Latest Twitter Files Expose the 'Censorship Industrial Complex'

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

A new release of the Twitter files that's just come out from journalist Matt taibbi, Matt taibbi is also the journalist who along with the Michael shellenberger testified before the House in a widely seen hearing. And this one is a really important one. It's called the censorship industrial complex. I looked in The New York Times and a couple of other major newspapers to see the coverage of this Twitter files, no coverage at all. No mention of it. And so that in itself is very telling and I think the reason is that The New York Times, along with a number of other news organizations are part, a part unbelievably of this censorship industrial, complex. Now, taibbi goes on to talk about how there is this censorship system, a kind of octopus that involves the government, but it also involves industry leaders. It involves nonprofits, and so, and this is not just a case where these people all sort of Dawson, suggestions to Twitter or to Facebook or to Google, there's a formal system of meetings. And a formal portal is established for thousands. I mean, long lists of people to be reported and for spreadsheets of thousands and cumulatively hundreds of thousands of names. One of these groups takes credit for getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the run up to the 2020 election. So we're talking about a massive censorship operation, one that is really quite unprecedented, even in the days of Soviet censorship, it's not clear that censorship had this kind of reach, in part, perhaps because of the limits of technology. One can assume that Chinese have a censorship program that rivals or exceeds this, but we are now close to the top of the list.

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