Hearings on ‘Twitter files’ reveal government censorship and arming

The House panel investigating the federal government’s “arming” reported in the “Twitter files” got off to a fiery start Thursday as the Republican hearing began with a series of sniper attacks between Rep. Jim Jordan and the senior member. Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Island).

The witnesses, including journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, were given access by Elon Musk to review “substantial” amounts of Twitter’s internal communications about possible working relationships between social media companies and government agencies.

In his opening remarks, Taibbi told the panel that he had generated a lot of public interest when the first Twitter Files reports came out.

“My computer was looking like a slot machine when the very first tweet about the Hunter Biden laptop story being blocked had 143 million views and 30 million interactions.

Taibbi caught the attention of millions when the first episode focused on Twitter’s internal discussions that led them to censor Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 presidential election as some officials attempted to explain that he was “hacking” against his policies Materials”.

“We’ve learned that Twitter, Facebook, Google and other companies have developed a formal system to take “requests” in moderation from every branch of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.

A focus of this fast-growing network is creating lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are considered “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but uncomfortable”.

Creating such lists is undeniably a form of digital McCarthyism.

We just saw this with the Covid lab leak theory. Many of the institutions we are now investigating initially labeled the idea that Covid originated in a laboratory as “disinformation” and conspiracy theory. Now apparently even the FBI is taking it seriously.

The First Amendment and an American population accustomed to the right to speak is the left’s best defense against the censorship-industrial complex. If the latter can overturn our first and most important constitutional guarantee, these groups will have no serious opponents anywhere.

If anything emerges from the Twitter files, it is that we risk losing this most precious right, without which all other democratic rights are impossible.”

Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk