Elon Musk might not be British but he certainly has the tea, and today, it’s piping hot.
The Twitter mogul took to his social media platform on Monday to once again expose operations within the US government enforcing online censorship policies and violating the free speech rights of countless Americans.
Musk has previously leaked information about agencies such as the FBI pressuring old Twitter’s leadership to make content moderation decisions that suited the current administration(s) end goals. But this week he named a lesser known agency—GEC, or rather, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center—and called it the “worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
Given what we know about other offenders among its ranks, those are pretty high charges.
Musk went on to call the agency a “threat to democracy” and linked to a thread with more information on their activities from independent journalist Matt Taibbi (who has broken some of the other “Twitter Files” online).
They are a threat to our democracy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2023
Read this thread for more detail https://t.co/2igo7PPwLy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2023
Taibbi’s thread was indeed damning. According to his reporting, in February of 2020 during the initial breakout of COVID, GEC went to the media with a report called, “Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.”
https://t.co/BcFhHCvjAE February, 2020, as COVID broke out, the Global Engagement Center – a fledgling analytic/intelligence arms of the State Department – went to the media with a report called, “Russian Disinformation Apparatus Taking Advantage of Coronavirus Concerns.” pic.twitter.com/KjUeE8vejt
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
He went onto note that GEC “flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’”
4.The GEC flagged accounts as “Russian personas and proxies” based on criteria like, “Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,” blaming “research conducted at the Wuhan institute,” and “attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.” pic.twitter.com/a4xBotQZ2m
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
5.State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode “led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.” ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin. pic.twitter.com/JlIobPzAFE
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
Unlike the response to some other agencies weighing in on the government’s censorship practices, it appears many at Twitter did balk at GEC’s role in these decisions.
17.A deeper reason was a perception that unlike the DHS and FBI, which were “apolitical,” as Roth put it, the GEC was “political,” which in Twitter-ese appeared to be partisan code.
“I think they thought the FBI was less Trumpy,” is how one former DOD official put it. pic.twitter.com/y33deYO50B
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
Yet, accounts were still reportedly banned at their request.
29.Twitter honored almost everyone else’s requests, even those from GEC – including a decision to ban accounts like @RebelProtests and @BricsMedia because GEC identified them as “GRU-controlled” and linked “to the Russian government,” respectively: pic.twitter.com/OQjQuKTzTO
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
https://t.co/08M51rg2BM all led to the situation described by @ShellenbergerMD two weeks ago, in which Twitter was paid $3,415,323, essentially for being an overwhelmed subcontractor.
Twitter wasn’t just paid. For the amount of work they did for government, they were underpaid.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) January 3, 2023
Honestly, there’s too many problems here to list. Obviously this is a crystal clear attack on the First Amendment rights of hundreds of thousands of people—and we have no reason to believe these activities have ceased. The government gets away with these kinds of violations by allowing them to be carried out behind the scenes by unelected bureaucrats we know little about and who we have no accountability over.
Congress passes some bad laws that violate the Constitution, to be sure, but it is nowhere close to the scale of violations we see in number or in impact that occur without a bill ever being passed.
If these people can threaten your business with regulations, taxes, or even things like antitrust, they can make you do whatever they say without ever passing a law. And with no law you have no recourse, nothing to sue over or take to the courts to get some kind of justice. All you have is the media and the hope that the public will be as outraged over these injustices as individuals would be were the wrongdoing occurring to them.
We have to get hype when we learn about these activities. Demand action to reign these bottom dwellers in, and stop supporting the mechanism they use to deploy these tactics in the first place.
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