Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

[grarpamp]

https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/in-response-to-the-twitter-files

Establishment journalists' response to the Twitter Files is that of a
profession committed to protecting the state instead of exposing it.
Establishment Media Rushes to Defend the FBI
The Hunter Biden laptop story shows the extent to which the corporate
media has become the propaganda arm of the state



   Last week, the FBI responded to the revelations exhumed from the Twitter
   Files in the most predictable way imaginable: by calling the journalists
   who reported on them [20]“conspiracy theorists.” A decade ago, an
   attack like this on the free press by the federal government’s top law
   enforcement agency might have united journalists in indignant outrage. No
   longer. If the Twitter Files showed the extent to which the intelligence
   agencies are in bed with the social media platforms, the story’s
   reception by the mainstream press has only shown how eager the
   establishment media is to jump into the sheets with them. It’s not just
   that the corporate media has abandoned the kind of adversarial journalism
   exemplified by the reporting on the Twitter Files; it has taken on the
   role of defending the state against those who continue to practice it.

   A few days after my friend and colleague [21]Michael Shellenberger dropped
   [22]Part 7 of the Twitter Files, CNN reporters Evan Perez, Donnie Sullivan
   and Brian Fung published a big [23]story, also [24]featured on the news
   channel, expressly aimed at refuting its findings. The central claim of
   the story was that the FBI had never “ordered” Twitter to suppress the
   Hunter Biden laptop story. That claim is true: the FBI, indeed, had never
   issued a direct order to Twitter that they had no legal authority to
   issue. But neither Shellenberger nor any other Twitter Files reporter had
   ever made that allegation in the first place. Elon Musk had, in a
   [25]tweet posted two and a half weeks prior to Shellenberger’s thread,
   in a discussion of an earlier Twitter Files installment written by a
   [26]different reporter.

   And CNN’s conclusion was correct: Musk, who is famous for his reckless
   tweets, had spoken inaccurately. But so what? Musk carelessly hyping a
   tweet thread with the hyperbolic claim that the FBI “ordered”
   suppression of a story does nothing to undermine the actual claim in the
   reporting, which is that the FBI used its influence improperly to
   discredit a true but politically inconvenient story. Seizing on Musk’s
   sloppy editorializing is a classic [30]motte and bailey that CNN is using
   to tarnish a story that it cannot in fact factually refute.

   What the Twitter Files do show is that the FBI ran what appears to be a
   disinformation campaign to persuade  social media platforms to suppress
   the Hunter Biden laptop story — a story they knew to be true. That last
   part bears repeating, as it is crucial to understanding the gravity of the
   FBI’s alleged impropriety: the FBI knew from the start that the story
   was authentic. FBI agents knew that Hunter Biden had personally dropped
   off his laptop at a computer repair shop in Delaware in 2019 and then
   abandoned it, that the computer repairman had viewed its contents and then
   contacted Rudy Giuliani to inform him of the sensitive information stored
   on the machine, and that the New York Post was writing a story on it. The
   FBI knew all of this because in 2019, the computer repairman had, via his
   father, contacted the FBI himself to tell them about it. FBI agents had
   visited him at his home, and the agency had then taken physical possession
   of the laptop. The FBI was also spying on Giuliani, which is how they were
   aware that the New York Post had an article coming. Knowing all of these
   facts, the FBI nevertheless went on to represent the Hunter Biden laptop
   story as “Russian disinformation” to social media executives.