Another batch of Twitter Files has dropped. While much of it simply reaffirms and expands our understanding of the ménage à trois between Twitter, the federal government, and left-wing media outlets, one tidbit revealed just how far this unholy alliance would go to protect the approved narrative. Not only was misinformation and disinformation targeted, but so-called “malinformation” was as well. What’s that, you ask? “True content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” Even the truth, it seems, is bad - and must be controlled - when it doesn’t support the narrative.
The Censorship-Industrial Complex
In the most recent infodump, journalist Matt Taibbi explains that when reporters were first given access to the internal documents of Twitter last year, they were focused on the company. Now, however, it has become clear Twitter was a partner with the government as well as other tech firms. They held regular “industry meetings” with the FBI and DHS and established a system for receiving thousands of content reports from government agencies like HHS, Treasury, NSA, and even local police departments.
This unholy alliance of government agencies, “non-academic NGOs,” and various other organizations Taibbi terms the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The Twitter Files show people moving from law enforcement and intelligence to the private sector and back, allowing them to be “fact-checked only by themselves.” Twitter occasionally pushed back on technical analysis about which accounts are bots, but they instantly deferred when it came to vaccines or elections.
After DHS’ Disinformation Governance Board was terminated by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Stanford Internet Observatory created its Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to “fill in the gaps.” The EIP was later renamed the Virality Project and added to Twitter’s JIRA ticketing system. Internal documents reveal a whopping 50 million tweets can be received and processed each day.
It was this Virality Project that suggested platforms (not just Twitter) take action against stories that, while technically true, could still cause vaccine hesitancy.
The Truth Is What You Make It
(Photo illustration by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In a list titled “Standard vaccine misinformation on your platform,” Twitter was encouraged to censor “True content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” This could include viral posts of people expressing their own vaccine hesitancy or stories of actual vaccine side effects. “This content is not clearly mis or disinformation,” the message stated, “but it may be malinformation (exaggerated or misleading).”
Suppressing such posts wasn’t always even ostensibly about truth. Taibbi explained how emails from the FBI and DHS often came with spreadsheets containing hundreds of thousands of account names for review – many of which were deleted shortly after. At least one list included YouTube videos flagged for “anti-Ukraine narratives.”
“This is the Censorship-Industrial Complex at its essence: a bureaucracy willing to sacrifice factual truth in service of broader narrative objectives,” Taibbi concluded, later adding that it is often a major source of disinformation itself, with American taxpayers footing the bill for their own “estrangement from reality.”
Many have long suspected Big Tech and the media at large of being in bed with the Democrats, even before the pandemic. We then got confirmation from the White House itself when former Press Secretary Jen Psaki explained that the administration had been flagging “problematic posts” for Facebook. Democrats, the media, and social media giants like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were all but openly driving the narrative in at least some degree of cooperation well before the Twitter Files offered up confirmation. Is it any surprise, then, just how extensive this Censorship-Industrial Complex had become or that the disregard for truth in the face of the narrative was so blatant and open?
