The reporters from the Twitter Files project just won the Dao Prize for excellence in investigative journalism. Could there be a better time to dive back into these stories?
What do Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, John Cleese, Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Dawkins and Walter Kirn have in common? They are all, despite holding very different political beliefs, very concerned about the future of political discourse in Western democracies.
The podcast returns with more coverage of The Twitter Files. On this episode, I am discussing how the US government used the FBI to exert censorship control over Twitter and many other tech companies to reinforce government narratives and silence critics.
When Substack launched what Musk interpreted as a Twitter competitor, the billionaire tried to force journalist Matt Taibbi to leave the publishing platform behind in favour of Twitter. When Taibbi declined, Musk declared The Twitter Files to be done and dusted.
During the pandemic, Twitter and other social networks censored dissidents and suppressed factually true stories to reinforce government propaganda and the interests of multi-billion-dollar companies with respect to SARS-CoV-2 and vaccines to combat it.
The Twitter Files show us how cynical the US government tried, and often succeed, to shape how we perceive reality. But they also show those of us that weren't buying the propaganda that they aren't slowly going insane.
Responding to listener feedback on episodes about journalism, Drachenlord, The Twitter Files, the Fediverse, free speech, artificial intelligence and beyond.
The Twitter Files show how the factually accurate Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. They also reveal the secret FBI operation targeting social media executives and high-level journalists that led to this suppression.
In a first episode about the Twitter Files disclosures, we look at how Twitter, at the behest of intelligence agencies, catalogued people's speech and selectively silenced some of them. And then lied about it.
I don't like Elon Musk. But I think him buying Twitter isn't a bad thing. The people who do, however, are either unintentionally wrong or they are actively fighting on the side of censorship and propaganda, like the US intelligence community.
