OH-MY: Trump Unleashes Vile Threats in Tantrum Over Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Farce (Part 6)

Posted by Mark NC on December 17, 2022 at 11:04 am. 10 Comments :

For the past couple of weeks Elon Musk has been hyping a series of pathetically shallow “Twitter Files” document dumps. He has characterized it as an “exposé” of Twitter’s prior management’s alleged cabal against aspiring tyrant and insurrection inciter, Donald Trump. Now episode 6 continues to expose only Musk’s own craven biases and dishonesty.

Click here to Tweet this article

Consistent with the previous episodes, the latest installment only manages to prove that prior content moderation decisions were actually responsible and that Twitter’s Trust and Safety team (who Musk recently fired) acted in good faith to protect their platform – and the nation – from the deliberate incitements to violence of Donald Trump and his “Big Lie” confederates.

Teasing the release of the sixth batch of what were private internal communications, Musk tweeted “And soon, ladies & gentlemen, the coup de grâce,” followed the single word “KABOOM,” which ironically is an accurate descriptor of his latest bomb. It is hardly the “coup de grâce” that he is bragging about.

In the 45 tweets of Episode 6 Musk’s “correspondent” (aka puppet), Matt Taibbi, began by making a couple of wholly unsupported conclusions that were supposedly based on the messages he posted. However, there was nothing in those messages that affirmed his predetermined conclusions. He began…

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.
5. Some are mundane […]
6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation.

What Taibbi is portraying as “constant and pervasive” is 150 emails sent in a period of three years. And many of those were, by Taibbi’s own account, “mundane.” So, doing the math, there were likely only one or two a month that were relevant. That’s a rather tortured definition of “pervasive.” Particularly when considering the fact that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were rightfully concerned about disinformation being spread by hostile foreign entities. Consequently, they stayed in touch with the social media platforms that those entities were exploiting to keep them apprised of the situation. That is, in fact, their job.

Taibbi later grossly misrepresented an email from the FBI to Twitter, saying…

[13] “HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:

Taibbi’s characterization of the FBI being the “master” of the “canine” Twitter staff was invented by Taibbi and not reflected in any actual message. What’s worse is how Taibbi deceitfully edited the FBI’s email to imply that they were demanding “action.” The unedited email actually reads…

“FBI San Francisco is notifying you of the below accounts which may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms and of Service for any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.”

So the FBI explicitly stated that the accounts they referred to Twitter only “potentially” violated Twitter’s rules, and then merely asked Twitter to take appropriate action, or none at all, as per Twitter’s policy. How is that by any stretch of the imagination a demand or reflective of a “master-canine” relationship? That is only reflective of Taibbi’s intent to deceive.

Taibbi closed his tweet storm with a Trumpian reference to the “deep state” as a “tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors.” Which is just another biased conclusion that is unsupported by his own “evidence.”

For his part, Trump went bonkers over the latest episode of the “Twitter Files” nothingburger. He posted on his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, that…

“This (the FBI’s wild and crazy relationship with Twitter) is absolutely a coordinated effort to change Election Results! Rachel Campos-Duffy…and it worked, but they got caught. This is why people protested in Washington. Our 2020 Presidential Election was Crooked, Rigged, and Stolen, and yet the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks & Thugs didn’t spend any time investigating this outrage!”

And that…

“Our Country is SICK inside, very much like a person dying of Cancer. The Crooked FBI, the so-called Department of ‘Justice,’ and ‘Intelligence,’ all parts of the Democrat Party and System, is the Cancer. These Weaponized Thugs and Tyrants must be dealt with, or our once great and beautiful Country will die!!!”

Naturally, Trump is continuing to whine about having decisively lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. But in more than two years and 60 court cases he has failed to provide a shred of evidence that the election was “rigged” or “stolen” from him. He nevertheless maligns the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection in his typically infantile and patently dangerous manner.

More worrisome is what exactly Trump means by demanding that members of the justice and intelligence communities, as well as Democrats, “must be dealt with”? Especially when combined with the warning that if they are not “our once great and beautiful Country will die!!!” It comes off as an unambiguous threat and/or a command to his StormTrumpers to take action.

This is why Trump must be held accountable for his crimes as expeditiously as possible. He is still inciting violence and fomenting an insurrection against the United States, whose Constitution he recently said should be “terminated.” The longer that accountability is delayed, the greater the risk.

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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. 4 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.

Click here to Tweet this article

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

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@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.

Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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. 2 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.

Click here to Tweet this article

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.

MORE ON “TWITTER FILES”:

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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.

Click here to Tweet this article

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

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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. 22 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.

Click here to Tweet this article

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.

MORE ON “TWITTER FILES”:

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

HUH? Senior Fox News Misinformer, Tucker Carlson, Declares that ‘Misinformation Can Be True’

Posted by Mark NC on December 6, 2022 at 12:19 pm. 9 Comments :

Since it’s inception, the mission of Fox News has been to advance the propaganda and lies of the Republican Party and its ultra-rightist agenda. Their management, editors, and program hosts are all chosen for, and devoted to that mission. And in recent years their extremist political evangelism has fervently pledged to the Cult of Donald Trump.

Click here to Tweet this article

Leading the wingnut evangelical crusade at Fox News is their top-rated host, Tucker Carlson. His program has become the most popular media destination for America’s white supremacists, misogynists, homophobes, and many other hate groups.

On Monday’s episode of Carlson’s hate-fest, he joined the conservative media’s embrace of Elon Musk’s Twitter nothingburger that purported to reveal an ingrained bias in favor of Democrats and then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Suffice to say that the entire alleged “bombshell” was a spectacular dud that produced nothing but rank speculation, fabrication, and the disturbing doxing of private Twitter communications and staff.

Nevertheless, Fox News and Carlson were determined to further brainwash their audience with flagrant falsehoods. And apparently aware that their deceits were too obvious to disguise, they endeavored to frame lies as truths. Carlson literally defined falsehoods as facts. And not even “alternative facts” as previously dubbed by his Fox News colleague, and Trump toady, Kellyanne Conway. Carlson confabulated that…

“Misinformation is a new word. It’s been around the intel world for a long time but it’s never been used in common conversation until recently. The distinction between misinformation and lying is that misinformation can be true. It doesn’t have to be untrue to be censored. It used to be truth is a defense. If you’re telling the truth, you can say it. Not anymore. With mis- and disinformation, if I don’t like it, if I’m in power, I can censor you.”

"Misinformation is a new word. … The distinction between misinformation and lying is that misinformation can be true." pic.twitter.com/eYzadS2d2w

— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) December 6, 2022

For the record, misinformation cannot be true. It is, by definition, untrue. If it were true there would be nothing amiss in it. And only in the perverse world of Carlson and Fox News could such a ludicrous contention be made or taken seriously. But then again, it was Carlson who was actually defended in a defamation lawsuit by his own Fox News lawyers who told the court that “no reasonable person” would believe anything he said.

In the same program, Carlson elaborated on his adoption of the Musk Twitter files non-scandal. He complained about Twitter’s decisions to moderate the content on their platform in order to prevent Russia from spreading propaganda that was intended to benefit Trump and to sow distrust of American elections. Never mind that Musk’s pathetic exposé failed to reveal any wrongdoing or bias. Carlson was outraged at what consumed his imagination, or at least what he wanted to consume the imaginations of his viewers. He huffed that…

“Twitter did this with the help of the FBI committing censorship on behalf of one candidate while working to hurt the other candidate. It is hard to imagine a more brazen attack on our democracy than this. This is not how our system is supposed to work. In fact, it’s illegal. What Twitter did is in violation of the First Amendment, as well as established campaign finance law. They never declared those contributions to the Biden campaign. That’s a crime.”

Tucker: It is hard to imagine a more brazen attack on our democracy than this… pic.twitter.com/rIxVLyFRQg

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 6, 2022

First of all, Twitter didn’t do anything with the FBI. The internal messages that Musk published proved that all of the decisions about what disinformation to suppress were made solely by Twitter “safety and trust” staff. No government entity or personnel were involved, other than to flag tweets that potentially violated Twitter’s rules. And those came from both Democrats and Republicans. Also, at the time, Biden wasn’t president. It all took place during Trump’s administration with his appointees heading the FBI and the Justice Department.

Yet Carlson thinks that there was something nefarious going on for which he found it “hard to imagine a more brazen attack on our democracy.” Really? More brazen than the attempt to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021? More brazen than trying to undermine the election for two years and install the loser as dictator? More brazen than calling for the “termination” of the Constitution.

Carlson also appears to have no idea what the First Amendment says. It is a constraint on government from imposing censorship. It has no authority over private individuals or businesses, such as Twitter.

Finally, Carlson really needs to think twice before bringing up in-kind contributions to political campaigns. Because if that were a concept that were upheld, Fox News would have have to declare billions of dollars in donations that it made to Trump and other GOP candidates for the past quarter century.

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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

Posted by Mark NC on December 5, 2022 at 12:39 pm. 8 Comments :

Comprehending Donald Trump’s ever accelerating psychoses is a constant struggle that requires daily (hourly?) attention and a vast tolerance for bellicose blasts of bullshittery. And as his political and legal tribulations come closer to fulfilling his personal apocalypse, he gets increasingly desperate and deranged.

Click here to Tweet this article

On Saturday, December 3, 2022, Trump spoke more explicitly about his anti-democratic, authoritarian aspirations than ever before. On his floundering Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, Trump raged that the Constitution should be “terminated” in order to satisfy his election fraud fantasies and his voracious lust for power.

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

Not surprisingly, the media (with the exception of Fox News, which we’ll get to below) reacted appropriately to Trump’s totalitarian temper tantrum. It is obviously newsworthy when a former president, and current presidential candidate, advocates dispensing with the Constitution that he would be oath bound to uphold. And just as unsurprisingly, Trump is now lashing out the media for reporting verbatim what he said. He wrote…

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of their other HOAXES & SCAMS. What I said was that when there is ‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,’ as has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election, steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG. Only FOOLS would disagree with that and accept STOLEN ELECTIONS. MAGA!

So Trump is “actually trying to convince the American People” that he did not say that he wants to “terminate” the Constitution. And he had to misquote himself to do it. What he conveniently left out of his latest harangue (and it’s still on his website) was his assertion that the imaginary fraud that he continues to obsess about would justify “throw[ing] the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declar[ing him] the RIGHTFUL WINNER,” and furthermore, “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

As Trump says, “Only fools would disagree” that he is deliberately editing his grossly offensive and un-American tirade. Fortunately for Trump, there are still a few fools willing to commit to his cult. Sadly, Fox News is still among them.

On Monday’s episode of Fox and Friends, the “Curvy Couch” potatoes did a segment on Elon Musk’s Twitter nothingburger about alleged leftist bias and suppression of stories about Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop. The whole “revelation” amounted to rank speculation, fabrication, and the disturbing doxing of private Twitter communications and staff.

Crammed into this segment were a few seconds about Trump’s Constitution trashing. Co-host Steve Doocy complained that…

“I know a lot of people are looking at what Twitter put out and they’re saying ‘There was no smoking gun.’ I think there is a smoking gun. And the smoking gun is that it worked. That that story about the laptop was censored and – Did it change the outcome of the election? We don’t know for sure. But we do know that there have been polls that have shown that, had people known about the Hunter Biden story and how Joe Biden may or may not have been involved ultimately and the Biden family, that could have changed their vote. Ultimately, would it have changed the outcome of the presidential? Well obviously Donald Trump felt so, because he said yesterday that the Constitution should be thrown out. Which is crazy.”

This is Fox & Friends only coverage of Trump calling to terminate the constitution — a passing mention, glossed over, as they try to hype up the nothingburger that was ~the Twitter files~

Less than 10 seconds pic.twitter.com/g34A3zGN00

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) December 5, 2022

Notice that Doocy’s validation of the allegations about Twitter consisted of nothing but his own conclusion that some unspecified strategy had “worked.” But in his next sentence he admits that it didn’t actually work, or at least “We don’t know for sure.” Therefore…no smoking gun.

Doocy goes on to claim that some polls, that he fails to identify, suggested that the outcome of the election would have been different had the public been aware of the bogus Biden story. And his validation of that baseless assertion came from another rather dubious source – Donald Trump “felt” it, and it triggered his attack on the Constitution. So that’s that, right?

For the record, Fox News has barely mentioned Trump’s Constitution bashing at all. One other instance was on MediaBuzz, where host Howard Kurtz simply acknowledged that it occurred, then said viewers could make up their own minds, and then cut to a commercial. That lasted less than half a minute. And this is Fox’s media “analysis” show.

Here's Fox News' Howie Kurtz on Trump calling for the "termination" of constitutional order to reinstate him in office: "A lot of media criticism on that, you can make up your own mind." pic.twitter.com/3wp6KOBICN

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) December 5, 2022

There’s a reason that Trump has to misquote himself in order to address the nauseating things he actually says. He needs to alter the reality of his glassy-eyed cult followers into believing that nothing he ever does or says could be wrong. And any suggestion that he is less than perfect is just another hoax and/or scam. It’s the same reason that he has still not condemned the vulgar anti-Semitism and white supremacy of his Mar-a-Lago dinner guests, Ye (aka Kanye West) and Nick Fuentes. Trump can’t malign those Hitler fanboys because he so fervently admires and emulates him, himself.

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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.

Click here to Tweet this article

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.

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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. 15 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.”

Click here to Tweet this article

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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

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

Posted by Mark NC on November 27, 2022 at 1:15 pm. 7 Comments :

There appears to be a congenital defect in conservatives in general, and in the Donald Trump brand of wingnut Republicans in particular. They seem to have an inability to express a thought that doesn’t exhibit profound ignorance. And they do it without the slightest hint of shame.

Click here to Tweet this article

On Sunday morning Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-QAnon) displayed some of the notable symptoms of this defect in a tweet that aimed to malign both liberals and the world’s biggest corporations, because she believes that they have so much in common. But what’s truly troubling is that her steaming stupidity is taking over the Republican Party as it prepares to assume the majority in the House of Representatives.

Instead of landing a blow on her targets, Greene succeeded only in embarrassing herself, as usual. In her crackpot commentary she sought to defend Elon Musk as he endeavors to destroy the $44 billion toy he bought by permitting rampant hate speech and disinformation. She is very upset that, as a result, many companies that advertised on Twitter are temporarily declining to do so. So in that vein she unleashed the following lunacy…

“This is Corporate Communism. Corporations using their economic power to force their political agendas. They need to go back to the ‘Customer is King’ mentality, not corporations are king. @elonmusk opening Twitter for everyone’s speech doesn’t promote one side.”

This is Corporate Communism.

Corporations using their economic power to force their political agendas.

They need to go back to the “Customer is King” mentality, not corporations are king.@elonmusk opening Twitter for everyone’s speech doesn’t promote one side,

Cont’d https://t.co/Que4WwOV3W

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene?? (@RepMTG) November 27, 2022

WOW! That’s quite a shipload of cow manure. To begin with, the phrase “Corporate Communism” makes no sense. There are no corporations in a communist economy, where all means of production are controlled by the state. That’s not an agenda advocated by liberals. She might be thinking of fascism, which is also known as corporatism, where corporations have power over the government. Which is precisely the agenda of the Republican Party.

Greene is also criticizing private corporations for exercising their right to conduct business in a manner that best serves the interests of its customers and shareholders. And for some reason, she thinks that linking to a list of fifty of America’s biggest companies that are repulsed by overt expressions of hate, supports her argument.

If a company chooses not to advertise on a certain platform because it doesn’t want to be associated with the repugnant people and ideas that it promotes, that’s their prerogative. Generally, when a company makes such a decision, it’s because of, not contrary to, what their customers want.

Elon Musk has promised to restore all suspended accounts, except those that violated the law or disseminated spam. That means that accounts that engaged in overt bigotry and dangerous disinformation regarding pandemics and elections, are free to resume their hostile activities. Never mind that the American people have communicated to Twitter’s advertisers that they will not patronize businesses that support such maliciousness. Greene doesn’t believe that companies should have the right to accommodate their customers wishes.

In Green’s world – and in Musks’s – “opening Twitter for everyone’s speech” is simply free speech. But that absolutist standard as referenced in the Constitution only applies to the government. And even there it isn’t absolute. Private companies can set there own standards, and be driven by the values of their customers. But Greene would rather the government force companies and other institutions to advance her values and those of the ultra-right GOP.

Greene went on to condemn Democrats as the party that “mandated unnecessary vaccines [and] drag queen shows in schools.” That’s the sort of asinine speech that she wants to permeate online dialogues. And if anyone disagrees with her they are communists who favor censorship.

However, it is Greene’s positions that hew more to those allegations of censorious state tyranny. Furthermore, she must not have noticed that corporations have “[used] their economic power to force their political agendas” for as long as there have been corporations. Many of them donate to her campaigns. And let’s not forget the “Citizens United“ decision that defined corporations as “persons,” allowing them to advance their political agendas with unlimited amounts of funding. None of that never seemed to bother her.

Now Greene wants to prohibit companies from freely conducting their own business, and to muzzle the American people who want to express their opinions to those companies. But she is too stupid to recognize just how hypocritical she is. And sadly, as Greene goes, so goes the GOP.

FULL DISCLOSURE: 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
on Facebook and Instagram.

And check out my books on Amazon:

Fox Nation vs. Reality:
The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.

Thanks so much for your support.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: