April 27, 2022

WORLD: Elon Musk Responds to Russian Collusion Hoaxer Currently Working at Twitter, Points to Big Changes. This Robert Reich Tweet Is Worth the Whole $44 Billion Elon Musk Paid for Twitter

RedState.com
written by Staff
Wednesday April 27, 2022

After Musk’s blockbuster deal to buy Twitter, the next obvious question was “What happens next?” Was Musk going to come in and completely clean house, kicking out all the woke staffers and leftwing leadership? Or was he going to take a more hands-off approach to the transition, allowing some of the worst offenders to remain in their roles? I think we are starting to get an answer to that.

In the last 24 hours, Musk has offered criticism of Vijaya Gadde, who is currently the top lawyer and head of the content moderation division at Twitter. She was responsible for not only banning Donald Trump but also censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. She also responded less than maturely to Musk’s takeover.

Now, in a move that intertwines multiple big stories, Musk has also responded to the fact that Russian collusion hoaxer Jim Baker, former FBI and now at Twitter, set up the meeting that Michael Sussmann used to spread the false Alfa Bank story. Sussmann is now under indictment via the John Durham special counsel.

Here are both those exchanges brought to you by a “journalist” from The Washington Post who apparently finds it really bad that Musk would call out obvious corruption regarding Twitter employees.
Regardless, I think Musk responding to both those stories is important. It points to big changes coming at Twitter. Some on the right who are more cynical speculated that he’d come in and maintain the status quo. If that were true, he wouldn’t be publicly calling out figures like Gadde and Baker, both of whom currently hold major leadership roles within the company.

Clearly, Musk didn’t spend $44 billion to let Twitter keep operating as a leftwing mouthpiece, banning speech that doesn’t fit the narrative. And while he’s not officially in charge yet, when the keys are handed over, you can expect him to burn the place down in regards to personnel. Jim Baker absolutely has to go. Vijaya Gadde, the brains behind Twitter’s censorship, has to go.

Yes, there will be pushback and hair set on fire, mostly from the mainstream media. But seeing Musk’s recent comments has given me confidence he can handle it. The left knows that it is losing. They feel their grip on power slipping away, both electorally and in regards to free speech. Musk is just the man to keep that train rolling.

Editor's Note: If Big Tech can ban and censor President Trump and other Republican politicians, they can ban us.
National Review
written by Philip Klein
Monday April 25, 2022

For years, every time conservatives complained about the stifling of open speech on Twitter, they were greeted with taunts of “If you don’t like it, you start your own Twitter.” Given that, this tweet from Robert Reich is precious, and from my perspective, already worth the $44 billion that Elon Musk paid for Twitter.
馃毃馃憞 I ADDED THE FOLLOWING 馃憞馃毃
LET US FLASHBACK TO THE DAYS THEY ENJOYED CENSORING ALL OPPOSITION TO THEIR IDEOLOGY.
 馃毃馃憞 SAME SOCIALIST PSYCHO TODAY 馃憞馃毃 馃毃馃憞 A LITTLE EXTRA RELATED STUFF 馃憞馃毃
Project Veritas published January 11, 2018: HIDDEN CAMERA: Twitter Engineers To "Ban a Way of Talking" Through "Shadow Banning". In the latest undercover Project Veritas video investigation, eight current and former Twitter employees are on camera explaining steps the social media giant is taking to censor political content that they don’t like.

Project Veritas
written by Staff
January 11, 2022

(San Francisco) - In the latest undercover Project Veritas video investigation, current and former Twitter employees are on camera explaining steps the social media giant is taking to censor political content that they don’t like.

This video release follows the first undercover Twitter expos茅 Project Veritas released on January 10th which showed Twitter Senior Network Security Engineer Clay Haynes saying that Twitter is “more than happy to help the Department of Justice with their little [President Donald Trump] investigation.” Twitter responded to the video with a statement shortly after that release, stating “the individual depicted in this video was speaking in a personal capacity and does not represent of speak for Twitter.” The video released by Project Veritas today features eight employees, and a Project Veritas spokesman said there are more videos featuring additional employees coming.

On January 3rd 2018 at a San Francisco restaurant, Abhinov Vadrevu, a former Twitter Software Engineer explains a strategy, called “shadow banning,” that to his knowledge, Twitter has employed:
“One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting and no one sees their content. So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it.”
Twitter is in the process of automating censorship and banning, says Twitter Software Engineer Steven Pierre on December 8th of 2017:
“Every single conversation is going to be rated by a machine and the machine is going to say whether or not it’s a positive thing or a negative thing. And whether it’s positive or negative doesn’t (inaudible), it’s more like if somebody’s being aggressive or not. Right? Somebody’s just cursing at somebody, whatever, whatever. They may have point, but it will just vanish… It’s not going to ban the mindset, it’s going to ban, like, a way of talking.”
Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team explains on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:
“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”
Former Twitter Engineer Conrado Miranda confirms on December 1st, 2017 that tools are already in place to censor pro-Trump or conservative content on the platform. When asked whether or not these capabilities exist, Miranda says, “that’s a thing.”

In a conversation with former Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Norai on May 16th, 2017, we learned that in the past Twitter would manually ban or censor Pro-Trump or conservative content. When asked about the process of banning accounts, Norai said, “On stuff like that it was more discretion on your view point, I guess how you felt about a particular matter…”

When asked to clarify if that process was automated Norai confirmed that it was not:
“Yeah, if they said this is: ‘Pro-Trump’ I don’t want it because it offends me, this, that. And I say I banned this whole thing, and it goes over here and they are like, ‘Oh you know what? I don’t like it too. You know what? Mo’s right, let’s go, let’s carry on, what’s next?'”
Norai also revealed that more left-leaning content would go through their selection process with less political scrutiny, “It would come through checked and then I would be like ‘Oh you know what? This is okay. Let it go.’”

Norai explains that this selection process wasn’t exactly Twitter policy, but rather they were following unwritten rules from the top:
“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules.”

“There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.”
At a San Francisco bar on January 5th, Pranay Singh details how the shadow-banning algorithms targeting right-leaning are engineered:

“Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.”

When asked if the majority of the algorithms are targeted against conservative or liberal users of Twitter, Singh said, “I would say majority of it are for Republicans.”

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe believes the power over speech Silicon Valley tech giants has is unprecedented and dangerous:
“What kind of world do we live in where computer engineers are the gatekeepers of the ‘way people talk?’ This investigation brings forth information of profound public importance that educates people about how free they really are to express their views online.”
Project Veritas plans to release more undercover video from within Twitter in the coming days.

Mr. O’Keefe has just completed a book about this series entitled “AMERICAN PRAVDA: My fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.” The book will be released by St. Martin’s Press on January 16, 2018.

UPDATE 4/27/22 at 9:33pm: Added info below.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 5:39 PM

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