Censorship: Twitter Takeover Totally Panics Political Regime of LeftLibDemSocMediaTechPol

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The Left's Righteous Tyrants

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/09/righteous-tyrants/

They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.

Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the
opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their
atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with
the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities,
commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.

Not so with modern-day martinets. Our 21st-century tyrants possess
nothing more than useless degrees from woke institutions and deep
contempt for at least half the country, likely born out of a lifetime
of social isolation. History, after all, shows that outcasts often
seek revenge against their childhood tormentors later in life.

Such appears to be the case with the former Twitter executives who
testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
Unimpressive by every measure—looks, personality, intellect,
persuasiveness, grasp of the facts—the Twitter Four should serve as a
reminder of what the defenders of freedom are up against. Thankfully,
our enemies, while powerful for now, have the mental, physical, and
emotional appeal of overcooked spaghetti.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and Anika Collier Navaroli took
the quasi-stand this week at a House Oversight Committee hearing to
explain their roles in colluding with the government to suppress free
speech during an election year, particularly related to the New York
Post’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020.
Baker, the former general counsel for the FBI when the bureau used
fabricated political opposition research to defraud a secret federal
court and obtain a warrant to spy on Donald Trump, was fired by Elon
Musk as Twitter’s general counsel after it was discovered Baker was
vetting company files made available to independent journalists.

Roth, Gadde, and Navaroli were considered the “custodians of the
internet,” Roth boasted in a New York Times opinion column published
in November, shortly after he resigned. “The work of online sanitation
is unrelenting and contentious,” Twitter’s former head of “trust and
safety” lamented. Roth then outlined a series of steps the government,
private companies, and Big Tech oligarchs should pursue to rein in
Musk.

“In the longer term,” Roth warned, “the moderating influences of
advertisers, regulators and, most critically of all, app stores may be
welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of
dangerous speech online.”

That sort of hubris was on full display this week as the Twitter Four
defended their crusade to censor users on the Right, including the
suspension of Trump in January 2021. In the process, these
self-proclaimed warriors of truth and integrity revealed themselves to
be nothing short of petulant foot-stompers unfit for employment
anywhere outside of Silicon Valley or the government. Further, all
four were clearly guided by their hatred for Trump and his supporters,
contrary to their solemn assurances that decisions were based on
unbiased considerations to protect the site from insidious content.

For example, Gadde retweeted a Nicholas Kristof piece in 2016,
emphasizing Kristof’s conclusion that he had “never met a national
politician in the U.S. who is so ill informed, evasive, puerile and
deceptive as Trump.” She, like 98 percent of people working in Silicon
Valley, is a generous contributor to Democratic Party officials and
candidates.

She reportedly cried when she learned Musk had acquired the company.

But Gadde’s attempts to hide her partisan stripes failed this week. In
a nonsensical explanation only an Ivy Leaguer could love, Gadde told
committee members about the inner workings of the social media giant.

“Defending free expression and maintaining the health of the platform
required difficult judgment calls,” claimed Gadde, who was largely
responsible for the decision to ban Trump’s account after January 6,
2021. “Most applications of Twitter rules were fact-intensive, subject
to internal debate, and needed to be made very quickly. We recognized
that after applying those rules, we might learn that some of them did
not work as we had imagined and that we would need to update them. At
times, we also reversed course.”

Coincidentally, just like occurrences in the traditional media, those
rules and course reversals only affected one side: the Right. But when
challenged to explain the imbalance, Gadde played dumb. She said she
could only “make a guess” as to the application of a “search
blacklist,” a tool that was frequently used by Twitter to hide the
accounts of conservative influencers.

Vaccine-injured Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) angrily confronted
Gadde about Twitter’s censorship of contrary views on COVID-19,
especially vaccine efficacy. After forcing Gadde to admit she did not
graduate from medical school, Mace presented tweets with CDC data on
vaccine side effects that Twitter nonetheless labeled “misleading.”

Gadde told Mace she was “not familiar with those particular
situations,” to which Mace snarked, “Yeah, I bet you’re not.”

Roth, a big talker behind the scenes and on the op-ed pages of
regime-friendly newspapers, sheepishly confessed he “regret[s] the
language he used” in some tweets including one that referred to the
president and his administration as “actual Nazis.” He then complained
that he was subjected to threats after Musk shared what Roth insisted
was a “defamatory allegation that I support or condone pedophilia.”
Roth said he was forced to sell his house in the aftermath.

Anika Collier Navaroli perhaps best portrayed the emotional fragility
and overall duncery of these social media tyrants. The “safety policy
team senior expert” worked for months before January 6 to “minimize
the threat of violence that we saw coming.” Part of the looming
danger, Navaroli claimed, was Trump’s comment for the Proud Boys to
“stand back and stand by”—a remark not made on Twitter but during a
presidential debate in September 2020.

Navaroli, now a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Critical
Race and Digital Studies, sprang into action. “We crafted what we
called a coded incitement to violence policy to address dog whistles
like this,” she told the committee. Rather than follow her orders,
Navaroli complained, Twitter “bent over backwards to find ways not to
approve it.”

She continued her pressure campaign to remove Trump until the events
of January 6. “Two days later, when it looked like it was going to
happen all over again, I asked management whether they wanted more
blood on their hands,” Navaroli said. “Only then did they act.”

Navaroli seemed to detect danger in everything Trump said. “The former
president said he liked to send out his tweets like little missiles.
To me, that sounded like weaponization of a platform in his own words
and yet Twitter was not concerned.”

She left Twitter in March 2021 after her paranoid fantasies got the
best of her. Navaroli told the January 6 select committee she “could
no longer be complicit in what I saw to be a company and a product
that was wantonly allowing violence to occur. [The] platform was going
to continue to allow people to die, and I could not be a part of
that.”

Just like the tyrants of old, this current crop hides its lust for
power behind a cloak of fairness and the “common good.” No, they’re
not cutting off food supplies or building labor camps but these
modern-day tyrants seek the same ends: crush the opposition and
control the masses.

Just with a lot less talent.