Matt Taibbi and the “Twitter files” showing overt government censorship via Twitter
Clear violations of the First Amendment’s right to free speech are being demonstrated over and over again; when does the mainstream media start covering this?
Matt Taibbi has been doing very important work on the “Twitter files” that show how our federal government has been the “central player” in urging and in some cases forcing Twitter to censor both individual posts and people.
That is an obvious violation of the First Amendment and if it had been Trump’s FBI doing this the mainstream media would be up in arms. But apparently b/c it’s Biden’s FBI (and many other agencies) doing this, the mainstream media has mostly been silent or dismissive of the Twitter Files.
This censorship emanating from the federal government includes things like “visibility filtering” aka “shadow banning” where posts are downranked or simply not shown to many people, which is clearly what has been happening to many of my posts over the last couple of years.
This government-induced social media censorship and tracking is, in my view, the leading edge of what I’ve been calling “techno dictatorship” right here at home. China is leading the extreme edge of this practice but many many other nations, including the US, are eager to follow suit in various ways.
This only changes if you, yes you, start to speak out about it.
I predict that this story will get bigger and bigger and will pretty soon get covered widely in mainstream media as they find they can’t ignore it any longer.
Here’s a juicy quote from Taibbi’s latest post:
“Every day, the Twitter Files reveal more about how the machinery of state censorship works. We learn more and more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags social media content in a neverending, cyclical process. The state isn’t a bit actor in a mostly-private “content moderation” movement. It’s the central player, clearly the boss of the whole operation, and clearly also the driving force in its expansion, a truth we can show in pictures.”
And here’s a good summary of Taibbi’s tweets on this particular issue.