patrick.net

Patrick says

I don't know whether it's Elon's doing, or whether Twitter is still infested with enough FBI vermin to keep quite a lot of the censorship going while Elon is unaware. He can't know everything.

He said the whole system was like a massive Rube Goldberg machine the other day. Clearly frustrated how F'd up everything is.

My twatter account is still banned. I appealed it a couple months ago and finally got told that it would stay banned because xyz policy infringement. Of course none of the quoted policies were even applicable. I literally got banned for saying that no matter how many surgeries they have, men can’t be women. That’s it.

I got banned again after Musk for that, hasn't been fixed yet.

They do seem to still be shadowbanning people:

https://slaynews.com/news/elon-musk-restores-general-mike-flynn-twitter-account-left-implodes/

https://twitter.com/apoctoz/status/1613199258135429120?ref_src=patrick.net

OMG, the NOSE and LIZARD TONGUE hahaha..

https://twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/1616712413587415041?ref_src=patrick.net

Patrick says

They do seem to still be shadowbanning people:

Yup:

https://evol.news/news/breaking-elon-musk-reveals-secret-twitter-labels-causingshadowbans-on-conservatives/

Elon Musk Reveals ‘Secret’ Twitter Labels Causing Shadowbans on Conservatives

All the Twitter files so far:

https://www.racket.news/p/capsule-summaries-of-all-twitter

In order, the Twitter Files threads:

Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbi

TWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.

Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

1a. Twitter Files Supplemental, December 6, 2022, by @mtaibbi

THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER

A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.

Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.

Twitter Files, Part 3, by @mtaibbi, December 9, 2022

THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 - January 6th, 2021

First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.

Twitter Files Part 4, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 10, 2022

THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 7th, 2021

This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.

Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.

Twitter Files Part 5, by @BariWeiss, December 11, 2022

THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 8th, 2021

As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.

Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”

Twitter Files Part 6, by @mtaibbi, December 16, 2022

TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.

Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”

Twitter Files Part 7, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 19, 2022

THE FBI AND HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP

The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.

Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

The ten teleporter documents referred to in Mike Shellenberger’s FBI thread.
Twitter Files Part 8, by @lhfang, December 20, 2022

HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN

Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.

Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.

Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:

Twitter Files Part 9, by @mtaibbi, December 24th, 2022

TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES”

The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.

Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”

Twitter Files Part 10, by @DavidZweig, December 28, 2022

HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”

Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.

and

Twitter Files Parts 11 and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023

HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN

and

TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”

These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.

Twitter Files Part #13, by @AlexBerenson, January 9, 2023

HOW TWITTER COVERED UP COVID TRUTHS

New addition Alex Berenson details how Twitter throttled down or erased true information about COVID-19, with the help of a former Pfizer lobbyist, Scott Gottlieb.

Key Revelations: Twitter senior political liaison Todd O’Boyle feared that onetime acting FDA commission Brett Giroir’s correct observations about the effectiveness of natural immunity were “corrosive” and might “go viral,” and put a misleading label on the tweet. Gottlieb also pressured Twitter to remove Berenson himself.

Twitter Files Part #14, by @mtaibbi, January 12th, 2023

THE RUSSIAGATE LIES

One: The Fake Tale of Russian Bots and the #ReleaseTheMemo Hashtag

Internal communications at Twitter show that Russian bots were not in fact hyping the classified memo of Republican congressman Devin Nunes in January of 2018.

Key Revelations: Three key Democrats — Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Blumenthal, and former House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff — cited a think tank called Hamilton 68 in denouncing a memo by Nunes as aided by “Russian influence operations.” Yet all three were told by Twitter executives there were no Russians in the picture. Said former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo and… none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

Twitter Files Supplemental, by @mtaibbi, January 13th, 2023

MORE ADAM SCHIFF BANS, AND “DEAMPLIFICATION.”

A brief thread of 10 tweets showing that the former head of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, sent repeated requests for bans of people critical of their office.

Key Revelation: Schiff and the DNC both not only asked for the takedown of an obvious satire by “Peter Douche,” but requested takedowns of accounts that were critical of the Steele dossier and outed the name of the supposed “whistleblower” in the Ukrainegate case, Eric Ciaramella. Schiff staffers said that while they “appreciate greatly” efforts by Twitter to deamplify certain accounts, they worried such effort s “could… impede the ability of law enforcement to search Twitter.”

https://mattbivens.substack.com/p/whos-in-charge-of-your-world-view

We are familiar with whistleblowers dropping huge data collections into the public sphere. Think of Edward Snowden revealing, 10 years ago, that the National Security Agency (NSA) was monitoring the telephone and internet communications of law abiding citizens (prompting President Barack Obama to propose reforms, even as his government canceled Snowden’s U.S. passport and trapped him in exile in Russia); or of Julian Assange publishing tens of thousands of secret documents about the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (prompting three successive U.S. presidential administrations to hound him ever since, such that he now remains in solitary confinement in a British prison, his health wrecked, and pending hearings on extradition to America); or of the still-unnamed persons who shared millions of electronic financial records dubbed the Panama Papers, which have been used by journalists to follow the money associated with leaders around the world, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, to the King of Saudi Arabia, to prime ministers from Iceland to Pakistan.

This Twitter lark is different, though. Musk is not a troubled middle management type who’s stolen a few documents and gone on the lam. He owns the files — all the files. They include communications with, and insights into, everything from the FBI to Facebook to the Pentagon’s fake Twitter accounts.

Welp, Twitter just banned my new account there as well, apparently for posting patrick.net memes.

Or maybe it was for my comment "Trans is mental illness".

My revenge is to make a meme:

Patrick says

Or maybe it was for my comment "Trans is mental illness".

Yes, I got an email and I am indeed locked out of Twitter for stating the fact that being trans is a mental illness. Which it obviously is.

Twitter demands that:

1. I delete the tweet, which is the same as apologizing. No, https://patrick.net/post/1338107/2021-02-13-rule-number-one-never-apologize
2. Give them a phone number so that they have a better way to spy on me.

No way will I do either.

I'm very disappointed in Elon. He doesn't seem to have changed anything really.

Patrick says

Patrick says

Or maybe it was for my comment "Trans is mental illness".

Yes, I got an email and I am indeed locked out of Twitter for stating the fact that being trans is a mental illness. Which it obviously is.

Twitter demands that:

1. I delete the tweet, which is the same as apologizing. No, https://patrick.net/post/1338107/2021-02-13-rule-number-one-never-apologize
2. Give them a phone number so that they have a better way to spy on me.

No way will I do either.

I'm very disappointed in Elon. He doesn't seem to have changed anything really.

If he doesn't change it, it will fade away and he will lose most of his money invested. Even goog is starting to crack, too much woke biz and no real biz. Falling behind

I have to agree with Trump now on his decision not to trust Twitter again.

Twitter simply is not trustworthy, even with Elon in charge.

Trump would look quite foolish to go back and get banned again. Trump does not like to look foolish.

"Fool me once..."

Patrick says

I'm very disappointed in Elon. He doesn't seem to have changed anything really.

Geesh - it has only been a few months.

There are loads of Tweets and videos now up now that question and criticize the Tranny narrative.

Full on calling it a mental illness (which it is) - is still pushing the limits too hard and too fast IMO.

socal2 says

Full on calling it a mental illness (which it is) - is still pushing the limits too hard and too fast IMO.

Obviously I disagree.

Facts should never be censored.

socal2 says

Patrick says

I'm very disappointed in Elon. He doesn't seem to have changed anything really.

Geesh - it has only been a few months.

There are loads of Tweets and videos now up now that question and criticize the Tranny narrative.

Full on calling it a mental illness (which it is) - is still pushing the limits too hard and too fast IMO.

I mean... going from clincally being a mental illness (gender dysphoria) to being promoted by schools to little children could be considered pushing the limits too hard and too fast. That's just my perspective though.

DhammaStep says

I mean... going from clincally being a mental illness (gender dysphoria) to being promoted by schools to little children could be considered pushing the limits too hard and too fast. That's just my perspective though.

Agree 100%

The tide is turning though. Takes longer for people to recognize their mistakes and reverse course against this cultural cancer. People who support all this Tranny garbage really feel like they are good and loving people with the best intentions at heart. Some are Pedo/perverts - but the majority are Liberal Wine Moms who are retarded. We need to give them a soft landing and easy path to come back to sanity.

It is going to take more than a couple months of free(er) Twitter under Elon for people to sober up on this issue.

And Elon's Twitter banned me for stating the fact that "Trans is mental illness."

socal2 says

DhammaStep says

I mean... going from clincally being a mental illness (gender dysphoria) to being promoted by schools to little children could be considered pushing the limits too hard and too fast. That's just my perspective though.

Agree 100%

The tide is turning though. Takes longer for people to recognize their mistakes and reverse course against this cultural cancer. People who support all this Tranny garbage really feel like they are good and loving people with the best intentions at heart. Some are Pedo/perverts - but the majority are Liberal Wine Moms who are retarded. We need to give them a soft landing and easy path to come back to sanity.

It is going to take more than a couple months of free(er) Twitter under Elon for people to sober up on this issue.

BOTH Trannies and COVID are going to take years for people to wake up on. Frankly, people are quicker with the COVID but are too freshly ashamed to admit it.

Patrick says

Facts should never be censored.

This is dangerous for governments (power) and corporations (money)

Patrick says

Facts should never be censored.

Freedom of speech includes the ability to share an opinion even when it is unpopular or offensive.

Patrick says

Patrick says

Or maybe it was for my comment "Trans is mental illness".

Yes, I got an email and I am indeed locked out of Twitter for stating the fact that being trans is a mental illness. Which it obviously is.

Twitter demands that:

1. I delete the tweet, which is the same as apologizing. No, https://patrick.net/post/1338107/2021-02-13-rule-number-one-never-apologize
2. Give them a phone number so that they have a better way to spy on me.

No way will I do either.

I'm very disappointed in Elon. He doesn't seem to have changed anything really.

Others have also run across the demand that we deny obvious reality:

Last week I got my Twitter account unbanned after submitting a third appeal. I logged in and got the message that my account was locked. A screen much like the one above was revealed with a tweet I did March of 2022, saying something like “scratch a LBGT activist and find a groomer. And trans women aren’t women.”

Yah I can see why the snowflakes banned me. Haha.

Patrick says

And Elon's Twitter banned me for stating the fact that "Trans is mental illness."

1) try another appeal. Mine worked on the third try.

2) I’m kinda glad that Elon made the twin horrible mistakes of voting for Biden and getting vaxxed. And that he admits/regrets both openly. It makes space for other lefties to admit that their choices to do the same were also mistakes. It gives them an out when one of the smartest richest most successful people in the world can admit to making those ones too.

Shaman says

1) try another appeal. Mine worked on the third try.

They demand my phone number.

I say no to that.

They demand that I delete my factual tweet.

I say no to that.