauci’s remdesivir and ventilators on patients – insuring their deaths. Truman’s life was built upon lies, deception, and fake narratives, controlled by a tyrannical director putting on a show to please his bosses and maximize profits. We are experiencing the same reality today.

Since March 2020 we have been trapped in a dystopian reality show based on lies, deception, and fake narratives about a weaponized virus created in a lab funded by Anthony Fauci and utilized to further the totalitarian Great Reset agenda of Schwab, Gates and their ilk, while maximizing the profits of Pfizer, TV networks and filling the pockets of politicians, shills, and apparatchiks willing to sellout the people of our country for thirty pieces of silver.

As the Truman Show approached its 30th anniversary, Truman began discovering unusual elements, such as a spotlight falling out of the sky in front of his house and a radio channel that precisely described his movements. He began to awaken to the fact he was nothing but a peculiarity trapped in a cage and constantly deterred from escaping at every turn, for the good of the show. He lived in a scripted world of conformity, where questioning the plot was not allowed, and the masses just played their parts.

This is exactly how a dictatorship without tears uses technology, pharmaceuticals, and psychological manipulation to convince the masses to love their servitude. This is the reality show we have been living in during this 21st Century dictatorship dystopia of dunces. But this psychological phenomenon is not new to mankind, as Plato described an ancient Truman Show analog in the 6th Century with his Allegory of the Cave. The nature of human beings has not changed across the trials and tribulations of history.

In the allegory, Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality but are not an accurate representation of the real world. An enlightened man is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand the shadows on the wall are not reality.

The ignorant inmates do not desire to leave their prison/cave, for it is the only life they know, and they fear reality. The fire and the puppets, used to create shadows, are controlled by artists. Plato indicates the fire is also the political doctrine taught by a nation state. The artists use light and shadows to indoctrinate the masses with the dominant doctrines of the times. Few humans ever escape the cave. Most humans will remain at the bottom of the cave, with a small few elevated as major artists, to project the shadows keeping the masses disoriented, confused and fearful.

“Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

The State is run by an eager group of psychopaths who are hell bent on destroying our civil society and common culture on behalf of globalists attempting to implement their Great Reset agenda, and enforcing it through technological surveillance, mind control through propaganda messaging, and strict management of the daily plot via mainstream media and social media censorship of the truth. As Plato contemplated fifteen centuries ago, most men will remain in their cave, believing shadows presented by their overlords is reality, never questioning their servitude or seeking the truth.

Never has this fact been truer than during this covid pandemic reality show directed by our Christof – mass murderer Anthony Fauci. The willful ignorance of the masses was assumed by the covid controllers who cast shadows of fear and death on the cave walls of the locked down extras in this well-orchestrated reality show. Using a purposefully misleading PCR test to vastly overestimate “cases”, paying hospitals to classify all deaths as covid, and having the propaganda professionals at CNN, MSNBC and Fox showing Covid Death Counters on their screens 24/7 to terrify the masses into compliance was the Covid Show.

Once the fear level was ramped to eleven on the control dial, the producers of this show introduced the miraculous Big Pharma vaccine antidote to save the day. Their script was so believable they were able to convince over 5 billion members of their captive audience to inject themselves with an untested, unproven genetic therapy, that didn’t prevent you from catching, transmitting, getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from the Fauci funded Wuhan lab produced virus. But, as a dramatic twist to the tale, it seems the “vaccine” causes myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, miscarriages, heart attacks, cancer, and sudden death.

Despite the obvious dangers and failures of these “vaccines”, those bullied into getting jabbed became so comfortable in their ignorance, they were easily persuaded to hate the unjabbed and wish for their deaths. Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” was extended for over a year and continues to this day. Rather than think critically and question why annual flu cases averaged 35 million per year prior to 2020 but dropped to near ZERO during the covid “emergency”, the cave dwellers lashed out in anger at anyone questioning the plot, because to admit they were duped would destroy their self-esteem and decrease their virtue signal credits.

The annual flu didn’t disappear. Covid was the annual flu, with a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign. This wasn’t a pandemic, but an IQ test, and most people failed miserably. But the critical thinking unvaxxed are still considered the enemy of the state, especially since they have been proven right.

Whether we are trapped in an artificial world produced in a dome, cave, or our current technologically advanced surveillance propaganda state, the goal of those controlling our false reality is to take away our freedoms, crush dissent, keep us ignorant of the truth, and treat us as plebs to be taxed and molded. Christof, whose name is supposed to invoke him being a god-like figure ruling over Truman’s world, declares Truman could discover the truth and leave at any time, while using every diabolical trick to keep that from ever happening, because his show generated revenues exceeding the GDP of a small country.

Truman and ourselves are essentially prisoners in a vast production, and our overlords believe it is their duty to convince us to love our servitude and prefer our cells, because it is financially beneficial to the overlords and their crew.

Our world is not fake, but it is tightly controlled by those running the show. Seemingly random events, plots, and subplots are manipulated to generate specific emotions and reactions by the public in order to achieve the objectives of those benefitting from the various storylines. They are molding our minds and forming our tastes through psychological and technological manipulation of our daily existence. Christof explained why most rarely discover the truth or question the world they live in – “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”

We have allowed men we have never seen to dictate how we live our lives, the choices we make, and which politicians and “experts” to believe, without ever putting in the effort to understand why we are being prodded to do so. We are locked in a self-imposed prison of desires, emotions, and needs through mass media messaging and a constant barrage of advertisements. Conformity and obedience are the desired traits sought by the ruling class, while individuality and skepticism are frowned upon and punished through social ostracism.

We are conditioned from birth to believe what they tell us to believe. Government school indoctrination and mass media misinformation does the trick. Distracted by our techno-gadgets and ignorant of truth is how the globalist oligarchs methodically implement their Great Reset agenda. They are so convinced of the ignorance of the masses they openly proclaim their depopulation and techno-prison schemes with no fear of push back or retribution.

The ending of the Truman Show is a lesson in resistance, persistence, and the strength of the individual, even in the face of a technologically advanced Big Brother state. It offers a message of hope, no matter how powerful our overlords appear to be. Refusing to obey or conform by one individual can inspire others to do likewise. Once Truman ‘awoke’ to his plight as a lab rat in a scripted show, he began to plot his escape. Using a makeshift tunnel in his basement, out of view of Christof’s cameras, he disappeared and forced the suspension of the broadcast for the first time in thirty years.

Christof discovers Truman sailing away from Seahaven in a small boat, as he has overcome the fake conditioning of fear instilled in him by the man who supposedly loves him but traumatized him about the sea by faking his father’s death while at sea. Christof chooses to almost drown Truman by creating a violent storm to deter him from discovering the truth. Ultimately the storm ceases and his boat strikes the wall of the dome.

This is exactly how our controllers treat the ignorant masses. They feed us stories designed to make us fearful and compliant to the exhortations of their paid experts. Paid to lie. Paid to misinform. Paid to persuade people a dangerous concoction is “safe and effective”. The evilness of using Sesame Street characters to convince four-year-old children they need this Big Pharma gene altering toxic brew, even though essentially ZERO children on earth died from covid, is a testament to the greed and malevolent impulses of those in power. Vast amounts of ever-increasing advertising revenue are what kept The Truman Show on the air for thirty years.

The covid advertising campaign will never be topped, as Hollywood stars, top athletes, famous writers, rock legends, supposedly impartial journalists, and all the major networks said SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!! Everyone was for sale, and all they had to do was lie and say the jabs were “safe and effective”. Product placement was the money-making formula for the Truman Show, while hard selling a Big Pharma phony cure over the airwaves 24/7 using the tax dollars of the victims was the final solution of the Great Reset Cabal.

The grand finale is a clash of the philosophies of reality versus false reality, as Truman discovers a staircase leading to an exit door. Christof speaks to Truman, claiming there was no more truth in the real world than in his artificial world, and he would be safe, with nothing to fear, in a world controlled by men invisible to him assuring him they have his best interests at heart. Truman chooses individuality, truth, risk, living a real meaningful life, and seeking honest relationships over a safe existence in a bubble where all decisions were made by others. Truman bows to the audience and exits, leaving Chistof to mourn the loss of his star and the revenue he generated. The ignorant masses watching the show cheer his escape and then ask, “what’s on next?” Plato captured the uncertainty and bewilderment Truman must have felt as he walked into the light.

“Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

This world of manufactured dystopian pleasure harkens more towards Huxley’s Brave New World, where pharmaceuticals and conditioning would keep the public seeking pleasure, pre-occupied with trivialities, distracted by materialism, unable to think critically, and reduced to passivity and egoism through the control of messaging by their controllers. Our efficient totalitarian state has gained complete control by convincing the masses to love their servitude and beg for more rules, restrictions, and reduction of liberties in the name of safety and security.

Smart phones, smart cities, and smart streets are nothing more than code for spying on you and controlling you. Truman finally understood his liberty was his to choose and not Christof’s to give. There is a small minority of Americans who are realizing the same thing after two years of totalitarian measures designed to take away our freedoms and liberty. The question is whether enough will exit this tyrannical government produced show to make a difference. The future of mankind literally depends on the answer to this question.

“Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.” ― Aldous Huxley

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Just as those controlling the Truman Show were not doing it for Truman’s benefit, but for their enrichment, those controlling the puppet strings of our society today had no interest in our health over the last two years, our financial well-being, our psychological well-being, or the peaceful rational functioning of our civilization. They have no interest in securing our border, reducing crime, holding fair elections, promoting peaceful solutions to global conflict, or allowing the truth to reach the masses. Their agenda has been and continues to be, the destruction of our civilized society, obliteration of our core standards and norms, depopulation of the planet, confiscation of our wealth, and ultimately our enslavement through technological shackles and chains.

As Huxley noted decades ago, technology has just provided our civilization with a more efficient means of going backwards. Technology is being used by our controllers to monitor our movements, communications, and to surveil, distract, and amuse us to death. It is no longer a force for good, but a means to control us. They plan to use technology to disarm their citizens through increasingly authoritarian regulations, sold as keeping us safe from mass shooters.

Their climate agenda isn’t about the climate, but about complete control of the masses. When government and their social media attack dogs monitor the citizens for “hate speech and misinformation”, and dole out retribution at their whim, our system is profoundly broken and extremely warped. They are supposed to answer to us. But these megalomaniacs have much bigger agenda.

We’ve lost all sense of reality, reason, and truth in a profoundly abnormal world, created by those we allowed to ascend to power through the control and influence of shadowy globalist billionaires operating as an invisible government, with Deep State apparatchiks doing the dirty work. Schwab, Gates, Soros, the World Economic Forum, and whoever hides in the shadows behind these psychopaths, intend to control the entire world and steal all the wealth because they believe they are smarter, more ruthless, and know what’s best for the lowly peasants polluting their satanic playground planet.

They know facts can be ignored when they’ve conditioned the masses to be willfully ignorant. They know they can lie without implications, but even more powerful, they can stay silent about the truth through censorship, suppression, and cancellation of truth tellers. The adaptation of the masses to this abnormal society, created by evil power-seeking men, is a form of mental illness – or as documented by Mattias Desmet in his book The Psychology of Totalitarianism – Mass Formation Psychosis.

 “The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

I know I will never adapt or adjust to this abnormal society. We certainly can’t change a system, so thoroughly rigged and controlled (e.g., 2022 Arizona election and the 2020 presidential election), through traditional means. Those in control can easily buy-off our politicians, scientists, doctors, academics, TV personalities, and journalists to spin whatever web they choose, enabling their despicable anti-human agenda of deviancy. The only viable solution is the individual solution of walking away from this phony world like Truman.

Armed revolution is a non-starter, as the oligarchs have far more firepower, and the dissenters are unorganized and scattered. A form of ‘Irish Democracy’ where a silent dogged resistance, marked by the withdrawal from society, belligerence to authority and non-compliance with government dictates by millions of ordinary people would accomplish far more than rioting and armed revolution. Millions have already practiced a form of Irish Democracy by not masking, not social distancing, not getting jabbed, and taking control of their own health decisions.

They have almost sealed the escape hatch in this dystopian paradise of pleasure and pain. They know their techniques of control through fear work like a charm. Their final task to achieve total control is central bank digital currencies (CBDC), where everything we buy and sell is tracked digitally, so taxes can be levied, your life tracked, and if you choose to dissent from government directives, your ability to utilize CBDCs will be turned off. Micro-chipping us is next on the agenda.

We need to reduce our tax and digital footprint now. It might seem hopeless in going to battle against these vile, vindictive vermin, but the solution is to not play. Many have already walked away from the modern world, taking to the country – farming, homesteading, bartering, and only giving to Caesar the bare minimum. They’ve chosen a hard, but a far more fulfilling life.

The more people who disassociate from their fake world, the weaker they get. As their hold on our lives weakens, they will lash out. This is why it is important to be armed. Direct armed confrontation with the establishment’s forces is foolish, but guerrilla tactics on land you know would start to eat away at the morale of the paid police thugs sent to enforce their dictates. The beast isn’t as strong as it portrays. It’s broke and its empire of debt is crumbling.

If millions walk out the exit door, the beast will begin to starve and eventually die. Maybe a new, less complex, smaller, more community-oriented society could be born from the ashes. Tribe up with like-minded individuals with different skills, if possible. There is hope if enough patriots decide to regain their senses and walk away from this abnormal society, leaving our totalitarian Christofs to wallow in their failure to control the truly awoken.

“Do not let the hero in your soul parish, in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” ― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

*  *  *
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Fri, 12/02/2022 – 16:25

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Election-Denying Republicans Were Big Losers in the 2022 Midterms


Republican candidate for Arizona governor Kari Lake, dwarfed by an American flag.

After former President Donald Trump’s fanciful claims of election fraud spurred a Capitol riot, many observers felt that there was no going back: From now on, conspiracies of fraud would be standard among candidates, and the possibility of danger would only increase.

Trump’s most fervent supporters “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” President Joe Biden said in September. Days before last month’s midterm elections, he even tied election conspiracism to the brutal attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

And it wasn’t limited just to Trump: In an article titled “Trump is not the only threat to democracy,” Darrell West of the Brookings Institute wrote, “One of the worst things Trump has done is to show many other aspirants how to engage in power politics using unethical steps.”

But the exact opposite happened: Voters rejected the most illiberal candidates, nearly all of whom chose to respect the results.

One of the most prominent boosters of 2020 election conspiracies was Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano, who clinched the Republican nominee for governor with the help of a significant cash infusion from his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro. Mastriano insisted the results of the 2020 election were fraudulent, even attending the January 6 rally that preceded the breach of the Capitol, and he threatened not to certify a Democrat as the winner of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes in 2024.

And yet, just days after the general election as he trailed his challenger by double digits, Mastriano conceded, saying that “Josh Shapiro will be our next Governor, and I ask everyone to give him the opportunity to lead and pray that he leads well.”

In fact, all over the country, Republican candidates fared worse with Trump’s explicit endorsement than without. Election deniers fared even worse. And like Mastriano, the majority conceded defeat rather than crying fraud.

One of the exceptions is Kari Lake, the firebrand Republican who looked poised to become Arizona’s next governor but flamed out after all the votes were counted. She called the results “BS” and spun bizarre accusations of fraud, but her protests aren’t catching on. She filed a lawsuit last week alleging that voting machines had been manipulated, and on Thursday a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and sanctioned Lake, citing her “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in the suit.

Elsewhere in her state, the election conspiracy movement is similarly running on fumes, as Republicans in solid red Cochise County refused to certify the results of their own election, in violation of Arizona law, over fraud allegations the state had already disproven. On Thursday, the board finally certified after a court order forced its hand.

It’s possible that voters were swayed by Biden’s apocalyptic rhetoric, but that’s unlikely given his overall persistent unpopularity. More likely is that average Republicans simply could not stomach the idea of pulling the lever for candidates like Lake or Mastriano. A recent poll found that 52 percent of Republicans believed the midterm elections were “definitely” or “probably” “free and fair”—still a shamefully low percentage, but as Reason‘s Eric Boehm noted this week, it’s also “the highest percentage the group has found in recent surveys about registered Republicans’ opinions of elections.”

There is evidence that Republican voters are souring on overt election deniers: In Georgia, for example, Herschel Walker ran 5 points behind Brian Kemp, the state’s Republican governor. Walker has consistently promoted conspiracies about the 2020 election, while Kemp earned Trump’s ire for bucking the former president’s entreaties to subvert its results.

While election conspiracism is unlikely to go away anytime soon, among independents and wide swaths of Republican voters, it is thankfully losing its luster.

The post Election-Denying Republicans Were Big Losers in the 2022 Midterms appeared first on Reason.com.

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Elon Musk Enforces Twitter’s Ban on ‘Hateful Conduct’ As Critics Predict a Flood of Bigotry


Is Elon Musk inviting hate speech on Twitter?

Twitter has seen an “unprecedented” increase in “hate speech” since Elon Musk took over the platform in late October, The New York Times reports. As the paper’s fact checkers might say about someone else’s scary claims, the Times story is misleading and lacks context. But it highlights the challenges that Musk faces as he tries to implement lighter moderation practices without abandoning all content restrictions.

Before Musk bought Twitter, the Times says, “slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site.”

Those numbers, which the Times attributes to “the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms,” might seem alarming. But in the context of a platform whose users generate half a billion messages every day, they suggest that explicitly anti-black, anti-gay, and anti-Jewish tweets are pretty rare.

Assuming that “antisemitic posts” are about as common as the two other categories, we are talking about something like 0.0024 percent of daily tweets. The Times concedes that “the numbers are relatively small,” which is like saying the risk of dying from a hornet, wasp, or bee sting is relatively small.

For readers who bother to do the math, the Times warns that the increases it cites are only the beginning: “Researchers said the increase in hate speech, antisemitic posts and other troubling content had begun before Mr. Musk loosened the service’s content rules. That suggested that a further surge could be coming.”

So far, however, Musk has retained Twitter’s ban on “hateful conduct.” Musk cited that rule yesterday, when he suspended music and fashion tycoon Kanye West’s account. West, who recently has dismayed fans and business partners alike with a string of antisemitic remarks, had already run afoul of Twitter’s rule by tweeting that he was about to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” His latest offense was tweeting a Star of David with a swastika at its center.

West’s earlier comment was either a deliberate play on “DEFCON 3,” a military term that denotes an “increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness,” or an accidental mangling of that phrase. Either way, the anti-Jewish hostility was hard to miss.

The image that prompted West’s suspension likewise posed a bit of a puzzle. “I like Hitler,” West told conspiracist Alex Jones on the latter’s podcast yesterday. “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” He added that “we got to stop dissing Nazis all the time.” It nevertheless seems fair to assume that adding a swastika to a Jewish star was not meant as a compliment.

While Musk said West had “violated our rule against incitement to violence,” the policy is broader than that description implies. “You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” it says. “We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories.” Also forbidden: “hateful imagery and display names.”

The official rationale for that policy emphasizes that open expressions of bigotry have a chilling effect on Twitter participation:

Twitter’s mission is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information, and to express their opinions and beliefs without barriers. Free expression is a human right—we believe that everyone has a voice, and the right to use it. Our role is to serve the public conversation, which requires representation of a diverse range of perspectives.

We recognize that if people experience abuse on Twitter, it can jeopardize their ability to express themselves….

We are committed to combating abuse motivated by hatred, prejudice or intolerance, particularly abuse that seeks to silence the voices of those who have been historically marginalized. For this reason, we prohibit behavior that targets individuals or groups with abuse based on their perceived membership in a protected category.

There is obviously a tension between Twitter’s commitment to “free expression” and its prohibition of hate speech. But while even the vilest expressions of bigotry are protected by the First Amendment, that does not mean a private company is obligated to allow them in a forum it owns. Twitter has made a business judgment that the cost of letting people talk about how awful Jews are, in terms of alienating users and advertisers, outweighs any benefit from allowing users to “express their opinions and beliefs” without restriction.

Other social media platforms strike a different balance and advertise lighter moderation as a virtue. But all of them have some sort of ground rules, because a completely unfiltered experience is appealing only in theory.

Parler, for example, describes itself as “the premier global free speech app,” a refuge for people frustrated by heavy-handed moderation on other platforms. It nevertheless promises to remove “threatening or inciting content.” Parler also offers the option of a “‘trolling’ filter” (mandatory in the Apple version of the app) that is designed to block “personal attacks based on immutable or otherwise irrelevant characteristics such as race, sex, sexual orientation, or religion.” Such content, it explains, “often doesn’t contribute to a productive conversation, and so we wanted to provide our users with a way to minimize it in their feeds, should they choose to do so.”

Musk describes himself as a “free speech absolutist.” That approach is mandatory for the government, except when it comes to judicially recognized exceptions such as fraud, defamation, and true threats. But it is not viable for a social media platform that wants to maintain some semblance of a welcoming environment, and it does not describe Musk’s actual practices since he took over Twitter.

Musk has invited back inflammatory political figures such as Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green. He has rescinded Twitter’s ban on “COVID-19 misinformation,” a fuzzy category that ranged from demonstrably false assertions of fact to arguably or verifiably true statements that were deemed “misleading” or contrary to government advice. At the same time, however, Musk has interpreted Twitter’s rule against impersonation as requiring that parody accounts be clearly labeled as such, and he evidently thinks enforcing the ban on “hateful conduct” is important enough to justify banishing a celebrity with a huge following.

As far as the critics quoted by the Times are concerned, that stance does not really matter, because loosening any rules is tantamount to abandoning all of them. “Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “They have reacted accordingly.”

If Twitter is indeed flooded by bigots eager to test the platform’s boundaries under Musk, they will compound the already daunting challenge of trying to police an enormous amount of content for rule violations. Even before Musk bought Twitter, critics complained that the platform was failing at that task.

Last July, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that it had “retrieved 1% of all content on Twitter for a 24-hour window twice a week over nine weeks from February 18 to April 21, 2022.” After running that sample through its Online Hate Index algorithm, the ADL found 225 “blatantly antisemitic tweets accusing Jewish people of pedophilia, invoking Holocaust denial, and sharing oft-repeated conspiracy theories.”

Given the huge size of the sample, that tally suggests either that a minuscule share of Twitter users is openly antisemitic or that the platform was doing a pretty impressive job of blocking or removing attacks on Jews. The ADL had a different take: “Of the reported tweets, Twitter only removed 11, or 5% of the content. Some additional posts have been taken down, presumably by the user, yet 166 tweets of the 225 we initially reported to Twitter remain active on the platform.”

Extrapolating from that 1 percent sample of “all content on Twitter,” the total number of antisemitic tweets might have been in the neighborhood of 22,000. Is that a lot? The ADL obviously thinks so. But when a platform is dealing with 238 million users generating nearly 200 billion tweets a year, even a highly effective system for detecting Jew hatred is apt to miss many examples. And that’s just one application of one content rule.

“Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well,” TechDirt‘s Mike Masnick argues. Given the amount of content, the subjectivity of moderation decisions, and the fact that they are bound to irritate the authors of targeted messages, he says, such systems “will always end up frustrating very large segments of the population.”

That observation, Masnick emphasizes, “is not an argument that we should throw up our hands and do nothing” or “an argument that companies can’t do better jobs within their own content moderation efforts.” Still, he says, it’s “a huge problem” that “many people—including many politicians and journalists—seem to expect that these companies not only can, but should, strive for a level of content moderation that is simply impossible to reach.”

The post Elon Musk Enforces Twitter's Ban on 'Hateful Conduct' As Critics Predict a Flood of Bigotry appeared first on Reason.com.

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New Movie Lists Honor Jeanne Dielman and 2001, Snub TikTok


still from Meshes of the Afternoon

Sight and Sound magazine has again issued two lists of the allegedly greatest films ever made—one lineup based on a poll of critics, the other on a poll of directors. At a time when movie listicles are as common as sweeping trend pieces extrapolated from two tweets and a vibe, this might not seem like anything special. But the Sight and Sound surveys have maintained a special distinction among cineastes, mostly by virtue of appearing only once every 10 years. Besides giving them an aura of rarity and value, this lets you chart the course of highbrow (or at least upper-middlebrow) opinion over the decades, watching one motion picture’s stock rise as another one falls.

Ten years ago, the big news was that Orson Welles’ 1941 film Citizen Kane was no longer in first place. In the great continental drift that is film-buff fashion, this was the equivalent of Pangea splitting: While Kane had not made the top 10 in the first critics’ poll, way back in 1952, it had topped the list in 1962 and stayed there for half a century. When Sight and Sound started surveying filmmakers as well as critics, Kane dominated the new poll too. But in 2012, the directors voted for Yasujirō Ozu’s family drama Tokyo Story and the critics voted for Alfred Hitchcock’s immortal mindfuck Vertigo. A decade later, Kane has not regained its throne: The directors have crowned Stanley Kubrick’s evolutionary epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, while the critics have selected Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the least salacious movie ever made about a prostitute. Old Kane is now second on the directors’ list (back ahead of Tokyo Story) and third among the critics (still behind Vertigo).

But the really big change this year is that the two top 10s now include some movies made after I left elementary school. In the last pair of polls, the most recent movie in either top 10 was Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam tale Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979. The most recent movie to have ever made one of the top 10s was Martin Scorsese’s boxing drama Raging Bull, also from the Carter era. This year, by contrast, the critics have Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) at No. 5, Claire Denis’ Beau Travail (1998) at No. 7, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) at No. 8. And the directors have In the Mood for Love and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990) in a tie for No. 9.

Now, I’ll understand if some of you are reluctant to call those movies “recent.” When Mulholland Dr. made its Cannes debut, my Reason colleague Fiona Harrigan was not quite 1 year old. But I saw that movie in its first run on a date with my now-wife, and I will pretend for as long as I can that it is still contemporary.

If you look at the lower ranks of the Sight and Sound top 100s, of course, you’ll find some more recent material. The critics’ poll has room for such modern fare as Moonlight, Parasite, and Get Out, and the first two of those made it onto the directors’ list too. But these lists have their limits. You can make a pretty good case that many of the best motion pictures of the 21st century have been TV shows, but there is no television here; I don’t know if that’s a product of the voters’ preferences or the pollster’s rules. You’ll know these lists are truly forward-looking when they have room for, say, BoJack Horseman.

They’ll be truly forward-looking when they have room for the vernacular videos that go viral online. No, I’m not saying I’ve seen a TikTok that’s on par with Citizen Kane. I’m just saying that cinema is a lot larger these days than what gets screened in theaters, and that at some point these other sorts of moving pictures are going to find their way into the canon. Some of them have danced around the edges already. The very first Sight and Sound top 10 had room for Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, which was, among other things, an extended advertisement for Standard Oil. If you’ve already let in an ad, you might as well let in a Tumblr GIF. I mean, it would have to be a really good Tumblr GIF. But in principle…

In that spirit, the most contemporary-feeling choice on these lists may be Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon, an experimental short that made it all the way up to No. 16 on the critics’ list this year. It’s not new at all—it came out in 1943, when it was my parents, not Fiona, who were not quite 1 year old—but its hypnagogic imagery has been an influence not just on arthouse directors like David Lynch but on music videos and other creative ephemera. More than any other item on the list, it’s easy to imagine a fragment of Meshes flickering in a tweet, a Facebook status, or an Instagram story, lending its uncanniness to an internet that itself feels awfully uncanny already.

But then again, Citizen Kane is pretty GIFable too. I shouldn’t neglect the old standbys.

 

The post New Movie Lists Honor <i>Jeanne Dielman</i> and <i>2001</i>, Snub TikTok appeared first on Reason.com.

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Is Florida Giving Up Its Fight Against ‘Woke’ Disney?


desantis

Less than eight months after Gov. Ron DeSantis launched a public feud with Disney, Florida’s state government is reportedly backing down from its confrontation with the House of Mouse.

State lawmakers are preparing to reverse legislation passed in April that would have stripped Disney of its special tax status and its authority to operate a pseudo-government that covers more than 25,000 acres of Floridian swampland-turned-resort. Instead of undoing Disney’s special arrangement, The Financial Times reported Friday that lawmakers are now looking to merely make “a few modifications” to the deal that allows Disney to control the Reedy Creek Improvement District.

State Rep. Randy Fine (R–Palm Bay), the lawmaker who originally drafted the bill to strip Disney’s self-rule power, tells the Times that the exit of Bob Chapek as Disney’s CEO and the return of former CEO Bob Iger makes it more likely that lawmakers will back down from the culture war that DeSantis picked with one of the state’s most iconic brands and largest employers—more than 77,000 people work at the Walt Disney World resort.

In other words, this looks like it was never much more than a pissing match between DeSantis and Chapek, who drew the governor’s ire when he sharply criticized Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law that censored discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. DeSantis signed the bill into law in March.

Florida has hundreds of special tax districts like Reedy Creek, but DeSantis seized on Chapek’s criticism and framed the whole thing as a culture war fight against a corporation that had received special privileges from the state. Chapek’s criticism of the new law amounted to “provocation, and we’re going to fight back,” DeSantis said in April as he signed the law undoing Disney’s special status.

But most of that was a wild exaggeration. As Reason‘s Scott Shackford wrote in April, the special tax and governing status granted to Disney in 1967 aren’t so much privileges for the corporation as they are gifts to the local governments surrounding the Walt Disney World resort. If the special status were revoked, Orange and Osceola counties would become responsible for providing mandatory public services—including basic infrastructure like water supplies and emergency services like fire departments, all of which Disney currently self-operates and self-funds within Reedy Creek—to the massive resort. It would effectively put local taxpayers on the hook for essential services that Disney used to pay for itself.

“Any contention that DeSantis is eliminating some sort of ‘special treatment’ for Disney comes with it the perhaps mistaken assumption that the two counties suddenly in charge of all of this infrastructure will somehow make the park better and not worse. In reality, putting Disney parks at the mercy of two different counties with different laws will be a huge mess for everybody involved, and that’s the point,” Shackford wrote. “It’s not about what’s fair or what’s best for the citizens in the area. It’s about punishing political foes and centralizing government power (a very nonconservative approach) to do so.”

Friday’s report that lawmakers are preparing to back down from those proposals only seems to confirm that conclusion.

The fight between DeSantis (with help from the Republican-controlled Legislature) and Disney wasn’t an example of a Republican governor taking a stand against a “woke corporation.” It looks to have been a grotesque misuse of state power that forced a private company to change its leadership, with the threats delivered in response to the former CEO’s decision to exercise his free speech rights.

The post Is Florida Giving Up Its Fight Against 'Woke' Disney? appeared first on Reason.com.

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