Was it any surprise that one of the biggest social media platforms was colluding with the U.S. government to censor Americans who stood against the “accepted narrative”? Whether it was banning Donald Trump, suppressing stories about Hunter Biden's laptop, or banning people for questioning the Covid vaccine's efficacy, it seems like Twitter would stop at nothing to ensure there were no dissenting opinions on the website.
If you haven't heard of the Twitter Files, let me give you a brief refresher: after Elon Musk bought Twitter, he promised to release files that would prove there was a concerted effort between the social media giant and the U.S. government to suppress free speech, and boy did he deliver.
In the Twitter Files, it was revealed that pro-Trump and pro-conservative messages were completely taken down from the platform, with some users even faced shadow bans to restrict them from reaching their followers with Tweets.
While banning someone from a website may not sound like the end of the world, it's important to keep in mind the message that this sends to Americans: apparently half of us hold opinions that are unacceptable to the liberal elites who run Silicon Valley.
The Twitter Files may come to represent the biggest breach of the First Amendment by the U.S. government in this century. The suppresion and censorship of free speech might even rival that of the Alien and Sedition Acts, part of which criminalized false or malicious statements about the federal government.
Whether or not the offenses committed by executives at Twitter (and within the U.S. government) were unconstitutional remains unclear, but one thing is certain: everyone who was trying to censor the political right not only succeeded, they were also permitted to continue censoring Americans without serious ramifications.
To read a more in-depth analysis of the Twitter Files, here is an article from The Federalist. An excerpt of the article can be found below:
After Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, he fired a slew of useless or insubordinate employees, instituted new content moderation policies, and tried to reform a woke corporate culture that bordered (and still borders) on parody.
In the process, Musk coordinated with Taibbi and Weiss on the publication of a series of stories based on internal Twitter documents related to an array of major political events going back years: the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, Twitter’s secret policy of shadowbanning, President Trump’s suspension from Twitter after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, the co-opting of Twitter by the FBI to suppress “election disinformation” ahead of the 2020 election, Twitter’s involvement in a Pentagon overseas psy-op campaign, its silencing of dissent from the official Covid narrative, its complicity in the Russiagate hoax, and its gradual capitulation to the direct involvement of the U.S. intelligence community — with the FBI as a go-between — in content moderation.
