Big Tech Censorship Is A Thing
Thanks to Elon Musk's #TwitterFiles, we finally have the receipts
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a supposed watchdog group to root out disinformation, has written a hit piece about how Twitter CEO Elon Musk only interacts with right-wing users who spread misinformation and hate.
In the past few years, Musk’s activity on the platform has become more and more problematic. But now that he has become the owner of Twitter, his behavior is more watched than ever. When looking at the full dataset of tweets post-Twitter acquisition, analysts observed concerning interactions that differed from the first dataset. For example, Musk interacted with accounts such as Tim Pool, ALX, Kanekoa the Great, Mike Cernovich, and Dinesh D’Souza, who have all been identified as prominent superspreaders of election disinformation in both the 2020 and 2022 US elections.
Notably, Musk also replied to anti-LGBTQ+ influencer Libs of TikTok and has interacted with the account four times, giving it a flurry of attention. Libs of TikTok is a prolific spreader of hate, exposing the geographic locations of schools, teachers and centers providing gender-affirming care, while egging followers on to act against them. Outside of the dataset, analysts found that when Musk liked a tweet from Libs of TikTok on December 27, 2022, the ‘like’ count of the tweet shot up to 90,000 – the highest like count the account had received in the preceding two weeks.
SDI has a laundry list of questionable and leftist connections itself. Its present and past sponsors include the Anti-Defamation League, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Omidyar Network, run by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, a well-known Never Trumper who has financed left-wing organizations, progressive politicians, and investigative journalism projects.
Of course, this “problematic” and questionable interaction behavior is especially egregious to these so-called watchdogs because since early December, Musk has been allowing the release of The Twitter Files. December 2, 2022 was the first “drop” of this information, disseminated through independent journalists Matt Taibibi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Schellenberger. There have been at least 20 threads so far, and they essentially blow the lid off Big Tech’s targeting of conservatives through collusion with the FBI and other tech platforms, as well as the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and how these executives manufactured reasons to remove then-President Donald J. Trump from Twitter and other social media platforms.
For deeper detail on what these information drops contained, RedState has done extensive coverage on the Twitter Files here.
The latest information dropped shows clear targeting of conservative sites by not only Twitter, but Google and Facebook. Independent journalist Kanekoa the Great, who SDI mentions in their article as one of those dangerous accounts that Musk interacts with, did his own thread with selected tweets below.
It continues on, and I recommend reading the entire thread simply because it’s not just about conservative writers, influencers and content creators; it’s about you, the average person. No matter what your life or career, you are required to interact with Google on a daily basis, whether it’s locating an address or finding a local dentist. Do we know what amount of information is being hidden and suppressed? The majority of Americans under 40 never learned quality research skills that didn’t require they use the internet. How would they know how to discover what is fact and what is simply corn-fed narratives?
Here’s the other part of this deal: search optimization is how conservative writers and content creators make their bread and butter. Unless you’re fortunate enough to be seen on a major media outlet or get connected with a celebrity with juice, you primarily rely on search engines and optimization to bring traffic to your site or enterprise. However, when the tech companies are deliberately suppressing your reach to the outside world by throttling your traffic, or hiding you completely from search results, you effectively have no chance.
I cannot imagine the thousands of dollars lost to me, and the millions lost to other outlets thanks to the interference of these supposed tech titans who felt they were saving the world for democracy… or something.
Of course, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and groups like it are not just interested in suppressing free speech and free enterprise; they want to paint what Musk is doing in releasing the Twitter Files to the public as illegitimate, by tying Musk’s interactions with conservative accounts as “hate” and spreading disinformation. They are not interested in strategic dialogue as much as they are interested in monologues that parrot the preferred narrative.
In a short period of analysis, researchers have already noted that hate speech is on the rise on Twitter. By further interacting with these types of accounts and their content, Musk is signaling to his followers and other Twitter users that these ideas are acceptable on the platform, likely inviting more hate on Twitter, and creating space for actors to spread disinformation and harmful ideologies.
This exposure by Musk needs to continue. Let’s hope this leftist associated group does not succeed in its smear campaign, and that Musk will continue to release the information as well as the documentation surrounding Big Tech’s suppression of free speech and thought.
