Truth Social Disease: Ads on Trump’s Twitter Ripoff are Mostly Scams and Trump-Fluffing Merch

Posted by Mark NC on January 29, 2023 at 11:07 am. 0 Comments :

Two years ago Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, suspended Donald Trump’s accounts. They correctly assessed that his relentless lies about election fraud were likely to incite more violence, and that his dangerous disinformation about COVID would result in more needless fatalities. As a result, Trump launched his own platform to seek the attention that his ego so desperately craved.

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Consistent with his prior business and political misadventures, Trump’s Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, has been a spectacular failure from its inception. Its buggy launch was plagued with crashes and frustrated users who couldn’t log in. Fake accounts and imposters overran the joint. It is the subject of criminal probes by the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Grand Jury in New York. And the shell company it partnered with to go public, Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), suffered an 85% decline in stock value over the past ten months.

So now that Facebook and Twitter have caved in and are restoring Trump’s accounts – which is profoundly ignorant, dangerous, and hypocritical – it’s not surprising that he is itching to resume tweeting.

SEE THIS: Trump is Said to Be Plotting His Return to Twitter, Affirming that Truth Social is a Flop

However, all is not well in Trumpville. The New York Times has done an exhaustive analysis of the advertising that appears on Truth Social that makes it look more like it’s contracted a Truth Social disease. Major advertisers are avoiding it like the plague.

Similar to what is happening on Twitter due to Elon Musk’s gross mismanagement, advertisers are afraid of their ads being juxtaposed with hate speech and other noxious content. Consequently, the only advertisers who are willing to shell out are sketchy scammers, conspiracy theorists, and junk peddlers. According to the Times, the site is rampant with…

“…many pitches from hucksters and fringe marketers […and…] Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads on Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by The New York Times.”

The Times provided a collection of some of the bogus ads that appeared on the site. One particularly loopy example showed “Trump holding a $1,000 bill made of gold, which he was apparently offering free to supporters.” […however…] “The bill was not free, it was not made of gold, and it was not offered by Mr. Trump.” Another example featured a fake tweet of President Biden threatening to ban a $2.00 bill with Trump’s face on it.

That’s the sort of garbage you’re left with when a site is abandoned by reputable advertisers. The mass exodus was noted last year in a tweet by by GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon) who was appalled at what she bizarrely called “corporate communism.”

SEE THIS: UH-OH: Marjorie Taylor Greene Fears ‘Corporate Communism’ of Advertisers Leaving Musk’s Twitter

Some additional points made in the Times article include that…

Truth Social “is burning through about $1.7 million each month … And two federal investigations have put about $1.3 billion of much-needed funding in jeopardy.”
“Truth Social has a relatively small user base and many older users, who are less desirable for the brands.”
“Marketers have complained that Truth Social’s ad-serving technology … offers limited tools for tracking an ad’s performance […or the ability to…] prevent their ads from appearing near words or phrases that might upset customers.”
“In a reflection of the wariness that brands have over Mr. Trump and his politics, the word ‘Trump’ ranked as the 11th most common blacklisted term provided by advertisers in 2019.”
“Over time, the low-quality ads on Truth Social have irritated its own users, who have complained to Mr. Trump after repeatedly seeing the same disturbing images or after falling for misleading gimmicks. ‘Can you not vet the ads on Truth?’ asked one user in a post directed at Mr. Trump. ‘I’ve been scammed more than once.'”

So as Trump commences his pursuit of the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, he is simultaneously struggling with the dire prospects of the online platform that he hoped would juice his campaign. And those aren’t even the worst of his problems. He is also being investigated by multiple state and federal prosecutors for crimes related to his incitement of the January 6th insurrection, election interference, and financial and tax fraud.

Sean Hannity of Fox News provided a helpful list of many of the probes that are currently being conducted about Trump. In the meantime, here are some articles about the slow and painful demise of Truth Social…

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Trump is Said to Be Plotting His Return to Twitter, Affirming that Truth Social is a Flop

Posted by Mark NC on January 18, 2023 at 10:43 am. 3 Comments :

Last November Donald Trump announced that he is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. In the weeks that have followed he has done nothing to advance his candidacy except to post rancid comments attacking his enemies (especially Special Counsel Jack Smith) on his Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, and calling in to right-wing Internet programs to whine about having lost the 2020 presidential election.

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Tomorrow will mark two months since Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account. However, Trump has been insisting for months that he prefers his own Truth Social website and has not posted on Twitter since being unbanned. In fact, Trump has continued to attack Facebook and Twitter as “boring” and failing without his awesome presence. He has called it a “disgrace to democracy” that “shouldn’t be allowed to do business in this Country,” because they have “only a Radical Left point of view,” and are “hated by everyone.”

SEE THIS: Trump Orders His Cult To ‘Drop Off of Twitter’ and Calls For It To Be Outlawed

That may all change now that Trump is an announced candidate for 2024. His need to disseminate his singularly apocalyptic perspective of America might supersede his animosity toward Twitter for having rejected him. In the months that he has been posting on Truth Social, he has only managed to accumulate about 4.8 million followers. He had more than 88 million on Twitter. And his massive yet fragile ego simply cannot abide that shortfall. Consequently, he is said to be plotting his return to Twitter. As reported by NBC News…

“Mounting a comeback for the White House, Donald Trump is looking to regain control over his powerful social media accounts. […] Twitter planned a permanent ban, but new owner Elon Musk reinstated Trump’s account on Nov. 19 and then criticized the company’s previous leadership for the ban.”

NBC is quoting an unnamed Republican insider who says that “Trump is probably coming back to Twitter. It’s just a question of how and when. He’s been talking about it for weeks.” This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed Trump’s behavior in the media. He demands constant attention and will do and say almost anything to get it.

Apparently that includes tacitly admitting that his own social media platform is a total bust. If Trump begins tweeting again he is not only conceding that Truth Social has failed, he might even be breaching his agreement to post exclusively on it for a specified period of time. Not that Trump is ever bothered by breaking contracts.

What’s more, Trump’s disappointment with Truth Social is warranted by the fact that it has failed to achieve any measure of success. Recent reports show that has seen a a nearly 30% decline in unique visitors over the past few months.

From the day Truth Social was launched it was mired in the sort of mayhem that can only be produced by incompetence. It repeatedly crashed and hosted innumerable fake accounts. It’s being criminally investigated by the SEC and a Grand Jury in New York. And the shell company it partnered with to go public suffered an 85% decline in stock value over the past ten months.

Truth Social’s problems have been festering from the start. And now that Trump is reportedly considering dissing it by re-embracing Twitter, it’s prospects are unlikely to improve. Here are a few of the pot holes it has encountered on the way to its demise…

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Another ‘Twitter Files’ Doc Dump Fails to Make Its Government Censorship Case: COVID Edition

Posted by Mark NC on December 27, 2022 at 12:22 pm. 4 Comments :

Since his $44 billion fiasco to take over Twitter, Elon Musk has demonstrated just how idiotic a wealthy narcissist can be. He has fumbled every step of the way, antagonizing the most critical components of success in social media: users and advertisers.

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Among his many missteps, Musk dispatched a crew of crackpots on a mission to malign Twitter’s prior management and to contrive a conspiracy theory that they were colluding with the government to bring down Donald Trump and censor conservative opinions. But after ten releases of what he calls the “Twitter Files” (which are actually improperly disclosed private communications by Twitter staffers), Musk has not only failed to prove his allegations, he has effectively proven that Twitter’s previous content moderation practices were entirely appropriate and fairly considered.

The tenth episode of the “Twitter Files” fairy tales focuses on how Twitter conducted content moderation with regard to the COVID pandemic and the misinformation that erupted from rightist virus deniers. As usual, the contention by Musk’s designated toady, David Zweig, is that the U.S. government applied untoward pressure on Twitter to suppress the opinions of pro-COVID nutcases and anti-vaxxers. He began with the explicit claim that…

“The United States government pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19.”

Nowhere in the subsequent 41 tweet discharge did Zweig support that claim. To the contrary, he repeatedly posted emails that showed Twitter’s Trust and Safety staff acting appropriately. In tweet #9 Zweig noted that…

“In the summer of 2021, president Biden said social media companies were “killing people” for allowing vaccine misinformation. [Alex] Berenson was suspended hours after Biden’s comments, and kicked off the platform the following month.”

Zweig’s apparent purpose here was to associate Biden’s remarks with Twitter’s actions. But he offers nothing to support that inference. Biden was quite right that the COVID deniers, led by Trump and hacks like Berenson (who is not a doctor or scientist) were indeed inflating the mortality rate of the pandemic. Zweig followed that up by saying that…

“[Twitter exec Lauren] Culbertson wrote that the Biden team was “very angry” that Twitter had not been more aggressive in deplatforming multiple accounts. They wanted Twitter to do more.”

Once again, Zweig is making an unsupported connection between the rational opinions of the Biden administration and the actions by Twitter. It isn’t the least bit surprising that public health officials would want social media to help reduce the harm of a deadly pandemic. Which is all that Culbertson was saying. However, in the very next tweet Zweig contradicts his government overlord allegations by conceding that Twitter didn’t “capitulate” to the Biden team. In other words, there was no evidence of government/Twitter censorship collusion.

A few tweets later Zweig attempted to provide an example of government censorship, but once again, his example was utterly devoid of any relevant substance…

“Exhibit A: Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, tweeted views at odds with US public health authorities and the American left, the political affiliation of nearly the entire staff at Twitter.”

Setting aside Zweig’s biased and baseless view of the political affiliations of Twitter’s staff, his “Exhibit A” was based on a thoroughly biased source. Kulldorff was an advocate of herd immunity (allowing people to get infected, which would lead to more fatalities) and was affiliated with ultra-rightist think tanks. He opposed proven mitigation efforts such as masking and social distancing, and claimed that vaccines caused more harm than good. Zweig continued praising the quack doctor saying that…

“But Kulldorff’s statement was an expert’s opinion—one which also happened to be in line with vaccine policies in numerous other countries. Yet it was deemed “false information” by Twitter moderators merely because it differed from CDC guidelines.”

Apparently Zweig thinks that opinions, just by being in line with unnamed other countries, makes them scientifically valid and equivalent to the determinations of U.S. experts who, by the way, consider valid science from experts worldwide. Then Zweig wrapped up his tweetstorm by concluding that…

“Twitter made a decision, via the political leanings of senior staff, and govt pressure, that the public health authorities’ approach to the pandemic – prioritizing mitigation over other concerns – was ‘The Science'”

Once again, Zweig failed to establish any “political leanings of senior staff” or the presence of any “govt pressure.” But he does seem to be dismissing the value of “prioritizing mitigation over other concerns.” What “other concerns” might he be thinking about? Corporate profits? Political exploitation? For the record, “prioritizing mitigation” means curtailing the spread of the virus and saving lives. Which are objectives that neither Zweig, nor Musk, nor Trump, seemed to care very much about.

Finally, Zweig asked “What might this pandemic and its aftermath have looked like if there had been a more open debate on Twitter?” By which he means more dissemination of misinformation. And it’s pretty clear that it would have looked a lot worse to those who were lucky enough to survive.

MORE ON “TWITTER FILES”:

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Trump’s Real ‘MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT’ Has Nothing to do with His Pathetic Trading Cards Scam

Posted by Mark NC on December 15, 2022 at 2:36 pm. 3 Comments :

On Wednesday night Donald Trump posted a comment on his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, teasing a “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” coming on Thursday. The post declared that “America needs a superhero,” and included a picture of him as a Bizarro World cartoon crusader.

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Trump’s fantasies of himself notwithstanding, his big reveal turned out to be even more pathetic than anyone could have imagined. It was nothing more than another opportunity to pick the pockets of his glassy-eyed cult disciples with a sham offering of “Trump Trading Cards” at $99.00 a pop. But they are not even real cards, they are just digital NFT images. He starred in his own telemarketing ad to hawk his latest sucker bait…

“Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump. Hopefully your favorite president of all time. Better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make.”

Come for the claim that Trump was a better president than Washington and Lincoln, stay for the "Trump digital trading cards" pic.twitter.com/qEKWYpgXL7

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) December 15, 2022

Whereupon Trump declared that he is selling NFTs – digital trading cards that “feature some of the really incredible artwork pertaining to my life and my career. It’s been very exciting.” He further revealed that any purchase enters the buyer into a contest with “prizes” (?) like dinner with Trump, who regards himself as something just short of a messiah. However, it’s notable that these cards are produced by a third party that is not owned, managed or controlled by Trump. He is simply licensing his name and likeness in order to fleece his flock. Which is so like Trump…

That said, there was another announcement posted on his website shortly after the trading cards pitch. And it actually has more of the “majorness” that he attributed to the digital card con. In a lengthy video, Trump laid out his plan to “shatter the left-wing censorship regime.” And he would do it by imposing his own totalitarian control of free speech. What follows are annotated excerpts of his uncomfortably high-decibel harangue. He began…

“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that. […] That’s why today I’m announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans..”

Never mind that the only free speech deniers in American politics are Trump’s Republicans. They have literally banned books in schools and libraries, and have sought to silence critics of Trump in their ultra-biased MAGA media. And notice that he doesn’t provide a single example of alleged censorship by the fearsome left-wing regime. Undeterred by reality, Trump continued…

“In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of deep state bureaucrats, silicon tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people. They have collaborated to suppress vital information on everything from elections to public health. The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed and it must happen immediately.”

What Trump is referring to here is the wholly manufactured and bogus “Twitter Files” “scandal” that was orchestrated by Elon Musk and purported to expose left-wing bias by Twitter when it suspended Trump’s account. After five data dumps, Musk and his cohorts failed utterly to achieve their goal of smearing the left. In fact, they actually proved that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team (who Musk recently fired) was exceedingly fair and conscientious in their deliberations and decision making.

Then Trump gets to the meat of his whining with the articulation of his five-point plan…

“First, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or disinformation.”

Who wants to tell Trump that the federal government is already prohibited from “imped[ing] the lawful speech of American citizens?” Trump is merely declaring his intention to issue an executive order that essentially repeats the Constitution’s First Amendment. Except, that is, for the last part where he proposes to punish those who exercise their free speech by alerting citizens to the dangers of mis- and disinformation. Trump, a major supplier of disinformation, wants to make sure he can keep on doing that. Moving on…

“Second, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance law, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act, and a host of other criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses.”

Here Trump is threatening to force the Justice Department to – uphold existing laws? Yep. But let’s face it, when Trump makes this sort of threat, he intends that it be directed exclusively at his enemies. He and his administration are more prone to violating those laws, but he never bothered to hold any of those who violated them accountable when he occupied the White House. And there’s more…

“Third, upon my inauguration as president, I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising section 230 to get big online platforms out of the censorship business. From now on digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination. We should require these platforms to increase their efforts to take down unlawful content such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.

First of all, Trump has no idea what Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is or does. While there is room to refine it, it is basically a protection so that online services aren’t held accountable for comments made by the public. Without it platforms like Twitter and Facebook couldn’t allow people to post comments at all.

Furthermore, Trump’s idea that platforms should have to “meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination,” is an imposition on their free speech rights, as well as posing difficult questions about who sets those standards. The government? Trump wants to force private companies to allow all “legal” comments, even if they are racist, hate speech, or sufficiently vague incitements to violence. And he’s still not through…

“Fourth, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called mis- and disinformation.”

In other words, Trump wants to prohibit private Internet platforms from refusing to post purposefully false information that has the potential to cause real harm. He wants fake COVID cures and anti-vaccine propaganda to be readily available. He wants lies about election fraud to stir up civil unrest. He even explicitly brought up his own fixation with phony election fraud saying that “Once you lose those elections … you no longer have a country.” Which brings us to his fifth point…

“Fifth, the time has finally come for congress to pass a Digital Bill of Rights. This should include a right to digital due process. In other words, government officials should need a court order to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.” […] In addition, all users over the age of 18 should have the right to opt-out of content moderation and curation entirely, and receive an unmanipulated stream of information, if they so choose.”

To be clear, Trump is proposing the first law that would allow government – with a court order – to censor content, which would be unconstitutional. Remember, this is his plan for free speech and to end censorship. And while the FBI did inform Twitter about certain content that was false (and so did Trump and the GOP), they never had the right to force it to be removed. That’s Trump’s idea. And so is his suggestion that adults can “opt-out of content moderation,” effectively forcing private Internet platforms to post content that they regard as harmful, offensive, or otherwise contrary to their standards. Then Trump closed saying…

“The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America and for the survival of Western civilization itself. When I am president, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left. By restoring free speech we will begin to reclaim our democracy and save our nation.”

The problem with Trump’s initiative is that it produces the polar opposite of what he claims is his intention. It would permit censorship, allow the government to force private businesses to post content they disapprove of, and shred the First Amendment. Which is all pretty much precisely what is expected of an aspiring authoritarian tyrant like Trump who has openly advocated banning websites he doesn’t like, such as Twitter and Facebook. America would be better off if his “major announcements” were all about trading cards and other snake oil ventures.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly.

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Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Farce Fails Pitifully in Portraying Poor Trump as a Put Upon Victim

Posted by Mark NC on December 13, 2022 at 10:40 am. 0 Comments :

From its outset, Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” Soap Opera purported to expose the social media platform’s content moderation staff as biased against Donald Trump. However, after four episodes it utterly failed to achieve its own blatantly biased objective. Now the fifth and latest installment flops in a similarly humiliating manner.

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Episode five was a 46 tweet spray by conservative author Bari Weiss that sought to disparage the decision makers at Twitter. She accused them of being predisposed to banning Trump merely due to “the risk of further incitement of violence” that he represented following his January 6th insurrection. However, the messages that were cited actually show a team that was conscientious of the complexity of the situation and committed to fully and fairly deliberating the choices available to them.

As has been the established practice by the previous installments, Weiss posted a slew of screenshots of private internal communications that failed to advance her premise. Then she closed with a rather muddled observation that only illustrates how poorly she understands the concepts of free speech and public discourse.

Musk introduced episode five saying that “Under pressure from hundreds of activist employees, Twitter deplatforms Trump, a sitting US President, even though they themselves acknowledge that he didn’t violate the rules.” That admission, aside from disparaging the free speech of hundreds of Twitter employees, is an inadvertent validation of Twitter’s team because it shows that they had not prejudged Trump. Weiss elaborated on that in several of her tweet quotes. For instance, these three tweets contradict the whole premise that Twitter insiders were bent on banning Trump from the start…

4. For years, Twitter had resisted calls both internal and external to ban Trump on the grounds that blocking a world leader from the platform or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information that people should be able to see and debate.

7. There were dissenters inside Twitter.

12. But the Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets quickly concluded that Trump had *not* violated Twitter’s policies.“I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement,” wrote one staffer.

That is not the discourse of a biased cabal of Trump haters intent on banishing the coup-plotting, sore loser. To the contrary, it’s evidence of a diversity of opinion and a commitment to an open dialogue. And most of the rest of Weiss’ tweet storm was more of the same. However, when she got near the end she summed up her harangue with a couple of tweets that show how little sense she makes…

43. Ultimately, the concerns about Twitter’s efforts to censor news about Hunter Biden’s laptop, blacklist disfavored views, and ban a president aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company.

44. They’re about the power of a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.

So Wiess is lamenting the wholly contrived “concerns” that Twitter censored and blacklisted news, and was intent on banning Trump. Then she claims that those concerns “aren’t about the past choices of executives in a social media company,” but they are about “the power of a handful of people at a private company.” How exactly are those two things different? It’s like saying that the sky isn’t blue, it’s actually blue.

What’s more, Weiss appears to be oblivious to the fact that lots of private companies “influence the public discourse and democracy.” The media, for instance, and virtually every major corporation that has vested interests in how their industries are regulated. Does she think that oil or banking or pharmaceutical companies (to name just a few) don’t try to exert such influence?

In fact, Twitter itself is trying to exert such influence by releasing these messages that were sent by people who had an expectation of privacy when they were communicating amongst themselves. In at least one case a Twitter employee was driven from his home due to threats as a result of Musk’s inappropriate exposure of these people’s identities.

In addition to his callous recklessness, Musk is being flagrantly hypocritical by pretending that he’s interested in free speech or transparency. The inescapable fact is that he’s releasing this limited batch of pre-selected messages through his hand-picked, right-wing biased puppets. Meanwhile, he’s refusing to make all of the messages available to the news media and the public so that everyone can see everything that was discussed and all of the relevant context.

In other words, Musk is limiting what the public can know, and he is delegating his power to “a handful of people at a private company to influence the public discourse and democracy.” Go figure.

What’s worse is that increasingly those people are repugnant cretins who promote racism, anti-Semitism, and neo-fascism, such as most of those whose Twitter accounts Musk has restored, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kanye West, Project Veritas, Roger Stone, neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, and especially Donald Trump.

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Fox News Lies: Falsely Accuses Michele Obama of ‘Pressuring’ Twitter to Ban Trump

Posted by Mark NC on December 11, 2022 at 12:28 pm. 1 Comments :

When Fox News gets their teeth into what they perceive to be scandal bait for their already brainwashed audience, they hold tight for absurdly long periods of time exceeding anything that could be considered rational. Whether it’s Benghazi, Hunter Biden, or Hillary Clinton’s emails, they clench down as if they’re afraid of it squirming free and escaping to reality.

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Among their most fevered fixations is anything having to do with President Obama or his wife Michelle. So on Sunday Fox News put out a story that reached back in time to malign the former First Lady for something she wrote nearly two years ago.

The story was an attempt to associate Ms. Obama with the pathetically shallow “Twitter Files” nothingburger that Elon Musk has been hyping as an “exposé” of the alleged liberal bias of Twitter’s prior management. Not surprisingly, they not only proved none of their baseless allegations, they actually revealed how responsibly Twitter’s Trust and Safety team acted to protect their platform – and the nation – from the deliberate incitements to violence of Donald Trump and his “Big Lie” confederates.

SEE THIS: The Sham ‘Twitter Files’ Exposé Actually Proves that Trump’s Coup Plot was Appropriately Muted

Fox’s story featured the sensationalist tabloid headline, “Twitter Files reveal Trump ban came after Michelle Obama, others pressured the company.” Needless to say, the files didn’t reveal any such thing. They merely made reference to a statement that Ms. Obama released the day after Trump’s insurrection on January 6, 2021. Fox’s story began saying that…

“Former President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter the day after former first lady Michelle Obama and others demanded the company ‘permanently’ remove him, according to the newest ‘Twitter Files’ installment.”

In reality, Ms. Obama never “demanded” anything of Twitter. She simply expressed her opinion about what should be done to prevent another atrocity like the one that occurred the day before. Here are some excerpts from her heartfelt and moving statement with the fragment that Fox News quoted in bold [the full statement is here]…

“The day was a fulfillment of the wishes of an infantile and unpatriotic president who can’t handle the truth of his own failures. And the wreckage lays at the feet of a party and media apparatus that gleefully cheered him on, knowing full well the possibility of consequences like these.” […]

“I cannot think about moving on or turning the page until we reckon with the reality of what we saw yesterday. True progress will be possible only once we acknowledge that this disconnect exists and take steps to repair it. And that also means coming to grips with the reality that millions voted for a man so obviously willing to burn our democracy down for his own ego.” […]

“I hurt for our country. And I wish I had all the solutions to make things better. I wish I had the confidence that people who know better will act like it for more than a news cycle or two. All I know is that now is a time for true patriotism. Now is the time for those who voted for this president [Trump] to see the reality of what they’ve supported — and publicly and forcefully rebuke him and the actions of that mob. Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior — and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technologies from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection. And if we have any hope of improving this nation, now is the time for swift and serious consequences for the failure of leadership that led to yesterday’s shame.“

Ms. Obama’s remarks were addressed to a nation that was in shock after having watched anti-democratic thugs desecrating the seat of our democracy, assaulting brave, outnumbered law enforcement officers, and threatening the lives of our representatives. She was speaking for millions of Americans who never thought they would witness such a despicable mob of traitors acting out their hostile treachery at the behest of a sociopathic, wannabe dictator, who couldn’t accept the fact that he’s a loser – which he still is, and still can’t.

What Ms. Obama was not doing was “pressuring” Twitter. She was exercising her First Amendment rights to express an opinion about what ought to be done in response to the horror we all saw on our television screens. Fox News offered no evidence whatsoever that she ever even spoke to anyone at Twitter. To the contrary, it was Trump and his cohorts who directly threatened Twitter in response to his well warranted suspension. And regarding the rioters at the Capitol, he is even now promising to pardon them for their heinous crimes if he were to return to the White House.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been paying attention. After all, Trump recently called for the “termination” for the Constitution in order to have himself installed as America’s first authoritarian tyrant.

SEE THIS: Trump Doubles Down on His Constitution Bashing and Misquotes Himself to Gaslight His Cult

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The Sham ‘Twitter Files’ Exposé Actually Proves that Trump’s Coup Plot was Appropriately Muted

Posted by Mark NC on December 10, 2022 at 12:24 pm. 21 Comments :

The new regime at Twitter has been engaging in what it calls an “exposé” of alleged censorship of conservatives in general – and Donald Trump in particular – on the part of Twitter’s prior management team. However, their efforts thus far have been pitifully underwhelming and have failed to prove any of their outrageous and unfounded allegations.

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When Elon Musk took control over Twitter he portrayed himself as a “free speech absolutist” who aspired to bring a dialogue to the service that was unfettered by bias and censorship. In reality, Musk just inserted his own personal biases and revealed that he has no grasp of what free speech really means. He also demonstrated that his absolutist approach only permits unfettered hate speech. Consequently, despite his instance that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape,” that’s precisely what it became shortly after he took the reins.

Last week Musk put out the first of what he promised would be a series of revelations exposing the bias of Twitter. That first release was pathetically devoid of any of the bombshells they teased. Although it succeeded in doxing private citizens and putting them at risk for harm.

Now the latest release of Musk’s multipart melodrama was posted Friday night. It consisted of 67 tweets by his protégé/puppet, Matt Taibbi, that ostensibly unveiled a vast conspiracy against conservative tweeters. Suffice to say that it was another nothingburger that failed utterly to prove its predetermined point.

To the contrary, Taibbi actually proved that the staff at Twitter acted responsibly to prevent Trump from inciting further violence during the January 6th insurrection in Washington, D.C. For example, the seventh tweet explicitly laid out how carefully considered any decisions were to tag or suspend potentially violating tweets and users…

7. Twitter executives removed Trump in part over what one executive called the “context surrounding”: actions by Trump and supporters “over the course of the election and frankly last 4+ years.” In the end, they looked at a broad picture. But that approach can cut both ways.

This tweet included a screenshot of the remarks by Twitter moderation staff…

“[H]ere is our quick take: the decision on whether to pull that particular tweet or use that as the last straw for trump depends on many factors including: (1) The overall context and narrative in which that tweet lives – we currently analyze tweets and consider them on a tweet-by-tweet basis which does not appropriately take into account the surrounding context – you can use the telling fire into a crowded theater example – context matters and the narrative that trump and his friends have pursued over the course of this election and frankly the last 4+ years must be taken into account.”

How Taibbi can regard this as evidence of bias is puzzling. It shows a respect for analyzing tweets that takes into consideration the context and the tweeter’s prior comments in order to fully understand their intent. It’s exactly how content moderation should be done. But Taibbi exhibits his bias in the tweets that followed…

8. The bulk of the internal debate leading to Trump’s ban took place in those three January days [6-8]. However, the intellectual framework was laid in the months preceding the Capitol riots.

9. Before J6, Twitter was a unique mix of automated, rules-based enforcement, and more subjective moderation by senior executives. As @BariWeiss reported, the firm had a vast array of tools for manipulating visibility, most all of which were thrown at Trump (and others) pre-J6.

10. As the election approached, senior executives – perhaps under pressure from federal agencies, with whom they met more as time progressed – increasingly struggled with rules, and began to speak of “vios” as pretexts to do what they’d likely have done anyway.

Taibbi is making a wholly manufactured assessment about what he calls the preceding “intellectual framework,” whatever that means. Then he complains that Twitter responsibly employed “rules-based enforcement,” that he baselessly calls subjective, and he whines that their moderation tools were “thrown at Trump.” Maybe that’s because Trump had violated Twitter’s rule innumerable times in the weeks and months that preceded January 6th.

However, the worst part of this screed was Taibbi’s claim that when senior executives “began to speak of ‘vios'” [violations] it was “perhaps under pressure from federal agencies.” Really? He could have just as credibly have said that it was “perhaps under pressure from Martians.” He provided zero evidence of anything resembling pressure by federal agencies or any other entity, terrestrial or otherwise.

That is representative how carelessly and dishonestly Taibbi put together this sham. His only purpose was to create a store of material that Republicans and Trump cultists could link to in order to advance their crackpot conspiracy theories and yammer about conservatives being victims of evil “Big Tech” liberals. The truth is that Twitter long ago admitted that their algorithms favored right-wingers. And near the end of the 67 tweet harangue was one that expressly outlined the situation with regard to Trump’s hostile incitements…

“An update on actions we’re taking as a result of what’s happening in DC today. We have removed (bounced) 3 tweets from @realDonaldTrump on 6 January 2020 [sic] for making unfounded claims of voter fraud and election theft, which must be viewed in the context of the violence in Washington DC today and reasonably can be expected to continue to incite and inspire violent acts around the country. We are requiring a 12-hour timeout following the removal of these tweets. We also have tweeted so there’s transparency in our actions and making it clear that future violations of the Twitter Rules will result in permanent suspension.”

That message completely negates virtually everything that Taibbi had falsely framed prior to it. But he still maintains that his work proves there was a bias at Twitter against Trump and other conservatives. If there was, it was a bias against allowing a treasonous, twice impeached, wannabe dictator from staging a violent coup. And Musk’s rush to reinstate Trump’s account further affirms that he couldn’t care less about the welfare of this nation or its people.

UPDATE: The next installment of Musk’s phony “Twitter Files” fiasco make a ludicrous accusation against Michelle Obama, saying that she “pressured” Twitter to ban Trump.

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Trump Literally Calls for Termination of the Constitution and FREAKS OUT Over Bogus Fox News Story

Posted by Mark NC on December 3, 2022 at 11:59 am. 18 Comments :

The unsettling totalitarian tendencies of Donald Trump have long posed an imminent threat to American democracy and freedom. From the outset of his political pursuits he has demonstrated a sinister aspiration to tyrannical rule. It’s a symptom of his malignant narcissism that puts the nation – and world – at risk.

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Now, more than two years after he was unceremoniously evicted from his occupation of the White House by the American people, Trump continues to peddle his “Big Lie” that the election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him. And although it’s a flagrantly false figment of his diseased imagination, he persists in pushing it out to his glassy-eyed cult disciples, despite his rapidly declining approval and influence.

However, if you thought that he had exhausted his store of preposterous allegations and infantile rage, you don’t know Trump. On Saturday morning he unleashed an avalanche of absurdity in service of his severely acute psychosis. This temper tantrum manifested in multiple posts on his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social. The tedious tirade culminated in the following hysteria…

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

REALLY? So Trump is now insisting that the Constitution be terminated in order to satisfy his election fraud fantasies and his voracious lust for power. It’s not especially surprising that Trump would hold that view. But it is unusual for him to so forthrightly express it.

The story that Trump regards as a “revelation,” and is so frantically flustered by, came from Fox News. It concerned a couple of Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana who are suing the Biden administration alleging censorship and suppression of speech by “Big Tech” and the FBI. Their complaint is wholly based on reports that the FBI held regular and normal meetings with the media to alert them to Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2020 election. But even Fox’s reporting doesn’t assert what Trump and the GOP AGs are twisting these facts to conclude…

“During the deposition, [FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis] Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general’s office. […] According to a source, Chan testified that in those multiple, separate meetings, the FBI warned the social media companies that there could be potentially Russian ‘hack and dump’ or ‘hack and leak’ operations.”

So even according to Fox News there was no conspiracy between the government and “Big Tech” to censor or suppress free speech. It was all just an effort to keep the social media outlets apprised of the Russian disinformation campaign. Also, it’s interesting that Trump is readily accepting this reporting based on allegations by an unnamed source when he has previously dismissed them all as fake.

What Trump, and most of the right-wing echo chamber, is distorting into another pseudo-scandal is an already debunked story. It featured false claims that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, told podcaster Joe Rogan that the FBI had ordered him to suppress news about – what else – Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop. Which is not what Zuckerberg said, or what the FBI was doing at all.

In reality, the FBI was doing their job to protect social media platforms, and thus the nation, from Russia’s election interference and fake news manipulation. Which is precisely what Russia was, in fact, doing. But that didn’t stop Trump from demanding that 2020 election be declared invalid, and that he be “declared the rightful winner.”

The Fox News story also reported that “the FBI regularly sends social media companies lists of internet URLs and social media accounts” that distribute “disinformation” from “malign foreign influence operations.” The story falsely implies that this amounts to censorship. Except that the evidence shows that the FBI never imposed any actions to be taken on the social media sites. They merely supplied the sites with information and let them determine for themselves what to do with it. In other words, free speech and the free markets prevailed. Not that Fox News or Trump would recognize it.

Ignoring the obvious facts in this affair, Trump ranted furiously in half a dozen successively incoherent posts that it represented “total corruption” and demanded that someone should “DO SOMETHING as our Country Melts!!!” He didn’t say who, or under what authority, this alleged melting should be halted. It was just more of his now familiar impotent whining and pathetic victimhood. And if the past is any indication, we should expect it to continue – and escalate – as he sinks farther into despair and desperation.

UPDATE I: Trump followed up his alt-tweet storm with another post saying that “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!” He doesn’t specify what that “cure” is, but considering that a short while ago he called for terminating the Constitution, it’s hard not surmise that he’s now calling for another coup attempt or other violent upheaval on the part of his treasonous cult.

UPDATE II: Two days later Trump denied ever calling for the termination of the Constitution, despite his words calling for exactly that, verbatim.

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WTFox? Fox News Hack Asks Press Secretary if the White House is Going to Shut Down Twitter

Posted by Mark NC on December 1, 2022 at 11:27 am. 2 Comments :

The melodrama engulfing Twitter since it was devoured by the American oligarch, Elon Musk, is spinning ever more ludicrous plots. And in keeping with the themes dictated by Donald Trump, they generally involve some wealthy wingnut’s paranoid delusions of persecution and victimhood. Poor little billionaires.

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Whenever there is some feigned offense as perceived by the uber-elites, the Fox News propaganda machine can be relied upon to pursue its mission of spreading disinformation on behalf of Trump’s Republican Cult Party. Central to that undertaking is the Fox News White House correspondent, Peter Doocy, whose role has always been to manufacture preposterous narratives for his network’s news mangling.

On Wednesday Doocy assumed his position in the White House press room to fulfill his assignment for the day. He quickly excreted another contrived and bizarre scenario that wasted everyone’s time and forced the Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, to school him on some basic principles of communication and free speech.

Doocy: When are you guys gonna delete the White House Twitter account?
Jean-Pierre: Why would we do that?
Doocy: Well, you say that you’re keeping an eye on Twitter because it might not be a suitable platform. So why use it?

It’s difficult to comprehend just how inept and unqualified Doocy is for the job he’s allegedly doing. Unless, that is, you accept that his job is to babble incoherently in pursuit of what he thinks is a “gotcha” question. Obviously the White House can post comments on Twitter that convey their positions without embracing everything about the site that is troublesome. But Doocy needed the remedial explanation…

Jean-Pierre: I want to be very clear here. The President has always said, and he has been very clear in his belief that it is important for social media platforms to continue to take steps to reduce hate speech and misinformation. And he will continue to say that. But media platforms make independent choices about the information that they present. So I don’t have anything to share on any policy or any changes that we will be making. We have multiple platforms, as you know, that we utilize to communicate with the American people.
Doocy: You say that you’re gonna be monitoring the speech on there. If you see something that you don’t like, would you try to shut Twitter down?
Jean-Pierre: When you talk about monitoring, I hate to break it to you Peter, just like everybody else, we very much monitor the news. We pay close attention to everything that you all are reporting. And Twitter is in the news a lot. And that’s what we’re paying attention to. We’re paying attention to what is in the news and what is being reported on the misinformation that’s out there.

Fox News’ Peter Doocy: “When are you guys gonna delete the White House Twitter account?"

White House Press Sec. Karine Jean-Pierre: “Why would we do that?" pic.twitter.com/6mWbw8FkDH

— The Recount (@therecount) November 30, 2022

Doocy’s laughably illogical leap to the conclusion that the White House would consider “shutting Twitter down” is representative of the mindset of Fox News and the radical right. It’s what they would do. All Jean-Pierre was saying is that misinformation and hate speech are tangible threats to the welfare of the public, and that Twitter and other social media outlets have an obligation to conduct reasonable moderation. But Doocy failed to grasp Jean-Pierre’s clearly articulated point that it is the company’s obligation, not the government.

For the record, the only presidential administration that ever actually threatened to shut down Twitter was that of the former reality TV game show host, Donald Trump.

It is also notable that Trump filed a truly idiotic First Amendment lawsuit against Twitter (which was quickly dismissed), and beseeched his glassy-eyed cult followers to quit Twitter, which he asserted should be outlawed. For more on those execrable exploits, see the following…

Funny, neither Doocy nor Fox News ever had any problem with any of that. They are obviously pro-totalitarian dictatorship when the dictator is Trump of any other Republican.

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Truth Social Traffic Flames Out Just as Trump is Trying to Fire Up His Next Losing Campaign

Posted by Mark NC on November 30, 2022 at 12:26 pm. 11 Comments :

Two weeks ago Donald Trump announced that he is running for the 2024 Republican nomination for president again. Presumably to score a record three popular vote losses. In an extraordinarily gloomy speech packed with horror stories of the “blood-soaked streets” and “cesspool cities” of America, Trump inspired his cult followers by declaring that he has “no doubt that it’s going to get worse.”

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Since Trump’s announcement, he has embellished his credentials in ways that can only make sense to a severely twisted mind. First of all, he chose to have dinner with the notorious white supremacist and anti-Semite, Nick Fuentes, at his Mar-a-Lago resort/home. And if that weren’t bad enough, he also publicly confessed to the theft of classified documents, and lying about it to the FBI.

This inauspicious start to Trump’s campaign might have been mitigated by his having his own Internet platform to promote himself and his candidacy. Unfortunately for him, that was not to be. Trump’s floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, received another blow this week with the news that it has suffered a precipitous decline over the past couple of months. According to reports…

“Truth Social, the alternative social media platform founded by former President Donald Trump, has seen a consecutive two-month decline in unique visitors, according to a watchdog site that monitors conservative media.”

“TheRighting, which reports on and analyzes trends in the conservative media, found that the number of unique visitors to Truth Social dropped from 4.02 million in August — an all-time high — to 3.38 million in September, and then to 2.85 million in October.”

That’s a nearly 30% decline in only two months. And it comes at the time that Trump needs it the most. While Elon Musk has reinstated Trump’s suspended account on Twitter, Trump insists that he will not be going back to the site. If that’s true (doubtful), he would be forsaking his 80 million Twitter followers for the four million glassy-eyed disciples he has on Truth Social. That’s a pretty bad trade off, and one that hurts both Trump and Musk.

From the day Truth Social was launched it was mired in the sort of mayhem that can only be produced by incompetence. It repeatedly crashed. Users couldn’t log in. Fake accounts were rampant. It’s being criminally investigated by the SEC and a Grand Jury in New York. And financially, the shell company it partnered with suffered a 75% decline in stock value over the past eight months. Its investors are backing out.

So while Musk is doing his darnedest to destroy Twitter, his competition at Truth Social for the white nationalist and disinformation demographic is simultaneously sinking into an abyss of failure. Which is typical for a Trump business, just as it is for Trump’s political endeavors. The horrendous record for the candidates that he endorsed during the midterm election is evidence of his waning influence. And post-midterm polls show that the American people don’t even want him to run again.

Truth Social’s woes are nothing new. The site has been a sink hole from day one. Here are a few of the pot holes it has encountered on the way to its demise…

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly.

Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse
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And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
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Thanks so much for your support.

The Internet's Chronicle of Media Decay

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Trump Literally Calls for Termination of the Constitution and FREAKS OUT Over Bogus Fox News Story

WTFox? Fox News Hack Asks Press Secretary if the White House is Going to Shut Down Twitter

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