Tristan
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Not censoring attacks, Tucker; censoring information.
Critical information to weigh the veracity and moral character of the Candidate, and his family.
BRKG Master Twitter thread. Elon Musk now owns Twitter, post 144. Heads roll for real
- Thread starter jward
- Start date
Not censoring attacks, Tucker; censoring information.
Critical information to weigh the veracity and moral character of the Candidate, and his family.
jward
passin' thru
(imho if you think it's today's "democratic party" and big tech then you too are part o' the problem.)
Lena Epstein
@LenaEpstein
1h
What @ElonMusk exposed goes even further than the Hunter Biden scandal.
It reveals how far today's Democrat Party—with Big Tech and their allies in the Legacy Media—will go to silence dissent and hold onto power.
Good people must stand up and fight back. I'm in. #TwitterFiles
Lena Epstein
@LenaEpstein
1h
What @ElonMusk exposed goes even further than the Hunter Biden scandal.
It reveals how far today's Democrat Party—with Big Tech and their allies in the Legacy Media—will go to silence dissent and hold onto power.
Good people must stand up and fight back. I'm in. #TwitterFiles
jward
passin' thru
Steve Herman
@W7VOA
Announcement from @SantaClaraDA
he's quitting #Twitter and issues an appeal to other district attorneys across the US to do the same. https://countyda.sccgov.org/news/ne...itter-protest-hatred-bigotry-and-antisemitism
12:51 PM · Dec 5, 2022
@W7VOA
Announcement from @SantaClaraDA
he's quitting #Twitter and issues an appeal to other district attorneys across the US to do the same. https://countyda.sccgov.org/news/ne...itter-protest-hatred-bigotry-and-antisemitism
12:51 PM · Dec 5, 2022
Haybails
When In Doubt, Throttle Out!
Well, of course they want others to quit Twitter... that's so they're not exposed to the truth.
HB
jward
passin' thru
Twitter is Fun Again!
Now, let's have the rest: Everything in the files about how national security agencies manipulate what we get to see and hear
Matt Bivens, M.D.
Dec 4
An important story developed this weekend, unspooling in real time on Twitter over a Friday evening. Basically, billionaire Elon Musk gave a good friend of mine — the journalist Matt Taibbi — extensive access to Twitter’s internal e-mails and communications, and told Taibbi he could start sharing.
What ensued was an epic takedown of Twitter, delivered on Twitter, in what was ultimately a 41-Tweet thread. It was parceled out as fast as Taibbi could post, side by side with readers commenting in real time — offering responses ranging from “wow!” to “this is garbage”, claims that history was being made before our eyes countered by sarcastic gifs of a sesame seed bun with no hamburger inside, and quite a few variations of the line: “This is fun! Twitter is fun again!”
Thank you for reading The 100 Days. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Share
And it was! Twitter indeed used to be fun, with real Americans — as opposed to computer bots and paid hacks — posting real-time opinion and wit, all in a format that mandates brevity. But in recent years, most of the fun has been policed out. So it was odd to once again enjoy scrolling through a feed. One of my favorite podcasters, MIT researcher Lex Friedman (clearly one of the kinder souls on planet Earth), weighed in:
Lex Fridman @lexfridman
The Twitter Files release is historic. This will strengthen our democracy.
12:05 AM ∙ Dec 3, 2022
129,018Likes10,976Retweets
By next morning, the Twitter Files report was covered by media as far-off as Russia, and Donald Trump was citing it as the latest reason to “throw the presidential election results of 2020 OUT”. Republican-leaning media declared that Taibbi had highlighted a national scandal. Democrat-leaning media yawned: A Washington Post report described the Twitter Files as “a dud,” while CNN said the files so far have simply “largely corroborated what was already known.”
As a political independent skeptical of both parties, I find all of the above to be simultaneously true. The opening salvo of the Twitter Files did indeed come up short; corroborate what we knew; highlight a national scandal; and raise fundamental of questions about the integrity of our democracy in general, and the recent presidential election in particular.
Funny how all of that can be true at the same time. Welcome to America 2022.
The stated goal of the Twitter Files project has revolutionary potential, and Musk and Taibbi tell us this is just the beginning. By opening up Twitter’s own internal documents, they have the opportunity to detail how Twitter users have been secretly manipulated, managed, and muzzled — for years — around the world — on multiple topics of first-order significance.
“Manipulated by whom? And to what end?” Those are important remaining questions, and here too, so far, the Twitter Files come up short. In particular, I want to hear more about the involvement of three-letter security agencies like FBI and CIA in shaping our social media, and by extension our world views. (More on this below, but Alan MacLeod of MintPress News has an excellent overview of the general problem.)
“The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future,” says Musk.
It is an inspiring example to set. There have absolutely been similar shenanigans underway across all social media. When do we get to see the Facebook Files, the YouTube Download, the Snapchat Papers?
‘A nightmare we can’t awaken from’
For the inaugural episode of the Twitter Files, Taibbi could have drilled down into any number of key historical moments. For example, the decision to kick a sitting U.S. president out of an international public discussion forum — the decision to ban the elected U.S. president from a medium otherwise free and open to virtually everyone else around the world — that was crazy and unprecedented. As we continue to open the Twitter Files, it will be fascinating to see how that decision process unfolded to “delete” the president from Twitter.But Taibbi sensibly enough chose to start with different historic events. In October 2020, Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies came to Joe Biden’s rescue when they actively suppressed a major — and embarrassing — newspaper story. The Twitter Files provides great new source documentation about what might have been the moment Biden won and Trump lost.
Could a single, late-breaking corruption allegation really have dictated a presidential election’s outcome?
Yes, and it has happened before. The 2020 election was razor close — but four years earlier, in 2016, the election had also been razor close, and many later blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on the FBI’s last-minute announcement that she was back under investigation for improper handling of official e-mails. Clinton herself, in her memoirs, used a prison metaphor to say FBI Director James Comey “shivved” her; statistician Nate Silver is among those who assert that the Comey surprise cost Clinton the presidency.
Comey and the FBI were clearly embarrassed and haunted by that possibility — Comey has called it “a nightmare I can’t awaken from” — and making matters worse, many top FBI officials loathed their new and unexpected boss Trump. (Comey in his memoirs says he just assumed Clinton would win.)
So it was Comey’s fault.
Or maybe it was the Russians? Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, in the final days of the Obama-Biden White House, the intelligence community — meaning, Comey & colleagues — handed down a major report that alleged broad-based Russian interference in our affairs.
This was the first big public report, the one that kicked off a cottage industry of government publications and investigations about “Russian meddling in our democracy” in the years since. Yet more than half of this grand report was just a prolonged, petulant sulk about ingrates around the world who, on YouTube, seemed to actually prefer English-language Kremlin television over BBC and CNN.
In fact, our intelligence community continued, Kremlin-sponsored television had garnered such popularity by reporting on things like fracking damage to the environment and “alleged” Wall Street greed that it was now more popular in London than CNN. (It was still Russia-run television, though: it got very unpopular very quickly after the invasion of Ukraine).
The intelligence community was indignant about all of this, and the FBI, cheered on by a wildly delusional press corps, soon opened a new chapter in the story of American xenophobia. They would spend years investigating (or manufacturing) some ludicrous propositions: that Donald Trump was a Russian sleeper agent; that Russia had compromised the 2016 election by posting a tiny amount of totally obscure clickbait ads of no possible logical significance.
Fast forward to 2020. After years of hyperventilating that Russians are trying to control us through our social media and “hack our elections”, representatives of FBI and CIA now seemed far better placed to do that instead.
The FBI’s former top lawyer, Jim Baker — a man who had spent years signing off on key moments of the Trump Russiagate investigations — had by this point taken up a new job, as a top lawyer for Twitter. Baker joined a surprising number of other FBI, CIA, and NATO think tank officials who had all moved into top Twitter posts in recent years.
From Rainbow Buff Bernie to that notorious laptop
As the 2020 election loomed, the FBI was hosting weekly meeting with executives from Facebook, Twitter and other social media giants to discuss, essentially, how to police social media. Five weeks before Election Day, for example, Twitter announced proudly that it was deleting accounts identified by the FBI as having “originated in Iran” — nefarious accounts that “were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 U.S. Presidential Debate.” The sight of a major social medium and the FBI proudly declaring they had just teamed up to protect the election from 130 Twitter accounts — accounts that Twitter in the same announcement also stated that no one actually read or followed — well, it should have seemed ridiculous, right?
jward
passin' thru
Chest-thumping about how the FBI needs to drive the dastardly foreigners out of our Facebook and Twitter feeds was, of course, not new. It was always eye-rolling to anyone who looked into it.
For example, we’d been told it was a major national security concern that the Russians were using our own Facebook against us — dividing us from within, with devious and manipulative ad purchases! — because they hated our freedoms. But as summarized in the Columbia Journalism Review, at issue was a mere $100,000 in “Russian” Facebook ads over the entire election season, at a time when Facebook’s advertising revenue per day, much of it political in that pre-election moment, was running about $96 million. So the entire alleged months-long Russian propaganda campaign would have amounted to less than 0.1 percent of a single day’s Facebook ads.
(It gets even more ludicrous. The ads were of no actual coherence — they were obviously nothing more than random, revenue-generating clickbait. As cited by solemn U.S. Congress reports, “the Russians” had spent their $100,000 on a bunch of nonsense — ranging from ads for fake hotlines to get help with masturbation addiction, to banners with the words “Born Liberal!” over a peaceful skycape of birds. So this was almost certainly not a devious Kremlin-directed plot, and instead simply the sleazy-lazy business of spam and clickbait.)
For me, the symbolic pinnacle of this insanity was a cartoon supposedly weaponized against us by our Russian adversaries. It was of a muscular, rainbow-colored Bernie Sanders:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...63483-5b0b-46b9-aa59-16cf7aa39ca0_892x864.png
Rainbow Buff Bernie ran for a single day in 2016. It was clicked on 54 times. Yet the U.S. House Intelligence Committee addressed this social media posting as part of a formal report into Russian meddling in our affairs. It was a matter of the highest concern. The House report informed us “the Russians” paid the exchange rate equivalent of $1.60 for this. Buzzfeed at the time solemnly reported these “facts” — $1.60, spent to buy 54 clicks — yet instead of mocking Congress and the FBI for this lunacy, they dutifully tracked down the American citizen who originally drew the cartoon for a pro-Bernie Sanders coloring book, so that she could explain herself! (She told them, “I feel pretty violated and very confused!”)
Clearly by 2020 we needed the FBI and the national media working hand-in-hand to police our social media — because Russia! Iran!
Yoel Roth, who at Twitter carried the Robespierrean title of Head of Site Integrity, has testified that he and other industry peers in the months before the 2020 election had “regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI … regarding election security.”
Let this sink in. Weeks before the story of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop broke, FBI officials were laying the groundwork — at Twitter, at Facebook, and no doubt beyond — to squelch it.
When 5 former CIA chiefs lied, and meddled in our elections
All of this was the backstory for the moment when The New York Post — a conservative publication that is also one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the nation — broke the bizarre story that candidate-for-president Biden’s son had abandoned a laptop at a computer repair shop; that it had all sorts of embarrassing and incriminating material on it; and that it had made its way to the FBI for investigation.
This was a major news story from a serious organization. The New York Post often reports through a political lens, no doubt — but no more or less than does The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Twitter, moving swiftly to suppress The New York Post’s story, immediately shut down the entire newspaper’s Twitter account. It stayed shut down for two weeks — in a 21st century equivalent to the old game of smashing presses, and gathering up and burning newspapers.
We know from Zuckerberg that Facebook, also at FBI request, took similar emergency steps to shut the story down.
Is there any reason to believe the story was not suppressed across the Internet, from Reddit to Snapchat to TikTok?
At Facebook, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan, they did not prevent ordinary citizens from sharing the New York Post story — but they did take action to limit how often the story appeared on feeds, so that “fewer people saw it.”
Twitter was even more ruthless. If ordinary Twitter users tried to share links to the story, Twitter removed them.
Taibbi picks up the story:
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
12:08 AM ∙ Dec 3, 2022
106,810Likes22,486Retweets
It was an incredible moment.
And when a White House press secretary re-Tweeted the New York Post / Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter shut down her account, too.
Four days after The New York Post story had been released and then immediately squelched, more than 50 former intelligence officials — including five former CIA chiefs (John Brennan, Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell and Leon Panetta) — signed a letter declaring the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
It was a hilarious formulation. These well-informed individuals surely knew the laptop story, as depressing as it is, was the real deal. They knew it because the Bidens did not deny it, among other things. It’s since been confirmed as an authentic story by everyone from CBS News to the U.S. Justice Department and The New York Times. So it’s real now, and it was real then. Hence the letter’s meaninglessly vague formulation — the story “has all the classic earmarks” of something is different than saying it actually is that something.
What a spectacle. Five former chiefs of the CIA — dozens of top intelligence officials — all of them openly using deception to meddle in the American democratic process. Remember: The laptop had been in the possession of the FBI. They knew exactly what it was! Yet they had just spent weeks briefing social media companies to watch out for a “Russian deception” involving the Hunter Biden laptop story, a story they all knew was actually true — and now they were doubling down on the deception with this corny public letter.
Nor were any of them being called out over this obvious deception by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN or other leading media. No doubt no one wanted to accidentally help get Trump re-elected — to pull a Jim Comey, and then be trapped in Comey’s “nightmare I can’t awaken from”. (Twitter’s Site Security chief Roth might well have had the ghost of Comey in mind when he e-mailed colleagues they would continue to suppress The New York Post story, “Given the SEVERE risks here and the lessons of 2016 …”)
Twitter executives — under the watchful eyes of their FBI colleagues — were left all alone to try to sort through this moment. I almost feel sorry for them when I think of it. Did the professional journalists of America step up to help? Please. Sadly, the more “respectable” a news media is, the fewer ethics it still has. What about our politicians? Again, when it comes to upstanding or moral leaders, they too are an endangered species in our country. Taibbi could find only a single Congressional Democrat, the reliable Ro Khanna, who would reach out to Twitter to ask about the First Amendment implications of censoring a major newspaper story of critical public interest.
And when Twitter turned to their legal department, their top lawyer on the case was former FBI top lawyer Jim Baker, offering them soothing advice to stay the course.
mattbivens.substack.com
For example, we’d been told it was a major national security concern that the Russians were using our own Facebook against us — dividing us from within, with devious and manipulative ad purchases! — because they hated our freedoms. But as summarized in the Columbia Journalism Review, at issue was a mere $100,000 in “Russian” Facebook ads over the entire election season, at a time when Facebook’s advertising revenue per day, much of it political in that pre-election moment, was running about $96 million. So the entire alleged months-long Russian propaganda campaign would have amounted to less than 0.1 percent of a single day’s Facebook ads.
(It gets even more ludicrous. The ads were of no actual coherence — they were obviously nothing more than random, revenue-generating clickbait. As cited by solemn U.S. Congress reports, “the Russians” had spent their $100,000 on a bunch of nonsense — ranging from ads for fake hotlines to get help with masturbation addiction, to banners with the words “Born Liberal!” over a peaceful skycape of birds. So this was almost certainly not a devious Kremlin-directed plot, and instead simply the sleazy-lazy business of spam and clickbait.)
For me, the symbolic pinnacle of this insanity was a cartoon supposedly weaponized against us by our Russian adversaries. It was of a muscular, rainbow-colored Bernie Sanders:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch...63483-5b0b-46b9-aa59-16cf7aa39ca0_892x864.png
Rainbow Buff Bernie ran for a single day in 2016. It was clicked on 54 times. Yet the U.S. House Intelligence Committee addressed this social media posting as part of a formal report into Russian meddling in our affairs. It was a matter of the highest concern. The House report informed us “the Russians” paid the exchange rate equivalent of $1.60 for this. Buzzfeed at the time solemnly reported these “facts” — $1.60, spent to buy 54 clicks — yet instead of mocking Congress and the FBI for this lunacy, they dutifully tracked down the American citizen who originally drew the cartoon for a pro-Bernie Sanders coloring book, so that she could explain herself! (She told them, “I feel pretty violated and very confused!”)
Clearly by 2020 we needed the FBI and the national media working hand-in-hand to police our social media — because Russia! Iran!
Yoel Roth, who at Twitter carried the Robespierrean title of Head of Site Integrity, has testified that he and other industry peers in the months before the 2020 election had “regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI … regarding election security.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has also said the FBI was giving his social media platform a similar warning.
Let this sink in. Weeks before the story of Hunter Biden’s notorious laptop broke, FBI officials were laying the groundwork — at Twitter, at Facebook, and no doubt beyond — to squelch it.
When 5 former CIA chiefs lied, and meddled in our elections
All of this was the backstory for the moment when The New York Post — a conservative publication that is also one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the nation — broke the bizarre story that candidate-for-president Biden’s son had abandoned a laptop at a computer repair shop; that it had all sorts of embarrassing and incriminating material on it; and that it had made its way to the FBI for investigation.This was a major news story from a serious organization. The New York Post often reports through a political lens, no doubt — but no more or less than does The New York Times or The Washington Post.
Twitter, moving swiftly to suppress The New York Post’s story, immediately shut down the entire newspaper’s Twitter account. It stayed shut down for two weeks — in a 21st century equivalent to the old game of smashing presses, and gathering up and burning newspapers.
We know from Zuckerberg that Facebook, also at FBI request, took similar emergency steps to shut the story down.
Is there any reason to believe the story was not suppressed across the Internet, from Reddit to Snapchat to TikTok?
At Facebook, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan, they did not prevent ordinary citizens from sharing the New York Post story — but they did take action to limit how often the story appeared on feeds, so that “fewer people saw it.”
Twitter was even more ruthless. If ordinary Twitter users tried to share links to the story, Twitter removed them.
Taibbi picks up the story:
Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi
18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
12:08 AM ∙ Dec 3, 2022
106,810Likes22,486Retweets
It was an incredible moment.
And when a White House press secretary re-Tweeted the New York Post / Hunter Biden laptop story, Twitter shut down her account, too.
Four days after The New York Post story had been released and then immediately squelched, more than 50 former intelligence officials — including five former CIA chiefs (John Brennan, Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin, Michael Morell and Leon Panetta) — signed a letter declaring the laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
It was a hilarious formulation. These well-informed individuals surely knew the laptop story, as depressing as it is, was the real deal. They knew it because the Bidens did not deny it, among other things. It’s since been confirmed as an authentic story by everyone from CBS News to the U.S. Justice Department and The New York Times. So it’s real now, and it was real then. Hence the letter’s meaninglessly vague formulation — the story “has all the classic earmarks” of something is different than saying it actually is that something.
What a spectacle. Five former chiefs of the CIA — dozens of top intelligence officials — all of them openly using deception to meddle in the American democratic process. Remember: The laptop had been in the possession of the FBI. They knew exactly what it was! Yet they had just spent weeks briefing social media companies to watch out for a “Russian deception” involving the Hunter Biden laptop story, a story they all knew was actually true — and now they were doubling down on the deception with this corny public letter.
Nor were any of them being called out over this obvious deception by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN or other leading media. No doubt no one wanted to accidentally help get Trump re-elected — to pull a Jim Comey, and then be trapped in Comey’s “nightmare I can’t awaken from”. (Twitter’s Site Security chief Roth might well have had the ghost of Comey in mind when he e-mailed colleagues they would continue to suppress The New York Post story, “Given the SEVERE risks here and the lessons of 2016 …”)
Twitter executives — under the watchful eyes of their FBI colleagues — were left all alone to try to sort through this moment. I almost feel sorry for them when I think of it. Did the professional journalists of America step up to help? Please. Sadly, the more “respectable” a news media is, the fewer ethics it still has. What about our politicians? Again, when it comes to upstanding or moral leaders, they too are an endangered species in our country. Taibbi could find only a single Congressional Democrat, the reliable Ro Khanna, who would reach out to Twitter to ask about the First Amendment implications of censoring a major newspaper story of critical public interest.
And when Twitter turned to their legal department, their top lawyer on the case was former FBI top lawyer Jim Baker, offering them soothing advice to stay the course.
Twitter is Fun Again!
Now, let's have the rest: Everything in the files about how national security agencies manipulate what we get to see and hear
mattbivens.substack.com
jward
passin' thru
Musk converts office space into 'bedrooms' for Twitter staff: Report
Christopher Hutton
December 06, 2022 01:08 PM
Elon Musk has continued his "hardcore" takeover of Twitter by reportedly converting several rooms at company headquarters into bedrooms for engineers to sleep in.
Twitter employees discovered on Monday that Musk had converted several conference rooms into sleeping quarters, according to Forbes. The sudden installation of curtains and mattresses was unannounced, and it appears to reinforce Musk's vision of employees putting in excess hours to fulfill his new vision for the company.
“It’s not a good look,” one employee said. “It’s yet another unspoken sign of disrespect. There is no discussion. Just like, beds showed up.” Another employee noted that the beds were mostly installed on an empty floor, although there was evidence that it had been used.
DELAYS, NEWS DUMPS AND DISAPPOINTMENT: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE TWITTER FILES
It is unclear how many of these bedrooms have been installed.
Musk has been working to rebuild Twitter in his vision after laying off 50% of the staff, leaving him with an estimated 3,700 employees at the company. He then forced the remaining staff to commit to a "hardcore" version of Twitter or resign with three months of pay. This requirement led to more than 1,000 staff resigning from their posts.
Several ex-employees have now filed lawsuits against Musk, claiming that the billionaire failed to provide them sufficient severance for their time.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The billionaire also spent the weekend releasing what he touted as the Twitter Files, a series of documents elaborating on Twitter's role in the censorship of the New York Post's story regarding Hunter Biden's laptop. The files, which were provided to the journalist Matt Taibbi, included evidence that President Joe Biden's campaign and the Biden administration had sent Twitter requests to pull down tweets. The campaign specifically requested that tweets containing explicit photos of Hunter Biden be taken down.
Musk converts office space into 'bedrooms' for Twitter staff: Report
Elon Musk has continued his "hardcore" takeover of Twitter by reportedly converting several rooms at company headquarters into bedrooms for engineers to sleep in.
www.washingtonexaminer.com
wait-n-see
Veteran Member
Musk converts office space into 'bedrooms' for Twitter staff: Report
Christopher Hutton
December 06, 2022 01:08 PM
Elon Musk has continued his "hardcore" takeover of Twitter by reportedly converting several rooms at company headquarters into bedrooms for engineers to sleep in.
Twitter employees discovered on Monday that Musk had converted several conference rooms into sleeping quarters, according to Forbes. The sudden installation of curtains and mattresses was unannounced, and it appears to reinforce Musk's vision of employees putting in excess hours to fulfill his new vision for the company.
“It’s not a good look,” one employee said. “It’s yet another unspoken sign of disrespect. There is no discussion. Just like, beds showed up.” Another employee noted that the beds were mostly installed on an empty floor, although there was evidence that it had been used.
DELAYS, NEWS DUMPS AND DISAPPOINTMENT: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE TWITTER FILES
It is unclear how many of these bedrooms have been installed.
Musk has been working to rebuild Twitter in his vision after laying off 50% of the staff, leaving him with an estimated 3,700 employees at the company. He then forced the remaining staff to commit to a "hardcore" version of Twitter or resign with three months of pay. This requirement led to more than 1,000 staff resigning from their posts.
Several ex-employees have now filed lawsuits against Musk, claiming that the billionaire failed to provide them sufficient severance for their time.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The billionaire also spent the weekend releasing what he touted as the Twitter Files, a series of documents elaborating on Twitter's role in the censorship of the New York Post's story regarding Hunter Biden's laptop. The files, which were provided to the journalist Matt Taibbi, included evidence that President Joe Biden's campaign and the Biden administration had sent Twitter requests to pull down tweets. The campaign specifically requested that tweets containing explicit photos of Hunter Biden be taken down.
Musk converts office space into 'bedrooms' for Twitter staff: Report
Elon Musk has continued his "hardcore" takeover of Twitter by reportedly converting several rooms at company headquarters into bedrooms for engineers to sleep in.
Amazing how quickly times change and people forget the past.
Remember when they had the initial surge of the venture caps on the west coast, and lasting into the 2010s? The news sites not only discussed the crazy hours being worked but showed the sleeping cots that were installed in each cube, as well as the aisles, to keep the s/w grunts cranking away full time. It was worth it to them though, if the company later took off.
Even here in DFW, some of the startups required no less than 7 days a week, 10 hours a day. You did get an excellent salary and very nice stick options in return though.
During the part of my career that was in semi-conductor, when we had to go to the factory to work on the units they had us sleeping on cots on the factory floor as close as possible to the robots and control units. It was too expensive for the robots to be down for any length, and they could not afford the time for us to stay at a hotel near by. The money was so good for us s/w grunts on those trips that only a fool turned it down, and surprisingly enough there were a couple that did.
jward
passin' thru
It's not just the hours, but the crazy commutes in some areas, that makes this one of the better of a really bad bunch of solutions.
I'm sure the SJW are working as we speak on solutions that will make absolutely nothing better, and everything far, far worse, for everyone involved
I'm sure the SJW are working as we speak on solutions that will make absolutely nothing better, and everything far, far worse, for everyone involved
energy_wave
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Why, just imagine all the carbon those employees will save not traveling back and forth to work. They just slide into their sleeping chamber and plug in the pacifier. Maybe when it's time to go back to work, Elon will come by their bed and tell them to wake up, it's time to wake up and go to work, just like mom used to do back in the school days.
jward
passin' thru
Washington Times Opinion
@WashTimesOpEd
"The 'Twitter Files' leak shows what we already knew: Twitter rigged the 2020 election to save candidate Joe Biden’s campaign and censor the truth,"writes @TayFromCA
@MAGAIncWarRoom
View: https://twitter.com/WashTimesOpEd/status/1600209717560807434?s=20&t=n47-zJWjHO6ZEQy9lq-BDA
@WashTimesOpEd
"The 'Twitter Files' leak shows what we already knew: Twitter rigged the 2020 election to save candidate Joe Biden’s campaign and censor the truth,"writes @TayFromCA
@MAGAIncWarRoom
View: https://twitter.com/WashTimesOpEd/status/1600209717560807434?s=20&t=n47-zJWjHO6ZEQy9lq-BDA
Knoxville's Joker
Has No Life - Lives on TB
I also think that Musk is setting the stage to tell the big tech folks you stay the hell away from any form of election interference. And if you try to rope me in I will hang you with that rope. I fully expect that several big tech big whigs will be getting suicided here soon. Not sure if we post those in this thread if we can tie the to twitter so to speak...
Do you folks realize that once this all makes it into the legal system, it will bring down the entire government. This makes watergate look like a baseball thrown through a window by comparison. In an ideal world, hundreds in Congress, the MSM, and the Big Tech execs would be rounded up and go to prison for “seditious conspiracy.”
Haybails
When In Doubt, Throttle Out!
That's what we all hope, Boss. The hardest part is waiting to see if it will, indeed, come to fruition or just fizzle out like all other hopes on the same topic.
HB
Melodi
Disaster Cat
On the beds - this is similar to what Musk was accused of doing at Tesla, and, employment-wise, it seems to be that it is OK to have beds and allow people to sleep over, but employment judges are not in favor of forcing regular employees to do so.
If Musk had a bit more people sense, he would have offered this as a perk to beat long commutes and avoid using hotels when there were conferences or long-business meetings, as well as end-of-deadline work marathons. Doing it without saying anything is not just expecting "hard work." It is asking beyond what is reasonable unless a contract specifically says, "employee can expect to stay over 5 nights a month or during the week at HQ."
In the long run, it isn't just "snowflakes" that leave that sort of unreasonable work conditions. It is anyone with a family or other responsibilities that manages to get another job. Smart people find another job first (with a salary they can live with).
On the releases of information, yes, I have been comparing this (including the slow start) to the Pentagon Papers from Day one - and this stuff could do a lot more than bring down a President if it isn't buried or the Deep State decided to go full "police state," as opposed to police state lite (tm)..
If Musk had a bit more people sense, he would have offered this as a perk to beat long commutes and avoid using hotels when there were conferences or long-business meetings, as well as end-of-deadline work marathons. Doing it without saying anything is not just expecting "hard work." It is asking beyond what is reasonable unless a contract specifically says, "employee can expect to stay over 5 nights a month or during the week at HQ."
In the long run, it isn't just "snowflakes" that leave that sort of unreasonable work conditions. It is anyone with a family or other responsibilities that manages to get another job. Smart people find another job first (with a salary they can live with).
On the releases of information, yes, I have been comparing this (including the slow start) to the Pentagon Papers from Day one - and this stuff could do a lot more than bring down a President if it isn't buried or the Deep State decided to go full "police state," as opposed to police state lite (tm)..
onetimer
Veteran Member
In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today
View: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600237095364096000?s=20&t=MNPpW60GGCCuIQb9znd9wQ
View: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600237095364096000?s=20&t=MNPpW60GGCCuIQb9znd9wQ
energy_wave
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Just remember, Elon didn't just buy Twitter, he bought a crime scene.
And a trillion pieces of hard evidence. And TPTB know it.
jward
passin' thru
I hope something paradigm shifting does come from it- couldn't help but note the temperol proximity between him raising questions 'bout Brazil's elections & twitter, and their lil event :: shrug ::
..I just have temporarily misplaced my faith in mankind and my hope that they'll ever choose right and honorable action o'er self interest, in any #s large enough to matter, or stop grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory
jward
passin' thru
Matt BinderI'm sure the SJW are working as we speak on solutions that will make absolutely nothing better, and everything far, far worse, for everyone involved
@MattBinder
lol someone has reported Twitter over Elon Musk possibly illegally converting office space into bedrooms at Twitter HQ
View: https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1600142064884146181?s=20&t=NhIyM0mrClJj82LPQGeXyA
jward
passin' thru
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
44m
Oh, you know, keeping busy …
View: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600439088560996353?s=20&t=NhIyM0mrClJj82LPQGeXyA
@elonmusk
44m
Oh, you know, keeping busy …
View: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1600439088560996353?s=20&t=NhIyM0mrClJj82LPQGeXyA
Knoxville's Joker
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Musk is going to make this bite silicon valley…
jward
passin' thru
TheLastRefuge
@TheLastRefuge2
I cannot emphasize this enough. If you want to understand the dynamic of the Twitter stuff, you have to trace the origin to when DHS under Obama/Holder created the targeting mechanisms for the modern surveillance state. Social media is a means, not an end.
Bush created the tools: DHS, ODNI, for domestic surveillance state. Obama then weaponized the targeting mechanism (political opposition) and added: DOJ-NSD, which is why FARA is a tool
1:02 PM · Dec 7, 2022
@TheLastRefuge2
I cannot emphasize this enough. If you want to understand the dynamic of the Twitter stuff, you have to trace the origin to when DHS under Obama/Holder created the targeting mechanisms for the modern surveillance state. Social media is a means, not an end.
Bush created the tools: DHS, ODNI, for domestic surveillance state. Obama then weaponized the targeting mechanism (political opposition) and added: DOJ-NSD, which is why FARA is a tool
1:02 PM · Dec 7, 2022
This is the same kind of crap that the UB haters did to me. I remember in particular a guitar giveaway / raffle for all those who donated one year. The UB pus-lickers actually filed complaints with various state agencies to force me to shut it down. Another one was their intent to turn me in to the IRS for the fundraiser. It’s why I had to incorporate and hire a CPA, at a total cost of an additional $600 a year in needless overhead.
No matter what, at the root of all this is hate. Boiling, white-hot hate. They tried to cancel TB before the cancel culture was even a thing.
jward
passin' thru
Hate. And mean girl, jr. high pure pathological envy, jealousy, and the desire to destroy any bit o' light in the world, because they're on the outside, looking in, and think that hole in their own soul, and the self hatred they feel, can be fixed if the rest o' the world is as bleak and barren.
Not that they can articulate that- they just feel the sweet hit o' self righteous, supercilious superiority, and pleasure that evil feels when it gets to express itself.
Not that they can articulate that- they just feel the sweet hit o' self righteous, supercilious superiority, and pleasure that evil feels when it gets to express itself.
Knoxville's Joker
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Oh so that is what happened then…
jward
passin' thru
The White House Doesn't Want to Answer Questions About the Twitter Files
Katie Pavlich
Speaking to reporters from the White House Wednesday, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre refused to answer questions about the "Twitter files" and allegations the Biden campaign worked to censor information on the social media platform -- including a bombshell New York Post story about Joe and Hunter Biden's shady foreign dealings -- during the 2020 presidential election.
Quite a tone change from just a few weeks ago when Jean-Pierre forcefully and adamantly explained the White House was closely watching Twitter CEO Elon Musk and his new acquisition of the social media platform. President Joe Biden has also implied he believes Musk is a "national security threat."
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Further, the White House is refusing to answer questions after it was revealed Tuesday night that former FBI attorney Jim Baker, who went to work at Twitter after peddling the bogus Steele Dossier and Russian collusion narrative, santitized the Twitter files before they were partially released last Friday night.
Recommended
jward
passin' thru
Elon Dishes More on the Possible Deletion of Twitter Files
Nick Arama
When Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk revealed that Twitter counsel James Baker had been fired for vetting the Twitter files without the knowledge of management, that left open a big question: Were things deleted in the process before Musk and Taibbi saw them and the first files were released?
Musk had previously made this comment about the question.
He also posted this:
But now he’s added some more to that comment about the “suppression.”
Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO urged Musk to release all the Twitter files en masse without any story-telling or intermediary.
“If the goal is transparency to build trust,” Dorsey said, “Why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions? Make everything public now. #TwitterFiles.”
That’s a bit funny, given that, as CEO, Jack could have released the information and he was around when a lot of the banning and suppression was going on.
Musk’s response was interesting.
“Most important data was hidden (from you too),” Musk said. “And some may have been deleted, but everything we find will be released.” So he’s acknowledging some of it might have been deleted and interestingly, noting things were hidden from Jack as well. That’s a big commitment to transparency and that’s going to make some of the powers that be lose their minds.
Now we can see why Musk also announced that he was “not suicidal.”
But remember if it’s on the internet, the internet is forever. Can anything that was deleted be recovered? Depending on what was done, sounds like it could be.
So if someone deleted things, but they can still be recovered and it can be shown they were deleted, the “coverup of the coverup” isn’t going to end well.
jward
passin' thru
I miss the good ole days, when your optimism was nuff to rub off on me n give me some small measure o' hope.
I am not feeling any; they've either:
got enough control in place that this is a nothing burger, or we will see a faux come to jesus moment, and after the dog and pony show of redress and absolution, they will carry on, exactly the same as they always have, with only their "name" or "brand" having changed.
..or it will be a tsunami and the threat will lead them to let WW3 and assorted horsemen outta the gates for real in order to distract us from it.
I gotta stop wakin' on the cynical side o the bed.
jward
passin' thru
The Border Observer
@borderObserver
18s
Elon Musk Confirmed Employees At Twitter Previously Charged $15,000 To A User For The Blue Tick
7 Nov 2022
They said twitter employees privately demanded a sum of $15,000 for the verified status.
@borderObserver
18s
Elon Musk Confirmed Employees At Twitter Previously Charged $15,000 To A User For The Blue Tick
7 Nov 2022
They said twitter employees privately demanded a sum of $15,000 for the verified status.
jward
passin' thru
Bari Weiss
@bariweiss
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601011428579717121?s=20&t=NXgeQP9NjTp2PXpJTOiwRQ
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601012181138407425?s=20&t=T2EQkhI7-wMOILVxWLVRHA
@bariweiss
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601011428579717121?s=20&t=NXgeQP9NjTp2PXpJTOiwRQ
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601012181138407425?s=20&t=T2EQkhI7-wMOILVxWLVRHA
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jward
passin' thru
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601012976894373888?s=20&t=V8hqJ3qnsTaINSSQO0sPBw
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601012976894373888?s=20&t=V8hqJ3qnsTaINSSQO0sPBw
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
jward
passin' thru
| Bari Weiss @bariweiss THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS. |
9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
10. All without users’ knowledge.
11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.
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West
Senior
jward
passin' thru
| Bari Weiss @bariweiss THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS. |
13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”
14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok
—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”
View: https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601018810495995904?s=20&t=jDTdYXbe5_-REWg5GJVFow
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jward
passin' thru
| Bari Weiss @bariweiss THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO. TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS. |
17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:
20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”
Cascadians
Leska Emerald Adams
Twitter Files dropping again tonight! More dirt on Cabal scams, lies, cover-ups, propaganda and CRIMES.