Twitter has created a blacklist of its users who express critical opinions – a practice used during the social media’s previous administration has been exposed. Náray Balázs interviewed Jake Denton, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, an American political analysis center, on Kossuth Radio’s Vasárnapi Újság program.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter at the end of October, promising to restore freedom of speech to its users. This is the second week that the Twitter documents have been made public, revealing the former owner’s restricted internal messaging that suppressed conservative views. For the first time, exchanges in which Twitter withheld the truth about the shadowy business and illegal personal affairs of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, were exposed.
You can listen to the entire conversation here.
The whole thing surrounding the so-called Twitter documents is much broader and covers many areas. It is a political matter, raising questions about the autonomy of government organizations, the influence of corporations and big tech companies, as well as basic democratic values and the ability of people to make free and independent choices. What is your primary opinion on this whole phenomenon in light of what has been announced i.e. the Twitter documentation.
I think this is what we have come to expect when there is a lack of oversight of such giant corporations, which can exert serious control over our daily lives. Twitter, for example, has become the primary source for news consumption. And when they come across a story of serious news value, they are able to shape the way you, the reader, and consumer of news, experience that particular story. And what came to light is that when there’s an issue to do with the left, and here in the US, the Democrats, Twitter will shape things in a way that they practically cover it up, and make sure that the issue doesn’t get spread over it. The media does not even influence the democrats. And what we’ll see is more Tweets showing similar things.
A day after the interview was recorded, new documents were released that showed, leading to public internal exchanges from the time of the company’s previous management, the extent to which the largely conservative actors had been blacklisted. How many types of blacklists are there, some that can’t be included in searches, some that can’t be published as trending topics, like a professor of medicine at Stanford University, who said during the coronavirus pandemic, that lockdown was harmful to children, was also included in Black list. What has emerged so far is just the tip of the iceberg.
So far, the very obvious things have come out, but what Elon Musk has hinted at so far is how presidential candidate Joe Biden became President Joe Biden; I mean, in the sense that he took Twitter members of his campaign team with him to the White House to see how it turned out. The other topic, which Musk has already hinted at, is that so-called Covid files are expected. How the social media site’s content-monitoring department suppressed voices and shaped reading, within which messages related to the pandemic could emerge. If it were also published, it would tell a very different story of corruption among the highest levels of government institutions and Silicon Valley companies.
Do you think that in light of this, we can talk about the overall practice of the technology giants? Not just about your Twitter, but about all the other big tech companies, BigTech? Google or the other major social media company, Facebook, is often mentioned in this context.
definitely. I think the important thing here, as you point out, is that Twitter is not a one-time event, but that it is so far the only one that has exposed its machinations – voluntarily. However, for example, partly as a result of excellent journalistic work, and from actions taking place here in the United States, it is also known that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, collaborated with White House personnel in creating an Internet interface for the Department of Homeland Security that gives access to user data. . They haven’t made it public of their own choosing, but it’s been floated, and there’s Google, which was found to silence conservative expressions in its main app, Gmail, during elections. In practice, during election fundraising campaigns, fundraising emails from Republicans were prevented from reaching voters. That is, when candidates tried to drum up support for their election campaigns, Google made sure that messages did not reach the email inboxes of the candidate’s support base. So what is widely seen as a way is through the concerted effort of Silicon Valley companies to block messages from conservatives from the average person’s email account or on Twitter.
Just last week, there was news that an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, reported in court testimony that there were regular meetings, briefings, and briefings between the authority and representatives of Big Tech. Is this a fact that decision makers should or should take into account?
Certainly, because things can no longer be simply thrown away. In parallel with the release of the Twitter files, another case was revealed, which involved how the FBI contacted Twitter employees to warn them that a hacked document, the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, might be released. And the word warning sounds very funny in this context, because on the one hand it expresses concern, but it should be considered more threatening than that. Beyond that, the FBI, the White House, and other government executive agencies do not hesitate to use their power over Silicon Valley companies in order to see a “better” outcome for them in the news supply or for their party. Policies.
When an authority, in this case the FBI, has a “request,” it may come across as more than a polite request.
And it really indicates how murky the relationship between these giant corporations and the country’s government is. The fact that it took a billionaire to learn more about these exchanges shows that there is a complete lack of transparency and these companies’ completely worded press releases about “not cooperating with the government” or “it’s not true that certain people are being censored”, so we can’t take these ads for granted. with it. The truth requires someone to buy such works and release previous internal documents. So I think we have to assume the worst right now that these companies are trying to protect us and we have to assume that they are against the interests of the American people.
The American people have reached a kind of breakdown. By that I mean they are starting to lose their tolerance for idleness.
Lawmakers have been ignoring this for far too long to protect and help the American people fight this fight against Big Tech. I just want to highlight the abuses of these companies, from Facebook to Twitter. We see them crossing borders and interfering in the lives and choices of the American people, and therefore they can never be held accountable. Whether it’s the current state of affairs around Twitter or a front-page story in the New York Times, we never get an answer as to who is responsible. At the end of the day, I think it would be best if people start realizing that these kinds of issues don’t necessarily have to come from the mainstream media, and you can tell what people want through Twitter. Hopefully, then, lawmakers will take matters into their own hands, show some anger, and give us some answers.
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From the internal exchange of messages published on Friday, it appears that as the presidential election approaches, consultations between Twitter, the FBI, and other authorities are becoming more frequent.
Not only has Twitter dictated what can be part of public discourse, but it has also included it
The seriousness of the issue has also been highlighted because in the United States in recent years, Twitter has dictated what the media should and shouldn’t cover, and the voice of who doesn’t matter and who doesn’t.
