Surprised you didn't spend more time on the Biden laptop aspect of the FBI scandal.
Seems pretty clear the FBI knew the laptop was authentic (they had it for a year) and knew it'd be reported on. So in advance they bombarded Twitter (and other platforms) with advance warnings about possible Russian hack-and-dump operations (despite Twitter's claims that they'd seen no such activity) such that the laptop news would fit that fact pattern when it was released.
This is nothing short of attempting to alter the outcome of a presidential election. That's enormous news, no?
Yes. Outlets like the Federalist and amgreatness have been claiming that federal bureaucracies were suppressing the Biden scandals to steer the 2020 election outcome for years. The Twitter Files expose confirmed these accusations.
I'm surprised to see such a quiet and muted reaction. This is cheating in a US Presidential election. It's likely that the outcome of the 2020 election would have been different without this cheating. It's reasonable to say that the US didn't have a free and fair election and we don't really live in a democracy governed by elections.
This is par for the course. Comey made the Clinton email announcement days before the 2016 election, and likely swung it. The Supreme Court just straight up elected George Bush.
I appreciate that you opened your eyes in the last couple years but history didn't start when you started paying attention.
You claim the 2000 and 2016 election outcomes were cheated. There isn't reasonable evidence of that. Hillary Clinton got in legal trouble for good reason, not because the FBI invented bogus charges to swing the election.
As for the 2000 election, the supreme court issued a ruling on a close contested election. You are free to not like that ruling. I don't even see how you can claim that is cheating. And for what it's worth, I despise Bush, and wasn't cheering for him.
2000 was a defeat for Al Gore. How do you know? Because a half-dozen news organizations did manual recounts in Florida, and EVERY SINGLE ONE came out in favor of Bush. And how do you know that? Because if any of the recounts came out in favor of Gore, you would have seen it trumpeted to the skies. Which didn't happen.
Brilliant essay. I agree that the problem is that only a few people seem to care. i heard Pat Buchanan talk about the deep shame people that worked in the Nixon whitehouse that weren't involved in Watergate felt after the revalation of Watergate. i don't see any shame from the people weren;'t involved in the twitter files, but benifited from the actions. The rot runs deep. Sorry for the bad grammer, too angry.
The problem is that a certain elite ruling class feels entirely entitled to cheat and they seem to be able to get away with it. And pundits like Kling, while he's meekly calling for a crusade against the intelligence agencies, but he's not even willing to say out loud that the Democrats are cheating in elections.
Agree with you accountability comments. One has to remember that the FBI HQ is still named after J. Edgar Hoover.
David French has a good explainer today about the difference between government persuasion and coercion. It's unclear from the information released so far where the FBI lands in the Twitter case. The FBI has legitimate reasons to have regular contact with Twitter.
"There is no difference between persuasion and coercion in this example." - that makes no sense in the english language. You realize that French was a successful 1st amendment lawyer, right? And that as he points out there's not enough information to say one way or another in the Twitter case. It's good to be a big, confident internet talker, I guess.
Bill, I know who David French is. Had the FBI used the same "persuasion" to get Twitter and the other social media companies to censor anti-Trump and pro-Biden commentators, he would be singing the opposite tune this morning. If you don't understand that, then you are fool as well.
"It’s obvious that the FBI’s persuasion efforts were pervasive and persuasive, but were they also coercive? Interestingly, both Taibbi and Schnellenberger identify incidents where Twitter pushes back on FBI requests. But the fact that Twitter pushes back does not prove the FBI wasn’t coercive. " Seems pretty open minded to me.
We'd all be better off if Trump gets fairly convicted and thrown in jail. Even Republicans should hold that view. Don the Loser cost R control of the Senate 2 cycles in a row.
Sigh.......you find that open-minded? Sheesh. French is trying to excuse the inexcusable, and only because it was directed against Trump, and not to his benefit. You can read that essay and tell that French at least has some embarrassment at being forced to defend this because it helped lead to an outcome he greatly desired. However, once you sell your soul and your principles, it is hard to buy them back no matter how many words you pen to seem open-minded. French can go **** himself as far as I am concerned.
And note- this will be used against any Republican candidate from this point forward, so I expect to hear no complaints from people like you when it is employed against Ron DeSantis in 2024.
I agree that the FBI can have legitimate reasons to keep an eye on Twitter and other social media -- looking for threats to national security, for example. But the stuff that Shellenberger laid out sure looks like the FBI tricking Twitter into believing that the Hunter Biden laptop was false disinformation. It appears to have been persuasion, not really coercion, but it was dishonest persuasion, which should not be acceptable.
That's the problem I see: the FBI has a reason to keep an eye on what people are writing and talking about, but not asking anyone to remove or redact things people are talking about. Regardless of whether Twitter can decide to censor or not, the FBI or any federal agency absolutely should not be suggesting or asking or persuading anyone to censor things.
For the kind of things we're talking about here, I would agree. Though it would be reasonable for them to have some kinds of things taken down. Nuclear plans, lists of undercover spies, terrorist communications, etc. But they've lost the benefit of the doubt on some of that because of labeling parent groups as domestic terrorists...
If a tweet or social media post is permissible under the First Amendment - no "Fire" in a theater, no inciting violence - no gov't agency should be requesting it to be censored.
For "public forums", like a judge decided Twitter is (to stop Trump from blocking some troll), we need ...
a Digital Utilities Commission (or office) or other regulator. For those with 20% of the advertising revenue of that segment - the top 4 or fewer.
It's clear there WILL be censorship, let's make it more honest, transparent, with rules made by a Congressional regulatory agency. Just like power & water utilities. But quite different.
The history of Hoover tells us that the FBI never was an honest agency protecting Americans -- it was always corrupt to the core.
As for the so-called difference between government persuasion and coercion -- all gangsters use that excuse. There is no such thing as a voluntary police encounter, except where the civilian begins by seeking out the police officer.
Fortunately there is an easy solution, once we have a rightful president again. The FBI was created, not by statute but by a presidential order. It can be dissolved by another.
"I think that the connection between Twitter and the FBI is news." Yes;
But the point was censor conservatives, which has long been known by conservatives and those willing to look. It was pretty clear that ex-FBI liars who knowingly lied about "Russian dis-information" to support censorship were rigging the election.
The files provide smoking gun evidence that the FBI stole the election.
As Trump sort of knew - and Barr (DOJ) should have known, and Wray (FBI) was responsible for, likely NOT informing Trump of the extent.
The successful demonization of Trump is why so many folks accept the Machiavellian "rigging the election is OK if it stops Trump" -- which is basically what rational atheist Sam Harris claimed.
We probably need two offices, one explicitly run by Republicans and the other by Democrats, who job is purely to investigate wrongdoing by gov't intelligence agencies. With the power to fire any bureaucrat for unprofessional conduct in wrongly using force or prosecution power, or wrongly NOT using. James Comey should have been fired by Republicans for not indicting HR Clinton for her crimes.
I understand the desire for criminal charges - but I'd far prefer 1,000 or 10,000 fired top gov't bozos, rather than 7 or even 80 being indicted, with unlikely serious punishment (like Sussman, or Kline). Neo was writing about this Oct. 29, 2020, before the election with 51 liars, and reviews what was known then, and what is new now: https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/20/twitter-files-7-the-fbi-sets-up-the-scam/ (She does the best comprehensive, accurate analysis of such issues, when she blogs them.)
I hate that so many Americans think the FBI rigging an election is OK.
Well, as I understand it, there are these things called the House and Senate, which have both Republicans and Democrats in them, and organizations within the House and Senate called committees, some of which, as I have heard, were created to perform oversight functions on those agencies.
The fundamental problem is your last line. A significant minority of Americans are perfectly fine with all kinds of governmental malfeasance, not just improper actions by the FBI, if it results in their party winning elections and their policy preferences being implemented.
There is no reforming or restraining these agencies- they will only continue to increase their power and control over the population. They need to be dismantled, and even that would probably fail- they would simply morph into something else with the same purpose and personnel inside the executive branch.
The first area of reform needed is to strip the agencies of the power to define exactly what their own employees are allowed to talk about with the public without going to jail. The second reform needed is the ability for some number of normal voters to sit in judgement over all sensitive matters. Nowhere in the Constitution does it state that only government employees should be allowed to know what is going on inside.
I'm not really terribly worried about this. I don't think the lack of sharing of stories about the Biden laptop on Twitter significantly affected the result of the election. In any case, they shouldn't have affected the results. Would we anticipate they will affect the 2024 election?
I do hope the transparency introduced by Mr. Musk will make it more resistant to this kind of influence, but they still seem completely unable to deal with rent-a-bots and Chinese hashtag bombardment. The hashtags for the Chinese names of major Chinese cities have been flooded with spam posts every few seconds since the anti-lockdown protests began nearly a month ago.
If they can't stop that, how they trust things like the polls he runs?
Of course widespread reported news impacts public perception and voting behavior. What else would the public vote on, other than their perception of reality, shaped by mainstream news? And if controlling news circulation didn't impact voting behavior, why would the FBI + CIA invest so much effort into controlling it? Sam Harris made the claim that controlling circulation of news was justified because swinging the election was so important, not that controlling news circulation doesn't impact elections. That latter argument is absurd.
I suppose my assessment is that the effort to control the information failed. In any case, it wasn't Twitter that caused the mainstream media to not report on it. CNN, MSNBC, WashPost, NYT, all made their choices to not cover it for the purposes you mention. Fox of course covered it, so it was well-known by Republicans. The amount of sharing it would have received on Twitter is highly unlikely to have changed anyone's vote.
FBI and CIA put a lot of effort into many things, it doesn't mean it's effective, it just means they are trying to do something.
I guess I'm more cynical by half: I assumed the FBI calls Twitter (or Zuckerberg) not to tell Twitter, Zuckerberg what to do - but to ask Twitter, Zuckerberg - what do you want us to do?
Surprised you didn't spend more time on the Biden laptop aspect of the FBI scandal.
Seems pretty clear the FBI knew the laptop was authentic (they had it for a year) and knew it'd be reported on. So in advance they bombarded Twitter (and other platforms) with advance warnings about possible Russian hack-and-dump operations (despite Twitter's claims that they'd seen no such activity) such that the laptop news would fit that fact pattern when it was released.
This is nothing short of attempting to alter the outcome of a presidential election. That's enormous news, no?
This is laid out in the most recent "Twitter Files", by the way:
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/fbi-behind-twitters-censorship-of
Yes. Outlets like the Federalist and amgreatness have been claiming that federal bureaucracies were suppressing the Biden scandals to steer the 2020 election outcome for years. The Twitter Files expose confirmed these accusations.
I'm surprised to see such a quiet and muted reaction. This is cheating in a US Presidential election. It's likely that the outcome of the 2020 election would have been different without this cheating. It's reasonable to say that the US didn't have a free and fair election and we don't really live in a democracy governed by elections.
This is par for the course. Comey made the Clinton email announcement days before the 2016 election, and likely swung it. The Supreme Court just straight up elected George Bush.
I appreciate that you opened your eyes in the last couple years but history didn't start when you started paying attention.
You claim the 2000 and 2016 election outcomes were cheated. There isn't reasonable evidence of that. Hillary Clinton got in legal trouble for good reason, not because the FBI invented bogus charges to swing the election.
As for the 2000 election, the supreme court issued a ruling on a close contested election. You are free to not like that ruling. I don't even see how you can claim that is cheating. And for what it's worth, I despise Bush, and wasn't cheering for him.
2000 was a defeat for Al Gore. How do you know? Because a half-dozen news organizations did manual recounts in Florida, and EVERY SINGLE ONE came out in favor of Bush. And how do you know that? Because if any of the recounts came out in favor of Gore, you would have seen it trumpeted to the skies. Which didn't happen.
Ergo, all the recounts favored Bush.
THE BIDEN LAPTOP! HER EMAILS! BENGHAZI!!
sheezuz. will it never end?
The Yanks should never have thrown billions at the intell agencies after 9/11
Too many people, having to 'invent' jobs
Good luck in winding that back.
I called the Department of Homeland Security a cluster-f from the get-go
Brilliant essay. I agree that the problem is that only a few people seem to care. i heard Pat Buchanan talk about the deep shame people that worked in the Nixon whitehouse that weren't involved in Watergate felt after the revalation of Watergate. i don't see any shame from the people weren;'t involved in the twitter files, but benifited from the actions. The rot runs deep. Sorry for the bad grammer, too angry.
The problem is that a certain elite ruling class feels entirely entitled to cheat and they seem to be able to get away with it. And pundits like Kling, while he's meekly calling for a crusade against the intelligence agencies, but he's not even willing to say out loud that the Democrats are cheating in elections.
Agree with you accountability comments. One has to remember that the FBI HQ is still named after J. Edgar Hoover.
David French has a good explainer today about the difference between government persuasion and coercion. It's unclear from the information released so far where the FBI lands in the Twitter case. The FBI has legitimate reasons to have regular contact with Twitter.
https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/frenchpress/did-the-fbis-involvement-with-twitter-violate-the-first-amendment/
French is a fool. There is no difference between persuasion and coercion in this example.
"There is no difference between persuasion and coercion in this example." - that makes no sense in the english language. You realize that French was a successful 1st amendment lawyer, right? And that as he points out there's not enough information to say one way or another in the Twitter case. It's good to be a big, confident internet talker, I guess.
Bill, I know who David French is. Had the FBI used the same "persuasion" to get Twitter and the other social media companies to censor anti-Trump and pro-Biden commentators, he would be singing the opposite tune this morning. If you don't understand that, then you are fool as well.
As French noted:
"It’s obvious that the FBI’s persuasion efforts were pervasive and persuasive, but were they also coercive? Interestingly, both Taibbi and Schnellenberger identify incidents where Twitter pushes back on FBI requests. But the fact that Twitter pushes back does not prove the FBI wasn’t coercive. " Seems pretty open minded to me.
We'd all be better off if Trump gets fairly convicted and thrown in jail. Even Republicans should hold that view. Don the Loser cost R control of the Senate 2 cycles in a row.
Sigh.......you find that open-minded? Sheesh. French is trying to excuse the inexcusable, and only because it was directed against Trump, and not to his benefit. You can read that essay and tell that French at least has some embarrassment at being forced to defend this because it helped lead to an outcome he greatly desired. However, once you sell your soul and your principles, it is hard to buy them back no matter how many words you pen to seem open-minded. French can go **** himself as far as I am concerned.
And note- this will be used against any Republican candidate from this point forward, so I expect to hear no complaints from people like you when it is employed against Ron DeSantis in 2024.
Just more evidence of dishonest hackery and grifting on the right. They care more about ripping people off than anything to do with the truth. This kind of stuff is even worse than any Twitter BS as it is based in self-acknowledged lies. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/business/media/sean-hannity-fox-trump-election.html
Will DeSantis even run? Mike Lindell might be on to something. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/mike-lindell-florida-ron-desantis-trump-b2249076.html
And I seriously don't care who Twitter or any other web site decides to ban.
I agree that the FBI can have legitimate reasons to keep an eye on Twitter and other social media -- looking for threats to national security, for example. But the stuff that Shellenberger laid out sure looks like the FBI tricking Twitter into believing that the Hunter Biden laptop was false disinformation. It appears to have been persuasion, not really coercion, but it was dishonest persuasion, which should not be acceptable.
That's the problem I see: the FBI has a reason to keep an eye on what people are writing and talking about, but not asking anyone to remove or redact things people are talking about. Regardless of whether Twitter can decide to censor or not, the FBI or any federal agency absolutely should not be suggesting or asking or persuading anyone to censor things.
For the kind of things we're talking about here, I would agree. Though it would be reasonable for them to have some kinds of things taken down. Nuclear plans, lists of undercover spies, terrorist communications, etc. But they've lost the benefit of the doubt on some of that because of labeling parent groups as domestic terrorists...
If a tweet or social media post is permissible under the First Amendment - no "Fire" in a theater, no inciting violence - no gov't agency should be requesting it to be censored.
For "public forums", like a judge decided Twitter is (to stop Trump from blocking some troll), we need ...
a Digital Utilities Commission (or office) or other regulator. For those with 20% of the advertising revenue of that segment - the top 4 or fewer.
It's clear there WILL be censorship, let's make it more honest, transparent, with rules made by a Congressional regulatory agency. Just like power & water utilities. But quite different.
The history of Hoover tells us that the FBI never was an honest agency protecting Americans -- it was always corrupt to the core.
As for the so-called difference between government persuasion and coercion -- all gangsters use that excuse. There is no such thing as a voluntary police encounter, except where the civilian begins by seeking out the police officer.
Fortunately there is an easy solution, once we have a rightful president again. The FBI was created, not by statute but by a presidential order. It can be dissolved by another.
"I think that the connection between Twitter and the FBI is news." Yes;
But the point was censor conservatives, which has long been known by conservatives and those willing to look. It was pretty clear that ex-FBI liars who knowingly lied about "Russian dis-information" to support censorship were rigging the election.
The files provide smoking gun evidence that the FBI stole the election.
As Trump sort of knew - and Barr (DOJ) should have known, and Wray (FBI) was responsible for, likely NOT informing Trump of the extent.
The successful demonization of Trump is why so many folks accept the Machiavellian "rigging the election is OK if it stops Trump" -- which is basically what rational atheist Sam Harris claimed.
We probably need two offices, one explicitly run by Republicans and the other by Democrats, who job is purely to investigate wrongdoing by gov't intelligence agencies. With the power to fire any bureaucrat for unprofessional conduct in wrongly using force or prosecution power, or wrongly NOT using. James Comey should have been fired by Republicans for not indicting HR Clinton for her crimes.
I understand the desire for criminal charges - but I'd far prefer 1,000 or 10,000 fired top gov't bozos, rather than 7 or even 80 being indicted, with unlikely serious punishment (like Sussman, or Kline). Neo was writing about this Oct. 29, 2020, before the election with 51 liars, and reviews what was known then, and what is new now: https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/20/twitter-files-7-the-fbi-sets-up-the-scam/ (She does the best comprehensive, accurate analysis of such issues, when she blogs them.)
I hate that so many Americans think the FBI rigging an election is OK.
Well, as I understand it, there are these things called the House and Senate, which have both Republicans and Democrats in them, and organizations within the House and Senate called committees, some of which, as I have heard, were created to perform oversight functions on those agencies.
The fundamental problem is your last line. A significant minority of Americans are perfectly fine with all kinds of governmental malfeasance, not just improper actions by the FBI, if it results in their party winning elections and their policy preferences being implemented.
There is no reforming or restraining these agencies- they will only continue to increase their power and control over the population. They need to be dismantled, and even that would probably fail- they would simply morph into something else with the same purpose and personnel inside the executive branch.
Yancey, you've been sounding very blackpilled in the past few weeks. I don't recall you always being like that.
I hope everything is OK for you at home.
The first area of reform needed is to strip the agencies of the power to define exactly what their own employees are allowed to talk about with the public without going to jail. The second reform needed is the ability for some number of normal voters to sit in judgement over all sensitive matters. Nowhere in the Constitution does it state that only government employees should be allowed to know what is going on inside.
I'm not really terribly worried about this. I don't think the lack of sharing of stories about the Biden laptop on Twitter significantly affected the result of the election. In any case, they shouldn't have affected the results. Would we anticipate they will affect the 2024 election?
I do hope the transparency introduced by Mr. Musk will make it more resistant to this kind of influence, but they still seem completely unable to deal with rent-a-bots and Chinese hashtag bombardment. The hashtags for the Chinese names of major Chinese cities have been flooded with spam posts every few seconds since the anti-lockdown protests began nearly a month ago.
If they can't stop that, how they trust things like the polls he runs?
Of course widespread reported news impacts public perception and voting behavior. What else would the public vote on, other than their perception of reality, shaped by mainstream news? And if controlling news circulation didn't impact voting behavior, why would the FBI + CIA invest so much effort into controlling it? Sam Harris made the claim that controlling circulation of news was justified because swinging the election was so important, not that controlling news circulation doesn't impact elections. That latter argument is absurd.
I suppose my assessment is that the effort to control the information failed. In any case, it wasn't Twitter that caused the mainstream media to not report on it. CNN, MSNBC, WashPost, NYT, all made their choices to not cover it for the purposes you mention. Fox of course covered it, so it was well-known by Republicans. The amount of sharing it would have received on Twitter is highly unlikely to have changed anyone's vote.
FBI and CIA put a lot of effort into many things, it doesn't mean it's effective, it just means they are trying to do something.
I guess I'm more cynical by half: I assumed the FBI calls Twitter (or Zuckerberg) not to tell Twitter, Zuckerberg what to do - but to ask Twitter, Zuckerberg - what do you want us to do?