Juno News - Twitter Files trigger EPIC meltdown

00:00:00.000 Welcome everyone to Ratioed. My name is Harrison Faulkner. Well if you're reading

00:00:11.640 Canada's state-sponsored propaganda at the CBC over the weekend, or if you were

00:00:15.480 reading one of Canada's many legacy media state-funded newspapers like the

00:00:20.040 Toronto Star, or perhaps if you were watching one of Canada's failing TV

00:00:24.120 news stations like Global News or our favorite news station over at Ratioed,

00:00:27.900 that being CTV news, you would have no idea that the biggest story of the year,

00:00:31.800 the most important free speech story of a generation, dropped on Friday. I'm

00:00:36.120 talking about Matt Taibbi's bombshell reporting on the Twitter files. Now we

00:00:40.980 all know that Twitter and Facebook were involved in censoring the Hunter Biden

00:00:44.280 laptop story, everybody knows that, but what we didn't know was just how much

00:00:47.700 influence the DNC and the Biden campaign had on Twitter staff to censor content

00:00:52.740 they didn't like, and also we didn't know was how willing Twitter was to censor

00:00:56.880 content on their platform, well because they just felt like it. So why should

00:01:00.120 this matter to you and why should it matter to Canadians? Well it's quite

00:01:02.380 simple really. Canadian legacy media have outright refused to cover this story, they

00:01:07.020 refuse to acknowledge the fact that we now know exactly what Twitter was doing, we

00:01:11.680 know exactly how much influence Joe Biden had on Twitter during the campaign, and

00:01:15.600 yet no journalist in Canada seems willing to write about this story. I wonder why

00:01:20.040 that could be, could it be perhaps that it goes against their narrative? Now we

00:01:22.920 definitely know it's not for a lack of interest in American news, I mean the CBC

00:01:26.820 writes slanderous articles against Donald Trump almost every single day, just go

00:01:30.780 to their front page. But for whatever reason, this story that doesn't shine the

00:01:35.020 best light on Joe Biden is not getting any coverage. And with Bill C-11 right

00:01:39.600 around the corner, online censorship needs to be at the front of mind for

00:01:42.900 Canadians. Whether it be from a social media company or whether it be from the

00:01:46.200 state, it's all the same. It is an attack on your free speech and it needs to be

00:01:49.980 confronted. And journalists should be asking these questions. I wonder why

00:01:53.880 they're not. Drop a like on the video, help us out by subscribing to the True

00:01:56.700 North YouTube channel, and the common question for the episode is this, is

00:02:00.180 legacy media journalism dead? Let me know in the comments what you think. Alright,

00:02:04.200 let's get into it. So let's dive into the Twitter files before we get into the

00:02:07.420 reaction or better yet the lack of reaction from Canada's legacy media. And

00:02:11.820 then we get into the negative reaction from American journalists who seem to be

00:02:14.980 crying over the fact that Matt Taibbi, an independent journalist, broke this story.

00:02:19.200 They're now accusing him of running PR for the richest man in the world. That's

00:02:22.500 quite rich coming from journalists who write for the Washington Post. And we're

00:02:25.860 also going to get into what we don't know because to me that's the most

00:02:28.200 interesting part of this reporting. It's the fact that Matt Taibbi's

00:02:31.380 reporting now opens the door to a whole potential of other stories, of other

00:02:35.520 instances in which Twitter has engaged in political influence on their platform.

00:02:39.960 This could really snowball and it could really snowball fast. So the Twitter files

00:02:43.320 may be the first big piece of journalism to be published exclusively on

00:02:47.820 Twitter. Matt Taibbi wrote this entire tweet thread as his reporting which is in

00:02:52.620 my opinion a fascinating turn in journalism. Oh and also just a few days

00:02:56.940 before Matt Taibbi dropped this bombshell he teamed up with Douglas Murray to

00:03:00.960 absolutely crush the mainstream media in a monk debate. Take a look at this score.

00:03:05.160 Him and Douglas Murray managed to flip the downtown Toronto Roy Thompson Hall

00:03:08.880 audience into completely rejecting mainstream media. It was an absolutely

00:03:13.740 perfect performance against a very weak washed-up Malcolm Gladwell and some

00:03:18.420 no-name New York Times columnist. That's just a bit of a side story. Let's get into

00:03:21.960 these Twitter files because that's the real story here. In a long 30 tweet Twitter

00:03:25.980 thread Matt Taibbi starts dropping internal communications between Twitter

00:03:30.900 staff during the 2020 election. Take a look at this. By 2020 requests from

00:03:35.620 connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to

00:03:39.180 another. More to review from the Biden team. The reply would come back handled.

00:03:43.200 This message comes in with five or six tweets to be deleted, to be censored on

00:03:48.240 behalf of the Biden campaign. Just incredible stuff. Celebrities or unknowns

00:03:53.160 alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party. And then you

00:03:57.600 have this message. I grabbed the first one under SI. Defer to safety on the high

00:04:02.100 profile second one. So Twitter was taking orders from political campaigns to

00:04:06.360 remove tweets and censor accounts because, well, the campaigns wanted them to be

00:04:10.860 censored. So that's part of the new information that we didn't know about

00:04:13.760 Twitter's censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story. It wasn't just the story

00:04:17.400 itself. It wasn't just the New York Post reporting. It was content that the

00:04:21.120 campaigns wanted removed or completely censored. It was random tweets. It was

00:04:25.600 tweets from unknown accounts or it was tweets from celebrities. Campaigns had this

00:04:30.100 influence to just outright remove content that they didn't want on the platform. Now in

00:04:35.420 Matt's reporting, it actually shows that Trump and Biden were both able to do

00:04:39.760 this. They were both able to censor content on Twitter, but it came down to

00:04:43.140 connections. It came down to how many people inside Twitter were on your side

00:04:47.220 and how much were they willing to help you out? And of course, who could have

00:04:50.200 guessed Twitter was leaning Biden. What a surprise there. As Taibbi points out in

00:04:55.020 this tweet, this system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter

00:04:59.480 was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were

00:05:03.360 more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left, well Democrats, than the right.

00:05:08.020 Here you can see data from Open Secrets. 99.7% of Twitter employees who made political

00:05:13.600 contributions sent their money to the Democrats. 99.73%. So if we're really

00:05:19.180 talking about which campaign is going to have the benefit of censoring content, it's

00:05:23.720 going one way and one way only. So this is where the Hunter Biden laptop story from

00:05:28.260 New York Post comes in. And a quick summary of the reporting is very important before we

00:05:31.720 go any further. The New York Post dropped a bombshell report on October 14th, 2020.

00:05:36.580 This report was damaging to Joe Biden's presidential campaign because using emails

00:05:41.000 obtained from Hunter Biden's laptop, the New York Post was able to connect the dots

00:05:44.680 and confirm that Hunter Biden had introduced then Vice President Joe Biden

00:05:49.600 to Ukrainian business contacts while Hunter Biden was serving on the board of the

00:05:54.000 energy company Burisma. And then less than a year after that introduction,

00:05:57.780 Joe Biden as Vice President pressured the Ukrainian government into firing the prosecutor

00:06:02.520 investigating the company that that executive worked for. So you can see why this reporting

00:06:07.740 was not something that Joe Biden wanted circulating on Twitter. So Joe Biden and Joe Biden's campaign,

00:06:13.920 which we now know from Matt Taibbi's reporting, wrote to Twitter to have this story censored.

00:06:18.180 And what did Twitter do? Well, we know what they did. They completely shut down the story,

00:06:22.280 labeled it as misinformation and stopped anyone from DMing the article on their platform. You could

00:06:28.160 not privately share the article to anyone else. United States legacy media, including Canadian

00:06:33.300 legacy media, ran with the narrative that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.

00:06:38.500 It was a cooked up Kremlin plot to try and lower Joe Biden's chances to become President of the United

00:06:43.140 States at the benefit of Donald Trump. As time went on after Joe Biden became President as the 2020

00:06:48.400 election faded into the rearview mirror, legacy media outlets in the United States who were running

00:06:53.600 with the Russian disinformation narrative slowly began to confirm the story as true. 769 days after

00:07:00.920 initially calling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation, CBS News confirmed the Hunter

00:07:06.800 Biden laptop story to be true. And the same exact thing happened with the New York Times and the

00:07:11.160 Washington Post in March 2022. So we know the Hunter Biden laptop story to be true. We know the contents

00:07:17.300 in those emails to be verified. And don't take my word for it, take it from the New York Times.

00:07:21.820 But during the election, when it mattered, when the story really could have had an influence,

00:07:26.020 Twitter interfered. Twitter meddled in the election and censored that story. So let's go back to

00:07:30.820 Taibbi's reporting on this. He writes this, Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story,

00:07:35.880 removing links and posting warnings that it may be unsafe. They even blocked its transmission via

00:07:40.540 direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases. White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was

00:07:47.040 locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from the Trump

00:07:51.420 campaign staffer, Mike Hahn, who seethed, at least pretend to care for the next 20 days.

00:07:56.400 So they censored the White House spokeswoman for sharing a true factual story during the election

00:08:02.700 campaign. If that's not election meddling, if that's not election interference, I don't know what

00:08:06.560 is. So all of this now brings us to what we don't know. What we don't know is how many other times

00:08:12.740 Twitter has used this tactic of censoring content, censoring information, because someone has told

00:08:18.760 them to do it. Whether it be a political candidate, whether it be a world leader, whether it be a

00:08:22.440 company, has told them to suppress information. Remember that at the beginning of COVID, you would

00:08:26.620 be censored on Twitter. You'd be locked out of your account on Twitter if you dared to talk about the lab

00:08:31.780 leak theory for COVID-19. If you dared to allege that perhaps COVID came from a Wuhan lab. The same 0.72

00:08:37.000 thing would happen on Facebook. So what else have they been up to? What else has Twitter been up to?

00:08:42.160 That's the big question that any real journalist would start asking. But so far, nothing. Nothing at

00:08:49.320 all. Let's take a look actually at what Canadian media are reporting on, if at all. Let's take a look

00:08:54.440 at what Global News is reporting. Hmm, seems quiet over there. What about CTV News?

00:09:00.840 Perhaps the state propaganda outlet, the CBC. Oh, wait a second. What's this story here? Here we go.

00:09:09.160 Trump condemned after calling for partial termination of constitution over his election line.

00:09:14.040 Seems like not what we're looking for. However, the CBC, along with the Globe and Mail, decided to

00:09:20.260 pick up this story from the Associated Press. No Canadian journalist was willing to write this story,

00:09:24.780 obviously. So they picked up a story from an American wire news service, the Associated Press. You're

00:09:29.680 probably thinking to yourself, well, this is another Trump attack article. Why is he bringing this up to

00:09:34.000 us right now? Well, as a matter of fact, the Associated Press did mention the Twitter files.

00:09:39.760 Only 10 paragraphs buried into this story and completely botched. Take a look at this.

00:09:46.760 Trump's comments came after Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, said he would reveal how Twitter engaged in

00:09:52.000 free speech suppression. See how they use scare quotes for that? Free speech suppression. Not like,

00:09:56.460 of course, it was actual free speech suppression, right? That wasn't free speech suppression.

00:10:00.420 Quote, free speech suppression leading up to the 2020 election. But files released Friday,

00:10:05.580 which focused on the tech company's confused response to a story about Biden's son, Hunter,

00:10:10.120 do not show Democrats trying to limit the story. Uh, excuse me, Associated Press, that's not the story.

00:10:16.520 Have you been paying attention? The story is not Democrats trying to suppress the story. The story is

00:10:21.620 Twitter suppressing the story. Obviously that's what we're talking about. Obviously this is free speech

00:10:26.400 suppression by a social media company, not the Democrats. Obviously the Democrats wouldn't want

00:10:31.500 the story. The Republicans wouldn't want the story if it was about Trump. And I would call out this

00:10:34.960 journalist, but the CBC hides who it is. They just say it's from the Associated Press. Classic.

00:10:39.560 Now to be fair, I could find one Canadian newspaper writing the story. The Toronto Sun,

00:10:43.300 the conservative newspaper. Shocker. So what you have here is a journalist working independently,

00:10:48.260 telling the truth, breaking a massive story and exposing political corruption inside social media

00:10:55.380 companies. A big story, a very important story. And in a different era, perhaps journalists who

00:11:00.980 didn't report the story might say to themselves, well, that is a great piece of journalism. I'm

00:11:05.280 really glad that someone was able to do it because after all, our job collectively is to speak truth

00:11:09.160 to power. But instead, of course, what did we get? We got a bunch of lefty legacy media journalists

00:11:14.340 in the U.S. crying over this story, trying to do everything they can to delegitimize Taibbi's

00:11:20.260 reporting and attacking him for telling the truth. This is from New York Times writer Wajahat Ali.

00:11:27.200 Matt Taibbi. What sad, disgraceful downfall. I swear, kids, he did good work back in the day.

00:11:33.660 Shouldn't be a cautionary tale for everyone. Selling your soul for the richest white nationalist on earth.

00:11:38.520 Well, he'll eat well for the rest of his life, I guess. But is it worth it? Elon Musk, a white 0.79

00:11:43.340 nationalist? And leave it to a New York Times journalist who talked down to his Twitter

00:11:46.720 followers as kids. Of course, it's from the New York Times. They think they're so much better

00:11:50.860 than us. This is from woke, unhinged, lunatic MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan. Imagine volunteering to do 0.99

00:11:57.300 online PR work for the world's richest man on a Friday night in service of nakedly and cynically

00:12:02.440 right-wing narratives and then pretending you're speaking truth to power. Take a look at this from

00:12:06.440 the NBC reporter Ben Collins. Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the

00:12:12.040 world. Humiliating. If breaking the biggest online free speech story in a generation is bad for your

00:12:17.300 journalistic credibility, what does working for NBC News do? I can only imagine. This report from

00:12:22.780 Taibbi was just the first in what is predicted to be a series of reports coming from Matt over the

00:12:27.760 next few days, exposing more of what's been going on behind the scenes at Twitter. We're going to be

00:12:32.680 following it at True North, unlike the legacy media journalists who want nothing to do with it.

00:12:36.700 That's going to do it for us this week on the show. Thank you so much for tuning in.

00:12:39.500 My name is Harrison Faulkner, and this is Reishi.

Juno News - December 05, 2022

Twitter Files trigger EPIC meltdown

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