Twitter: An Underpaid Government Contractor?

By: Chris Johnson

In May of last year, Biden’s Department of Homeland Security announced the creation of a new division: The Disinformation Governance Board. This board was tasked with “coordinating department activities related to disinformation aimed at the US population and infrastructure,” according to CNN, and DHS’ choice to head up this board was telling as to exactly what that might mean.

Nina Jankowicz was an obvious leftist shill. In her career as a “disinformation specialist” she had derided the Hunter Biden laptop story as false, meanwhile regurgitating the defunct Steele Dossiere, which was used against Donald Trump, as credible.

At the news of her appointment last May, I wrote, “…the ‘czar’ who will be determining what is considered ‘disinformation’ has made it clear who she will be targeting, having stated:  ‘Most of the disinformation that we’ve seen . . . is coming from the right.’  You and I are the targets.  Jankowicz has already suggested that law enforcement should police online speech, stating: ‘… if I were walking down the street and there were a bunch of men yelling these slurs at me, the police would intervene … Online, that just doesn’t exist yet. So I’m hopeful for that architecture to come into play.’

“Now she has the authority to do just that.  Biden’s ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ wasn’t put in just any old government agency, but in the Department of Homeland Security – the law enforcement agency which has more armed employees that any other government agency and is tasked with policing ‘threats’ to America.  And we know who they consider to be threats – those who express viewpoints which differ from the leftist narrative.

“A free nation would not have a government agency in charge of controlling information and telling us what is and isn’t ‘disinformation.’ Totalitarian governments do that – and that is what the Left is striving to implement.  The very essence of totalitarianism is to attempt total control. In order to do that, you have to control information.  This is a blatant attempt to further suppress speech and viewpoints which threaten their control.” 

Remarkably, DHS seemingly caved to the criticism they were receiving for this new measure. They “paused” the board, and Nina Jankowicz resigned just weeks after her appointment.

But, Matt Taibbi’s most recent “Twitter Files” release reveals that this was not the end of government influence of accepted speech, particularly on social media, nor was it the beginning.

According to Taibbi, by October 2020 with the FBI acting as a forwarding center or “the belly button” of the US Government, “Twitter was taking requests from every conceivable government body, beginning with the Senate Intel Committee (SSCI), which seemed to need reassurance Twitter was taking FBI direction… Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more…

“Remember the 2017 ‘internal guidance’ in which Twitter decided to remove any user “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as a state-sponsored entity committing cyber operations? By 2020 such identifications came in bulk.

“‘USIC’ (US Intelligence Community) requests often simply began ‘We assess’ and then provided lists (sometimes, in separate excel docs) they believed were connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency and committing cyber ops, from Africa to South America to the U.S… Some reports were just a paragraph long and said things like: ‘The attached email accounts… were possibly used for “influence operations, social media collection, or social engineering.” Without further explanation, Twitter would be forwarded an excel doc…”

Taibbi concludes his thread with this: “It all led to the situation described by @ShellenbergerMD two weeks ago, in which Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor.

“Twitter wasn’t just paid. For the amount of work they did for government, they were underpaid.”

The Twitter Files reveal the relationship our government has with social media companies. The government tells Twitter or Facebook to remove something and the company removes it.

But how much of the national conversation takes place online in this day and age? By far the majority. If only certain opinions are allowed to be expressed in these forums, lest a government agency flag them for removal, that’s not free speech, it’s totalitarianism.

Sadly, as all of this comes to light by way of the Twitter Files, a pathway to accountability is unclear. Other than Twitter’s new ownership, what can be done to remove government agency influence from social media?

We certainly can’t count on this administration to fight for freedom and justice.

Yet, our hope for freedom and justice doesn’t lie in politics, anyway. The Lord’s arm has not grown short. As the unpredictable occurrence of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter shows, God can even use tech-giants to fulfill His purposes. And we’d better pay attention, because He is.

 

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