Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

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Donald J Trump Won The US 2020 Presidential Election


Stockman: Twitter Implicitly Became The Ministry Of Truth

https://brownstone.org/articles/twitter-became-the-ministry-of-truth/
https://www.davidstockmanscontracorner.com/re-the-twitter-files-praise-be/

New material Musk released over the weekend confirms the very worst.
The banal boys and girls previously ensconced in Twitter’s top
echelons were not only having a jolly time attempting to steer the
nation’s news narrative; these executives were actually meeting weekly
with FBI, Homeland Security and national intelligence officials to
discuss “disinformation” they wanted removed from the site, including
the notorious suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

That’s just one step removed from a state-run Ministry of Truth and is
perhaps even more insidious. That’s because it didn’t even involve
unwanted and unconstitutional coercion. Instead, the executives of
this private enterprise were voluntarily neglecting their day jobs
(maximizing corporate profits and shareholder value) in order to spend
a huge amount of corporate time and resources propagating official
narratives and suppressing dissenting views.

It was as if the Washington powers-that-be had nationalized a
multi-billion company, drafting it to propagandize on behalf of their
own political and policy agenda and continued tenure in power.

So the question recurs as to why Jack Dorsey, Parag Agrawal, Vijaya
Gadde, Yoel Roth and countless more top executives were not attending
to corporate “biness”, but instead were ostentatiously moonlighting on
behalf of an extra-curricular agenda that had absolutely nothing to do
with making money at Twitter.

The answer is actually no mystery. The Twitter Files published so far
by the trio of intrepid journalists given access to the company’s
internal files—Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael
Shellenberger—provide a screaming case of the dog which didn’t bark.

Not once do any of these executives predicate their “content
moderation” and thought control actions on the need to mollify
advertisers and thereby protect corporate revenues and profits. Not
once!

Actually, of course, the risk of losing advertising revenue would be a
valid free market reason for “de-amplifying” content that caused
revenue sources to wither. But no one averred that the NY Post’s
dropping the dime on Hunter Biden would send GM or Proctor & Gamble
advertising dollars packing or even that the user eyeballs on which
those dollars depended would suddenly blink-shut owing to the horror
of it.

Indeed, the eyes of the company’s collective leadership were so far
off the eight-ball of profit maximization that they had seemingly
endless time for the pursuit of all manner of foolishness and trivia
on Twitter’s network. For instance, former Governor Huckabee’s
obviously facetious tweet about fraudulent voting got the attention of
the entire upper echelon:

    Stood in the rain for hour to early vote today. When I got home I
filled my stack of mail-in ballots and then voted the ballots of my
deceased parents and grandparents. They vote just like me!
#Trump2020,” Huckabee tweeted on Oct. 24, 2020.

The blatant attempt at humor here should have escaped no one’s
attention with an IQ above 80. But as Matt Taibbi revealed, the
bigwigs using the Slack channel titled “us2020_xfn_enforcement”
actually hosted a lively debate about whether Huckabee’s tweet should
be removed.

    “Hello putting this tweet on everyone’s radar. This appears to be
a joke but other people might believe it. Can I get your weigh in
this?,” a Twitter employee wrote, linking to Huckabee’s tweet.

    Twitter’s former Head of Trust & Safety, Yoel Roth, said in the
Slack channel that while he agrees “it’s a joke,” Huckabee is “also
literally admitting in a tweet to a crime.”

    “Yeah. I could see us taking action under ‘misleading claims that
cause confusion about the established laws, regulations, procedures,
and methods of a civic process’ but it’s not one that we could really
label in a useful way, so it’s removal (of a stupid and ill-advised
joke) or nothing. I’m maybe inclined not to remove without a report
from voting authorities given it’s been a while since he tweeted it
and virtually all of the replies I’m seeing are
critical/counterspeech,” Roth said.

There are countless other examples in the Twitter Files of what
amounts to trivia and pure partisan sniping garnering top corporate
attention. In one tweet, Donald Trump referenced a mail-in voting
problem in Ohio that was found to be true.

    Nevertheless, Twitter executives were praised for their speed to
impose “visibility filters” so the tweet could not be “replied to,
shared, or liked,” and the staff received a censorship “attaboy”:
“VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED.”

Still, that was Donald Trump the sitting president—so presumably he
was worthy of top level censorship. But what about one John Basham, a
former Tippecanoe County, Indiana, Councilor?

The latter had apparently caught the attention of the FBI, which sent
a report to Twitter for action owing to the fact that Basham claimed,

    “Between 2% and 25% of Ballots by Mail are Being Rejected for Errors.”…

Let’s see. Does the opinion of an ex-official from a place that no one
has heard about since the election of 1840 (“Tippecanoe and Tyler,
Too”), implicitly claiming that the mail-in error problem was either
huge (25%) or relatively trivial (2%), really matter when it comes to
running a global corporation, or even a government-contracted
censoring operation for that matter?

That is to say, these kids and half-baked partisan ideologues were in
so far over their heads that it was only a matter of time before the
whole enterprise ran aground. Indeed, they had formulated so many
rules for content moderation and such complex multi-stage forms of
penalty, including parental-style “timeouts”, that much of the
internal debate revealed in the Twitter Files amounted to arguments
about the application of sheer stupidity.

This was more than evident in the case of Twitter’s seven suspensions
of the “LIBs of Tik Tok” (LTT) account. This Twitter account was
launched by one Chaya Raichi in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4
million followers. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as
long as a week.

Yet what was the offense? The committee justified her suspensions
internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of
“hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that
gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”

Actually, that’s a red hot matter of judgement and opinion that can be
argued either way—the exact kind of thing that is supposed to be
debated in the town square. But either way, the Twitter claim that the
LTT viewpoint on the matter amounted to “hate speech” reveals just how
far off the deep-end these wokish juveniles had descended.

Still, what matters here is the wording of the Site Policy
Recommendation: It’s all about school playground style punishments,
and nothing at all about the needs of the business or viewpoint of
advertisers.

Meanwhile, what was happening back at the ranch in 2020-2021 when the
Twitter HQ was being transformed into the Village of the Damned?

Well, on the one-hand the company’s stock price was coming up roses.
After hitting the skids in 2015-2016, the Twitter’s market cap had
risen from $12.5 billion in the fall of 2017 to $27 billion by the
fall of 2019 to a peak of $54 billion in July 2021.

In short, given a quadrupling of the company’s stock price in just
four years and the resultant massive gains in the value of executive
stock options, the top echelon apparently felt free to become
moonlighting volunteers for the Deep State. That is, doing well they
faced no penalty for doing good at the shareholders’ expense.

And we do mean shareholders’ expense. During its 2020 and 2021 fiscal
years combined, which encompassed the peak period of the C-suite
insanity chronicled by the Twitter Files, the company did harvest $8.8
billion of revenue from the Lockdown-world’s acceleration of the
advertising migration from legacy to digital venues.

Moreover, collecting those sums only required $3.2 billion in cost of
goods sold, resulting in sterling gross profits at $5.6 billion and
64% of sales. In turn, that should have resulted in a shareholder
bonanza on the bottom line. Except it didn’t.

In fact, the company’s moonlighting management spent far more than
that—$6.1 billion—on R&D, sales and marketing, general overhead and
other top-side expenses. That is to say, Twitter’s putative business
model went bust, with cumulative operating losses of nearly one-half
billion dollars during the two year period.

Likewise, its bonafides as a cash-burning machine were reinforced.
During 2020-2021 it generated $1.6 billion of cash from operations,
but spent nearly $1.9 billion on CapEx. Accordingly, Twitter’s
operating free cash flow came in at -$260 million.

In short, when the company reached a peak valuation of $54 billion in
July 2021 it was bleeding red ink and burning cash. It essentially had
an infinite valuation multiple, which absurd valuation, in turn,
amounted to a flashing green light for rampant moonlighting by not
only its top management, but nearly the entirety of its the 7,500 work
force.

In that regard we have been waiting for our Twitter screen to go dark
ever since Elon Musk fired the employment rooster back to at least its
December 2017 level (3,372). But, alas, the tweets just keep on
coming, even as expenses have been pared back to the levels extant
when Twitter was valued at the aforementioned 25% of its eventual
peak.

The Twitter story is not a one-off case, nor is it evidence that Wall
Street and the homegamers alike are comprised of greedy fools who will
fall for anything.

To the contrary, the destructive outbreak of corporate moonlighting in
behalf of woke ideology and partisan causes was born, bred and
matriculated by the money-printers at the Fed.  At the end of the day,
it is bad money that leads to bad, value-destroying behavior in the
C-suites—just one more instance of the “malinvestment” which is the
inherent result of monetary inflation.

In this context, the unjustified bubble in the Twitter stock is
actually small potatoes compared to the giants of Silicon Valley—all
of which have been infected with the same bad money based descent into
political moonlighting.

As it happened, the stock of the FANGMAN (Facebook, Apple, Netflix,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and NVIDIA) got enormously bloated by the
Fed’s rampant money-printing during the last decade.

Thus, in 2013 these seven tech giants were collectively valued at
$1.19 trillion, which figure represented 15.9X their combined net
income of $75 billion. Arguably, that PE multiple was reasonable and
appropriate given the fact that most of these companies were growing
rapidly but were also benefiting from a one-time headwinds.

These included—

    the shift of advertising from legacy to digital media;

    the migration of merchandise sales from bricks and mortar stores
to e-Commerce;

    the shift of computer technology from standalone boxes and their
packaged software to the cloud; and

    the full adoption of smart-phone technology by the mass public.

These one-time tailwinds did result in a 20% per annum earnings growth
for the seven FANGMEN during the 2013-2021 period. But the flood of
Fed liquidity during the same period caused the PE multiple to more
than double to 34X based on the view that the Fed would never let the
market decline; and also that the rock-bottom interest rates would
remain in place indefinitely, resulting in the baleful reign of TINA
(there is no investment alternative to stocks).

Accordingly, the market cap of the seven companies soared to $11.5
trillion by the fall of 2021, representing a 33% per year gain. In
turn, this meant not only that market caps had grown 1.5X faster than
unsustainable one-time earnings gains, but that C-suites throughout
Silicon Valley had no trouble taking their eye off the profits
maximization ball in order to pursue political agendas that had
nothing to do with good management of their respective businesses.

Alas, the worm has turned. The market cap of the FANGMEN has already
dropped by a staggering $4.5 trillion to just $7.1 trillion at
present. At the same time, collective earnings of these allegedly
perpetual “growth” stocks have declined by nearly 14% since their
summer/fall 2021 peak of $336 billion.

By our lights, companies experiencing double-digit earnings
shrinkage—even before the upcoming recession—do not deserve the 24.5X
multiple the market is now putting on their collective profits of$290
billion.

Likewise, shareholders never deserved the $4.5 trillion that has
already vaporized, even as they were being badly served by management
that had gone AWOL, moonlighting on wokeness and politics.

In all, bad money is the ultimate devil’s workshop. The bloodbath in
Silicon Valley stocks and the Twitter Files disclosures enabled by the
proprietor of Tesla, its most hideously over-valued company, are
finally proving exactly why.