He is the most powerful and influential CEO in the world.

He is also the one who receives extensive media coverage. While his millions of fans often feel like they know him, Musk seems to think that this is not the case, given the rumors circulating that he comes from a privileged background which allowed him to start his life as an entrepreneur.

The tech billionaire tries to establish the facts in a long message on Twitter in which he confides that he did not have a happy childhood. In this message, he hopes that, by being very honest about himself, he will silence the rumors.

Here is the full message that responds to an allegation that his father, Errol Musk, owned an emerald mine. It is important to note that Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, is not close to his father.

Childhood

“I grew up in a lower, transitioning to upper, middle income situation, but did not have a happy childhood. Haven’t inherited anything ever from anyone, nor has anyone given me a large financial gift,” Elon Musk wrote.

“My father created a small electrical/mechanical engineering company that was successful for 20 to 30 years, but it fell on hard times. He has been essentially bankrupt for about 25 years, requiring financial support from my brother and me.

“That said, he does deserve credit for teaching me the fundamentals of physics, engineering and construction, which is more valuable than money, but did not support me financially after high school in any meaningful way.

“Our condition of providing him financial support was that he not engage in bad behavior. Unfortunately, he nonetheless did. There are young children involved, so we continued to provide financial support for their well-being.

“Regarding the so-called ‘emerald mine’, there is no objective evidence whatsoever that this mine ever existed. He told me that he owned a share in a mine in Zambia, and I believed him for a while, but nobody has ever seen the mine, nor are there any records of its existence.

“If this mine was real, he would not require financial support from my brother and me.”

His Sister

Elon Musk, 51, has a brother, Kimbal, and a sister, Tosca. Kimbal, 50, is a restaurateur, chef and entrepreneur. He is a shareholder of Tesla and owns The Kitchen Restaurant Group. Tosca, 48, is a film-maker and director, who runs the streaming platform Passionflix, which adapts romance novels for the screen.

Last year, Tosca said in an interview, that their father physically and verbally abused their mother Maye in front of them when they were children.

Tosca claimed that young Elon had often come between their parents to defend their mother. She also says that Errol had gone so far as to destroy the belongings that their mother had bought for them to get revenge on her for asking for a divorce.

This difficult childhood estranged the father and the son.

“Some people spew hate language towards us because they think we grew up with a silver spoon and were given everything – which is so far from the truth. When I was growing up it was just a matter of survival,” Tosca said at the time.

“I don’t like that my kids watch YouTube and there are jokes about my brother; it makes them feel a little uncomfortable. And they don’t understand why people would say [negative] things about him.” source

https://youtu.be/ohxTed2ZkiU

What advice would billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk give to young people who want to be successful? Simple: study physics.

The SpaceX and Tesla co-founder was speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai.

Musk and the summit Chairman, His Excellency Mohammad Al Gergawi, discussed the future of artificial intelligence, space travel, autonomous vehicles and the world’s growing need for energy, all of which require people with advanced scientific knowledge.

Musk said: “My advice is, if you want to make progress in things, the best analytical framework… is physics.”

“I’d recommend studying the thinking process around physics. Not just the equations – the equations are certainly very helpful – but the way of thinking in physics. It’s the best framework for understanding things that are counterintuitive.”

Thinkers needed

Musk’s comments reflect the concerns of others in industry and government who fear a technology skills shortage as older staff retire and there are not enough younger people to replace them.

According to the European Union’s vocational training agency Cedefop, member states are experiencing shortages in information and communications technologies, medicine, engineering and mathematics – all careers that require specialized STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) knowledge.

Additionally, more industries – from banking to architecture and plumbing –  are finding they are increasingly moving into a high-tech environment. The biggest department in Domino’s, for example, is the IT department, which has led the company to redefine itself as an “e-commerce company that sells pizza”.

Competition and confusion

This blurring of traditional lines is leading to some confusion over what is, and isn’t, a STEM profession.

A US Bureau of Labor report in 2015 into STEM workers said: “Depending on the definition, the size of the STEM workforce can range from 5% to 20% of all US workers. Although fields such as computer programming and mechanical engineering are generally considered STEM fields, there is less consensus on areas such as medicine, architecture, science education, social sciences, and blue-collar manufacturing work.”

Source: Shutterstock/Zhu Difeng

Musk, speaking in Dubai about the rate of technological change over the past century and future developments, highlighted the need for more science and maths graduates to ensure humans’ full potential is realized.

“When you think the first controlled power flight was in 1903 with the Wright Brothers. And then, 66 years later we put the first people on the moon … if you asked people in 1900 what are the odds of landing on the moon they would’ve said that’s ridiculous. If you try to talk to them about the internet they wouldn’t know what the heck you were even talking about. But today, with a hundred-dollar device you can video-conference with anyone in the world.”

The pace of change

Musk added there would be considerable growth in areas such as programming, machine autonomy and even space travel, but there would also be challenges

to overcome.

“I think we’ll see autonomy and artificial intelligence advance tremendously … My guess is in probably 10 years, it will be very unusual for cars to be built that are not fully autonomous.”

“As it is, the Tesla cars that are made today have the sensor system necessary for full autonomy … so, it’s mostly just the question of developing [and uploading] the software … You just tell it where you want to go, and it takes you there with extreme levels of safety.”

Source: Shutterstock

Wishing on a star?

The SpaceX founder said he hoped plans to explore other planets would be well advanced in coming decades, though he admitted he could just be wishful thinking.

“I hope we are out there on Mars and maybe beyond Mars, Jupiter. I hope we’re traveling frequently throughout the solar system, perhaps preparing for missions to nearby star systems. I think all of that is possible in 50 years. And I think it’s going to be very exciting to do that.”

But he did highlight one potential problem that could pose a threat to the dreams of a high-tech future: the amount of electricity needed to power it.

“There’s the movement towards electric vehicles, sustainable transport, I think that’s going to be good for many reasons. But [it won’t be] something that happens immediately; that’s going to happen slower than the self-driving vehicles.”

While he said the move to all-electric transport would take 30 to 40 years, he warned: “The demand for electricity will probably triple. So, it’s going to be very important to think about how you make so much more electricity.”

A final thought

Finally, when asked what he would say to young people who wanted to be like him, Musk replied: “I think that probably they shouldn’t want to be. I think it sounds better than it is …”

“It’s not as much fun being me as you’d think … It could be worse, for sure, but … I’m not sure I want to be me!” source

Top 10 Rules of Success by Elon Musk

Business magnate. Investor. Engineer. He is also the co-founder of such great projects as Tesla Motors, SolarCity, OpenAI, Zip2 and Paypal. But how did a little boy from Pretoria, South Africa become the real Iron Man who is changing the world now? His story isn’t about unexpected successful events, but about struggling and strong life principles. If you want to be successful and set up your own business, you should follow these rules.

Attract great people

According to Elon Musk, a company is a group of people. But it shouldn’t be a depersonalized group of people. In order to see how talented and smart they are, get to know your employees better, share ideas and results with them. It’ll help them to realize that you respect and appreciate them.

“All a company is, is a group of people that are gathered together to create a product or service. So depending upon how talented and hardworking that group is, and the degree to which they’re focused cohesively in a good direction, that will determine the success of the company. So do everything you can to gather great people if you’re creating a company.”

I think that success of any company depends on not only people but the working process. It must be optimized, and your employees shouldn’t waste their time on unnecessary actions. So, invest money in your people and try new things and new tools.

Have a great product

The market is full of different services and products, and, if you want to start a business, your product has to be much better than what your competitors have.

“Whatever you’re doing is a great product or service, it has to be really great. […] If you’re entering anything where there’s an existing marketplace against large, entrenched competitors, then your product or service needs to be much better than theirs. […] You’re always going to buy the trusted brand unless there’s a big difference. […] It can’t just be slightly better, it’s gotta be a lot better.”

Work ‘super hard’

If you want to create a great product that will be really useful for people, work super hard. Procrastination hasn’t helped anyone to succeed and build a famous company.

Musk gave this piece of advice to the students finally leaving behind years of difficult schoolwork: “What does ‘super hard’ mean? […] Work hard like, every waking hour. That’s the thing I would say, particularly if you’re starting a company. If you do simple math, say somebody else is working 50 hours and you’re working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.”

Do something important

When Elon invested in Tesla, he thought that this company wouldn’t be successful. But he believed that this idea was important for humanity, because it could change the world and help it become oil free. And, now, Tesla is the future.

“I didn’t really think Tesla would be successful, I thought we would most likely fail. But I thought that we could at least address the false perception that people had that an electric car had to be ugly and slow and boring like a golf cart. […] If something’s important enough you should try even if the probable outcome is failure.”

Focus on signal over noise

Don’t listen to the little man

Don’t listen to the little man

When you start something new, be prepared that everyone, even people close to you, will try to talk you out of your idea. If you listen to their advice, you’ll regret this for the rest of your life. So, maybe, your satisfaction is more important. Think about it.

“So many people tried to talk me out of starting my own company, it was crazy. One friend of mine collected a whole series of videos of rockets blowing up, and made me watch those. She just didn’t want me to lose all my money. […] We’re doing these things that seem unlikely to succeed, and we’ve been fortunate, at least thus far, they have succeeded.”

Take a risk

During the speech to the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and Leventhal School of Accounting class of 2014, Musk shared some pieces of advice: “Now is the time to take risks. You don’t have kids. As you get older your obligations increase. And once you have a family, you start taking risks not just for yourself, but for your family as well. It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that, before you have those obligations. I would encourage you to take risks now and do something bold; you won’t regret it.”

I think that these words are not only for young people who don’t have children, but for people of all ages. Of course, if you have a family, you’re responsible for them. But imagine that you didn’t try what you really wanted. Is this life worth living?

Look for problem solvers

Nowadays, many people set up their businesses and fail because of business competition. Don’t think they’re losers. Look at this another way- these people were brave because they took a risk and struggled, solved problems. And, now, they’re experienced, maybe, your company needs such kind of people.

“When I interview someone to work at a company, I ask them to tell me about the problems that they worked on and how they solved them. If someone was really the person that solved it, they’ll be able to answer multiple levels, they’ll be able to go down to the brass tacks. And if they weren’t, they’ll get stuck […] because anyone who struggled hard on the problem never forgets it.”

Really like what you do

Elon Musk recommends finding a job that you’ll really like because life is very short so don’t waste your time on what you hate:

“Whatever area you get into, even if you’re the best of the best, there’s always a chance of failure. So I think it’s really important that you really like whatever you’re doing. If you don’t like it, life is too short.”

If you hate your job, maybe, it’s time to find a new one. But when you start your career in a new sphere, you should check information about the profession twice because the Internet is full of different myths. For example, many people believe that technical writing is boring because it deals with technical aspects of life. But it’s not true, tech writing is an exciting job with creative tasks, active social live and the high job satisfaction level.

Moreover, Tesla has available vacancies for technical writers! If you want to upgrade your skills and build your career in Tesla, here is the blog that will help you.

source

Elon Musk testifies that he thinks the number 420 has ‘karma’,  but he’s not sure if it’s ‘good or bad’

• Elon Musk testified in a civil trial Monday that he wasn’t joking about taking Tesla private at $420 a share.
• He said the price was a roughly “20% premium” over Tesla stock when he tweeted about it in 2018.
• The “420” popular pot reference has been a theme for Musk, who bought Twitter at $54.20 a share.

by Sophia Flores source

This illustration picture taken on November 23, 2020 shows a bottle reading “Vaccine Covid-19” and a syringe next to the Pfizer and Biontech logo. (Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images)[/caption]

Pfizer partner BioNTech pushed for social media platforms to censor activists who demanded low-cost generic vaccines for low-come countries.
Global drug giants saw the pandemic as an opportunity to make an immense amount of profit. Unbeknown to the public, pharma launched a massive lobbying blitz in order to crush any effort to share patents for new COVID- related medicines. This included therapeutics and vaccines.
In 2021, BIO, the lobby group that represents Moderna and Pfizer, wrote to the newly inaugurated Biden administration demanding that the United States government sanctions any country that was attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost COVID medicine or vaccines.
In addition, the company reached out to Twitter to let the social media company know that they should censor users who asked about generic low-cost vaccines.
5. That brings us to Twitter. The global lobbying blitz includes direct pressure on social media. BioNTech, which developed Pfizer’s vaccine, reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines. pic.twitter.com/6cVIRcUDZV
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
Twitter quickly responded to the request. It’s not clear how the platform censored posts where people asked for poorer countries to get access to the vaccines, however, moderators kept moderating activist tweets.
6. Twitter’s reps responded quickly to the pharma request, which was also backed by the German government. A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine pic.twitter.com/Bt9YNJUlN1
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) January 16, 2023
In a different push, BIO fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects. Public Good Projects worked alongside Twitter to set content moderation rules around COVID “misinformation.”
The company provided $1,275,000 to that particular campaign. The campaign focused on tweets that had unhinged misinformation. They also focused on vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and policies that coerce vaccination.
10. BIO provided $1,275,000 to the campaign, part of which is revealed through tax forms. The PGP campaign, called “Stronger,” helped Twitter create content moderation bots, select which public health

The Twitter Files: Part 14 – #ReleaseTheMemo scandal

Growing distrust of mainstream media should be supplemented by scrutiny among users of Big Tech social media. They’re not an answer to the problem.

Twitter files 14: This one was prepared by news veteran Matt Taibbi. From his Substack post: “Remember this one? Russian bots and trolls were blamed by virtually every major news organization in the country for amplifying the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. The files contain a mass of emails from executives blowing up this ridiculous story, once and for all. / “The #ReleaseTheMemo scandal was one of the more shameful episodes in the recent history of our media, but taken seriously by all but one or two mainstream editors at the time. All citing the same dubious source — the Hamilton 68 “dashboard” trumpeted by former FBI counterintelligence official and current MSNBC contributor Clint Watts — they insisted Russians deployed Twitter bot-armies to whip up cyber-support for Republican congressman Devin Nunes. Nunes had just released a classified memo alleging Democrats and the FBI used the infamous paid oppositional research dossier of ex-spy Christopher Steele to obtain secret FISA surveillance authority on Trump-connected figures like Carter Page, amid other improprieties. / “We now know Twitter internally found no evidence, as in zero, that Russians were anywhere near this story.”

From TF 14:

The significance of this (and probably other) Russian influence claims is that the mainstream media pros — whose news sense we are all supposed to trust — either did not suspect anything or pretended that they did not. They entirely failed to ask critical questions. That’s why we hear very little about the steady stream of Twitter revelations from them now. The big question is what news institutions that the public can trust will replace them?

Here are capsule summaries of all the Twitter files up to 13 so far, with links and glossary.

There is a danger, if we get caught up in the latest revealing file dump, of failing to see the momentous big picture, which is that Big Tech control of the news, with the tacit support of Big Media and the U.S. federal government, means that we did not get a very good picture of what was happening in the last few years by turning to the internet. Here are three instances to ponder:

● If you relied on legacy mainstream media for coverage of Elon Musk’s Twitter reforms, you probably heard plenty of angst from former employees but you may not have heard about the crackdown on using the platform for child sex abuse:

To those who aren’t aware yet, last week Twitter did add a direct reporting option for child sexual exploitation. (ONLY on tweets with content images/videos) this was not previously available and was a separate form that wasn’t easy to find.

I’m grateful to see these changes. pic.twitter.com/AI88XdX9HW— Eliza (@elizableu) November 20, 2022

It may relevant that Musk has ten kids himself.

● Facebook, eager to please the White House, apparently suppressed true information about the COVID vaccines in order to combat “vaccine hesitancy”: “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable information. This is often-true content, which we allow at the post level because it is important for people to be able to discuss both their personal experiences and concerns about the vaccine, but it can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.” In short, if you thought that Facebook was manipulating your news in order to get compliance, you were right. No wonder 2022 has been dubbed the year conspiracy theory became conspiracy fact. Or as some wags now say, these days the lead time between a conspiracy theory and today’s news is six months.

● Non-compliant media have also been a target. A recent lawsuit by the attorneys-general of Missouri and Louisiana show that the White House was after Facebook to censor Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “Facebook’s efforts did not meet the administration’s demands for greater censorship, however. In response to the representative, White House Director of Digital Strategy Robert Flaherty questioned how Carlson’s video didn’t violate Facebook’s existing policies and pressured the company to turn over information on the efficacy of its censorship practices.

“‘How was this not violative? The second half of the segment is raising conspiracy theories about the government hiding that all vaccines aren’t effective,’ Flaherty claimed. ‘Moreover, you say reduced and demoted. What does that mean? There’s 40,000 shares on the video. Who is seeing it now? How many? How effective is that?’” – The Federalist (January 10, 2023)

For the purpose of creating public trust, there’s nothing like the White House stage managing news in order to protect its political narrative…

At any rate, the current plunge in public trust of legacy mainstream media needs to be supplemented by growing scrutiny among users of Big Tech social media. They’re not an answer to the problem.

You may also wish to read: As the Twitter files drop, ponder the future of mainstream media. Mainstream media are largely ignoring the story for reasons that go to the heart of their own growing weakness and unstoppable decline. Journalism will never matter anywhere near as much to the MSM again as doing what their betters want. And they view those who follow the story as a threat.

and

Big Tech censorship goes well beyond Twitter. Big Tech media is not, in itself, an answer to current legacy mainstream media if we would like to know information that our betters would prefer that we didn’t. Governments that gain control of media generally want an absolute rewrite of history so that it re-emerges as a PR machine for their governance.

source

Twitter Files: Top Democrats peddled false Russian bots narrative about Nunes memo, despite Twitter warnings

Twitter officials called Adam Schiff and others ‘congressional trolls’ for pushing fake bots narrative about #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag

By Brian Flood | Fox News

Journalist Matt Taibbi unveiled part 14 of the Twitter Files on Thursday, diving into the “Russiagate lies” and how he says a “fake tale of Russian bots” helped Democrats denounce the famous Devin Nunes report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Emails and memos show that high-powered Democrats peddled a narrative of Russian bots despite being told directly by Twitter that there wasn’t a connection to the Kremlin.

The lengthy Twitter thread began with Taibbi noting that “at a crucial moment in a years-long furor, Democrats denounced a report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation, saying it was boosted by Russian ‘bots’ and ‘trolls.'”

He then indicated “Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence,” and shared an email in which Twitter executives appeared to inform Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that the social media platform “has not identified any significant activity connected to Russia with respect to Tweets posting original content to this [#ReleaseTheMemo] hashtag.”

Journalist Matt Taibbi unveiled part 14 of the “Twitter Files” on Thursday. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

Elon Musk has been vocal about being transparent when it comes to Twitter’s past and present actions curating content on the platform, including censored content. The Twitter owner has enlisted independent journalists to slowly release evidence of these actions in a series dubbed the “Twitter Files” that continue to expose once-secret communications.

“Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored,” Taibbi wrote. “On January 18th, 2018, Republican Devin Nunes submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee detailing abuses by the FBI in obtaining FISA surveillance authority against Trump-connected figures, including the crucial role played by the infamous ‘Steele Dossier.'”

“The Nunes assertions would virtually all be verified in a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in December 2019,” Taibbi continued. “Nonetheless, national media in January and early February of 2018 denounced the Nunes report in oddly identical language, calling it a ‘joke.'”

Taibbi pointed out that on Jan. 23, 2018, Feinstein and Schiff “published an open letter saying the hashtag ‘gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.’”

“Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal followed suit, publishing a letter saying, ‘We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans,’” Taibbi wrote.

“Feinstein, Schiff, Blumenthal, and media members all pointed to the same source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts, under the auspices of the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD),” Taibbi noted; Watts is an MSNBC contributor. But Twitter officials found no authentic Russian connection to the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and informed Democrats as such.

“Inside Twitter, executives panned Watts, Hamilton 68, and the Alliance for Securing Democracy. Two key complaints: Hamilton 68 seemed to be everyone’s only source, and no one was checking with Twitter,” Taibbi wrote.

He then noted that then-Twitter exec Emily Horne wrote, “I encourage you to be skeptical of Hamilton 68’s take on this, which as far as I can tell is the only source for these stories… it’s a comms play for ASD.”

Then-Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth also warned “all the swirl is based on Hamilton,” and other Twitter execs echoed that notion.

Twitter staffers tried to stop Blumenthal from releasing his letter, to no avail.

“Execs eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims,” Taibbi wrote. “They expressed this explicitly to Blumenthal’s camp, saying ‘Twitter spent a lot of resources’ on this request and the reward from Blumenthal shouldn’t be round after round of requests.”

“Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record,” Taibbi wrote. “As a result, reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the ‘Russian bots’ theme, despite a total lack of evidence.”

Taibbi then shared a series of headlines in which media outlets pushed the Russian bots narrative.

Twitter also discovered no Kremlin source for other hashtags that mainstream and liberal media outlets blamed on sinister Russian activity.

“NBC, Politico, AP, Times, Business Insider, and other media outlets who played up the ‘Russian bots’ story – even Rolling Stone – all declined to comment for this story,” Taibbi wrote.

But media organizations aren’t the only ones refusing to speak with Taibbi.

“The staffs of Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal also declined comment,” Taibbi wrote.

Asked for comment, Nunes told Taibbi that the “Russia collusion hoax” was one of the “greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

“The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines,” Taibbi wrote. “Twitter had no editorial input on this story. Searches were carried out by third parties, so the documents could be limited.”

This marked the 14th installment of the Twitter Files, which began going viral last month shared by prominent independent journalists including Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shallenberger, Lee Fang and David Zweig.

Previous Twitter Files have covered a wide range of topics, including the company’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election; the internal pressure it faces to permanently ban former President Donald Trump; efforts by the White House and government officials to suppress content; and the existence of shadow-banning of prominent conservatives.

Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn and David Rutz contributed to this report. 

Brian Flood is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to brian.flood@fox.com and on Twitter: @briansflood. 

Democrats and media organizations knowingly propagated
the ‘Russiagate theory’ hoax to discredit Donald Trump’s election victory: Twitter Files

Dibakar Dutta source

The story was covered in detail by journalist Matt Taibbi who emphasised that Twitter employees found no evidence of Russian influence in the 2016 US elections, yet they continued to allow Democrats and media organisations to use their platform to push the notion that Trump had Moscow’s backing.

On Thursday (January 12), the 14th tranche of the ‘Twitter Files’ was released on the social media platform, which exposed how the Democratic Party leaders and the mainstream media organisations used the ‘Russiagate theory’ to discredit the 2016 victory of the former US President Donald Trump.

The story was covered in detail by journalist Matt Taibbi who emphasised that Twitter employees found no evidence of Russian influence in the 2016 US elections, yet they continued to allow Democrats and media organisations to use their platform to push the notion that Trump had Moscow’s backing. “Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored,” he pointed out.

Former US House of Representative, Devin Nunes, had submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee on January 18th, 2018, pointing out several flaws in the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Although the report was verified by the US Justice Department a year later in December 2019, the Democrats went all-out to cast aspersions on the memo presented by Devin Nunes.

The sceptics included Democratic leaders Senator Dianne Feinstein, Congressman Adam Schiff, Senator Richard Blumenthal and leftist propaganda outlets such as MSNBC, The Washington Post and others.

Interestingly, Democrats and their lap-dog media had unilaterally relied on an online dashboard called ‘Hamilton 68’, published by a national security advocacy group ‘Alliance for Securing Democracy’ to further their claims. The dashboard claimed to expose Twitter activity related to the supposed ‘Russian disinformation campaign.’

However, internal communications now show that Twitter employees (who are mostly Democratic Party supporters) had failed to gather any evidence that could lend credence to the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

Yoel Roth, former Global Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter, pointed out, “I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with release the memo (hashtag) and…none of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia.”

‘Twitter Files 14.0’ revealed how attempts made by top executives to stop Democrats from posting unverified claims about Russiagate were in vain.

“It might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer that it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there because it could come back to make him look silly,” emphasised one concerned Twitter employee about the political well-being of Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal.

“Executives eventually grew frustrated over what they saw as a circular process – presented with claims of Russian activity, even when denied, led to more claims,” wrote journalist Matt Taibbi.

It became clear that Democrats went ahead with their outlandish claims about the ‘bogus’ Russian disinformation campaign, despite warnings from top Twitter employees.

Later, it dawned upon the Twitter employees that they were being exploited by the Democratic Party leader. “Blumenthal isn’t looking for real and nuanced solutions,” noted one executive.

“Despite universal internal conviction that there were no Russians in the story, Twitter went on to follow a slavish pattern of not challenging Russia claims on the record,” noted journalist Matt Taibbi.

“…Reporters from the AP to Politico to NBC to Rolling Stone continued to hammer the “Russian bots” theme, despite a total lack of evidence,” the author of ‘Twitter Files 14.0’ added.

Matt Taibbi said, “Russians weren’t just blamed for #ReleaseTheMemo but #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting, even #GunControlNow – to “widen the divide,” according to the New York Times.”

Interestingly, the above-mentioned news outlets and Democratic Party leaders who peddled the Russiagate conspiracy theory refused to speak to Matt Taibbi.

While speaking about the matter, ex-US House of Representative member Devin Nunes said, “Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work.”

 

He added, “By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

 

“This #ReleaseTheMemo episode is just one of many in the #TwitterFiles. The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines,” journalist Matt Taibbi concluded.

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Democrats peddled debunked ‘bot’ conspiracy to denounce memo exposing ‘abuses’ in the Trump-Russia investigation – even though Twitter told them there was NO EVIDENCE of Moscow’s involvement, new files reveal

• 14th Twitter Files installment dives into spread of discredited Russia theory 
• Centers on 2018 memo from Devin Nunes on flaws of Trump-Russia links 
• Democrats said the memo was being promoted on Twitter by ‘Russian bots’
• But Twitter executives found no evidence Moscow was behind the push
• It warned the Democrats, but they kept publicly pushing the false claims
• The social media company failed to issue a public statement on their findings  

By WILLS ROBINSON FOR source

Democrats peddled false narratives that Russian bots were promoting a memo about the Trump-Russia investigation – even though Twitter told them they had found no evidence of Moscow’s involvement, according to a new installment of the Twitter Files.

The 14th installment of the social media company’s files released by journalist Matt Taibbi showed executives tried to warn senior Democrats about a debunked ‘Russian bot’ theory in 2018.

The Democrats claimed Devin Nunes’s 2018 memo, which exposed flaws in the investigation linking Donald Trump to Russia before the 2016 election, was being amplified by Kremlin-backed entities on social media.

Twitter employees said the claims weren’t true and shared their findings with the Democrats, but their efforts were in vain because politicians kept pushing the theory anyway.

Instead of publicly challenging the claims, Twitter was instead told by outside counsel to issue a vague statement saying they take bots and foreign interference ‘seriously’, Taibbi writes.

• The 14th installment of the Twitter Files released by journalist Matt Taibbi showed executives tried to warn senior Democrats about a debunked ‘Russian bot’ theory in 2018

It is further evidence of how Russiagate theories and the discredited Steele Dossier were able to be publicized with little challenge.

‘Twitter warned politicians and media they not only lacked evidence but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored’, Taibbi wrote.

In 2018, Democrats discredited the Republican memo on FBI surveillance abuse by falsely suggesting it was being promoted by ‘Russian bots’ with the hashtag ReleaseTheMemo.

The memo, written by former Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, pointed out flaws in the investigation into Trump’s supposed links to Moscow.

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Nunes’s memo was verified by the Department of Justice a year later.

California Democrats Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff wrote an open letter saying the ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was being promoted by ‘Russian influence operations’.

And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) then said it was ‘reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans’.

Taibbi wrote that: ‘Feinstein, Schiff, Blumenthal, and media members all pointed to the same source: the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by former FBI counterintelligence official Clint Watts, under the auspices of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.’

The dashboard claimed to expose Twitter activity connected to any ‘Russian disinformation campaign’.

Twitter’s Global Policy Communications Chief Emily Horne, who went on to work at the White House and National Security Council, told her colleagues to be ‘skeptical’ of the Hamilton 68 dashboard and said it was a ‘comms play’ for the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

 

Twitter executives wrote to Feinstein and Schiff saying they had found no evidence of Russian activity connected to the Release The Memo hashtag

Their own internal investigations on the ‘bot’ theory had found ‘not any… significant activity connected to Russia’.

Ex-trust and safety chief Yoel Roth, who resigned over his role in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, also couldn’t find any Russian connection to the bid to discredit the memo.

‘I just reviewed the accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with #releasethememo,’ Roth wrote according to Taibbi. ‘None of them show any signs of affiliation to Russia’.

Twitter reached out to Senator Blumenthal’s office to explain that bots were not responsible, but they were ignored.

Staffers even tried to offer the Democrat other information that could be seen as ‘wins’ for him.

‘It might be worth nudging Blumenthal’s staffer that it could be in his boss’ best interest not to go out there because it could come back to make him look silly,’ one Twitter staffer wrote.

But Blumenthal went ahead and published the false claims anyway, and Twitter executives grew ‘frustrated’ with the fact their work was being swept under the rug.

Their efforts to try and combat the claims waned, and they didn’t release statements on the record saying the ‘bot’ theory was false.

News outlets continued to push the false narrative.

Twitter execs responded internally by saying: ‘We are feeding congressional trolls’.

They also said Democrats were putting the ‘cart before the horse’ by assuming the social media campaign was started by Russia.

Twitter senior executives compared the situation to the story: ‘If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’.

‘He’ll want a glass of milk, which will lead to a wave of other exhausting requests, at the end of which he’ll want a glass of milk. And one more cookie’, Taibbi wrote.

On the bombshell claims, Nunes told Taibbi: ‘Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work.

‘By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.’

Taibbi concluded: ‘This #ReleaseTheMemo episode is just one of many in the #TwitterFiles. The Russiagate scandal was built on the craven dishonesty of politicians and reporters, who for years ignored the absence of data to fictional scare headlines’.

Twitter Files part 14 sheds light on “Russian bots” and #ReleaseTheMemo

It began in 2018 when Senators Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff wrote the platform a letter regarding trending hashtags and Russian disinformation campaigns. Twitter pointed out that both the politicians and the media didn’t only lack the evidence but had evidence the accounts were not Russian. However, the platform was “roundly ignored.”

Backtracking to a week before Twitter received the letter, Republican Devin Nunes submitted a classified memo to the House Intel Committee that detailed the abuses by the FBI in obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance authority against those connected to former President Trump. Included was the role played by the Steele Dossier.

Credit: Matt Taibbi

In December 2019, a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz verified Nunes’ assertions virtually.

“We also found that the FBI’s interviews of Steele, his Primary Sub-Source, a second sub-source, and other investigative activity revealed potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports,” the report read. “Among other things, regarding the allegations attributed to Person 1, the Primary Sub-source’s account of these communications, if true, was not consistent with and, in fact, contradicted the allegations of a “well-developed conspiracy” in Reports 95 and 102 attributed to Person 1.”

The report also pointed out that the FBI filed three renewal applications with the FISC in 2017, repeating the seven “significant errors contained in the first FISA application.” Yet, the report found another ten errors in the three renewal applications. Taibbi noted that despite that, the national media denounced Nunes’ report in January and February 2018 in “oddly identical language, calling it a ‘joke.’

Senators Feinstein and Schiff also wrote an open letter claiming that the hashtag “gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.

The senators claimed that Nunes’ memo “distorts” classified information. “But note they didn’t call it incorrect,” Taibbi wrote.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal also wrote a letter. “We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans citizens and undermined our democratic processes through our elections and public policy debates.”

The letter asked Twitter to notify users who interacted with tweets created by the accounts tracked by the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD). The senators and members of the media pointed to the Hamilton 68 dashboard created by Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence official, created The letter asked Twitter to notify users who interacted with tweets created by the accounts tracked by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.”

The Hamilton 68 dashboard was described as a project with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshal Fund and tracked around 600 accounts that it claimed were tied to Russian-sponsored influence and disinformation campaigns. Bret Schafer, an analyst who helped run the project, spoke about the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag.

“I’ve never seen any single hashtag that has had this amount of activity behind it,” he said. Taibbi noted that the dashboard “was vague in how it reached its conclusions.”

Twitter executives didn’t quite trust the dashboard and the key complaints were that Hamilton 68 seemed to be the only source of information and no one was checking with Twitter. Global Policy Communications Chief Emily Horne encouraged skepticism of the dashboard’s take. In the screenshots below, Horne pointed out that it was a comms play for ASD.

“They’ve made a very strong media push in the last week, piggybacking on Clint’s testimony.”

Off the record, she said, “I encourage you to be skeptical of Hamilton 68’s take on this, which, as best as I can tell, is the only source for these stories. 1) Hamilton 68 does not release the accounts that make up their dashboard, so no one can verify the accounts they include are, in fact, Russian automated accounts, and 2) it is extraordinarily difficult for outside researchers, who do not have access to our full API and internal account signals, to say with any degree of certainty that an account they believe is behaving suspiciously is 1) automated and 2) Russian.”

“If you speak with them, I encourage you to press them on how they can be sure of both of these claims when they do not have access to internal signals and data.”

Twitter’s former head of safety, Yoel Roth, wasn’t able to find any Russian connection to the hashtag and noted that after reviewing accounts that posted the first 50 tweets with the hashtag, none showed any signs or affiliation to Russia. Instead, Twitter found that the engagement was “overwhelmingly organing and driven by strong VIT engagement). VIT is an acronym for very important Tweeters, and these included Wikileaks, Donald Trump Jr., and Congressman Steve King.

When Twitter brought this up to a Blumenthal staffer, the staffer tried to wave them off “because we don’t believe these are bots.”

Another Twitter executive pointed out that if Blumenthal would lay off on this, “it seems like there are other wins we could offer him.” However, the senator published his letter, which led to the platform’s executives being frustrated over what they viewed as a circular process.

“Twitter spent a lot of resources to respond to the initial request, and the reward from Blumental shouldn’t be round after round of requests for user notice. It also doesn’t do anything to fix the problem. That distracts our team from the real iq fight.”

Twitter executives later realized that they were”feeding congressional trolls” and compared the requests to a popular children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Although Twitter believed that there were no Russians in the story, it stopped challenging Russia’s claims on the record. Outside counsel from firms advised Twitter to use language such as “With respect to particular hashtags, we take seriously any activity that may represent an abuse of our platform.”

This resulted in reports from several mainstream media outlets pushing the “Russian bots” story without any evidence. Taibbi noted that several media outlets that played up the “Russian bots” story declined to comment. So did the staff for Senators Feinstein, Schiff, and Blumenthal. Nunes shared a comment.

“Schiff and the Democrats falsely claimed Russians were behind the Release the Memo hashtag, all my investigative work… By spreading the Russia collusion hoax, they instigated one of the greatest outbreaks of mass delusion in U.S. history.”

Alex Berenson shared the 13th installment of Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News

The latest Twitter Files involving the tech giant’s response to the pandemic puts a focus on Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and sitting board member of prominent COVID vaccine manufacturer Pfizer.

Alex Berenson, a vocal COVID contrarian whose past commentary on the vaccine has received scorn by critics and praise by fans, was the latest to be granted access to Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, publishing his findings on his “Unreported Truths” Substack newsletter.

Berenson shared an August 2021 email Gottlieb sent to Twitter’s senior public policy manager Todd O’Boyle flagging a tweet written by former Trump administration official Dr. Brett Giroir, who had written “It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no scientific justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection.”

According to Berenson, O’Boyle forward Gottlieb’s email to Twitter’s “Strategist Response” team, writing “Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner.”

Giroir’s tweet was later slapped with a “misleading” label and blocked any ability to like or share the tweet, telling Twitter users “Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb is the latest figure to be swept up in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.” (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)

Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor who was a prominent media pundit in the height of the pandemic, flagged another tweet in Sept. 2021, one from Substack writer and COVID policy critic Justin Hart, which read “Sticks and stones may break my bones but a viral pathogen with a child mortality rate of ~0% has cost our children nearly three years of schooling.”

“Why Gottlieb objected to Hart’s words is not clear, but the Pfizer shot would soon be approved for children 5 to 11, representing another massive market for Pfizer, if parents could be convinced Covid was a real threat to their kids,” Berenson wrote.

In the August 2021 tweet Gottlieb flagged, Berenson was critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“This is whats promoted on Twitter. This is why Tony needs a security detail,” Gottlieb told Twitter at the time.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member and former FDA commissioner, was prominently featured in the media’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. (Chris Usher/CBS via Getty Images)

In reaction to the latest Twitter Files, Gottlieb issued his own thread suggesting the disclosed emails don’t tell the whole story.

“In the past, I’ve raised concerns with Twitter related to the safety of me and others, and threats being made on the platform. This included direct as well as specific threats. Sometimes it included statements that I believed were purposely false and inflammatory,” Gottlieb wrote Monday. “The selective disclosure of my private communications with Twitter stokes the threat environment. So does actions that empower people who’ve shown little restraint when it comes to purposeful vitriol. It instigates more menacing dialogue, with potentially serious consequences.”

Gottlieb went on to share other emails he sent to Twitter flagging threatening tweets directed towards him and his family.

Alex Berenson, former New York Times writer and vocal COVID policy critic, was the latest to be tapped by Elon Musk to report on the “Twitter Files.” (Fox News)

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This marked the 13th installment of the Twitter Files, which began going viral last month shared by prominent independent journalists including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Michael Shallenberger, Lee Fang and David Zweig.

Previous Twitter Files have covered a wide range of topics from the company’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, the internal pressure it faces to permanently ban former President Trump, efforts by the White House and government officials to suppress content, to the existence of shadow-banning of prominent conservatives.

The Twitter Files: Part 13 – Pfizer Secretly Pressed Twitter to Hide Posts Challenging the Company’s COVID Shots

 Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb secretly pressed Twitter to hide posts challenging his company’s massively profitable Covid jabs

Growing distrust of mainstream media should be supplemented by scrutiny among users of Big Tech social media. They’re not an answer to the problem.

First, as Elon Musk continues to dump the files out the window at Twitter — to the dismay of the media elite that generally knew and approved of censorship of views other than their own, especially where COVID-19 or U.S. federal politics was concerned:

Twitter files 13: Handled by independent journalist Alex Berenson — once banned from Twitter for criticizing the government response to the pandemic: “Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb secretly pressed Twitter to hide posts challenging his company’s massively profitable Covid jabs /To funnel his demands, Gottlieb used the same Twitter lobbyist the White House did – fresh evidence of overlap between the company selling mRNA shots and the government forcing them on the public.”

Twitter Files 13: Pfizer’s Dr. Scott Gottlieb Lobbied for Censorship

Former Food & Drug Administration chief Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer director, lobbied for the censorship of tweets that might have harmed the bottom line of the company he was representing, according to the latest Twitter Files.

“Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on COVID public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021,” according to Alex Berenson, an author on the pandemic and a former The New York Times reporter.

“Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.”

Giroir was a more recent FDA chief under the Trump administration, too, but Gottlieb called the tweet “corrosive,” fearing it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage,” according to Berenson’s review of internal Twitter emails.

Twitter moved the request by calling Gottlieb a former FDA chief, without mentioning he was sitting on Pfizer’s board.

The conflict of interest and using government authority is the latest damning evidence of censorship of Trump-connected voices on Twitter, and the first of perhaps many promised by Musk under the loose heading of “Fauci Files” — a reference to retired White House COVID-19 face Dr. Anthony Fauci.

source source

First Twitter Files Drop of 2023

While conservatives still await the so-called “Fauci Files,” the 12th edition of the Twitter Files released Tuesday night continued to detail how the FBI became the “conduits” to amass censorship requests to feed through the “belly button” of the social media company.

The past Twitter Files have already called the FBI the “doorman” for myriad government agencies seeking to influence Twitter, but independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s latest edition details how a media pressure campaign caused frustration at Twitter, inundated it with government censorship orders, and forced it to request the FBI to feed requests through a single cord attached at the company “belly button.”

“By 2020, Twitter was struggling with the problem of public and private agencies bypassing them and going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts,” Taibbi wrote to start his 40-post thread, which started to delve into the COVID-19 pandemic era of Twitter’s release of internal communications.

Former President Donald Trump administration’s State Department started an intelligence group called the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that did not sit well with anti-Trump Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was also growing frustrated with media reports attacking Twitter for not monitoring COVID-19 narratives.

“Twitter was also trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Roth,” Taibbi wrote. “‘If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,’ said policy director Carlos Monje.”

The frustration boiled over at Twitter when the Trump administration sought to decouple social media from accounts tied to the China amid the breakout of COVID-19, which included Canada and CNN accounts.

“When the State Department/GEC – remember this was 2020, during the Trump administration — wanted to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts it claimed would ‘amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation’ about COVID, Twitter analysts were beside themselves,” according to Taibbi.

“Roth saw GEC’s move as an attempt by the GEC to use intel from other agencies to ‘insert themselves’ into the content moderation club that included Twitter, Facebook, the FBI, DHS, and others,” he continued.

Problems continued when Roth’s hesitancy to accept GEC’s recommendations versus others led to the GEC to further leverage the media to force Twitter’s hand.

But the anti-Trump Roth did not like working with the Trump State Department, effectively choose to cut the GEC out of influencing Twitter’s censorship regime.

“A deeper reason was a perception that unlike the DHS and FBI, which were ‘apolitical,’ as Roth put it, the GEC was ‘political,’ which in Twitter-ese appeared to be partisan code,” Taibbi wrote. “‘I think they thought the FBI was less Trumpy,’ is how one former DOD official put it.”

“After spending years rolling over for Democratic Party requests for ‘action’ on ‘Russia-linked’ accounts, Twitter was suddenly playing tough,” Taibbi continued. “Why? Because, as Roth put it, it would pose ‘major risks’ to bring the GEC in, ‘especially as the election heats up.'”

Amid the fight between government and Twitter, the Roth-comfortable FBI proposed to be the “conduits” to feed the requests through the “belly button” of the private Big Tech company, because Roth wanted a small “circle of trust.”

Once the FBI spigot was fully connected, Twitter became bloated with censorship requests.

“Requests arrived and were escalated from all over: from Treasury, the NSA, virtually every state, the HHS, from the FBI and DHS, and more,” according to Taibbi.

It even ventured into the absurd, as anti-Trump Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sought to have a journalist he did not like to be banned, Paul Sperry. Twitter responded “we don’t do this,” but ultimately it would relent and ban Sperry anyway.

Eventually, the FBI umbilical cord was fully effective in receiving bans, according to Taibbi.

“They were even warned about publicity surrounding a book by former Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokhin, who alleged ‘corruption by the U.S. government’ – specifically by Joe Biden,” Taibbi continued.

Twitter was inundated, and confused, leaving the FBI frustrated it would not get immediate results on censorship requests.

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

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reportedly promised Twitter it would be “the belly button” for requests from intelligence agencies to the tech industry, newly released documents show.

“Will the industry partners rely on the FBI to be the belly button for the USG? We can do that as well,” FBI Agent Elvis Chan reportedly asked former Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth in an email, according to the latest “Twitter Files” installment reported by journalist Matt Taibbi.

Chan was reportedly asking Roth about monthly calls between intelligence agencies and the tech industry led by the FBI, Taibbi said. Chan was reportedly pushing for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center to be included in the weekly call, according to emails shared by Taibbi.

Twitter reportedly pushed back against including the GEC in the meetings because it was “political” unlike the “apolitical” intelligence agencies. Roth expressed concerns about the GEC being “press happy” and said it would be a “major risk” to bring it into the weekly call, Taibbi reported.

Chan proposed a compromise to Twitter and Facebook where the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would serve as “conduits in and out from the USG,” Taibbi continued.

Chan reportedly told Roth, “State/GEC, NSA, and CIA have expressed interest in being allowed on in listen mode only,” on a “one-way” channel with the FBI, DHS, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Taibbi’s thread showed.

Roth and Chan reportedly ended up agreeing to an industry call on Signal, an encrypted text messaging app, Taibbi added. Twitter reportedly frequently received requests from the FBI, DHS and other intelligence agencies, Taibbi found. The Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, National Security Agency and the State Department were reportedly among the government agencies sending requests to Twitter, according to Taibbi.

The latest installment of the Twitter Files revealed the FBI’s desire for Twitter to rely on it to be the belly button of the U.S. government (USG). The first Twitter Files installment of 2023 revealed shared the events that led up to the intelligence community’s influence on Twitter. Following that installment, journalist Matt Taibbi released another, which revealed the Global Engagement Center’s (GEC) role.

Taibbi described the GEC as “a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department,” and screenshots revealed how this new entity would go directly to the media. In one such instance, a report titled, Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns, was released, which wrecked a bit of havoc for Twitter.

Twitter’s then Trust and Safety head, Yoel Roth, pointed out the motives of Clemson’s Media Forensic Hub when it complained that Twitter hadn’t “made a Russia attribution” in some time.

Roth told researchers like Clemson that Twitter would be happy to work directly with them instead of the media. He was unsuccessful. Simultaneously, Twitter was trying to reduce the number of agencies that had access to Roth. Twitter’s then-policy director, Carlos Monje, pointed out that once Twitter gave these agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, access to Roth.

“If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,”  Monje said.

Taibbi noted that the GEC report appeared to be based on DHS data that was circulated earlier that week. The data included accounts that followed two or more Chinese diplomatic accounts and ended up with a list “nearly 250,000” names long. The list included Canadian officials and a CNN account.

In an email, Roth said that the GEC attempted to insert itself into conversations Twitter had with several government agencies, including the FBI and DHS. The GEC began to agree to loop Twitter in before going public; however, the agency used a technique that trapped Twitter previously.

“The delta between when they share material and when they go to the press continues to be problematic,” a comms official wrote, adding that they primed the media to be “curios and inquisitive of this dynamic, too.”

This led to Twitter’s disputing a State Department claim that China coordinated coronavirus disinformation accounts. The FBI then informed Twitter that the GEC wanted to be included in their regular “industry call” between companies like Twitter and Facebook and the DHS and FBI. At first, Twitter didn’t want to go this route. Executives at Facebook and Google were united with Twitter in its opposition to the GEC’s inclusion.

“The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests. The relative lack of discretion and caution from senior GEC leadership in sharing reports/analysis based on shaky methodology. A limited track record of successful collaboration with industry.”

What is Chat GPT? What is Chat GPT Potential Uses

Chat GPT Potential Use Cases

How Chat GPT Can Solve Real World Problems!

The latest tech product by Elon Musk founded Open AI is Chat GPT and it is nothing short of extraordinary. There hasn’t been a single day I did not use it since its release to the public on 1 Dec. GPT-3 (short for “Generative Pretrained Transformer 3”) is a state-of-the-art language processing model developed by OpenAI. It has a wide range of potential use cases, including natural language generation, translation, summarization, text classification, and more.

Chat GPT is one of its applications that is optimized for human-like conversations. When you give a prompt, the AI will reply like a human would do. You can even train it with your commands and change its tone & style of chatting. No wonder it will help you save a ton of time and effort in researching topics on google. The possibilities are endless.

In this blog, we are going to explore some of the possible use cases of Chat GPT that can solve real-world problems.

Chat GPT Potential Use Cases

1. Chatbot Development: Generate human-like text, a chatbot powered by GPT-3 could provide more natural and engaging interactions with users.
2. Content Creation: Generate unique and compelling articles, blog posts, or social media content, saving time and effort for content marketers and writers.
3. Virtual Assistants & Digital Assistants: Generate responses to user queries, a virtual assistant could provide more accurate and natural-sounding answers to a wider range of questions.
4. Translation: Translate any length of text into any language that AI is trained on. You don’t need to learn multiple languages to communicate.
5. Summarization: Summarize a book or a text script or any long piece. Even create different interpretations of the same text.
6. Question Answering: Ask a question and get the answer. This has applications in many Edtech products. It can even provide an explanation behind the answer.
7. Social Media Moderation: Detect and flag inappropriate or offensive content on social media automatically.
8. Sentence Completion & Paraphrasing: Complete or paraphrase sentences of any length. Even decide the tone & style of the paraphrased text.
9. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text: Convert text to speech or speech to text.
10. Named Entity Recognition: Automatically identify and classify named entities (people, places, organizations, etc.) in text.
11. Write Novels, Stories & Scripts: Develop a story or a film script with different scenes, plots, characters, dialogues etc. Creative storytelling with realistic and engaging elements.

Conclusion

This language-processing AI model is so powerful that it will change the whole world. Chat GPT has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology and each other. From providing personalized customer service to enhancing language learning, the potential use cases for Chat GPT are numerous and varied. As technology continues to evolve and improve, we can expect to see more and more creative and innovative applications for Chat GPT in the future. It’s an exciting time for this technology, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds. What about you?

source @finguru

12 Ways Chat GPT Will Change U.S. Forever

Even Touching Areas Such as Immigration

On November 30th, 2022 OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research laboratory with a mission of developing friendly AI in a way that benefits humanity as a whole, came out with its cutting-edge Chat GPT chatbox. If Chat CPT lives up to its promise it will cause a tectonic shift in our lives. The appearance of Chat GPT is said to rival Google in its utility and has taken the world by storm attracting over 1 million users in just five days. Chat GPT appears ready to turn things upside down by impacting various occupations such as law, journalism, translations, and social media marketing. It works like Google in that you type a question into a box and hit enter. The chatbox displays the answer, usually in essay format, responding to the question posed. Let’s take a look at how Chat GPT can impact U.S. immigration as an example of what can be expected.

Immigrants might ask Chat GPT to outline what kinds of immigration options they have for immigrating to the United States. Then, they might ask to present the answer in a table format. Then applicants might ask Chat GPT to detail the requirements for a specific work visa and what will need to be included in an application. Chat GPT will respond as requested in real-time.

2. Explaining Legislation

Applicants for immigration benefits will be able to ask Chat GPT to explain immigration legislation in a simplified form. For example, investor immigrants might ask Chat GPT to explain the recent U.S. EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 to better understand what is required of them in this manner. The simplified resulting version will make life much easier for the viewer who is spared the agony of reading the densely worded act and explanations.

3. Specialized Instructions

Immigration applicants will be able to ask Chat GPT to provide them with a specialized instruction guide on how they should prepare their immigrant applications to ensure the most likely approval of their cases. For example, this might include a request for a “Possible Table of Contents for an introduction to the U.S. E-2 work visa.” Chat GPT will type out the table. Then the applicant will be able to study up on the visa by typing in the various subtitles or dig deeper into any particular aspect of the visa, such as the quickest way to get one.

4. Preparing Persuasive Resumes

Chat GPT will be able to help applicants prepare persuasive resumes, for example by listing skills, education, experience, and projects undertaken by gathering the information from online sources or from online letters or text provided in written format to Chat GPT. Users will be able to type in requirements for positions and ask Chat GPT to suggest formats for resumes to match the requirements listed better.

5. Preparing Covering Letters

Chat GPT will be able to help applicants prepare cover letters drafted in a way that will reference their geographic locations, or expertise, or other items matching them up with the purpose of the letters.

6. Doing Business Plans

Chat GPT will be to help investor immigrant applicants prepare business plans for their proposed investment. For example, an immigrant investor proposing to buy a Holiday Inn Hotel in North Carolina will be able to ask Chat GPT to prepare the plan to apply for an E-2 visa for such a hotel using information published about Holiday Inns online.

7. Helping To Learn English

Chat GPT will be able to help applicants prepare for English and other language tests, such as the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) by providing examples of questions previously asked and answered. Indeed, the chatbox will be useful for learning new languages. For example, the chatbox could be asked, “What is the quickest way to learn the conjugations of verbs in Spanish?”

8. Preparing Country Profiles For Asylum Claimants

Chat GPT will be available to asylum claimants to prepare detailed country profile information to strengthen submissions related to their claim of having a well-founded fear of persecution in escaping from their home country.

9. Preparing Histories Of Events

Government adjudicators of immigration applications will be able to use Chat GPT to prepare a complete history of events to verify the truth of answers to application forms and immigration submissions. Similarly, in depositions, attorneys will be able to search out histories of events to test the veracity of their evidence. But Chat GPT will not provide personal information such as location, age, or habits of indiviudals.

10. Finding The Whereabouts Of Places

Chat GPT will help users search to find places and their histories. But it will not be able to locate backgrounds such as of lost relatives who could sponsor users.

11. Legal Research

Chat GPT can search for key precedents, provide model pleadings and outline legal arguments for cases headed to immigration courts or the federal courts.

12. Translations

Chat GPT will be able to translate documents for submission with immigration applications.

Chat GPT is still in beta mode and is offered for free to collect feedback on how to improve it. Its input is only up to date to 2021 and therefore it is not able to answer questions about current affairs or make projections about the future. Eventually, it will be made available commercially. You can try it here. It’s great!

To conclude here is a copy of a question and answer I posed to Chat GPT about this article:

What outline would be best to introduce the benefits of Chat GPT to immigrants?

Here is the actual Chat GPT answer:

Here is an outline that you could use to introduce the benefits of Chat GPT to immigrants:

1. Introduction: Begin by explaining what Chat GPT is and why it might be useful for immigrants. You could mention that Chat GPT is a language model that can generate human-like text, and that it could potentially be used to assist with tasks such as answering frequently asked questions or generating documents.
2. Benefits: Next, outline the benefits of using Chat GPT for immigrants. For example, you could mention that Chat GPT could help immigrants save time by automating certain tasks, or that it could help them access information more easily. You could also mention that Chat GPT could potentially help immigrants navigate complex legal processes more effectively.
3. Examples: Provide some specific examples of how Chat GPT could be used by immigrants. For example, you could mention that it could be used to generate personalized responses to questions about the immigration process, or to generate documents such as visas or green card applications.
4. Limitations: It’s important to be upfront about the limitations of Chat GPT as well. For example, you could mention that it is not a substitute for legal advice, and that immigrants should always review any documents generated by Chat GPT before submitting them.
5. Conclusion: Summarize the main points of your introduction to Chat GPT, and encourage immigrants to consider using it as a tool to assist with their immigration needs.

Andy J. Semotiuk source

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Chat GPT 3: A Look At The Artificial Intelligence Backed Chat Bot

If you are on Twitter, even as a lurker and not an active user,
it is quite likely you have come across Chat GPT 3. The free research preview of it is out now.

If you are on Twitter, even as a lurker and not an active user, it is quite likely you have come across Chat GPT 3. The free research preview of it is out now. Chat GPT 3 made quite the impression on Twitter, just like the AI art-generating app Midjourney did.

There were talks about how the GPT 3 will replace Google. Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who worked at Facebook during its initial days, talked about how the Chat GPT 3 was much better than Google search. However, there are some problems. For starters – Chat GPT 3’s training data ends in the year 2021. As a result, it is completely unaware of anything that will happen in the world after 2021. This means, if we want to search something about the Russia-Ukraine war, then Google will be the go-to destination.

Initial impressions of Chat GPT 3

“As I just learned that OpenAI had access to Twitter database for training. I put that on pause for now,” Musk tweeted, as people posted screenshots of their chat with Chat GPT 3. Chat GPT 3 “was started as open-source and non-profit. Neither are still true,” he added. Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen and Horowitz, has complained about bias in the responses of Chat GPT 3. Some users on Twitter have also complained about its inability to do basic linear algebra.

Chat GPT 3 can do some things that Google can’t. For example, Google can’t write a play. Chat GPT 3 on the other hand can. If you use it to write multiple plays, a pattern can be detected and the plays start becoming monotonous, but when one commands Chat GPT 3 to write a play for the first time, the result can be interesting, if not perfect. One merely has to give it a few prompts and voila, a play is there.

An example of Chat GPT 3’s work

Consider this prompt – “Write a drama on a horror story set in a British University. Characters – Professor James; post graduate student Emily; Undergrad student Mark; Emily’s neighbour William”.

The result of the prompt was this – ”

Professor James sat at his desk, surrounded by piles of papers and old books. He was a well-respected scholar of ancient history at the University of Oxford, and he had been working on his latest research project for months.

As he sorted through his notes, there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” he called out, not looking up from his work.

The door opened, and a young woman named Emily walked in. She was a postgraduate student, and she had been working with Professor James on his research.

“Hello, Professor,” Emily said, taking a seat across from him. “I’ve been going through some of the old documents you gave me, and I think I’ve found something interesting.”

Professor James looked up, intrigued. “What have you found?” he asked.

“It’s a letter from the 18th century,” Emily explained. “It’s written in Latin, and it mentions a mysterious ritual that was performed at the university. It’s supposed to be able to bring the dead back to life.”

Professor James raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like a tall tale,” he said. “But I suppose it’s worth looking into.”

As they discussed the letter, there was another knock at the door. It was an undergraduate student named Mark, who had also been working on the research project.

“Come in, Mark,” Professor James said.

Mark walked in, looking worried. “Professor, I think I saw something strange in the library,” he said. “I was working on some research, and I thought I saw a ghost.”

Professor James and Emily exchanged a skeptical glance. “A ghost?” Professor James said. “That’s quite a claim, Mark.”

But Mark was insistent. “I swear, I saw something. It was a woman, and she looked just like Emily.”

Emily’s face went pale. “What did she look like?” she asked.

“She had long blonde hair, and she was wearing a white dress,” Mark said. “She just appeared out of nowhere, and then vanished.”

Emily’s eyes widened in horror. “That’s my old neighbor, William,” she said. “He died in a car accident a few months ago. I always thought he was a little creepy, and I think he was in love with me.”

Professor James and Mark looked at each other in shock. Could it be that the ghostly woman was really Emily’s old neighbor, William?

As they tried to figure out what to do, they heard a knock at the door. It was Emily’s old neighbor, William, standing there in the flesh.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” William said. “But I was just walking by and thought I saw Emily’s ghost in the window. I had to come and see if she was okay.”

Professor James, Emily, and Mark looked at each other in confusion. If William was alive, then who was the ghost they had seen?

As they tried to piece together the mystery, they realized that the letter from the 18th century had been talking about a real ritual. And somehow, Emily’s old neighbor, William, had stumbled upon it and brought Emily’s ghost back to life.

But as they tried to reverse the ritual and send Emily’s ghost back to the other side, they realized that it was too late. The ghost of Emily was now forever trapped in this world, doomed to haunt the halls of the University of Oxford for all eternity”.

Is Chat GPT3 the only AI-backed chatbot on the market?

Chat GPT 3 is not the only AI-backed chatbot on the market, although it is the only one that is free, which is perhaps why it is grabbing attention. A chat interface backed by AI has been in the market for quite some time, it is called “Replika”. Unlike Chat GPT 3, it has a voice to communicate back with you, and admittedly it is much better than Siri or anything else on the market. Replika is also reportedly used by people as a therapist, because it has a specific mode called therapy mode, where one can basically have a voice conversation with the AI-powered chatbot. Replika costs around £5 per month.

Comparison with Google

Does Chat GPT 3 have access to the amount of data that Google has? Even a Wikipedia page on Google has much more information on a certain topic than Chat GPT 3. Consider typing “Lysenkoism” on Google and Chat GPT 3 and compare the results. When one considers Google Scholar, the result is even more stark.

Google has its own AI-powered chatbot called LaMDA, but Google is not keen to release it to the public anytime soon as it is concerned about the “reputational risk”. If Google’s Chatbot gives a wrong answer, makes an error in response to a prompt, which Chat GPT 3 does, Google’s reputation will be damaged as there are higher expectations from Google. The point Musk made is worth flagging, the data sets Chat GPT 3 got access to, to train itself, were given under the presumption that Chat GPT 3 (Open AI) was not for profit. It is unclear why other Tech giants will give it access to data if it competes with them.
source

How does Chat GPT work?

source

What is Chat GPT?

Chat GPT is defined as a generative language model. However in practice it is understood as an artificial intelligence chat that has been trained and designed to hold natural conversations. Chat GPT belongs to the research company OpenAI, founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Wojciech Zaremba.

What is Chat GPT used for?

But what are the applications of Chat GPT? Some of the applications for which you can use Chat GPT (besides having a good time asking questions) are discussed below:

• With GPT you can generate coherent and well-written texts in a wide range of styles, topics and languages. In addition, news summaries, product descriptions or stories can be generated.
• Thanks to this chat, problems can be analyzed and solutions or answers to questions can be generated.
• GPT can be used to generate appropriate and consistent responses for a chatbot in a wide range of contexts.
• It can be used to generate attractive posts and messages for social networks.
• With GPT you can generate reports, e-mails and other content for productivity applications.
• Thanks to chat GPT, large data sets can be analyzed and valuable information can be extracted from them.

How does Chat GPT work?

As its acronym indicates, Generative Pre-training Transformer, Chat GPT is a generative language model based on the ‘transformer’ architecture. These models are capable of processing large amounts of text and learning to perform natural language processing tasks very effectively. The GPT-3 model, in particular, is 175 billion parameters in size, making it the largest language model ever trained. To work, GPT needs to be “trained” on a large amount of text. For example, the GPT-3 model was trained on a text set that included over 8 million documents and over 10 billion words. From this text, the model learns to perform natural language processing tasks and generate coherent, well-written text. Once the model is well trained, GPT can be used to perform a wide range of tasks, as we have seen in the previous section. Reinforcement learning, based on human feedback, was used for training. Ultimately, by supervised fine tuning. The human AI trainers provided conversations in which they represented both the user and the AI assistant. In addition, the coaches were provided with written suggestions to help them write their proposals. So, they mixed this new dataset with the InstructGPT dataset that was transformed into a dialog format.

But how did they create the reward model for reinforcement learning?
The first thing that was needed was to collect comparison data. This consisted of two or more model responses, ranked by quality. So, in order to collect the data, they took some conversations that the trainers had had with Chat GPT and randomly selected them. In this way they tested various endings for the coaches to rank.

For this reason, these reward models could be adjusted using Proximal Policy Optimization. Also, the trainings were carried out on a Microsoft Azure platform on a supercomputer. In conclusion, to use GPT in a chat, the model is provided with an input in the form of text. This input can be in the form of a question or a context sentence. And, from this input, GPT generates an appropriate and coherent response. In fact, this response can be used in a chatbot or any other application where it is necessary to generate a text from a given input.

The architecture of the transformers is based on the use of attention, which is a technique that allows the model to pay attention to different parts of the input sequence at different times while processing the sequence. This allows the transformers to process information more effectively and perform natural language processing tasks more accurately. GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) is a generative language model based on the transformer architecture. This means that the model has been designed to process sequences of elements, such as words in a sentence, using transformations and attention. This architecture is very effective for performing natural language processing tasks and has revolutionized the way many NLP tasks are approached.

New Twitter files allege platform suppressed medical opinions, information on COVID

WASHINGTON (TND) — Journalist David Zweig started a new chapter in the “Twitter Files” saga Monday with a thread of tweets examining the social media platforms’ alleged errors in trying to curb the spread of misinformation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Zweig reported the story in conjunction with The Free Press, the right-of-center media company founded by ousted New York Times editor (and fellow “Twitter Files” writer) Bari Weiss.

This thread shifts the focus on the “Twitter Files” – a series of information drops of previously private and internal communications from the company made available to a select group by owner Elon Musk – from its recent series hurling allegations of wrongdoing and censorship collusion between Twitter and the FBI, as well as the federal law enforcement and intelligence communities writ large. Previous entries included a trilogy diving into discussions at Twitter in the lead up to the ban on former President Trump’s account in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Twitter’s handling of the New York Post’s article on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Zweig divided his narrative into two parts Monday: the first focusing on alleged pressure from the Biden White House on Twitter to moderate or ban certain “anti-vaxxer” accounts; the second breaks down how the social media platform moderated content from voices that sought to disrupt the established wisdom on pandemic response.

“In the summer of 2021, President Biden said social media companies were ‘killing people’ for allowing vaccine misinformation,” writes Zweig in a tweet. “Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.” He notes that Berenson then sued Twitter, during which legal process internal documents revealed that the White House had asked company officials about kicking him off the platform. “They had only one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off the platform,” wrote a Twitter employee in a Slack channel. “Otherwise their questions were pointed but fair.” Zweig then points out that Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, wrote in a summary of White House meetings with the White House during December 2022, members of the Biden team were “very angry in nature” as they were dissatisfied with the company’s handling of and lack of action on several accounts.

This point has been a common thread in the “Twitter Files,” between authors like Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and now, Zweig, as The National Desk has previously reported. They frequently cite instances of government requests, especially ones that come from a place of frustration, as examples of overreach or censorship by the government and therefore major proof of wrongdoing and possible violations of the First Amendment. What the “Twitter Files” fails to contextualize in those claims is that Twitter never had to follow the FBI or Biden White House’s requests for moderation, nor do users on their platform have a right to say whatever they want. As a private company, Twitter is not bound by free speech and does not have to continue to allow voices and statements that it finds violate its policies.

Zweig then expands this argument of alleged overreach by Twitter when it comes to COVID by looking at how the social media platform handled moderating contents and accounts that challenged the recommended guidelines for dealing with the novel coronavirus as laid out by the Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization and others.

He starts by breaking down the – very potentially real – problems with Twitter’s strategy, which lied in the strategy – and its implementation – itself. “There were three serious problems with Twitter’s process,” wrote Zweig. “First, much of the content moderation was conducted by bots, trained on machine learning and AI – impressive in their engineering, yet still too crude for such nuanced work.”

On the note of nuance, he follows up with the second broad area of failure. This revolved around the company hiring contractors in locations like the Philippines who did not have the proper training to handle the science-heavy tweets around COVID. “They were given decision trees to aid in the process, but tasking non experts to adjudicate tweets on complex topics like myocarditis and mask efficacy data was destined for a significant error rate,” he reports.

While those kinds of missteps could definitely lead to botched attempts to moderate content in a balanced and fair way, Zweig continues by alleging that the personal outlooks and opinions of Twitter’s employees, which bent towards “establishment dogmas,” informed the AI and the final decisions that led to purported censorship. “The buck stopped with higher level employees at Twitter who chose the inputs for the bots and decision trees, and subjectively decided escalated cases and suspensions. As it is with all people and institutions, there was individual and collective bias.”

Zweig then cites examples from a handful specific accounts where he claims the social media company went out of its way to censor “legitimate” information, data and expert opinions on COVID-19 that deviated from the norm of the global medical community.

He leads off with the case of Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Swedish-born biostatistician who was then a professor of medicine at Harvard’s Medical School. Kulldorff co-authored the “Great Barrington Declaration” with three other medical professors, advocating for an end to lockdowns and a herd immunity approach to addressing COVID-19. One of Kulldorff’s tweets from March 2021, saying those with prior infection and children do not need to be vaccinated, was flagged with a label calling the information “misleading.” He was banned the next month.

Zweig alleges that this was overstep by Twitter as Kulldorff was offering an “expert opinion” on COVID strategy shared by “numerous other countries” – though he fails to cite a single country with that outlook. However, experts agree that the protection from natural antibodies gained as a result of COVID infection do not last indefinitely (granted neither do vaccines, hence why booster shots are needed), which is concerning for his lassiez-faire attitude towards immunization.

Furthermore, the “Great Barrington Declaration” he co-authored was immediately decried in the highest terms across the medical community. “Not only is there no proof of lasting immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, but the strategy would place an unacceptable burden on healthcare workers, as well as the economy,” wrote Dr. Deepti Gurdasani of Queen Mary University of London, in an open letter signed by 80 medical researchers to The Lancet, one of the most prestigious academic journals in the world.

The head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that strategies like those Kulldorf advocated for are “scientifically and ethically problematic.” “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic,” he said in a press briefing a week after the declaration was published.

Zweig then cites the tweets of a “self-proclaimed public health fact checker” with 18,000 followers that were also flagged as misinformation. The fact checker admits on her website that she had just started to keep track of COVID data in May 2020 and that she does not have any formal training in epidemiology.

The last major example he cites is when Twitter labeled a tweet by physician Euzebiusz Jamrozik as “misinformation.” Jamrozik shared a graph from a 2022 study that tracks the number of cardiac arrests among participants in the study (ages 16-39) following their receipt of a COVID mRNA vaccine. While Zweig alleges this as wrongdoing because a physician was sharing the results of a published study, he neglected to say that the study was about the under 40 population of Israel and the study furthermore stated that it did not establish “causal relationships between” vaccines and heart attacks.

In a follow-up tweet Monday, Musk said there was “Much more to The Twitter Files: Covid Editon than this introductory thread.” He promised a follow up piece coming next week to feature “leading doctors & researchers from Harvard, Stanford & other institutions.”

So it seems, the “Twitter Files” are winding up for 2022.

cited

Twitter Files Part 11 shows how ‘PR crisis’ following 2016 election allowed company to embrace intel community

Matt Taibbi shared 2023’s first batch of “Twitter Files”

Twitter files allege ‘very angry’ Biden team targeted journalists over COVID tweets: Howard Kurtz

‘Media Buzz’ host Howard Kurtz discusses the latest batch of Twitter files that reveal the Biden and Trump administrations attempted to suppress COVID content they did not agree with.

The first “Twitter Files” of 2023 dove into the tech giant’s evolution from its resistance to its embrace of the intel community.

In the eleventh installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” Substack writer Matt Taibbi reported about the “PR crisis” Twitter underwent in 2017 when Democrats pummeled the tech giant for its apparent inaction of investigating Russian influence on the platform as Facebook was public with uprooting suspicious foreign accounts following the 2016 presidential election.

Amid pressure, Twitter launched a “Russia Task Force” to investigate whether the Kremlin had such a foothold on the platform, even after it had suspended several suspected Russia-linked accounts.

“First round of RU investigation… 15 high risk accounts, 3 of which have connections with Russia, although 2 are RT,” an October 2017 memo shared by Taibbi read at the time.

Another read, “Finished with investigation… 2500 full manual account reviews, we think this is exhaustive… 32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia, only 2 of those have significant spend one of which is Russia Today…remaining <$10k in spend.”

Taibbi cited a report from BuzzFeed News that had flagged 45 “fake propaganda accounts” to Twitter, which were later suspended, and “leaks” from Congress published in the media and proposed legislation from lawmakers that further pressured the tech giant to take action.

“This cycle – threatened legislation, wedded to scare headlines pushed by congressional/intel sources, followed by Twitter caving to moderation asks – would later be formalized in partnerships with federal law enforcement,” Taibbi wrote Tuesday.

He then highlighted the discrepancy between Twitter’s “external” policy, which was that it would remove content “in our soul discretion,” while its “internal guidance” read that “any user identified by the U.S. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber operations against targets associated with U.S. or other elections… shall not be allowed to advertise on Twitter.”

“We will not be reverting to the status quo,” Twitter’s then-Public Policy VP Colin Crowell told his colleagues at the time.

Each installment of the “Twitter Files” was shared by the journalists in lengthy Twitter threads addressing various controversies. Taibbi went viral with the first installment in early December with his “Twitter Files” focusing on Twitter’s internal discussions leading to it censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, with some officials struggling to explain how it violated its “hacked materials” policies.

It was later revealed that the first batch of “Twitter Files” was vetted without Musk’s knowledge by Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s general counsel and was involved in the Russia probe. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.

Baker was swept up Taibbi’s reporting about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, telling his colleagues at the time, “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked” but added, “it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”

Additionally, Taibbi initially reported, “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.” It is unclear whether Baker’s involvement in vetting the “Twitter Files” led Taibbi to draw that conclusion and whether Baker omitted files that would have shown the federal government intervening in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Jim Baker was fired by Elon Musk as Twitter’s deputy general counsel after revelations that he had vetted the first batch of the Twitter Files without Musk’s knowledge. (Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)

The second installment published by The Free Press editor Bari Weiss revealed Twitter’s “blacklisting” of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.

Internal communications also reveal Twitter staffers admitting that the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok never violated its “hateful conduct” policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.

Those revelations appear to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in 2018, when he testified under oath that Twitter did not censor or shadowban conservatives.

The third, fourth and fifth installments of the “Twitter Files” focused on the permanent suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot in January 2021.

Taibbi reported how Twitter circulated election-related tweets from various users leading up to the 2020 election that were “flagged” by the FBI as being problematic.

Independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss were tapped by Elon Musk to report on the “Twitter Files.” (Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage, Bari Weiss)

Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed that Dorsey was phoning it in as he was on vacation while his deputies were pushing to deplatform Trump, with Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth particularly spearheading efforts to censor other users pertaining to tweets about the 2020 election. It became known that Roth met on a weekly basis with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Inteligence in the weeks leading up to the election.

Weiss addressed the pressure Twitter management was facing from its employees who called for Trump’s permanent suspension, though the Free Press editor also revealed several Twitter staffers who enforce policies did not believe Trump’s tweets from Jan. 6 actually violated its rules.

However, it was Vijaya Gadde, then-Twitter’s head legal chief, who asked if Trump’s tweets could be “coded incitement to further violence.” Moments later, the so-called “scaled enforcement team” suggested that based on how Twitter interprets Trump’s tweets, it could violate the violence incitement policies.

Part six of the “Twitter Files” put a spotlight on Twitter’s close ties with the FBI. Taibbi alleged the law enforcement agency was acting like a “subsidiary” of the tech giant, revealing communications that showed FBI agents systemically flagged Twitter users for tweets that included “possible violative content” pertaining to the election.

In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

The FBI’s routine contact with Twitter regarding users that would ultimately face punishment for their tweets has raised major flags about potential First Amendment violations.

FBI headquarters building is seen in Washington, U.S. Pro-Russian hackers have claimed to have hacked the FBI website this week. (REUTERS/Yuri Gripas)

In part seven, Shellenberger framed the Twitter’s coziness with the FBI in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop story, showing the FBI’s requests for Twitter to share sensitive data of its users, which Twitter refused to give, and the agency’s repeated inquiries into whether Twitter has seen foreign activity leading up to the 2020 election, something Twitter at the time said it hadn’t. On Oct. 13, 2020, just one day before the New York Post broke its Hunter Biden story that was quickly censored, Twitter received ten unknown documents from the FBI through its secure one-way Teleport channel.

One email from February 2021 shows the FBI paid Twitter over $3.4 million since October 2019 over the course of their partnership, as Twitter’s policies seek reimbursements when it comes to producing information as part of a legal process.

Roth had even participated in what was dubbed the “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” with the Aspen Institute in September 2020 to elaborately simulate how the media and Big Tech should handle something like the Hunter Biden laptop.

The FBI remained defiant amid criticism, telling Fox News in a statement “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers… It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Part eight, shared by Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang, exposed Twitter’s assistance in the Pentagon’s foreign influencing campaigns, allowing the military to use covert accounts to push out propaganda overseas despite it being against Twitter’s own policies. Taibbi separately reported in the ninth installment about Twitter’s constant interactions with “OGAs” (other government agencies) including the CIA.

The tenth batch of Twitter Files, this time reported by writer David Zweig, focused on COVID and the platform’s efforts to enforce its so-called “misinformation” policy, reporting “both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.” Zweig highlighted a memo written by Lauren Culbertson, Twitter’s Head of U.S. Public Policy, who claimed the Biden team was “very angry” about Twitter not taking action to “de-platform” various accounts based on meetings with the White House. Musk teased there’s “much more” Twitter Files to reveal in 2023 particularly about COVID and how top doctors and scientists were “actively suppressed on Twitter,” presumably for going against the White House-approved narrative.

Joseph A. Wulfsohn is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to joseph.wulfsohn@fox.com and on Twitter: @JosephWulfsohn.

Latest ‘Twitter Files’ alleges rigged COVID debate
Tom Dempsey, Devan Markham

The Twitter Files: Part 11 – How Twitter Rigged The COVID Debate

The latest Twitter Files investigative report has dropped, this time from author and journalist David Zweig. In this edition, Zweig unveils Twitter and the U.S. Government’s efforts to censor info that was true but inconvenient to government policy, discredit doctors and other experts who disagreed, and suppress ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s own data.

“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19,” Zweig tweeted. “Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes.”

Check out Zweig’s investigation below:

The Twitter Files: Part 10 – Twitter And “Other Government Agencies”

Twitter Files Part 10:
Trump, Biden White Houses leaned on tech giant to moderate content during COVID

David Zweig went viral with reporting that implicates both Trump and Biden administrations

Twitter And “Other Government Agencies” • Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi)

By Joseph A. Wulfsohn | Fox News

The latest installment of the “Twitter Files” shed light on how both the past and current administrations leaned on tech giants to moderate content during the coronavirus pandemic.

Independent writer David Zweig went viral on Monday with reporting on behalf of Bari Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, on how the U.S. government “pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.”

“Internal files at Twitter that I viewed while on assignment for @thefp showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s pandemic content according to their wishes,” Zweig wrote. Citing Twitter’s “meeting notes” with the Trump administration, one name-dropped then-White House Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios, who “led the Trump administration’s calls for help from the tech companies to combat misinformation.”

“Areas of focus included conspiracies around 5G cell towers, runs on grocery stores, and misinformation that could stoke panic buying and behaviors,” the memo read, according to Zweig.

The memo revealed other companies including Google, Facebook and Microsoft participated in “weekly” calls with the Trump administration to discuss “general trends” that were happening on their platforms.

The “Twitter Files” noted that when President Biden took over, “one of the first meeting quests from the Biden White House was about COVID misinformation” and that Biden’s staff “focused on vaccines and hight profile anti-vaxxer accounts, including Alex Berenson.”Another memo, written in December 2022 by Twitter’s head of U.S. public policy Lauren Culbertson, alleged the Biden administration was “not satisfied with Twitter’s enforcement approach as they wanted Twitter to do more and to de-platform several accounts.”

“Because of this dissatisfaction, we were asked to join other calls. They were very angry in nature,” Culbertson wrote, according to Zweig’s reporting.

Zweig continued, “Twitter executives did not fully capitulate to the Biden team’s wishes. An extensive review of internal communications at the company revealed employees often debating moderation cases in great detail, and with more care than was shown by the government toward free speech. But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”

The latest “Twitter Files” could implicate up to three potential 2024 hopefuls; former President Trump, who last month launched his third bid for the presidency, former Vice President Mike Pence, who led the coronavirus task force during the Trump administration, and President Biden, who has repeatedly said he intends to seek re-election.

Fox News Digital asked Kratsios, representatives for both Trump and Pence as well as the Biden White House whether they ever suggested, encouraged, requested or demanded Twitter or any other tech company to either suppress or remove content related to COVID and whether they had any concerns that such inquiries would be in violation of the First Amendment.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, cited a post the former president made about the “Twitter Files” on his social media app Truth Social, which specifically knocked former Twitter lawyer and ex-FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who Zweig reported wanted Twitter to suppress the then-president’s Twitter account over an optimistic COVID tweet from Oct. 2020. Cheung also shared a campaign statement touting Trump’s record combating COVID, but did not respond to the multiple inquiries regarding the Trump administration’s apparent role in social media censorship.

Neither Kratsios, Pence’s office, nor the Biden White House responded to Fox News’ requests for comment. Twitter also did not respond to a request for comment.

Each installment of the “Twitter Files” was shared by the journalists tapped by Twitter owner Elon Musk to address various controversies. Substack writer Matt Taibbi went viral with the first installment in early December with his “Twitter Files” focusing on Twitter’s internal discussions leading to it censor the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 presidential election, with some officials struggling to explain how it violated its “hacked materials” policies.

It was later revealed that the first batch of “Twitter Files” was vetted without Musk’s knowledge by Twitter deputy general counsel Jim Baker, who previously served as the FBI’s general counsel and was involved in the Russia probe. Musk fired Baker shortly thereafter.

Baker was swept up in Taibbi’s reporting about the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, telling his colleagues at the time, “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked” but added, “it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”

Additionally, Taibbi initially reported, “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.” It is unclear whether Baker’s involvement in vetting the “Twitter Files” led Taibbi to draw that conclusion and whether Baker omitted files that would have shown the federal government intervening in Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The second installment published by Weiss revealed Twitter’s “blacklisting” of prominent conservatives, including Fox News host Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a longstanding opponent of COVID groupthink during the pandemic who expressed opposition to lockdowns.

Internal communications also revealed Twitter staffers admitting that the popular right-wing account Libs of TikTok never violated its “hateful conduct” policy despite being punished several times for allegedly doing so.

Those revelations appear to contradict what former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress in 2018, when he testified under oath that Twitter did not censor or shadowban conservatives.

The third, fourth and fifth installments of the “Twitter Files” focused on the permanent suspension of former President Trump around the Capitol riot in January 2021.

Taibbi reported how Twitter circulated election-related tweets from various users leading up to the 2020 election that were “flagged” by the FBI as being problematic.

Independent writer Michael Shellenberger revealed that Dorsey was phoning it in as he was on vacation while his deputies were pushing to deplatform Trump, with Roth particularly spearheading efforts to censor other users pertaining to tweets about the 2020 election. It became known that Roth met on a weekly basis with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the office of the Director of National Intelligence in the weeks leading up to the election.

Weiss addressed the pressure Twitter management was facing from its employees who called for Trump’s permanent suspension, though the Free Press editor also revealed several Twitter staffers who enforce policies did not believe Trump’s tweets from Jan. 6 actually violated its rules.

However, it was Vijaya Gadde, then-Twitter’s head legal chief, who asked if Trump’s tweets could be “coded incitement to further violence.” Moments later, the so-called “scaled enforcement team” suggested that based on how Twitter interprets Trump’s tweets, it could violate the violence incitement policies.

Part six of the “Twitter Files” put a spotlight on Twitter’s close ties with the FBI. Taibbi alleged the law enforcement agency was acting like a “subsidiary” of the tech giant, revealing communications that showed FBI agents systemically flagged Twitter users for tweets that included “possible violative content” pertaining to the election.

In response to the “Twitter Files,” a spokesperson for the FBI told Fox News Digital, “The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

The FBI’s routine contact with Twitter regarding users that would ultimately face punishment for their tweets has raised major flags about potential First Amendment violations.

In part seven, Shellenberger framed the Twitter’s coziness with the FBI in the context of the Hunter Biden laptop story, showing the FBI’s requests for Twitter to share sensitive data of its users, which Twitter refused to give, and the agency’s repeated inquiries into whether Twitter has seen foreign activity leading up to the 2020 election, something Twitter at the time said it had not. On Oct. 13, 2020, just one day before the New York Post broke its Hunter Biden story that was quickly censored, Twitter received 10 unknown documents from the FBI through its secure one-way Teleport channel.

One email from February 2021 shows the FBI paid Twitter over $3.4 million beginning October 2019 over the course of their partnership, as Twitter’s policies seek reimbursements when it comes to producing information as part of a legal process.

Roth had even participated in what was dubbed the “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” with the Aspen Institute in September 2020 to elaborately simulate how the media and Big Tech should handle something like the Hunter Biden laptop.

The FBI remained defiant amid criticism, telling Fox News in a statement, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers… It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Part eight, shared by Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang, exposed Twitter’s assistance in the Pentagon’s foreign influencing campaigns, allowing the military to use covert accounts to push out propaganda overseas despite it being against Twitter’s own policies. Taibbi separately reported in the ninth installment about Twitter’s constant interactions with “OGAs” (other government agencies) including the CIA.