BACKGROUND:Dan Bongino @dbongino reacts to having been blacklisted by Twitter:
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 9, 2022
"This is some Soviet-style bullsh*t right here." pic.twitter.com/eQrLV4jgUx
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.” pic.twitter.com/AdOK8xLu9v
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022
Posts
56 comments:
It must be slightly shocking to see your name with these restrictions next to it. You knew it was happening, but twitter denied it. And now here is the proof. You weren't crazy after all.
Blogspot has TOS that I assume Althouse has agreed to: https://www.blogger.com/content-policy
I also assume that the TOS applies to comments on a blogspot blog.
People will think…
…WHAT I TELL THEM TO THINK!
Isn't Section 230 premised on the notion that we shouldn't treat internet platforms like they are the "speaker" for the things their users say. We decided to treat Twitter, Google, etc. like they are Verizon instead of the New York Times.
BUT...when Twitter is specifically deciding whether to permit death threats and doxxing against a teenaged boy, why does Twitter get immunity that the New York Times doesn't enjoy?
I also assume that the TOS applies to comments on a blogspot blog.
I can’t believe Ann is still here…
Another Left Wing Conspiracy Theory that is true. How about that?? It's funny that everything they have been screaming about and calling us extremists for, we were correct, and they were lying. But keep on voting for the people who lie about us. Things will change for the better...right??
Yes, D.D. Driver, Twitter seemed (and still seems) to spend a lot of time & effort editing & managing content for what is not supposed to be a publisher.
I found a bio of Yoel Roth online. About what you would expect, PhD in comms from the Annanberg Center. Same sex marriage. His CV looks as though he designed a career to be a censor of public speech. Not a lawyer, which I think was a detriment to his position at Twitter. He seemed to view his job as regulating what he thought was improper speech on Twitter rather than what was illegal speech on Twitter.
This continuous slow walking of the truth is killing our society.
We all knew this. We all know it goes on in every corner of the media, both legacy and new media.
We knew the Russia Collusion case was bullshit.
We know all of these added on Trump investigations and coming indictments are bullshit.
We knew the pangolin theory was bullshit.
We knew the lockdowns were bullshit.
We know the vaccine is bullshit and in fact, may be killing people. In great numbers.
We know the price of gas is directly related to the end of US production of oil and gas. We know this.
We know all of this and much more. And here's the key: THEY know it, too. But it's a dance we are playing. As if we have to wait for them to stumble on what they already know is true, before it can be officially declared it's true. And then they'll tell us, "It's old news." Or "we've said that all along."
Still, it's good to see this coming out in black and white. And now...who's next?
Biggest gaslighters evah were these Twatter twits.
Big gasholes slither on to the next rock they’ll crawl under…
I got shadow banned a few times.
This was a defensive move of retrenchment by an establishment losing control over media. No one was threatened by the old, fatherly Walter Cronkite when CBS ruled TV and no one could afford to compete. The oligarchs put him out as a grandfatherly Santa figure to soothe nerves after all.
We are living through the World Electronic Media War. From what I read, this era isn't that different from Europe after the printing press went mainstream: Martin Luther spoke against the Pope / Catholic Church and sparked Protestantism, and printed newspapers spawned 30 years of war against the old order.
Oligarchs don't like to lose and fight tooth and nail to avoid losing.
Now, if only Bongino's speaking voice didn't sound like sandpaper on gravel...
wndybar.
They count on intimidation. For some of us that doesn't work very well. And if you examine the quality of thought of our usual suspects you understand why.
They are still doing it. I used to follow an account "Indigenous Ant-Fascist in the Empire" who was linked with Antifa, but he was genuinely anti-fascist. He used to post hysterically funny memes about the fascists in Kiev, even as his "Antifa" comrades complained, but he just got banned. Why? Because his memes were too funny with too heavy an admixture of truth. I saved a few of them to repost, but I wish I had saved more. It would be an honor to get banned thus.
Mass reporting by NAFO gets accounts banned on the flimsiest pretexts. You can bet that the FBI assets at Twitter happily signed those letters and did whatever was required to keep their positions.
IluminatiBot is another account that recently got silenced for whatever reason, even though it's a gag account. It's back up though. I guess some of its funny memes hit a little too close to the mark.
Rusty said...
wndybar.
They count on intimidation. For some of us that doesn't work very well. And if you examine the quality of thought of our usual suspects you understand why.
12/9/22, 7:17 AM
So true!!!
What's the diff between a conspiracy and truth? About six months.
Are we serious - "Soviet Style Bullshit?" Twitter is a private company. What would be Soviet-style Bullshit is the government telling them what they can and cannot publish. Which apears to be exactly what the MAGA crowd wants. No wonder they feel such affinity with Putin.
By the way, how can I get on Bong's show? Doesn't everyone get to appear whereever they want and say whatever they want? Yes - until it is the media platform that you own/control.
I got one account permabanned simply for reposting the "Never go full retard" meme photo, along with the phrase "They went full retard."
I got another account permabanned for posting a story from the Babylon Bee.
Fuck these people. The happyface fascist Vijaya Gadde, and her slimy, vile information minister, Yoel.
I also got a weeklong suspension on Facebook for posting the phrase "illegal entry is a crime." On a thread specifically discussing immigration.
That's it. That was the entire comment.
I got another weeklong FB suspension for the comment "transgenders are mentally ill."
Again, that was the entire comment, verbatim.
Fuck all of these people. If their headquarters buildings collapsed in an Earthquake I'd cross the street to piss on the rubble.
Democrats and their tech oligarchs = Soviets.
Liars and heaters who cannot handle or accept free speech.
Jim5301 @ 8:17: “Are we serious - ‘Soviet Style Bullshit?’ Twitter is a private company. What would be Soviet-style Bullshit is the government telling them what they can and cannot publish…”
Isn’t that exactly what Twitter was doing? Taking orders from the FBI and the White House on how to “moderate content”? Like: burying the Hunter Biden laptop story and laying a smokescreen about “Russian hacking”?
I shadow ban myself all the time. You people should try it. It liberating like a Cuban cigar and a large scotch.
Thank you, Jason. Stating obvious truths really upsets fantasists. You are not permitted to say that the King has no clothes.
Democrats and their tech oligarchs = Soviets.
Liars and cheaters who cannot handle or accept free speech.
jim5301 said...
"Are we serious - "Soviet Style Bullshit?" Twitter is a private company. What would be Soviet-style Bullshit is the government telling them what they can and cannot publish. Which apears to be exactly what the MAGA crowd wants. No wonder they feel such affinity with Putin.
By the way, how can I get on Bong's show? Doesn't everyone get to appear whereever they want and say whatever they want? Yes - until it is the media platform that you own/control."
I'm sure like most conservative radio talk shows they have a day where they will take random callers. Give it a try. It will be funny as hell listening to you make a fool out of yourself. Like you do here.
"Isn’t that exactly what Twitter was doing? Taking orders from the FBI and the White House on how to “moderate content”?
No it is not at all the same. The government could not "order" twitter to do anything. Sure they could make suggestions, and even "threaten" legislation (which would prob be found unconstitutionl) but that is how things work in a free country. Certainly Trump did the same all the time.
Shorter Jim53IQ- "All the government was doing was extorting Twitter to censor people, not ordering them to do it."
Jim5301 @ 9:55: “…that is how things work in a free country…”
Whatever they’re paying you, it’s not enough. Outstanding work!
jim5301 said...
..... By the way, how can I get on Bong's show?
Become interesting, humorous, or newsworthy?
Howard said...
I shadow ban myself all the time. You people should try it. It liberating like a Cuban cigar and a large scotch.
One way or another you are a fake Marine.
The Marine Corp would disown anyone displaying this kind of cowardice.
jim5301 said...
"Isn’t that exactly what Twitter was doing? Taking orders from the FBI and the White House on how to “moderate content”?
No it is not at all the same. The government could not "order" twitter to do anything. Sure they could make suggestions, and even "threaten" legislation (which would prob be found unconstitutionl) but that is how things work in a free country. Certainly Trump did the same all the time.
jim is right.
This wasn't Soviet Style bullshit. The Soviets naionalized the corporations and took them over.
This was Nazi Style bullshit where the government allied with corporations to shut down dissent.
jim 1234 thinks Twitter is just a "private company" and government is just making a few suggestions. Crazy is still legal so jim1234 is able to say what he wants. It helps if you are a lefty, though. A woman got referred to the police by some military officer for objecting to sexual material on a poster at her kid's school.
Hunter Biden's tax payer funded Hooker said...
Democrats and their tech oligarchs = Soviets.
No.
Soviets were Internationalist marxists.
Government and Corporate alliances against the individual are formed by Nationalist Marxists.
A recent example is known as National Socialist Workers Party in Germany.
Twitter execs clearly lied to Congress under oath. Isn’t this a violation of the law? If the GOP House leadership refers them to Biden’s DOJ for prosecution after Jan. 3, 2023, AG Merrick Garland will laugh it off and goes back to his crusade against domestic terrorists, aka conservatives and pissed off parents who want their voices heard at school board meetings when those boards tell them to shut up, sit down, and oh, by the way, your children are ours to groom idealogically..
Achilles: you have zeroed in. Fire for effect. Make the rubble bounce.
Yancey Ward said...
Shorter Jim53IQ- "All the government was doing was extorting Twitter to censor people, not ordering them to do it."
Again that would be Soviet or Maoist style bullshit.
That is not what was happening. Twitter was full of people that were absolutely complicit with the government to shut down dissent.
This was Nazi style bullshit.
Maybe it's time for a Turing test? Is Jim5301 a real human person? Or some AI code that ran down someone's leg?
"Achilles: you have zeroed in. Fire for effect. Make the rubble bounce."
Amen.
This, rather simple concept of the difference between socialism and communism seems lost on so many.
The larger problem or maybe meta problem is that Democrats don't think that there is a problem with woke people suppressing viewpoints that the socially aware consider improper. Take an area outside of politics. There were responsible people with more expertise on the subject than Twitter execs or Randi Weingarten who considered the shutdown of schools foolish and unwise. These people were not cranks. They were right and the Twitter execs and Randi Weingarter were wrong.... Weingarten was wrong in a way that adversely affected millions of people. Alex Jones was wrong in a way that affected hundreds. You can pile on Alex Jones, but if you get a little too agitated in your criticism of Weingarten, you diatribes will be considered hate speech.....I don't think Weingarten, Fauci, et. al. are bad people, but they made some bad decisions and those bad decisions have never been properly dissected or analyzed by the media....The left severely criticized the intelligence community for the info they supplied on Iraq's weapon program. The left has been totally supportive of the far more dubious info that the intelligence people supplied on Trump and Hunter's laptop.
It's so funny how these few cherry picked screenshots are being presented by this "journalist" hand-selected by the owner of the company because of her vocal position on these issues (same with Taibbi).
For instance, we have no idea what tweets management reviewed to decide to throttle searches. So these are decisions presented devoid of reference the actual behavior of these accounts.
If the big finding is that they throttled, ok. Though obviously this is again just cherry picked, since we don't know who else was or wasn't throttled.
Given how dominant conservative accounts have been on twitter (constantly the most liked and retweeted), I think what we're seeing is quite different. Twitter was explicitly directing employees not to act in any way on libsoftiktok without passing it through top management. That's OBVIOUSLY an effort to keep libsoftiktok from getting banned. Note -- repeated 7 day suspensions would explicitly not lead to permanent banning, and could not be decided in the usual process that did not require upper management approval.
This is not journalism. It's Elon Musk wanting to present a narrative to the public, cherry picking two public figures most receptive to that narrative, providing them access to a select set of documents, requiring incredibly rapid review, and requiring publication on twitter, which means distilling a ton of stuff down to a couple paras of total text.
Ask yourself if you'd believe a single damn word of this if it was done by, say, Dominion about their voting machines, or Arizona about their vote counting.
Release the documents, so we know what is released and what isn't. Let other outlets review, so there is the usual journalistic competitiveness.
Until then it's Elon Musk just doing his thing.
Oh, and hilariously, the one content moderation tool Musk has promised to use is shadow banning.
Another journalism question too: wondering if Bari Weiss, while reporting about this super secret internal group for decision making, ask Elon Musk whether new twitter's internal deliberations will be open to the public? Ha, no she didn't ask, and no they won't be.
You guys just like the new dictator more than the old one. To me they're both dictators.
Though it shouldn't, it shocks me that our voices from the left here are absolutely cool with a "private company's" acting in cahoots with the government to shut down speech the government didn't like... a "private company" that wanted the protections of a common carrier, no less.
Such courage.
"Government and Corporate alliances against the individual are formed by Nationalist Marxists.
"A recent example is known as National Socialist Workers Party in Germany."
Hahahaha! Nitwits gotta be nitwits...always! (This assumes you're being sincere, that you do not know better and are just lying for effect.)
"We are living through the World Electronic Media War. From what I read, this era isn't that different from Europe after the printing press went mainstream: Martin Luther spoke against the Pope / Catholic Church and sparked Protestantism, and printed newspapers spawned 30 years of war against the old order."
For all the Twits crying about the tyranny of Twitter's owner(s) and editors in curating their site's content, you have your own virtual printing presses to hand: create your own blogs, develop your own community of public discussion, even set up your own social media apps in order to promulgate your preferred content, curated as you prefer, (or not curated at all, as you may also prefer). We all now have our own potential global megaphones; it lies with each who wishes to be heard to do the work.
"Though it shouldn't, it shocks me that our voices from the left here are absolutely cool with a 'private company's' acting in cahoots with the government to shut down speech the government didn't like... a 'private company' that wanted the protections of a common carrier, no less.
"Such courage."
How do you know the private company (or companies) are censoring certain content at the government's behest rather than according to their own preferences and initiative? Don't make the mistake of thinking these private providers of internet town halls have any obligation to allow completely free speech. One might prefer that a private carrier would allow uncensored speech from across the board, of course, as there is value in the clash of ideas by diverse voices in one forum. However, if such "clash of ideas" leads to mere name-calling and trolling, or a proliferation of inaccurate or false information presented as fact, a responsible reaction is to clear away the trolls and the mis- and disinformation.
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Jamie12: the one thing you say with which I can quickly agree, is the need for context. I'd love to see an org chart of Old Twitter, showing accountability/authority on ALL work streams that would affect who can say what to whom. Right now I'm told there is a Star Chamber of Content Approval and a Council of Proper Talk and yada yada with membership (nominal or real) of X, Y, Z and the man in the moon, with Jack Dorsey hovering over this area of operations and having veto power over that area but in fact he's on vacation when some.banning occurs. The audit trail here is a complete goat-rodeo.
If you want transparency, you should demand that all this stuff be laid out, and right now.
Cheers.
Daniel12,
I don't honestly know what you are claiming. But about things like this:
Given how dominant conservative accounts have been on twitter (constantly the most liked and retweeted), I think what we're seeing is quite different.,
I confess myself confused. You think "conservatives" "dominate" Twitter how? That they're more often retweeted? You think pre-Musk Twitter was dominated by the Right? Seriously?
And what now? Musk has banned Ye, but opened up Twitter to Babylon Bee and LibsOfTikTok. (And Trump, of course, but he seems uninterested, which is the best we could hope for.) The Bee is obvious satire, with a strong Christian tinge. Not too long ago, that wouldn't make it obviously verboten. And LibsOfTikTok literally does nothing but amplify the audience of posts that were made public by their posters. It's perhaps unfortunate that they thought posting to a worldwide medium somehow protected them from being seen by people worldwide; but that's what you do get when you post to TikTok.
Robert Cook @ 2:07: "...Don't make the mistake of thinking these private providers of internet town halls have any obligation to allow completely free speech..."
Don't make the mistake of thinking that the CYA gene is not being expressed at a furious rate in every single bureaucracy, and most furiously when the subject matter is Which Client Gets Screwed With Potential Legal Blowback. Tell me: would you serve on one of these Twitter Truth Tribunals, deciding which words needed to be disappeared and which user needed to undergo a subtle down-regulation in visibility and followership, unless you could satisfy yourself that you were most fully indemnified against blowback? Maybe maintaining a little file of how you had objected to these moves; had never agreed to them? Hmmm?
Foregoing assertion does not depend on private versus public status of the provider. CYA is CYA. Let the discovery begin!
"Communism..."
More specifically, what we're seeing here is proof we live in an actual Fascist country, where industries work with Government in order to censor (or 'reduce visibility') individuals whose speech is not in line with the Government's wishes.
The word 'fascist' has been a pejorative, but this is becoming real, as-defined, Fascism. The 'one party state' is becoming a reality. Certainly the 'deep state' has an opinion that the Democratic Party is it's preferred party. Our elections have become sketchy. The FBI seems to be approaching the definition of a "Stasi", carrying out the harassment of opposition party (or even lawyers for the opposition).
And, as with Woodrow Wilson's 'brown shirts', the American Protective League, we now have a brown-shirt force of our own in Antifa.
What would be Soviet-style Bullshit is the government telling them what they can and cannot publish.
Maybe you should be following this a bit more closely. That way you wouldn't write stupid things.
How do you know the private company (or companies) are censoring certain content at the government's behest rather than according to their own preferences and initiative?
This is a good point, but not the way you think it is. We don't know because there is a lack of transparency. That is in and of itself is a major problem here for many of us. Intelligence agencies feeding false narratives to social media corporations in off the record backroom meetings creates way too much risk of chicanery.
Anything is possible. I can believe that well-intended wokesters did it all on their own. I could also believe that the CIA planted the Hunter Biden laptop and is using it blackmail Uncle Joe in plain sight. Who knows what to believe when there is no transparency?
"If you want transparency, you should demand that all this stuff be laid out, and right now."
100%
And then the next necessary question will be how Musk will do it differently and how we'll know what he actually does (other than from his tweets).
Though it shouldn't, it shocks me that our voices from the left here are absolutely cool with a "private company's" acting in cahoots with the government to shut down speech the government didn't like... a "private company" that wanted the protections of a common carrier, no less.
It shocks me. It does not surprise me.
"Art imitating life or life imitating art" Watch the movie NETWORK! How prophetic!
"Tell me: would you serve on one of these Twitter Truth Tribunals, deciding which words needed to be disappeared and which user needed to undergo a subtle down-regulation in visibility and followership...?"
No.
Actually, I couldn't care less about Twitter. I don't use or read it; its appeal is nonexistent to me. It is a Virtual Tower of Babble.
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