August 27, 2022

"Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated."

It's a long segment so don't miss the key material near the end, explaining why he settled with Twitter and how he's moved on to publishing documents showing that the federal government pressured Twitter to ban him. Twitter had accepted him, he says, and White House people said they wanted him banned, and, within 6 weeks, he was banned.

That clip should be put alongside this other Joe Rogan clip, from one day earlier. Here's Mark Zuckerberg talking about the FBI's pressuring Facebook to moderate content:

36 comments:

Achilles said...


""Alex Berenson Sued Twitter Over Being Banned and Was Reinstated.""

See. Everything is fine now.

You can go back to supporting Republicans like McConnell and Scott.

Please stop with this Trump stuff.

Carol said...

Berenson started out on an anti-pot legalization crusade but was getting killed online because cannabis is a libertarian sacred cow, like trans and tattoos.

Then he switched to covid skepticism and voila! Success!

Whatever it takes eh.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Alex Berenson: I have Twitter documents showing 'the White House wanted me banned'.

How is the Washington Post and The New York Times going to spin this?

If they don't just pretend is not happening.

Lars Porsena said...

..and in the background the White House helped grease the skids under Berenson.

Jupiter said...

I'm afraid what this boils down to is that someone at Twitter attempted to deal honestly with Berenson, before the Regime black-balled him. They were naive back then. They've learned their lesson, and going forward they will never apologize, never explain.

Ann Althouse said...

"See. Everything is fine now."

You should listen to the segment, which has a lot in it.

Eric Rathmann said...

Similarities with the McCarthy era. My father graduated college in 1933 and wanted good work so he and his brother went to the USSR. Left after 3 years when things got dicey. Anyway, he gets arrested and tried as a communist in the 1950s. At one point he received, out of the blue, a letter from J.Edgar Hoover, which my father felt was an intimidation method. "We know who you are and are watching you".
It certainly appears to me that the government has returned to that level of control.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

If indeed the White House pressured twitter to ban Alex Berenson; Alex Berenson is not the only one.

In times pasts, before the ACLU was captured, this would have been a dead to rights class action.

Aggie said...

I personally think that the shift away from the Legacy Mainstream Corporate Media toward a more, (how to say?) cottage-industry type of journalism very, very refreshing, and a leap forward in quality and content. Now there is a whole array of specialized interests and investigative talent represented, with high-quality journalism using full vocabularies, exploring things that just don't otherwise get covered. Individual products from the efforts of individuals! What an improvement over McJournalism. It's almost like the early NPR All Things Considered, only spread out across a marketplace.

I probably subscribe to a dozen or so substacks and pay an annual fee to the ones I particularly like. They're all over the political/social spectrum, but I relish reading each of them for their independent thinking.

Berenson......(sigh). Yeah, he started out pretty well and was one of those I eagerly followed, but it very quickly devolved into make-a-buck journalism and I soon lost interest. I think this accelerated the first time I listened to him speak - it might've been Rogan, can't remember - but as I listened I was thinking 'hmmm, I wonder if this guy genuine'. I'll read the occasional article by him, but - free speech is one thing, leveraging a free speech issue to gain subscription fees, yeah - that's called Free Enterprise, Alex, not Free Speech.

Ann Althouse said...

Unfortunately the clip ends a little early. He goes on to say he's working on a lawsuit against (somebody in) the federal government.

harrogate said...

I'm so steamed at content moderation I can hardly stand it. But time for lunch!

Jupiter said...

Zuckerberg "explained" on the Joe Rogan show that the FBI "basically" told "our team" that the Hunter laptop was Russian disinformation, so of course they had to suppress it, so as not to "interfere with" the election. He used the word "basically" three times. Meaning, "what I am saying is false". The FBI has now stated that they said no such thing. Zuckerberg made it all up. He gave a one-billion-dollar in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party, and tried to tell us that the FBI made him do it. Joe Rogan lapped it up.

Saint Croix said...

The FBI is a rogue agency and it needs to be shut down, in my opinion.

I have zero trust in the federal police. They are like KGB to me. Spying on people. Partisan raids on the former president's home. Trying to silence critics. Defining parents upset at what their kids are being taught (i.e. indoctrinated in) as terrorists.

And look at the history. J. Edgar Hoover was the infamous head of the FBI. He spied on Martin Luther King Jr. That is your FBI, ladies and gentlemen. Nobody could fire Hoover -- or stop him -- allegedly because he had spied on everybody in both parties and knew all the secrets.

You want to save the FBI? Start with impeaching the attorney general. And while that shitstorm is going on, investigate the FBI. Multiple people should lose their jobs. Everybody involved with "Crossfire Hurricane" should be investigated.

There has to be a massive cleaning of the FBI. They need a black eye and a reckoning. You cannot whitewash this shit and hope to save their reputation. Right now our federal police are a threat to free speech and a threat to our republic. Possibly they can reorient their agency to actually fighting crime. But first a lot of people need to be publicly disgraced.

Yancey Ward said...

Yes, Berenson caught a lot of grief from the Right for settling the Twitter lawsuit. Most of this, though, was his own injudicious words coming back to haunt him when he was pleading for paid subscriptions to fight the case in the first place. Now, I wasn't one of those, and I even defended him on his Substack once on the issue, and I do believe he intends to try to fight the federal government on what is clearly a big violation of his civil rights in this case. And Berenson isn't the only one who got targeted by the Biden apparatchiks.

Yancey Ward said...

Jupiter, I believe the FBI did contact Facebook and all the other social media platforms to tell them this story about the laptop was Russian disinformation- I believe Zuckerberg on this one. What I don't believe is that Zuckerberg needed to be pressured to suppress the story- he would have done this without any prompting at all.

Sprezzatura said...

“He gave a one-billion-dollar in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party, and tried to tell us that the FBI made him do it. Joe Rogan lapped it up.”

When pushed Zuckerberg said that the government didn’t give direction re the laptop story. The government had told FB to be on the lookout for possible manipulation in general. You can tell Zuckerberg really wants to pander to cons. He’s telling Joe how his moderation court thingy is setup by a famous Republican lawyer that coulda been a conservative Justice appointee. Contrast this w/ Berenson who bragged about his case being handled by a librul judge—so you know it wasn’t some sorta hack decision where you choose to hire a known conservative because you want a conservative result.

Anywho, I thought the most interesting stuff was the talk about our country being a complete polarization shit show but other countries aren’t like that.

Cool.

P.S.

It is cute to hear Berenson fuss about a timeline that hinges on Biden saying something in public. Presumably Biden said that Brenenson was the enemy of the American people.

P.P.S.

What’s the latest re the daughter’s diary? Is the lame stream media doing the work of the libruls and hiding that too?

JK Brown said...

The Biden admin pressured Twitter to ban him. Sounds like semi-fascism to me.

Who drives the bureaucrats? A question ignored since the start of the New Deal.

"The characteristic feature of present-day policies is the trend toward a substitution of government control for free enterprise. Powerful political parties and pressure groups are fervently asking for public control of all economic activities, for thorough government planning, and for the nationalization of business. They aim at full government control of education and at the socialization of the medical profession. There is no sphere of human activity that they would not be prepared to subordinate to regimentation by the authorities. In their eyes, state control is the panacea for all ills."

--von Mises, Ludwig (1945). Bureaucracy

Butkus51 said...

Joe Rogans choice for President is Michelle Obama.

He hasnt learned a damn thing.

ElPresidenteCastro said...

If a government can't manipulate private companies to suppress speech, how are is it supposed to stay in power?

oldirishpig said...

I haven’t watched the Rogan-Lizard Boy piece but in all the commentary I can’t see if Rogan asked the most important follow up question: what will you do when they come to you the next time?

MayBee said...

It really is disturbing.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Joe Rogans choice for President is Michelle Obama.

Joe Rogan has to appease his pay masters, so they keep him on the platforms.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Joe Rogans choice for President is Michelle Obama.

Joe Rogan has to appease his paymasters, so they keep him on the platforms.

cubanbob said...

I'm amazed some hustler lawyer starting a class action suit against Twitter and Facebook for violating section 230 by acting as publishers instead of a common carrier. The discovery would be fascinating.

Patrick Henry was right! said...

And Ann will still vote for Biden and the Schumer, Pelosi agenda. Nothing will ever outrage her enough to see the light. So sad.

n.n said...

Zuckerberg uses "basically" when his statement is a qualified or subset of the whole. So, basically, unlike the FBI performance during the Whitmer entrapment event, the FBI did not direct, but rather steered an outcome.

Patrick Henry was right! said...

And Ann will still vote for Biden and the Schumer, Pelosi agenda. Nothing will ever outrage her enough to see the light. So sad.

Conversations With Larry Corroon said...

Twitter Banned James O'Keefe/Project Veritas too too. Twitter=BAD

NMObjectivist said...

I find that Alex Berenson is an honest, true liberal. If you disagree with him, listen more carefully to what he says. You may be surprised. I've had that experience.

Sprezzatura said...

“Nothing will ever outrage her enough to see the light. So sad.”

FTR, according to you does seeing the light mean that you must agree that it would be good for DJT to overturn our representative democracy, set up by our Founding Fathers, so that he could remain in power against the will of the people?

Or, according to you, does seeing the light just mean that you think it is no problem for DJT to keep classified documents even though the documents don’t belong to him and the documents had been (for a many months long process) requested re being returned?

OTOH can you see the light by agreeing that it’s not good to overturn the will of the people re representative democracy and it’s also not good for a kicked-out POTUS to refuse to give back documents that belong to we the people, not him?

Just sayin’ if you want to accuse others of poor eyesight ya may want to not be in a glass house. Or something like that.

walter said...

Rogan allowed Zucky to slither away from censorship via Zuke's reframing solely in terms of news feed ranking.
I had my NY Post Hunter post nuked entirely.

Spazzturda,
Same process Dems attempted previous elections but without Senator sign-on that 2020 had.
Suck it.

walter said...

(I do appreciate Spazzturda's slithering to the surface to defend the denmentia in chief and all that entails. Much amusement to follow)

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Yancey said ...
..."I believe the FBI did contact Facebook and all the other social media platforms to tell them this story about the laptop was Russian disinformation- I believe Zuckerberg on this one. What I don't believe is that Zuckerberg needed to be pressured to suppress the story- he would have done this without any prompting at all."

Indeed. Me too.

WWIII Joe Biden, Husk-Puppet + America's Putin said...

Patrick Henry -
Ann is generally fairly liberal. & Cruel neutral. But I do recall she did NOT vote for Biden.

Tina Trent said...

Zuckerberg claims that instead of having in-house people censor people and entire news stories, a board is appointed by Facebook to censor speech and entire news events.

So who appointed the board? Who pays them? They are Facebook employees handpicked by Zuckerberg, censors cosseted in a word salad of their boss's lies.

Now listen to the Twitter guy's lawyer make exactly the same argument to Rogan last year. That time, he fought the word salad. Now he's just eats it like a good little boy. Sucks to sell your manhood for a pile of cash.

Saint Croix said...

Watching the Berenson interview now.

It's insane for the 9th Circuit to hold that Facebook can censor on behalf of foreign governments.

It's equally insane to hold that Facebook can censor on behalf of the U.S. government.

You'd think some robed dummy out in California would understand that the First Amendment is a bedrock right that all Americans enjoy. The government has exactly zero authority to censor private citizens.

I get why India might not understand this, but surely the fucking 9th circuit -- all of whom have sworn an oath to follow the Constitution -- should have heard about the free speech clause by now.

Look up the word "proxy" if you don't know that fucking word, you dummies.