Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

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Ron Paul: 'Twitter Files' Make It Clear, We Must Abolish The FBI

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/december/19/twitter-files-make-it-clear-we-must-abolish-the-fbi/

As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all
too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First
Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In
Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes
an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.

The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that
agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails
between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US
government officials for the “private” social media company to censor
comments and ban commenters they did not like.

The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that
included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly
forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged
regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts
to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside
government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental
organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US
government did not like.

US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of
Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that
sink in.

This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it
occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be
gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged
in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees
were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear
are crickets.

What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed
the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even
minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly
flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of
history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the
population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude,
corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground
publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and
ridicule.

Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why
the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against
any American poking fun at the deep state.

There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law
Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard
CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has
ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of
respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated
censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those
polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state
censorship.

As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only
applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates
of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed
between its former officials and the government.”

So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies
and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through
“private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are
allowed to say when they communicate with each other.

Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.

We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us
as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed…and End the
Federal Bureau of Investigation!