UPDATES:
……Former Twitter executive Anika Collier Navaroli testified on what she repeatedly called the “nuanced” standard used by her and her staff on censorship.
……Navaroli then testified how she felt that there should have been much more censorship and how she fought with the company to remove more material that she and her staff considered “dog whistles” and “coded” messaging.
……”“Instead of asking just free speech versus safety to say free speech for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the winds so that people can speak freely.”
……The statement was reminiscent to the statement of the former CEO Parag Agrawal. After taking over as CEO, Agrawal pledged to regulate content as “reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.” Agrawal said the company would “focus less on thinking about free speech” because “speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.”
Navaroli was saying that it is not enough to simply balance free speech against public safety (a standard that most free speech advocates would oppose as ill-defined and fluid). Instead, Navaroli and her staff would decide “free speech for whom and public safety for whom.”
In other words, they determined what was free speech based on their leftwing politics, not safety.
Former Twitter executives conceded Wednesday they made a mistake by blocking access to the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Even so, the execs testified House Oversight Committee hearing adamantly denied Republican assertions they were pressured by Democrats and law enforcement to suppress the story, even as Republican panel members repeatedly tried to draw a line between the Biden campaign, Twitter, and even the CIA.
‘The decisions here aren’t straightforward, and hindsight is 20/20,’ Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, told the committee. ‘It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected, but not confirmed, cyberattack by another government on a presidential election.’
He added, ‘I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.’
The admission came at a hearing where Democrats obtained testimony from another former Twitter employee to testify that the Trump White House contacted the company to try to get it to take down a tweet by model Chrissy Teigen calling Trump a ‘p**** a** b****.’
Roth’s comment comes despite new Twitter owner Elon Musk asserting that ‘Twitter files’ he ordered released show the company acted ‘under orders from the government.’
The three former executives appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to testify for the first time about the company´s decision to initially block from Twitter a New York Post article in October 2020 about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.
Emboldened by Twitter’s new leadership in billionaire Elon Musk – whom they see as more sympathetic to conservatives than the company’s previous administration – Republicans used the hearing to push a long-standing and unproven theory that social media companies including Twitter are biased against them.
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said the hearing is the panel’s ‘first step in examining the coordination between the federal government and Big Tech to restrict protected speech and interfere in the democratic process.’
……The witnesses Republicans subpoenaed were Roth, Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, and James Baker, the company’s former deputy general counsel who previously held a top-level legal post at the FBI.
None of the meddling and censorship was accidental. Twitter was a willing participant.
Every three-letter weaponized agency in the Swamp dictated which accounts to ban and posts to censor. The Dems did their part, as well.
Big Tech social media and the FBI collaborated to control information and disappear anything they didn’t like. Election fraud, Biden’s corruption, the Hunter Biden laptop, and Fauci’s malfeasance were all subject to the kind of suppression found in communist China.
Former FBI General Counsel Jim Baker was part of the fake Russian collusion investigations. He was then hired as deputy General Counsel for Twitter. Let that sink in.
Marjorie Taylor Greene lowered the boom on former censorship tool Yoel Roth:
……Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who destroyed top Twitter official Yoel Roth after he used his position to harm conservatives, whom he openly despised on his personal account, where he called Trump and his administration “actual Nazis.”
Oversight Committee Chair James Comer showed Roth’s tweet to members of the committee:
Here’s the Tweet as it appeared on the site:
……One of the most heated moments of the congressional hearing occurred when the outspoken firebrand from Georgia accused Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, of election interference when her campaign Twitter account was shut down amid her 2022 campaign.
……Rep. Taylor Greene ripped into Roth for election interference when he allowed her account to be suspended during her campaign while allowing child pornography to flourish on Twitter. The Georgia lawmaker dropped a MOAB bomb on the censorship weasel when she shared an example from Roth’s doctoral dissertation, titled “Gay Data,” where he allegedly argued that minors should have access to the adult, male gay “hookup” site Grindr.
Rep Taylor Greene blasted the disgusting Roth, “You permanently banned my account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter!”
MTG drops Truth MOAB on panel of former Twitter censorship bosses 💣 pic.twitter.com/n0Ei18Qlvy
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 8, 2023
The Twitter Files blew the lid off of the government-Big Tech collusion by displaying the actual communications between the Dems, the FBI, and the Twitter hierarchy.
Their own words and actions are staring them right in the face, but they deny everything. It’s hard to spin the evidence, so denial is their only defense.
Who are we going to believe? Them, or our lying eyes?
In his opening remarks, the former FBI lawyer (Jim Baker) also went so far as to claim that he erred on the side of “caution” when it came to handling the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“I did not act unlawfully or otherwise inappropriately in any manner with respect to Hunter Biden’s laptop,” Baker said. “Indeed, documents that Twitter has disclosed publicly reflect I urged caution with respect to the matter and noted that we needed more information to fully assess what was going on and to decide what to do.”
Documents uncovered in the “Twitter Files” also suggest that Baker aided in a domestic intelligence coup against Americans during the 2020 election by priming the lead censors at Twitter to discredit reporting on the Biden family business. The FBI, which was already aware of the laptop, had a classified briefing with Baker one month before the story broke (something Baker refused to admit to in the hearing).
……Even when Roth said Twitter’s policies didn’t justify throttling the laptop story, Baker pushed for censorship.
Former Twitter executives who met with the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday were given a stern warning from one representative, who said arrests were coming their way.
The purpose of the hearing was to address how Twitter blocked the sharing of a report on Hunter Biden’s laptop by the New York Post prior to the 2020 election.
……during questioning, several members of the House Oversight Committee, including Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., were firm in their questioning of the representatives who appeared on Wednesday.
Higgins told Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, former Twitter deputy counsel James Baker and Anika Collier Navaroli, a former employee at Twitter, that the bottom line was the FBI had the “Biden Crime Family” laptop for a year, knowing it was leaking and that those leaks would hurt the Biden campaign.
Higgins accused the FBI of using its relationship with Twitter to suppress criminal evidence against Joe Biden, a month before the 2020 election.
“You, ladies and gentlemen, interfered with the United States of America 2020 presidential election, knowingly and willingly,” Higgins said. “That’s the bad news, it’s gonna get worse because this is the investigation part. Later comes the arrest part. Your attorneys are familiar with that.”
Every malfeasant who took part in this, including the FBI echelons and the Big Tech censors should be indicted. I’ll believe it when it happens.
Related posts:
https://sfcmac.com/twitter-files-part-vi-twitters-constant-and-pervasive-dealings-with-the-fbi/
https://sfcmac.com/twitter-files-part-vii-the-fbi-the-hunter-biden-laptop/
Related articles:
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/marjorie-taylor-greene-im-so-glad-you-lost-your-jobs/
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1623338068051910658