Twitter

On The Media Of ‘Russiagate’ And Related Fake Stories

February 3, 2023 Moon of Alabama. Educate! Media, Russia, RussiaGate, Twitter

Last week Matt Taibbi, with access to Twitter's internal papers, debunked the fake Hamilton 68 propaganda dashboard that was used to create many stories about alleged Russian disinformation. I had done similar five years earlier but had no access to the original data. There were enough secondary indications to conclude that the dashboard was a sham. Still, have the case made with primary data is a valuable addition. There has been no Russian influence or disinformation campaign. Two days later the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published a five part longread from an 18 month long investigation into the 'Russigate' drama and on how the media had cooked it up. CJR's editor wrote the intro: No narrative did more to shape Trump’s relations with the press than Russiagate. The story, which included the Steele dossier and the Mueller report among other totemic moments, resulted in Pulitzer Prizes as well as embarrassing retractions and damaged careers. For Trump, the press’s pursuit of the Russia story convinced him that any sort of normal relationship with the press was impossible.For the past year and a half, CJR has been examining the American media’s coverage of Trump and Russia in granular detail, and what it means as the country enters a new political cycle. Investigative reporter Jeff Gerth interviewed dozens of people at the center of the story—editors and reporters, Trump himself, and others in his orbit.

Under Musk, Twitter Continues To Promote US Propaganda Networks

January 8, 2023 Bryce Greene, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Educate! Censorship, Elon Musk, Media, NED, Twitter

Elon Musk’s controlled release of the documents known as the “Twitter Files” has given us some insight into the inner workings of the social media platform. The batch of docs released on December 20 is arguably the most explosive, detailing Twitter’s deliberate shielding of US propaganda operations. After getting limited access to Twitter‘s internal systems, Lee Fang of the Intercept (12/20/22) detailed how Twitter staff “whitelisted” accounts run by US Central Command (CENTCOM), the unit of the US military that oversees the Middle East, as part of covert propaganda campaigns. In other words, Twitter protected accounts engaged in US psychological warfare operations, even though they clearly violated the platform’s terms of service.

‘Free Speech’ Is Whatever The Rich Say It Is

December 25, 2022 Adam Johnson, The Real News Network. Educate! Class Struggle, Elon Musk, Freedom of Speech, Media, Twitter, Wealthy Elites

It’s been a banner month for people who love invoking the “free speech” buzzword. Whether Elon Musk was promoting it as a catch-all abstract value to justify inviting transphobes and neo-nazis back to Twitter, or mainstream journalists were invoking the idea in response to a petulant billionaire banning his critics from the large social media company he just purchased for $44 billion, everyone these past few weeks has had some opinion on “free speech,” what it means, and who its supposed champion—or, more often than not, its most hypocritical defender—truly is. What the conversation has been largely lacking (other than a coherent definition of “free speech”) is a serious acknowledgment that free speech as a concept means very little if we don’t discuss how massive asymmetries in the distribution of power and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a tiny few effectively determine who has the right to speak freely and who doesn’t.

Elon Musk’s Takeover Through The Eyes Of Twitter’s Janitors

December 14, 2022 Teddy Ostrow, In These Times. Educate! California, Elon Musk, Twitter, Worker Rights and Jobs

San Francisco, California - Billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has captured headlines for its tumultuous effect on the company’s corporate staff and the risks it poses to the platform’s future survival. But Musk’s acquisition also has dire, albeit underreported, consequences for the service staff who keep the blue bird humming. In These Times spoke to four janitors who say that all 20 custodial workers at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters lost their jobs on December 5 because Twitter’s new custodial contractor refused to rehire them. The move comes less than two months after Musk, who bought Twitter on October 27, fired several senior executives and later roughly 3,700 employees ranging from engineers to communications workers to content moderators—half the company’s staff—on November 4.

The Twitter Files

December 4, 2022 Matt Taibbi, Scheer Post. Educate! Biden administration, Censorship, Elon Musk, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Media, Twitter

The following is a thread of Tweets written by Matt Taibbi on Dec. 2 about Twitter’s content moderation practices—specifically dealing with the Hunter Biden laptop story—after being given internal documents by Elon Musk. Outlets like USA Today have reported they have not been able to verify the authenticity of the emails. The thread was promoted by Musk stating “The public deserves to know what really happened …” 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.

Workers Built Twitter — They Should Own It, Not Elon Musk

November 28, 2022 Kyle Thibodeau and Rose Lemlich, Left Voice. Educate! Elon Musk, Media, Tech industry, Twitter, Worker Rights and Jobs

Let’s be clear: Elon Musk has no idea how the software that runs Twitter actually works. He has made it abundantly clear that he has not even a basic understanding of how a website like Twitter functions under the hood, or how it was built, or what Twitter workers do all day. On his first day in the office, he demanded that workers print out their code so that he could review it himself, apparently under the impression that a 16-year-old social media site with a system architecture made up of dozens if not hundreds of component pieces of software, each made up of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of lines of code, could be remotely consumable by a single person kicked back in a La-Z-Boy for light bedtime reading.

Twitter May Be In Violation Of German Labor Law

November 24, 2022 Molly Shah, The Real News Network. Resist! Germany, Media, Twitter, Worker Rights and Jobs

Twitter has been conducting massive layoffs across its global workforce in the weeks since the company was officially acquired by Elon Musk, but Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to company staffing is running into major compliance issues and violations of local labor laws. This is especially true in Europe, where labor laws typically offer many more protections for workers than comparable laws in the United States. Workers across the continent, including in Ireland, France, and the United Kingdom, have challenged the legality of their terminations. In Germany, workers who were fired from Twitter are fighting back against their terminations and using German labor law to do so. “I think it is important now to use the German protections which are available.

FTX Goes Bust

November 16, 2022 Craig Murray. Educate! Censorship, cryptocurrency, FTX, Media, Twitter

The FTX story seems truly remarkable. From being founded only in 2017 it rose to be a “partner organisation” of the World Economic Forum and the second largest donor to Biden and the Democrat’s mid-term election campaign. It has now gone completely bust, taking every penny of its depositors money with it. That is some trajectory. I suppose it is inevitable that dodgy chancers would create derivatives markets for gambling on crypto, but I confess I had not given the matter much thought. It goes without saying that in those five years the founder of FTX had managed to take a huge personal fortune out of the company before it went bust. FTX was a one man company belonging to Sam Bankman-Fried.

Researchers Find Massive Anti-Russian ‘Bot Army’

November 8, 2022 Peter Cronau, Consortium News. Educate! Cyber Warfare, Media, Propaganda, Russia, Social Media, Twitter

A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers also found these automated tweets had been purposely used to drive up fear amongst people targeted by them, boosting a high level of statistically measurable “angst” in the online discourse.

US Government Is World’s Worst Violator Of Freedom Of Press

August 9, 2022 Ben Norton, Multipolarista. Educate! Censorship, China, CIA, Facebook, FBI, Google, Iran, Julian Assange, Media, Nicaragua, Russia, Silicon Valley, Twitter, Venezuela, YouTube

The US government employs many strategies to try to justify its intervention in the internal affairs and violation of the sovereignty of foreign nations. Chief among these deceptive tactics is Washington’s weaponization of accusations that its adversaries violate the freedom of expression. This is quite ironic, given that the United States is the world’s leading violator of press freedoms, according to any consistent definition of the term. And unlike the countries that Washington claims supposedly repress the freedom of expression within their borders, US government censorship of independent media outlets and suppression of alternative voices is global, hurting people across the planet. The Joe Biden administration has in particular gone to great lengths to depict itself as a defender of civil liberties.

Swarms Of Israeli Bots Are Crippling Pro-Palestinian Twitter Accounts

May 18, 2022 Jessica Buxbaum, Mintpress News. Educate! Censorship, Israel, Media, Palestine, Twitter

“These accounts were following the exact same people that were tweeting about Palestine, but from France or Francophone accounts that work on Palestine,” Razek said of her new followers. The advocacy director of Rābet, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy’s digital platform, became wary of the issue after Abier Khateb, a grants manager at Open Society Foundations, reported mass followings as well. Razek told MintPress News that she began individually reporting each account as fake but kept her own account open — lest she let the alleged bots win. But after a few days, Razek made her profile private. At the peak of the mass following, Razek had accumulated 400 fake followers.

The Road To Hell, Brought To You By Liberalism

May 9, 2022 Danny Haiphong, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Censorship, Elon Musk, Liberalism, Twitter

Elon Musk successfully won his bid to purchase Twitter on April 25th just days after a rally in New York City chanted “Azov” to express support for Ukraine. While these events appear unrelated on the surface, they represent key examples of the road to hell paved by U.S. imperialism’s dominant ideology: liberalism. Liberalism is often viewed as the most progressive political ideology of the prevailing social order in the West. In actuality, liberalism is the driving ideological force of capitalist and imperialist expansionism. Liberal ideology is characterized by the fetishization of racism, individualism, and the political preconditions necessary for the expansion of capitalism. Once a kick-starter for the explosive growth of capital, liberalism has devolved into an ideology that defends the rule of the rich at any and all cost.

#NoMore Censorship Of Africa’s Roving Digital Army Of Peace

December 4, 2021 Simon Tesfamariam, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Africa, Censorship, Media, Twitter

At approximately 5 am PST on November 29th, I awoke to an almost uninterrupted buzz of text messages from my cell phone. I turned to my nightstand, put my glasses on and quickly learned through concerned friends that my Twitter account had been taken down. Naturally, I logged on to Twitter. From one account to the next, including my "burners", I received an error message indicating that each account had been suspended. I was given no explanation. How could Twitter take down all my accounts without any explanation? What did I do to deserve such an honor? It didn't take long for me to discover that I wasn't alone. Apparently, Twitter had suspended about a dozen other accounts from the Horn of Africa and its diaspora that had been associated with the nascent #NoMore movement.

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