Twitter Files reportage has followed the exact pattern of suppression that was employed in Covid against the truth tellers who have been vindicated.
The content of the TFs is true and reveals at best a toxic, fascistic relationship between socmed and the state whose purpose is to control information and perception. To prevent this from being understood by the lower common denominators, the messengers have been subjected to constant attack by the state and its captive media.
All secondary reporting that sought to interview Taibbi etc has focused on only reporting methods, journalistic credibility and periphery issues while totally ignoring the actual content or meaning of the Twitter Files. Taibbi in particular has been subjected to constant takedown that follows a scripted, co-ordinated pattern that starts with accusing him of being a billionaire’s lackey while grieving the great journalist he used to to, before either accusing him of failing to look at [INSERT THING] by now and/or rubbishing method, process or, latterly, minute inaccuracies.
The worst example of this is Mehdi Hassan on MSNBC (home to Rachel Maddow) “debating” Taibbi. Hassan simply bullied Taibbi and rode over all of his discussive answers, constantly interrupting with snide remarks, before trying to pass off practically inconsequential errors and possibly a point built out of semantics as though they were a devastating takedown. Hassan’s approach was so sickeningly transparent and unsophisticated that anyone with a normal sense of what oppositional discussion is would baulk but that still leaves a huge number of people who probably buy in to the superficial claims of Hassan and MSNBC that it was a definitive delegitimization of the TFs’ content. It wasn’t. Hassan deliberately went nowhere near content or meaning, and even - like other state stenographers - misquoted him using a clip from Joe Rogan and employed improper contextualisation and attribution. This isn’t the first time that exact technique and same clip were weaponized, which tells us again that Hassan is doing the bidding of the state.
Taibbi has responded with a piece that literally ends “MSNBC: Fuck you.”
*EDIT* An email from CISA shows that Matt Taibbi did correctly reference CISA in a TF dump. Hassan maniacally claimed that Taibbi has incorrectly referenced CISA. Hassan appears to be wrong on this. This leaves only a date error as the other error the whole of MSNBC found in Taibbi’s TF reports. The “22 million” issue is more semantic. In total, all of these issues add up to nothing and demonstrate what a joke Hassan and MSNBC is, even when they are being sponsored by the state and using their full resources to execute a takedown. This lack of capability explains why Hassan had to shout down Taibbi for over 20 minutes.
There are four key aspects to the TFs.
1. Ongoing revelations while access remains
Taibbi has stated that he doesn’t know how long he will have access to the source material but indications are that much remains unreported amongst the material accessed so far. Taibbi has grown the team involved in the reporting so output should continue for some time and several releases.
There are two key angles on Twitter that translate to the wider socmed environment: the full scale of access, interaction and methods employed between the state and Twitter; the full range of topics and individual’s that concerned the state and why. From the way Taibbi describes parts of the process, it sounds like neither of these things will be completely understood but Taibbi states he’s taken a big picture view first, and a sub-topic view second, which makes sense.
2. Implications for socmed
The operating assumption is that anything that was happening in Twitter was happening elsewhere. Facebook demonstrates this to be the case by its overt censorship techniques applied in Covid. There are only two forms of leverage via which to affect any socmed company - user demand and legislative force.
We have seen enough in society to know the outcome to expect. Dumb, ignorant and inept users will actively ignore meaning and plod on as system captives, like they did after Snowden and Assange, which is exactly why the TFs and this state of affairs now exists.
VST makes no bones about this. People are dumb for many reasons, even if a person is pretty smart. Making the mob dumb, ignorant and inept is the point of these tools of the fascist state. There will be no user-led demand for societal or legislative change on their terms. The choice will remain “use or don’t use” combined with “caveat emptor”, which is how we all use black box technology. Dumb people repeat those two assertions as though they have actually thought about them, just like they did with “nothing to hide, nothing to fear.”
There are two main implications for social media. First, there will be state-backed business as usual for all the conformant platforms. While Meta builds the digital prison that is the metaverse, people continue to use Facebook to access narratives that they feel comfortable with. That’s largely the point of using such platforms: digital and mental laziness that leads to a comfortable doggy basket in which to curl up. Second is the effect of perceived contrast between Twitter and any other platform, which is about competition between private corporations.
3. Musk’s changes that create contrast
Superficially, Musk’s actions suggest positive change. VST has already pointed out that this is a matter of perception. The TFs prosecute the past while providing a narrative justification for general change but Musk exercises total control over change on his terms and by his judgement. We don’t know what his true vision of perception management is and should therefore make no assumptions.
Twitter is being changed on-the-fly in numerous ways, only a few being clearly announced and visible. Others are being worked out by users to be different forms of manipulation and censorship that still serves the same agenda that is being exposed by TFs.
Musk is herding everyone into a monthly subscription that is 60% more expensive than it used to be. He is telling us that you get what you pay for to undergird the expectation of a bad socmed and Twitter experience if you don’t pay. That is a direct carrot and stick approach to behavioural management.
He has “open-sourced” Twitter (he hasn’t) by sharing the main, high level algo on github “for transparency”. On the one hand this is a positive move to be welcomed as we get another look at the inner workings of something that people thought was professional and competent but is actually amateurishly mish mash clown art. Opening the algo in this way gets Musk a ton of free labour and innovation as loads of people from all backgrounds find features and bugs in the algo and tell him their ideas without getting paid. This is crowdsourcing IT development at zero cost. Smart Elon, dumb consumers. See how this works? It’s all based around perception management and marketing. What we see from the algo is profile management and also at least one direct backdoor function that fed into the state. Neither of these things were of interest to Mehdi Hassan.
Users on Twitter right now are reporting forms of suppression on topics largely relating to WEF/Covid matters, and the ongoing gamification of the platform’s swarming and reporting functions to suppress voices on the platform. These are techniques that state level agents such as 77th Brigade can actively exploit to have user accounts shut down and they persist. @Jikkyleaks reports deliberate replies to their posts with pornographic and possibly child porn images that Twitter is tolerating and failing to deal with. Other users are now flagging that Twitter is actively preventing liking and sharing of certain kinds of tweets, an example being any tweet containing a substack link. Profile management rules in the algo show how a profile is downgraded for using two or more hashtags, external links, and more. The internal logic of these rules pre-Musk makes sense, and they still make “business sense” today.
Superficially, the contrast between Twitter and other socmed has increased. “He’s opening up the platform” and “other noise” is what some sycophants blurt. VST argues the opposite. Musk is working out ways to keep Twitter users paying while staying inside the Twitter sandpit without buggering off to external sites including substack to read more than 280 characters of vacuous noise from strangers. We have no idea if Twitter has completely severed all links and relationships with the state. Taibbi is looking at the past, not the current operation and the forward business plan.
What has been revealed of the algo shows opaque function and object calls that clearly do other processing that affects the algo. Unless we know what goes on at levels below the public algo, Twitter remains a black box. There’s nothing to say that one day, the algo will be updated with the transfer of all profile management rules to a “profile_calc” object that is not available. What sense does it make in the long term for everyone on Twitter to know exactly the rules to follow to get maximum exposure for their tweet? Everyone will then construct tweets of a repetitive format and then your wall will be hugely influenced by the mass of tweets of equivalent importance. You may as well remove all tweet and profile rules and make the place a basic free-for-all, where only the user can tell the system what they like to see, and strip the platform of its ability to tell users what to see. But that makes no business sense if you are in the business of actively managing perception to achieve desired and predicable behavioural outcomes. The more sophisticated endgame is to let people believe that they have more control on Twitter than they do elsewhere, that there’s less external interference at Twitter and that you can better know how Twitter works than competitors. All of this is just about perception. People will literally invent their own stories of why Twitter is better or worse based on emotion and piecemeal experience alone. When asked to justify their opinion, they will all come up short on actual evidence of why and how a predominantly black box private platform does what it does. They won’t ask themselves why and nor will state stenographers.
4. The fascist state’s reactions
Musk has forced the state to react. The Congressional hearings show that the Democrats involved are employing standard MO’s of lying, censorship, smearing, suppression and use of weaponised state architecture. To see this is important, provided you are looking at source material. If you are getting the low down from the captive press, you will not see what happened in the hearings.
Taibbi et al is now about to be subjected to lawfare, a la Trump. Shellenberger says he’s up for it. All of this is designed to financially destroy these reporters while robbing them of time to do their jobs. Musk will not support them under the excuse of partisanship. What he should do is create a legal fund pool for them to spend without his influence.
This will not happen. In place of that, it is citizens who back those journalists who should seek to provide direct legal fund support. This is the model citizens should adopt in order to fight fascism. What we will see, like the Canadian truckers’ protest, is the escalation of the fascist state and this is what needs to be seen. Then, the mob must adapt and circumvent the state’s attempts to shut down citizen power. Bitcoin would play a role in this but woe betide a quickly built crypto entering the space for this purpose.
Systems control you. Who controls systems?
Musk is an engineer and businessman whose business is tech systems that interface with human systems, combined with network effect and data at every scale. On that basis, his objectives generally drive towards achieving a predictable human behavioural outcome via systems he owns. That’s Twitter. You don’t know what his end goal and vision is, and you barely know any of his methods. You only know what you’ve been told about a system that is purely about perception management through the guise of noise and information sharing.
If what you have been told and the way you’ve been told it look different, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a net good thing. Taibbi likes Musk and thinks that what he’s doing is a step in the right direction. Musk’s public calls for a halt on AI development sound sensible, but does that include Tesla AI and is such a halt possible, given Bill Gates is telling us to fuck off and eat the thin gruel he serves up?
If people calling for a thing you want can’t get it in laws that apply to everyone, then it’s not going to happen. In that space, private effort continues at the speed of money x ambition / transparency + control. There is an unlimited supply of money and ambition and there’s a shortage of transparency and control.
Tesla FSD is being live beta tested on public roads and has been shown to fail. The rest of the car has had public test failures in multiple systems (including induced driver behaviour such as overdependence on “autopilot”). Musk isn’t clamouring for a halt there or greater regulation of his own work, despite people having been killed.
Musk understands systems. When you understand a system, you become able to game those systems to your advantage. People wielding advantage don’t give advantage away for nothing to their detriment.
See also:
Precursor Article:
https://gods656j4.substack.com/p/daniel-and-revelation-we-must-view
Great read, I too believe Musk has alternative motives