I think we've seen quite a bit that's useful,
it's not really the smoking gun we'd hope for.
I feel that Elon Musk has held back some material.
>> You just heard from a columnist over at the New York post
her name is Miranda Devine.
And she flat out says that the so called twitter files meaning the information
that Elon Musk leaked or gave to Matt Taibbi, who then put together
a lengthy twitter thread ended up really being a big nothing burger.
Certainly not the smoking gun that the right wing was hoping for.
However, regardless of that, I do think it's important to talk about
the ramifications of relying on a private company, private corporation to make
these decisions about what content is and is not allowed on their platform.
Because if twitter truly is considered or thought of as the public square,
well, I think there should be a lot more transparency in regard to what is and
is not censored.
However, the notion that the government got involved in censoring
content on twitter, meaning the Biden administration got involved in
censoring content on twitter is unfounded as the story stands today.
Matt Taibbi says there's more to come, who knows what he's gonna report moving
forward or more importantly what he's gonna tweet moving forward.
But for now let's give you a summary of what's happening and what this all means.
Let's start with the context and what this is really about for the right wing,
it centers on the New York post and the Hunter Biden laptop story that was
published just weeks prior to the 2020 election taking place.
So in October of 2020 again before Biden was elected.
Just weeks before election day the post published a salacious story about
the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop.
The information came to them via Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney
to then President Donald Trump in the form of a hard drive with information
taken from the computer said to be left at a Delaware computer store.
Now, the right wing has really latched onto the Hunter Biden laptop story.
They're obsessive about it now that the Republican party has taken control of
the house.
They have made it abundantly clear that that is what they're gonna spend most
of their time doing just investigating the Hunter Biden laptop story,
meaning if you are frustrated with how your life is today, the instability,
the precariousness of your work life,
the lack of wages necessary to keep up with inflation.
Republicans plan to do nothing about that because they're far more obsessed with
what kind of sex Hunter Biden was getting involved in and how much cocaine he did.
So let me continue though.
Now at the time that that story broke, the laptop story was met with skepticism,
I think for obvious reasons, right.
Number one, it's Rudy Giuliani of all people who's coming to the public with
this information.
And Rudy Giuliani, I think needless to say has got some issues,
some credibility issues including consistently claiming that the election
was stolen from Donald Trump, consistently claiming that he has evidence to prove it.
And consistently failing to provide a shred of evidence that the election was
in fact stolen from Donald Trump.
So credibility issues there so you can understand the skepticism.
He also refused to share the source material with news outlets.
So the credibility issues, the lack of source material,
it was easy to dismiss that story but the information coming out of
the laptop story has since been verified as legitimate.
So what's fair is fair and we should be clear about that.
Now outlets chose not to aggregate the post report and
followed warnings from former US Intelligence officials.
Former US Intelligence officials that's an important keyword here,
who signed a letter saying that the Hunter data had all the markings of a Russian
disinformation campaign.
Now the reason why I say former US Intelligence is important is
because if its current US Intelligence that's badgering twitter or
other social media platforms to censor certain content.
Well, a case could be made that the governments getting involved in censoring
speech and
that does run into some potential issues with the Constitution the First Amendment.
But so far we haven't seen anything to prove that but let's continue.
So twitter did get involved,
first the platform suspended the twitter account of the post.
It also deleted and suspended anyone who shared the story.
Twitter eventually reversed that decision and reactivated the New York post twitter
account along with countless others banned from sharing the Hunter Biden story.
Now, Kayleigh Mcenany,
who at the time was the White House Press secretary was also suspended from twitter.
And so that led to a lot of backlash and to be quite honest, the Hunter Biden
laptop story that was censored by twitter got a lot in my opinion,
a lot more attention as a result of it being censored from the platform.
Now then twitter CEO Jack Dorsey admitted during congressional testimony that they
had made a mistake and they had, if they could do it all over again,
they would have gone in a completely different direction,
they would have handled it differently.
And here's a part of Matt Taibbi long
Twitter thread on all of this that I think is the most relevant.
Okay, so he says slowly over time Twitter staff and
executives began to find more and more uses for these tools.
Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well,
first a little, then more often, then consistently.
By 2020 requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine.
The one executive would write to another more to review from Biden team
meaning his campaign team, the reply would come back handled.
Okay, so so far we're talking about Biden's campaign, he's not president yet.
So the idea that the White House is meddling in free speech is again unfounded
and it doesn't matter though because Elon Musk weighed in on this and
he says the following.
If this isn't a violation of the Constitution's First Amendment, what is.
By the way further debunking this myth of billionaire meritocracy,
have you read the Constitution, have you read the First Amendment?
It's the government specifically censoring your speech that is what's considered
a violation of the First Amendment.
That is not what happened here.
Now the lack of transparency and the fact that you have campaigns censoring
what content we're able to see is something that I'm concerned about, right.
It would be much more important for us to know how do they make these decisions why
do they make these decisions?
And these platforms are notorious for not being upfront, honest and
transparent about what's transpiring.
But again, this has turned out to be more of what we've already known and
in terms of the smoking gun that the right wing was hoping for
they certainly haven't gotten it.
And if they do, they haven't got if they will in the future,
they certainly haven't gotten it yet.
Now it's actually not let's go to tie bees other tweet because I think this is
a really important part of it as well.
This is the 22nd tweet in his lengthy thread where he writes,
although several sources recalled hearing about a general warning from federal law
enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks.
There's no evidence that I've seen of any government
involvement in the laptop story.
In fact, that might have been the problem.
Okay, so no evidence of the government getting involved.
But let me continue with the next tweet where he says,
the decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but
without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal policy and
trust the policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.
Okay, so I just think if it's the government,
if it's really like FBI officials, really they're gonna go to lower level employees,
they're not gonna talk to the CEO of the company at all,
they're not gonna talk to Jack Dorsey at all.
I found that a little strange, but let's continue.
So the allegation is that the FBI went directly to like these
lower level employees who deal with the content moderation and
what is and is not considered safe.
Also worth pointing out that it wasn't just the Biden campaign,
the Trump campaign was definitely involved as well.
Let's go to the next graphic.
This is another tweet from Taibbi's thread where he says both parties had access to
these tools.
For instance, in 2020 requests from both the Trump White House and
the Biden campaign were received and honored.
Then he says, however, and he provides the campaign donations that went from twitter,
people working at twitter to the different parties and
there were more campaign contributions to democrats as opposed to republicans.
So his argument there is, well the employees there obviously
leaned more democrats, so there was more favoritism toward the Biden campaign.
But nonetheless, both campaigns, meaning both parties were consistently like
contacting twitter, looking for content to be censored on the platform.
Now, it's also worth noting that many of the links the Biden team asked twitter
to remove were actually like pornographic links from the Hunter Biden laptop.
So embarrassing stuff about Hunter Biden again,
I think the nature of wanting to censor something draws more attention to it.
So I mean I saw some of those images, I don't really care about it.
I just don't think, I mean, what power does Hunter Biden have?
Hunter Biden is not like Ivanka trump or Jared Kushner or Don Jr,
family members that Donald Trump intentionally brought on to
serve as advisers or part of his cabinet in the White House.
That is not what's happening with Joe Biden and his son Hunter, so
why do I care?
Okay, so the guy had an addiction issue.
So do many Americans like why is this such a big deal and
why are republicans so obsessed with investigating it in the house?
I mean go for it I guess.
I mean I don't really care.
I have no loyalty to Hunter Biden.
He's not my daddy.
I'm not like right wingers who's like who are like on their knees doing what they
can to protect and show love to their elite.
I don't care about any of that.
If there's any wrong, doing great, investigate him, what do I care?
What I do care about is what kind of representation are we getting from our
elected officials, people that we elected into positions of power to represent us.
That's what matters here, right?
And in terms of First Amendment violations,
there's still no evidence of that whatsoever.
And if you are concerned about a platform as big as twitter serving
as the town square, well, okay, well,
we're seeing some censorship happen right now when Elon Musk takes over,
he has no problem censoring anyone he disagrees with.
And I've certainly noticed that on the platform, but
when it's kind of painted as a liberal effort all of a sudden, it's not okay.
If we genuinely care about protecting speech on twitter,
which still is a private company, well then we should be demanding equal
treatment regardless of what the political ideology is.
But all I'm seeing right now is right wingers, Gadde, just absolutely enjoying
themselves knowing that Elon Musk is completely tipping the scales,
not to the center, but toward the right.
Finally, I do wanna go to one more video, because I just find it so
fascinating how many people on the right prominent members of the media have just
flat out admitted the truth, which in this case this is not the smoking gun
that we were hoping that they were hoping for, right.
So let's go to the last video here.
This is Will Kane on Fox and Friends speaking to the laptop
repair shop owner about how really there's not much here.
>> As much as we have seen from what Elon has released about the coordination
between the government and twitter, there isn't necessarily a smoking gun yet
when it comes to your case, Hunter Biden.
In other words we don't have the government official saying spike that.
Do you think that probably exist?
Do you expect that somewhere and is yet to be seen?
We see a twitter that's ready and willing to do with the government wants or in this
case the DNC there's actually a DNC at this time so the Democratic Party but
we haven't yet seen who made the call and who put it in their mind.
>> That's right, Twitter is not ready and willing to do everything the government
wants because there's still no evidence that that's what happened.
There's evidence that campaigns were contacting twitter and asking for
certain things to be censored deleted and that's what Matt Taibbi is referring to.
But other than that there are no First Amendment violations.
And I think if you take a step back and you look at the story for what it is and
the endless cries about free speech from the right wing and what it's really about.
It's just about Americans not understanding what the constitution
actually protects number one, which is really concerning and
an indictment of our education system to say the least.
But the second part of it is it's become yet another version of the manufactured
culture war, where republicans will point fingers at everyone else and
say that they're engaging in oppression Olympics.
That they're always looking to be victims when in reality they dominate every
conversation about how they're the victims,
there's no evidence of victimhood here.
You have two political campaigns, one Republican,
one Democrat contacting twitter during the 2020 elections,
asking them to take certain content down and a lot of cases twitter did.
And if we have a problem with that,
then we need to have a real conversation about who controls that platform.
Should it be a billionaire who has complete control and can go ahead and
censor whoever he wants or should it be a more democratically decided process.
Should it be a platform where there's more, I don't know, government control,
public control.
So there's a lot more transparency, a lot more freedom in sharing information.
These are difficult questions to answer.
But if you're genuinely concerned about free speech
putting all that power in the hands of one billionaire
isn't gonna protect your ability to say what you wanna say on the platform.
A quite the contrary, because again, the constitution doesn't protect you
from a billionaire censoring your speech on a privately owned platform.