Brownstone Institute
The EU Files: What Elon Musk Is Not Telling You About Twitter Censorship
From the Brownstone Institute
The “Twitter Files” have exposed numerous contacts between US government officials and Twitter and requests for suppression of accounts or content: notably, in the context of alleged Covid-19 “disinformation.” But what they have not revealed is that there was in fact a formal government program explicitly dedicated to “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” in which Twitter, as well as all other major social media platforms, were enrolled.
As part of this program, the platforms were submitting monthly (later bi-monthly) reports to the government on their censorship efforts. Below is a picture of an archive of the “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” reports.
I did not have to hack into the intranet of the US government to find them. All I had to do was look on the public website of the European Commission. For the government in question is not, after all, the US government, but the European Commission.
The reports are available here. Lest there be any doubt that what is at issue in “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” is censorship – but how could there be any doubt? – the Commission website specifies that the reports include information on “demoted and removed content containing false and/or misleading information likely to cause physical harm or impair public health policies” (author’s emphasis).
Indeed, the Twitter reports, in particular, include data not only on removed content, but also on outright account suspensions. It is thanks precisely to the data that Twitter was gathering to satisfy the EU’s expectations that we know that 11,230 accounts were suspended under Twitter’s recently discontinued Covid-19 Misleading Information Policy. The below chart, for instance, is taken from Twitter’s last (March-April 2022) report to the EU. Note that the data is “global,” i.e. Twitter was reporting back to the European Commission on its censorship of content and accounts all over the world, not just in the EU.
To be clear then: It is strictly impossible that Twitter has not had contact with EU officials about censoring Covid-19 dissent, because the EU had a program specifically dedicated to the latter and Twitter was part of it. Furthermore, it is strictly impossible that Twitter is not continuing to have contact with EU officials about censoring online content and speech more generally.
This is because the EU’s “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” program was launched within the framework of its more general so-called Code of Practice on Disinformation. Under the Code, Twitter and other online platforms and search engines have assumed commitments to combat – i.e. suppress – what the European Commission deems to be “misinformation” or “disinformation.”
In June of last year, a “strengthened” Code of Practice on Disinformation was adopted, which created formalized reporting requirements for Code signatories like Twitter. Other major signatories of the Code include Google/YouTube, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft – which is notably the owner of LinkedIn – and TikTok.
Furthermore, the strengthened Code also created a “permanent task force” on disinformation, in which all code signatories are required to participate and which is chaired by none other than the European Commission itself. The “task force” also includes representatives of the EU’s foreign service. (For more details, see Section IX of the Code, titled “Permanent Task-Force.”)
And if this were not enough, in September of last year, the EU opened a “digital embassy” in San Francisco, in order precisely to be close to Twitter and other leading American tech companies. For the moment, the embassy reportedly shares office space with the Irish consulate: meaning, per Google maps, that it is around a 10-minute drive from Twitter headquarters.
So, it is strictly impossible that Twitter has not had and is not continuing to have contact – indeed extensive and regular contact – with EU officials about censoring content and accounts that the European Commission deems “mis-” or “disinformation.” But we have heard absolutely nothing about this in the “Twitter Files.”
Why? The answer is: because EU censorship really is government censorship, i.e. censorship that Twitter is required to carry out on pain of sanction. This is the difference between the EU censorship and what Elon Musk himself has denounced as “US government censorship.” The latter has amounted to nudges and requests, but was never obligatory and could never be obligatory, thanks to the First Amendment and the fact that there has never been any enforcement mechanism. Any law creating such an enforcement mechanism would be obviously unconstitutional. Hence, Twitter could always simply say no.
But so long as it wants to remain on the EU market, Twitter cannot say no to the demands of the European Commission. As discussed in my previous article here, the enforcement mechanism that renders the Code of Practice obligatory is the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA gives the European Commission power to impose fines of up to 6% percent of global turnover on platforms that it finds to be in violation of the Code: n.b. global turnover, not just turnover on the EU market!
The Commission has not been shy about reminding Twitter and the other tech companies of this threat, thus posting the below tweet last June on the very day that the “strengthened” Code of Practice was announced.
This was before the DSA had even been adopted by the European Parliament! But the DSA has been the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Twitter and the other online platforms for the last two years, and it is now law. Once designated a “very large online platform” by the Commission – which is inevitable in its case – Twitter will have 4 months to demonstrate compliance, as the below “DSA Timeline” makes clear.
Moreover, the power to apply financial sanction is not the only extraordinary enforcement power that the DSA gives the Commission. The Commission is also given the power to conduct warrantless inspections of company premises, sealing the premises for the duration of the inspection, and gaining access to whatever “books or records” it pleases. (See Article 69 of the DSA here.) Such inspections, which have been previously used in the context of EU competition law, are quaintly known in the literature as “dawn raids.” (See here, for example.)
This is why Elon Musk and the “Twitter Files” are so verbose about alleged “US government censorship” and so willing to “out” the private communications of US government officials, but have remained suitably mum about EU censorship demands and have not outed the private communications of any EU officials or representatives. Elon Musk is being held hostage by the European Union, and no hostage in his or her right mind is going to do anything to irritate the hostage-takers.
Far from any sign of defiance of the Code and the DSA, what we get from Elon Musk is repeated pledges of fealty: like the below tweet that he posted after meeting with EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton in January. (For an earlier such pledge in the form of a joint video message with Breton, see here.)
And if Musk should ever have any doubts about what he needs to do to satisfy the EU’s requirements, help is always close at hand – indeed a mere 10 minutes aways. For the EU’s “digital ambassador” to Silicon Valley, Gerard de Graaf, is one of the authors of the DSA.
But if Elon Musk is so fearful about crossing the EU, then why has he restored so many Covid-19 dissident accounts? Wasn’t that an act of defiance of the EU and notably of its “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” program?
Well, no, it was not.
Firstly, it should be recalled that Musk had originally promised a “general amnesty” of all suspended accounts. As discussed in my earlier article here, this quickly drew a stern and public rebuke from none other than Thierry Breton, and Musk failed to follow through. Instead, in accordance with Breton’s demands, there has been a case-by-case restoration of selected accounts, which has recently slowed down to a trickle.
@OpenVaet, whose own Twitter account remains suspended, has been maintaining a partial inventory of suspended Twitter accounts. As of this writing, only 99 of the 215 accounts in the sample, or roughly 46% percent, have been restored. (See @OpenVaet’s spreadsheet of still banned and restored accounts here.) Assuming the sample is representative, this would mean that over 6,000 accounts in all are still suspended.
And this is to say nothing of the more insidious form of censorship that is “visibility filtering” or “shadow-banning.” Per the motto “Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach,” Elon Musk has never denied that Twitter would continue to engage in the latter. Many of the returning Covid-19 dissidents have noticed a curious lack of engagement, leading them to wonder if their accounts are not in fact still subjected to unannounced special measures.
But, secondly, and more to the point, have another look at the archive of the “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” reports shown above. That is the completearchive. The March-April 2022 reports are the final set of reports. Last June, as noted here, the European Commission discontinued the program, folding the reporting on Covid-19 “disinformation” into the more general reporting requirements established under the “strengthened” Code of Practice on Disinformation.
By this time, most of the most onerous Covid-19 measures in the EU, including “vaccine passports,” had already been ended, and most of the remainder have been gradually rolled back since. Elon Musk thus allowed (some) Covid-19 dissent back onto Twitter when, at least in the EU, there was hardly any public policy to dissent from anymore.
But the EU’s censorship regime as such is still very much in place, and censorship has by no means come to end on Twitter. Thus, on the very night of the Brazilian elections on October 30, Twitter was already censoring local reports of electoral fraud. The famous “misleading” warning labels that had once been used to quarantine reports of Covid-19 vaccine harm now made a reappearance, insisting that according to unnamed “experts,” Brazil’s elections were “safe and secure.” (For examples, see my thread here.)
Whether electoral integrity/fraud in countries of interest, the war in Ukraine or the “next pandemic” for which the EU is already reserving mRNA “vaccine” capacity, you may rest assured that the EU will not lack new subjects of “disinformation” requiring censorship and that Elon Musk and Twitter will oblige.
Whether this censorship takes the form of outright suspensions and content removals or content “demotion” and account “visibility filtering” is a secondary matter. The European Commission will be able to work out such details with Twitter and the other platforms.
Indeed, the DSA further requires the platforms to grant the Commission access to their back offices, including, as Thierry Breton triumphantly notes in a blog post here, “the ‘black box’ of algorithms that are at the heart of platforms’ systems.” As noted on the Commission website, the Commission is even setting up a European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency, in order to be able to better fulfill its “supervisory” role in this regard.
Needless to say, such “transparency” does not extend to mere users such as you or me. For us, the algorithmic functioning of the platforms will remain a “black box.” But the Commission will be able to know everything about it and to demand modifications to ensure compliance with the EU’s requirements.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For me, it’s not difficult to see what the world’s real rulers are trying to achieve. They’re trying to obtain more power and control for themselves. In fact, they’ve largely already achieved this goal. The terrifying thought is they are far from done.
We know they are not finished because their most conspicuous initiative at the moment is their quest to slay the petulances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The correct definition of misinformation/disinformation is any speech that challenges what authority figures say is the truth.
The world’s real rulers don’t want their pronouncements challenged, as this would pose a grave risk to their continued rule and their ability to implement myriad programs that will effectively defeat, once and for all, human freedom.
As long as persuasive dissent doesn’t go viral, the Powers that Be know they will achieve their objectives, which are authoritarian world government much closer to the communist utopia envisioned by thinkers and tyrants like Marx, Mao, and Lenin.
But real communism is not the real goal either, as communism was supposed to make every person equal. The modern form of communism, not unlike all previous forms of communism, ensures the world’s elite organizations will remain ultra-powerful while the proletariat will beg for crumbs.
Who are the World’s Elite Organizations?
They are every important organization – those with great influence (and police-state powers) – including all governmental agencies and departments as well as international government organizations like the UN, WHO, and European Union.
They are also all the major “crony” corporations that benefit from close ties to government and non-governmental organizations.
Plus, foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which have more money than many nations and certainly more ideological commitment to deploy their resources to implement their agendas.
A simple method to define the establishment organizations would be to simply identify the world’s key authorized narratives and then ask yourself what organizations zealously support these initiatives (aka “The Current Thing”).
In the last four years, any organization that vociferously supported all the Covid protocols would be examples of “captured” organizations that enthusiastically supported the Current Thing.
But these same organizations also support all the other ascendant political movements, such as the fight against (allegedly) man-made Climate Change, numerous wars or “interventions” to advance “democracy,” central bank digital currency, and ever more mRNA “vaccines.”
Furthermore, it’s obvious these same organizations support initiatives designed to discredit long-accepted cultural norms in favor of more “progressive” thinking that normalizes gender reversal, race grievances, LGBT+ initiatives, or any reform that advances “diversity, inclusion, or equity.”
The promotion of policies that make mass illegal immigration much easier to achieve has also become a crucial program of our planet’s establishment rulers.
I believe the above summary provides an accurate assessment of the state of the world today.
I also note that it’s an undeniable truth that every program of these establishment organizations has made the world a darker place, with future developments planned by our leaders guaranteed to decrease the qualify of life for children or young adults who may live another 50 to 80 years.
For example, at the moment, unelected delegates who serve on the World Health Organization continue to deliberate in secret as they finalize a new health treaty and make changes to “international regulations” that will affect virtually every citizen on the planet in decades to come.
The salient point about the WHO is that this agency was provably and disastrously wrong on every policy and piece of guidance it issued involving the response to Covid-19.
Another way to identify the members of the Establishment ruling class is to simply identify those who were spectacularly wrong on every key issue of our times. These are the people and organizations who are seeking even more power and control.
Who Will Prevail in the End?
The good news is our side – those who still believe in human liberty – vastly outnumbers the group that is clearly aligned against us.
Above I listed many of the world’s captured organizations. These organizations are staffed by probably a couple hundred thousand key leaders who are committed to supporting the nefarious and freedom -eradicating components of “The Current Thing.”
As I’ll show below, the numbers who identify with “our side” surely exceed tens of millions of citizens.
The bad news is the the enemies of freedom – the worshippers of Big Brother – control all of the institutions and organizations in the world that actually matter.
Whoever sought to capture all of these organizations – from the CDC, the military, the Federal Reserve, the WEF, and the mainstream press – didn’t embark on these projects just to entertain themselves. They did this for a reason. This reason? They wanted to use these organizations to advance/achieve their goals.
To be more specific, they must have known that if they captured all of these organizations it would be almost impossible for any private citizens to stop their plans.
Our Side Actually has a Major Numeric Advantage
Still, the committed generals and staff officers who are seeking even more global control of the masses are…greatly outnumbered by people who are repulsed by their programs.
I’m currently working on a business idea that might supplement the dissident class of independent writers or “citizen journalists” found in the alternative media and on Substack.
In working on this project, I’m very interested in gauging the size of the market for content that resonates with the world’s population that still values freedom. This would be the group of citizens who is skeptical of the authorized narratives and values (genuine) “watchdog” journalism.
My estimate is there must be tens of millions of people who think like I do, people who would like to stop all the goals of the WEF, Davos, and WHO crowd.
The Tucker Carlson Metric
Perhaps the simplest way to estimate the size of this market is to examine the audience of one of the world’s best-known “contrarian journalists,” Tucker Carlson.
Before Carlson was fired by Fox News, his nightly news show routinely drew four million viewers per night, which made it the top-rated news program in North America. Over the course of a month, the show might have attracted 10 million viewers.
As we all know, Carlson was fired for producing content that was extremely popular with millions of adults. But Carlson didn’t disappear or stop producing “taboo” commentary and news segments, he simply moved to Twitter (now X) and kept doing the exact same thing.
Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin garnered more than 150 million views and his various streaming podcasts routinely double or triple the number of people he was reaching on Fox News.
Since Tucker covers many of the same “taboo” subjects I do, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 million of Carlson’s regular viewers strongly oppose everything the world’s so-called leaders want to make a reality. And that’s just Carlson’s audience.
Substack has more than 35 million subscribers, probably 20 percent of whom are searching for content they know they won’t find in, say, the New York Times or CBS News. That would be a “market” of 7 million freedom-supporting citizens.
Tucker was recently the guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast show. Rogan probably has an audience just as large and loyal as Carlson. Indeed, in their wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rogan made the point that shows like his and Tucker’s should now be considered “mainstream”…because they reach far more viewers than, say, the newscasts of the big TV networks (which actually aren’t so big anymore).
As far as I can tell, all the “alternative media” outlets are growing rapidly while all the traditional news outlets are Dead Men Walking.
Again, this is an extremely encouraging sign for anyone who believes that skeptical and independent speech is important to help ensure a world where real freedom might continue to exist.
But I Haven’t Mentioned the Biggest Group of Citizens
While “our side” greatly outnumbers the figure of key employees occupying all the captured organizations, the real population group that matters is the immense group that is sitting out this existential battle for freedom.
The citizens who will probably determine the outcome of this battle are the people who have not discovered the Substack contrarians or who never watch Joe Rogan…or who think Tucker Carlson is a dangerous extremist who should have been fired by Fox (and should now be fired by Elon Musk and X). This group numbers in the billions.
(This would be the group that doesn’t want to think anymore about the Covid response or think about the possibility that scary-looking, worm-like clots might be in their veins and arteries right now.)
This group just wants to get through each day with adequate supplies of bread…and if they’re given a few mildly entertaining circuses to distract them from the challenges of their daily lives, that’s enough.
For this segment of the population, any big debate on “freedom” is either boring, not germane to their lives, or they love and appreciate Big Brother and are convinced he is protecting them.
What this means to you and me is that the denouement of this historic battle will be determined by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population.
On one side, we have the 200,000 or so leaders of thousands of important captured organizations. On the other side, we have 10 to 20 million citizens who’ve found each other in the alternative media. In the middle, we have a couple billion people who are oblivious to what’s really at stake.
Whatever way this massive middle group swings in the future, so goes the world.
One suspects the world’s real rulers know that their track record and planned agendas won’t stand up to close scrutiny. They know that their arguments are not as persuasive and could easily be debunked if our side’s arguments were to “go viral.”
To help keep this middle group indifferent or on their side, the Deep State concocted the concepts of disinformation and misinformation to smear or throttle the influence of those on our side.
The ever-growing Censorship Industrial Complex has performed its most important job with (disgusting) distinction. For now at least, the depressing truth is the masses don’t seem to care much about the issues that some of us think are tectonic.
This means recruiting the legions of people we need to recruit will be a strangely tough sale.
Our charge of persuading more of our neighbors to join our side has been made far more difficult by the false narrative that all of the important disinformation is coming from citizens like us, when, in fact, we don’t control any of the important information.
If and when the masses realize who’s been producing the real disinformation, freedom might pull an upset victory.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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