TWITTER CONSPIRACY HEARING: State Sponsored Thought Police, “I never thought that would happen in the United States of America”

The Twitter hearings opened yesterday with testimony from journalists, Mike Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger. It was not short of bombshells. One thing is for certain, America is in trouble. Real trouble.

Michael Shellenberger Outlines Deep State Psychological Operations Being Conducted Against Americans

“What you’re basically seeing here is the rise of a for-profit censorship industry funded by American taxpayers to censor real-world information. And this is basically a turning of the national security state from the kind of psychological operations they launched abroad into the United States using the exact same kind of influence operation tactics that they’ve used abroad on the American people. It’s a huge scandal.” Michael Shellenberger

Matt Taibbi epic comeback:

“Ranking Member Plaskett, I’m not a ‘so-called journalist’. I’ve won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I’ve written 10 books including 4 NYT Best Sellers.” pic.twitter.com/crXlWjScEr

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 9, 2023

Hearing highlights:

National Review: Representative Stacey Plaskett (D., Virgin Islands) ripped into Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger during a Thursday hearing on the Twitter Files, accusing the pair of journalists of endangering the lives of Twitter employees by exposing how the social-media platform partnered with various federal agencies to censor disfavored political views. Plaskett insisted that there was no “real evidence” of coordination between Twitter and the federal government and argued that the hundreds of emails revealed by Shellenberger and Taibbi are simply evidence of benign “content moderation” efforts (National Review). Benny Johnson: Jim Jordan OBLITERATES Democrat on House Weaponization Committee after she has utter meltdown over Twitter Files authors testifying to expose Big Tech censorship (Twitter). Townhall: Rep. Jim Jordan took his five minutes and it’s must-watch: “The truth is, we want to focus on protecting the First Amendment” (Twitter).

Chaos erupts during House Weaponization Committee hearing as unhinged Democrats try to coerce Twitter Files journalists to reveal their sources pic.twitter.com/86MBwbTa91

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 9, 2023

Fox News: Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, was accused of badgering journalist Matt Taibbi into revealing a source on Thursday during a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing on the “Twitter Files,” but the reporter wouldn’t budge. Sourcing was a sensitive subject as it had already come up during the hearing when Taibbi was asked directly about it regarding his reporting on internal Twitter communications and accusations of government censorship. Garcia asked Taibbi when Twitter owner Elon Musk first approached him to partake in the “Twitter Files” project, which has allowed once-secret internal discussions to be exposed, revealing an array of issues. Taibbi began to say he couldn’t reveal that information when Garcia insisted she simply needed a date (Fox News). Townhall: Chaos. Tensions rise after House Democrats try to get (Matt Taibbi) to reveal his sources for the Twitter Files (Twitter). RNC Research: Journalist Michael Shellenberger says Biden’s FTC demanding Twitter reveal the names of journalists with whom they interacted is a “chilling” and “disturbing” attack on the free press. “I never thought that would happen in the United States of America” (Twitter).

TWITTER FILES HEARING: Michael Shellenberger testifies to Rep. Goldman that the FBI did “direct” Twitter to censor accounts pic.twitter.com/1ievId08xV

— RSBN (@RSBNetwork) March 9, 2023

i watched the Hearing on Twitter this morning w/Taibbi + Shellenberger (link below).

i’m alarmed at the Dem position, that #twitterfiles are inherently RW + that it’s a LW value for State Dept, DOD, DHS, etc to use private co’s to censor speech https://t.co/ML8mbdgKXl pic.twitter.com/4KLOz2qddZ

— Brook Hines got the existential willies (@nashville_brook) March 9, 2023

The Censorship Complex Isn’t A ‘Tinfoil Hat’ Conspiracy, And The ‘Twitter Files’ Just Dropped More Proof

By: Margot Cleveland, March 10, 2023:

“It may be possible — if we can take off the tinfoil hat — that there is not a vast conspiracy,” Democrat Colin Allred of Texas scoffed at independent journalist Matt Taibbi during Thursday’s House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. But while Allred was busy deriding Taibbi and fellow witness, journalist Michael Shellenberger, the public was digesting the latest installment of the “Twitter Files” — which contained yet further proof that the government funds and leads a sprawling Censorship Complex.

Taibbi dropped the Twitter thread about an hour before the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing began. And notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the players revealed in the 17-or-so earlier installments of the “Twitter Files,” Thursday’s reporting exposed even more government-funded organizations pushing Twitter to censor speech.

But yesterday’s thread, titled “The Censorship-Industrial Complex,” did more than merely expand the knowledge base of the various actors: It revealed that government-funded organizations sought the censorship of truthful speech by ordinary Americans.

In his prepared testimony for the subcommittee, Shellenberger spoke of the censorship slide he saw in reviewing the internal Twitter communications. “The bar for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering extremism’ to ‘countering simple misinformation.’ Otherwise known as being wrong on the internet,” Shellenberger testified.

“The government no longer needs the predicate of calling you a terrorist or an extremist to deploy government resources to counter your political activity,” Shellenberger continued. “The only predicate it needs is the assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”

Being “wrong” isn’t even a prerequisite for censorship requests, however, with the Virality Project headed out of the Stanford Internet Observatory reportedly pushing “multiple platforms” to censor “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.”

An excerpt showed this verboten category included “viral posts of individuals expressing vaccine hesitancy, or stories of true vaccine side effects,” which the so-called disinformation experts acknowledged might “not clearly” be “mis or disinformation, but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”

Silencing such speech is bad enough, but the Virality Project “added to this bucket” of “true content” worthy of censorship: “true posts which could fuel hesitancy, such as individual countries banning certain vaccines.”

Let that sink in for a minute. The Virality Project — more on that shortly — pushed “multiple platforms” to take action against individuals posting true news reports of countries banning certain vaccines. And why? Because it might make individuals “hesitant” to receive a Covid shot.

Keep reading…..