How Twitter Censored Information

Elon Musk has purchased the social networking service Twitter. He says he believes “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated…”

To achieve that free speech, Musk believes he has to ‘clean house’ in terms of staff numbers, staff bias (according to Twitter’s files, in 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff’s political donations went to Democrats) and content restrictions that affect the free flow of ideas.

Musk also believes Twitter has to be transparent about how it functions, which includes an accounting of how it operated previous to his purchase.

That ‘historical’ accounting is being released in a series of ‘Twitter Files’ which are internal Twitter, Inc. documents (screenshots, emails, and chat logs)  that  CEO Elon Musk released to journalists for them to present to the public. Here are their reports, with their comments in quotation marks:

Part 1: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Part 7: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop
“October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate. And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.”

Part 2: Twitter’s Secret Blacklists “teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.”

Part 3: The Removal of Donald Trump October 2020-January 6th
Part 4: The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7
Part 5: The Removal of Trump from Twitter
On the morning of January 8, President Donald Trump  tweets twice:
6:46 am: “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
7:44 am: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter executives (then banned) Trump, even though key staffers said that Trump had not incited violence—not even in a “coded” way.

Part 6: The FBI Subsidiary
“Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.”
Part 8: How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign

Part 9: How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate
“But Twitter did suppress views—many from doctors and scientific experts—that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing.”

“Martin Kulldorff, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is an epidemiologist and biostatistician. He is Professor of Medicine at Harvard University (on leave) and a Fellow at the Academy of Science and Freedom. His research focuses on infectious disease outbreaks and the monitoring of vaccine and drug safety.”

More Information about the Misleading Information Policy
Twitter had a COVID-19  Misleading Information Policy (which has been removed) that stated you could not tweet that vaccines are untested, experimental or somehow unsafe or that specific groups or people are more or less prone to be infected or to develop adverse symptoms. That policy may have limited tweets about the incidence of  myocarditis, even though  “Based on passive surveillance reporting in the US, the risk of myocarditis after receiving mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines was increased across multiple age and sex strata and was highest after the second vaccination dose in adolescent males and young men. (Source JAMA, Jan 25, 2022). It also may have limited tweets about age and obesity even though: “More than 81% of COVID-19 deaths occur in people over age 65; Having obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to a COVID-19 infection.” (Source CDC)

“Trust, but Verify” – US President Ronald Regan
On December 28, 2022, Elon tweeted: “New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science.”

I see this as the next step in what Dr. Zubin Damania has been talking about for the past year or so:

This is now the prime challenge. First of all, you cannot villainize or demonize each side. You have to understand there’s going to be extremes that are crazy on both sides, but that the vast majority of people are trying to be good based on their moral matrix. So we have to, first of all, open dialogue between the sides that doesn’t involve, shaming and name calling and ad hominems and logical fallacies. We need to introspect and see our own moral matrix and bias so that we can go, okay, so when am I just feeding my own confirmation bias?… Then we need to have dialogue across these lines respectfully. And that’s what I call Alt-Middle.
– Dr. Zubin Damania –

Christmas Tangle 2022 – A No Snow Holiday This Year

We  are in sunny AZ this holiday season. We arrived here just in time to miss the snow and bitter cold that is making travel so hazardous in western Canada and the USA right now! I’d like to say it was good planning on our part, but weather is too unpredictable for us to take any credit for our choice!

To all of you who have been a part of our lives in a great or small way – The Car Guy and I wish you all

Safe Travels,
A Very Merry Christmas
and
All the Best in the New Year!

All my favourite holiday Quotations: Christmas Quotations

My very first Christmas Post: The Annual Christmas Letter.

Perhaps my best Christmas Story: Home – The LEGO Businessman and the Oranges

A Gallery of my Christmas Tangles:

Christmas 2021

Christmas 2020

Christmas 2019

Christmas 2018

Christmas 2017

Christmas 2016

Christmas 2015

Christmas 2014

This and That – In the Christmas ‘Spirit’

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?
– Clement Stone –

Easy Peasy Cork Wreath: first, drink hundreds of bottles of wine…

Update on the Paper Bag Snowflakes

I thought I ordered lunch size brown bags and smaller white bags. I guess not.

Three snowflakes done – finished size is 16 inches (40 cm).

When you are into Paint Pouring, Everything Looks like a Canvas…

I’m painting some scuffed old ornaments with acrylic pour paints.

We don’t have a cat any more, but the memory of it climbing the Christmas tree is still vivid. I remember the event each year when I am putting up the ceramic angel ornament that was bifurcated when the tree (with cat clinging to the apex) assumed a lateral aspect.

Song of the Snowbird

Oh, the weather outside was frightful,
The snow was not delightful.
And since we’ve got a place to go
We drove, to a home, without snow.

Glad to be in Arizona again!

Meanwhile, Back in the Land of Ice and Snow

Paper Lunch Bags – Some Quotes and Giant Snowflakes!

Paper Bag Quotations are at the end of this post.

These Giant Paper Bag Snowflakes seem to be very popular with crafters this year. They appealed to me because they are so ‘over the top’ big!

I had all the supplies on hand – brown paper lunch bags (you could use any color of bags); hot glue or white glue; scissors and or X-Acto knife;  cord or ribbon (for hanging).

Each snowflake uses 9 to 10 paper bags (depends on the size of the bag) that are glued and stacked one on top of the other. With the bags still folded,  run a bead of glue along the base of the bag and another bead down the center of the bag. Lay another bag on top of the glued bag,  making sure they line up. Press (with your hands) along the glue lines. Repeat with next bag.
Once a stack is glued together (I made two stacks, cut them, then glued the stacks together), cut shapes with scissors or an X-Acto knife. Do not cut into the glued areas.

Next, carefully unfold the snowflake (see the video at the end of this post  to see how.) Run two beads of glue in the same manner as before to stick the first and last bags together.

Glue a loop of string as shown in the video below. I glued the loop about a third way down one arm of the snowflake so that the snowflake would be  suspended from a thicker section. Hang the snowflake. I used long T-pins for snowflakes that I mounted on the wall.

I hung some of mine in front of windows. I hung other ones on the wall.

Paper Bag Quotations:

I caused my husband’s heart attack. In the middle of lovemaking I took the paper bag off my head. He dropped the Polaroid and keeled over and so did the hooker. It would have taken me half an hour to untie myself and call the paramedics, but fortunately the Great Dane could dial.
– Joan Rivers –

I’d learned some things. I knew you weren’t supposed to hold a good wine at the top – the paper bag falls off.
– Pat Paulsen –

I scoop a clattering cascade of green apple Jelly Bellys into the white paper bag and remember when we were seven. I got stung by a jellyfish. Tim cried because his mother, and mine, wouldn’t let him pee on my leg, which he’d heard was an antidote to the sting.
– Huntley Fitzpatrick –

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in “Wuthering Heights” with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.
– Joan Didion –

“My God”, I said. “You move so silently. So you have had ninja training.”
“I have two older brothers,” Vince said. “It’s the same thing.”
I held up the white paper bag and bowed. “Master, I bring a gift.”
He looked at the bag curiously. “My Buddha bless you, grasshopper. What is it?”
I tossed him the bag. It hit him in the chest and slid to the floor. “So much for ninja training,” I said.
– Jeff Lindsay –

Pray note that my chest does not appear to be a toast rack in a wet paper bag.
Mort glanced sideways at the top of Ysabell’s dress, which contained enough puppy fat for two litters of Rotweilers, and forbore to comment.
– Terry Pratchett –

Secrets are like honey in a paper bag. Eventually, they leak out.
– Drew Bankston –

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.
– Tom Robbins –

We’ll See What Happens

Scam, Spam and Phishing
My recent post, 13th Anniversary of Blogging, was reblogged without my permission by someone who I think might be a phishing scammer (though I may be over-reacting.)

I contacted WordPress about this and asked them to take the reblogged post down. The Happiness Engineer (HE… or maybe HER) suggested I fill out a Copyright Infringement Complaint. I don’t see how that would do me any good because WordPress is the one that provides the reblog tool that lets people take your content.

I had left a comment on the site that had reblogged my post, asking them to take it down. The reply from the blogger was: “Pls am sorry and I will happy if you can guide me too on this WordPress blog to become famouse and get money there easily pls Mrs Amusive pls contact me on what’sapp +(234xxxxxxxxxx) so we can talk more pls”

So I  filed a complaint of scamming  – which was a lot faster and easier than a copyright infringement complaint. We’ll see what happens.

The Response to Elon Musk Buying Twitter

The big news in Social Media is that Twitter has been purchased by the richest man in the world, Elon Musk. His expressed reason for purchasing it is because he wants “civilization to have a common digital town square.” By common, Musk says the company would allow “all speech that the First Amendment protects”. Getting from ‘what Musk now owns’ to ‘what Musk wants it to be’ has been a bumpy ride so far (as opposed to the ride you get in one of his Teslas…)

This has created an uproar with people who want Twitter (or Facebook or YouTube) to decide what is misinformation or hate speech (for example) and do not agree with Musk’s opinion that better decision making comes from more open debate. We’ll see what happens.

Quiet Quitting

This is a new term to me. It means “doing the minimum requirements of one’s job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.” I’ve read that this trend is popular with Gen Z who believe working will lead to on-the-job burnout if they do more than what they think they are being paid to do.

This has apparently led to Quiet Firing where the employer does the minimum required of them – which does not necessarily include giving raises, increased opportunities or promotions to employees who don’t do more than what is absolutely necessary… etc.

The Employer could, of course, escalate things to ‘UnQuiet Firing’. Apparently Musk has fired about half the Twitter work force. Speculation is that Amazon will lay off 10,000 employees and Zuckerberg is cutting 11,000 employees.  I suppose it is possible that some of those laid off were quiet quitters… We’ll see what happens.