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December 10, 2022

'Twitter Files 3' reveals details about the suppression and suspension of Trump's account

By Rajan Laad

Elon Musk's Twitter Files series has revealed what many conservatives have suspected for ages.

The first installment of Twitter Files revealed how the social media giant suppressed the New York Post's story about Hunter Biden's laptop and how the DNC worked with Twitter to suppress "dissenters."

The second installment revealed that Twitter had a secret blacklist for "dissenters," causing their reach to be restricted or their accounts to be suspended.  Topics that violated the Democrat groupthink were prevented from trending. 

The latest installment of Twitter Files by journalist Matt Taibbi covers the suspension of President Trump's account and former Twitter executives colluding with federal agencies to interfere with the 2020 elections.

Taibbi revealed that Twitter was already restricting the reach of President Trump's account using a "vast array of tools."

Twitter executives had laid a "framework" for banning Trump's account four years prior to its actual suspension.  They were looking for an excuse to execute the ban.  The excuse presented itself in the form of the January 6 "insurrection."  They first suppressed Trump's account and eventually suspended him.

After suspending Trump, one Twitter executive appeared to gloat.

Some Twitter executives considered banning the official @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts used by Trump's White House after Trump's account was suspended.

But they realized that the accounts would transition to the Biden administration and decided against suspending them.  They settled for limiting their use of the Trump administration's official accounts:

Internal communications also revealed close ties between Twitter and federal agencies.

Internal documents revealed that Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, met with the FBI, DHS, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) about the N.Y. Post's Hunter Biden laptop story, which was censored.

Roth regularly met with the FBI and DHS 

Roth even joked about concealing meetings with the FBI on his meeting calendar.

Other Twitter executives also worked with the FBI and attempted to conceal the FBI's influence:

The FBI even sent reports about specific tweets with the implicit understanding that action will be taken.

Twitter dutifully tagged those tweets with disclaimers or links to liberal fact-checking sites.

Prior to the 2020 elections, Twitter executives opened a channel on their internal messaging service dedicated to election-related account removals.

There was friction between safety operations and senior policy execs like Roth and Vijaya Gadde (then head of legal policy and trust).  The former was accustomed to a rules-based process approach, while the likes of Gadde operated as a judge, jury, and executioner while policing Twitter.

Taibbi revealed there were no "moderation" requests from Trump's campaign, Trump's White House, or Republicans.

Twitter had devolved from being a forum that reflected public opinion to a skewed medium that manipulated public opinion. 

In limiting the reach of a sitting U.S. president, Twitter operated like an Orwellian super-government.  The public mandate was deemed to be less important than the opinion of a few Twitter executives.

Twitter and various politicized federal agencies attacked American democracy by suppressing the voice of the country's highest elected official and meddling in the 2020 elections.

In fact, suppressing reach is much worse than suspension because it gives the user the erroneous impression that his message is being consumed by all when it is consumed by only a few. 

In a democracy, every candidate is allowed to campaign and spread his message.  If the message of one candidate is surreptitiously suppressed while the other is allowed, it is almost the equivalent of a one-party system.

The level of collusion between Twitter and federal agencies reveals how deep the rot runs and how politicized these agencies have become.

The FBI instructing Twitter to "deal with" certain tweets is the nation's foremost law enforcement agency policing and sitting in judgment of the expression of citizens. 

What's worse is that citizens were unaware of this.

The question remains: if federal agencies did this on Twitter, where else did they meddle?  Perhaps there were areas that the public could never ever imagine.

So what happens now?

The news media are the P.R. agency for the Democrats, so they will ignore the stories.  How ironic that stories about the suppression of information are being suppressed.

When the story is covered, the former Twitter regime will be depicted as moral and virtuous while Musk's Twitter will be projected as tyrants and spreaders of misinformation.  The media may claim that these revelations are a violation of the privacy of former Twitter employees and have made them vulnerable to attacks from "right-wing extremists."

Do not expect the guilty to be punished.

The worst that can happen to them is that the GOP House summons them and scolds them on television during a congressional hearing.

The midterms have taught us that the media still have clout among the public, despite surveys showing a lack of trust.

If the public is either unaware of facts or is fed stories that twist facts, these revelations are meaningless.  Perhaps only conservatives who already suspected Twitter's manipulation will believe this.  For the rest, it will be a coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign.

Sadly, this almost renders the exercises meaningless.

These Twitter Files will have an impact.

It will make Musk, like Trump, a target of the Democrat machinery.  It isn't a question of if, but when and how Musk will face retaliation.

The media are already carrying stories of Musk's "inhumane" layoffs, Musk exploiting his employees, and Musk living at Twitter's headquarters.  They are portraying Musk as a monster, which gives the Democrats an excuse to set free various politicized government agencies on Musk.

The question remains as to how this can be undone.

The suppression of President Trump's and many other conservative accounts prior to the 2020 elections means that voters were prevented access to key information.  Worse still, it was done without their knowledge.  Perhaps the lack of this information influenced their vote for Biden. 

It is impossible to gauge the impact this act of information suppression had on the 2020 elections.  It cannot be called voter fraud because the voter was voting with the presumption that he had all the information to inform his decision.  It cannot be detected in audits, because the voting was done according to process.

In a fair world, the election would be declared invalid and would be redone.  But we know that will never, ever happen.  The result is that the country has to suffer dire consequences due to the misgovernance of Biden.

Instead, those asking questions are being branded "election deniers."  

It is clear that the 2016 elections were fair because the Democrats really believed their own lies in thinking Trump didn't stand a chance against Hillary Clinton.  But once their lesson was learned, they were not going to allow history to repeat itself.

The Democrats and even some Republicans are urging Trump to swallow this unfairness of the 2020 elections and look to the future.

But if we do not talk about the myriad wrongs of the past, there is no way to fix the future. 

If these issues are not addressed, the U.S. may never have a Republican president again.

Image: Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

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