00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today in the Charlie Kirk show, I go through the breaking news of how I was one of the top stories on the planet and Twitter targeted me personally.
00:00:54.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:38.000Because I had no idea I wasn't paying attention.
00:01:40.000They said, Well, you were just mentioned in the latest Twitter files under a threat tag, do not amplify.
00:01:48.000So then I scrambled and made it work and talked about this recent piece of news on Tucker's program.
00:01:54.000But I want to take a step back and tell you my history with Twitter and why Twitter felt it was necessary to categorize my personal Twitter account with a do not amplify threat tag.
00:02:10.000I first started my Twitter when I was a junior in high school.
00:02:15.000I remember the class that I was sitting in.
00:02:18.000I remember exactly what was going on with some teacher droning on about something that was largely irrelevant.
00:02:25.000And we all had computers in this class, and we were supposed to listen to this teacher, nice person, but a bunch of nonsense.
00:02:32.000And I remember days prior in high school, people were talking about this new website called Twitter, where people like Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James could verifiably communicate with their audience.
00:03:25.000I understood what messaging would work.
00:03:28.000I understood how to get things trending.
00:03:31.000And there was a small community of us that would do the same, Jack Pesobic as well.
00:03:35.000And then in 2016, all of that work I put into Twitter actually started to pay off.
00:03:42.000I got verified on Twitter in the fall of 2016.
00:03:46.000And then Donald Trump, of course, won the presidency.
00:03:48.000And Donald Trump legitimized the platform of Twitter beyond our wildest imagination.
00:03:55.000In the spring of 17, in the summer of 17, I started to really lean in and say, oh, wow, okay, if you tweet every 25 minutes, if you word them in a certain way, if you're able to capture the spiciness of the messaging while also getting into the news cycle, you can really start to make things go viral.
00:04:17.000And so then in 2018 and 2019, my Twitter became more than just kind of a an annoyance for the Democrat Party.
00:04:27.000It started to materialize as a legitimate threat to the regime.
00:04:34.000In fact, I was so focused, so I'll use the word obsessed with Twitter that it got to the point where I was averaging 115 to 120,000 retweets a day.
00:04:51.000Now, for those of you that aren't familiar with the platform, you're like, oh, what is Twitter?
00:04:56.000In fact, I remember a piece written by Jonathan Swan came out by Axios where they did an objective analytical analysis of all the Twitter accounts in the world.
00:05:14.000And they concluded that my Twitter account, the kid that didn't go to college, at the time was 23, 24 years old.
00:05:24.000Turning point was a fraction of the size that it is now.
00:05:27.000I would go to college campuses and go debate communists.
00:05:31.000That my Twitter account was the fourth largest Twitter account on the planet.
00:05:37.000I remember Donald Trump was so struck, President Trump was so struck by that article that he had his staff printed out and he signed it and sent it.
00:05:47.000He was number one and I was number four or five.
00:05:51.000And that was just based not on followers, but on engagement, on likes, retweets, shares, comments.
00:05:58.000And so if you were trying to stop the MAGA movement, if you were trying to stop the conservative movement, if you were trying to thwart or stunt our momentum, to their great surprise, the kid that doesn't have a cable television show at the time did not have a radio program, at the time did not have a podcast, at the time did not have a live stream, but just a Twitter account, he became a problem.
00:06:26.000Now, mind you, I understood the Twitter rules very well.
00:06:44.000The rules were not fair, but I knew them.
00:06:47.000And despite the unfair rules, I knew not to cross them because, you know, some people say, well, Charlie, why didn't they just ban you?
00:06:53.000Because I never gave them an outright reason to ban me because I knew the rules.
00:06:58.000And I played under their silly rules, despite the fact that they're totalitarian in nature, because I never wanted to be a martyr and lose my Twitter account because I knew that it actually was helpful in reaching millions of the unconverted and persuadable people.
00:07:12.000And so then 2020 came along and the virus spread across our land.
00:07:19.000And here I am with the fourth or fifth largest Twitter account, 115, 120, 125,000 retweets a day.
00:07:28.000And you might think that I'm exaggerating these numbers.
00:07:30.000They're all there in my Twitter dashboard.
00:07:32.000You can go back and you could see what my engagement was in the calendar year of 2019.
00:07:38.000And when I mean I was obsessed with Twitter, I would just be continually refreshing.
00:07:42.000And when you study it for six or seven hours sometimes a day of what is working and what messaging is flying and what is getting retweets and what is getting likes, eventually you get good at it.
00:07:54.000If you want to get good at something in life, focus on it and put energy towards it.
00:08:22.000But it was interesting: they placed me on 1A, the front page of the New York Times.
00:08:30.000Now, this was April 19th, 2020, during the height of the lockdowns, the height of the virus.
00:08:37.000And what they were doing, what the New York Times was doing that I didn't quite appreciate at the time, is they were laying the foundation.
00:08:48.000They were setting the basis, the groundwork for my censorship, for the censorship of my account.
00:08:57.000You see, they wrote in the New York Times that my engagement was more than CNN and the New York Times, the own piece that they were writing.
00:09:05.000And it gave them an ability for them to send this to Twitter and say, keep an eye out for this guy.
00:09:11.000They couldn't kick me off the platform, but what happened next, thanks to Elon Musk, is shocking.
00:09:18.000It is Soviet, and it should not be tolerated in a decent and civil society.
00:09:24.000A kid from Chicago who didn't go to college, tweeting about current events without a national television program, became such a threat to the World Economic Forum, to Washington, D.C., that they had to assign a threat-level tag of do not amplify.
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00:10:47.000Somebody said, Charlie, don't brag that you were a master of Twitter.
00:10:52.000You see, this is where I disagree a little bit.
00:10:54.000I was influencing millions of people every single day.
00:10:58.000We were influencing so many people that Twitter went out of their way to censor us and to give us the threat assessment tag of do not amplify.
00:11:09.000Now, in the summer of 2018, and I really have Candace Owens to thank for this, I sat down and met with Jack Dorsey.
00:11:18.000Met with Jack Dorsey at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
00:11:33.000See, when I sat down with Jack Dorsey, we were talking about how they were using or our concern that Twitter was suppressing dissident voices, kicking people needlessly off of social media, and shadow banning people.
00:11:52.000Jack at the time appeared very transparent.
00:11:56.000Jack said, No, the technology doesn't even allow us to do this, and there's all these different checks and balances.
00:12:02.000And he had some of his tech guys walk us through it.
00:12:07.000He had a legal representative there saying they're not even legally allowed to censor people based on viewpoint or shadow ban them based on viewpoint or based on information.
00:12:19.000And I'm not going to say that Candace and I were satisfied.
00:12:22.000I'll allow her to tell her memory of events.
00:12:26.000It was almost four and a half years ago.
00:12:27.000But I would say that Candace and I didn't leave the meeting necessarily with an overwhelmingly negative sentiment.
00:12:35.000I appreciated Jack for his time, for his willingness to meet with us, because Candace and I together had two of the most powerful Twitter accounts out there.
00:12:44.000But then as things started to change, and I obviously took the contact information and stayed in contact with some of the people there at Twitter, as things started to change, I started to email them.
00:12:52.000I said, hey, guys, things are changing.
00:12:54.000And my Twitter account and my Twitter engagement is really kind of going off a cliff.
00:12:59.000And my ability to talk to millions of people is disappearing.
00:13:03.000And then the New York Times article comes out in April of 2020.
00:13:09.000Now, you pair that New York Times article with the Axios study that showed that I had the second largest conservative Twitter presence behind Donald Trump and the ninth largest Twitter account.
00:13:21.000So this is what this is the whole world.
00:14:11.000So number nine was our Twitter account, my Twitter account.
00:14:17.000And so looking through this list, you can pair that then with the New York Times article that the information that we were spreading on the Charlie Kirk Twitter had to be stopped.
00:14:32.000You see, in a kind of a weird way, I carved out a niche that a few others did.
00:14:39.000Jack Pasobic did, Mike Cernovich did, and others did as well.
00:14:43.000But I saw that Twitter was this place for elite thought to be incubated.
00:14:50.000We went from 115 to 120,000 retweets a day down to 800 retweets a day.
00:15:03.000And when I started to complain about this and started to try to tell news and media anchors about this, they'd roll their eyes and call me a conspiracy theorist.
00:15:12.000Like, okay, Charlie, there's no evidence of this.
00:15:15.000Or you kind of then end up indulging in their game because you kind of sound really narcissistic.
00:15:22.000I used to get 120,000 retweets and now I only get 800.
00:15:25.000So I just kind of said, all right, they're censoring me.
00:15:29.000And I just kind of said, we'll keep tweeting for the spirit of it.
00:15:33.000But they basically obliterated our ability to trend, to push back against consensus ideas.
00:15:40.000And it gets even deeper than this because I do not believe that Twitter acted alone.
00:15:46.000Based on my conversations and my meetings with Jack Dorsey, I believe that Twitter was influenced by somebody or something to shut me up and label me as Do Not Amplify.
00:17:34.000There's a couple other thoughts I want to unpack with this.
00:17:37.000I don't believe Twitter acted in isolation here.
00:17:41.000Based on my meeting with Jack Dorsey and my conversation with Twitter employees and the limited knowledge I had from the outside, I believe Twitter was pressured or forced to do this.
00:17:55.000Now, that doesn't mean it's an excuse for their incredibly should be illegal.
00:17:59.000I'll talk about that in a second and unethical behavior.
00:18:02.000But I believe that someone was telling them to put the threat tag of do not amplify on my Twitter account.
00:18:10.000So some of you are saying, Charlie, I don't understand what do not amplify is.
00:18:13.000So this is what Barry Weiss leaked yesterday.
00:18:16.000This is a picture of my Twitter account with certain descriptions or threat tags to it.
00:18:22.000Now, Twitter went out of their way to say for my Twitter account, do not amplify.
00:18:27.000Essentially, do not allow my tweets to go viral.
00:18:32.000Do not allow the content that I am putting up, pictures, videos, one-liners, do not allow it to be seen by lots of people, despite retweets and likes, do not allow it to be boosted in the algorithm.
00:18:49.000Instead of allowing the Twitter algorithm to grow, of which I understood intimately in 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, they put their thumb on the scale and say, we are going to single out Charlie Kirk and say we are not going to allow his account to be seen by other people.
00:19:54.000And I do want to point out that these signals evolve minute by minute, hourly by hourly.
00:20:00.000Behaviors of bad faith actors who intend to manipulate, distract, divide a conversation or to unfairly amplify their content, which they didn't earn.
00:20:37.000But essentially, what we learned from the Twitter files is this.
00:20:43.000My Twitter account needed to be taken out to defeat Donald Trump in 2020.
00:20:51.000That if my Twitter account, alongside others, Jack Posobic and Mike Cernovich and Candace Owens, if our Twitter accounts were allowed to be free, same with Dan Bongino, maybe the Hunter Biden laptop story would have gone viral.
00:21:08.000You see, if I would have had access to a Twitter account that was getting 115,000 retweets a day, and according to Axios, was the second largest Twitter account out there when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, I could have made sure it was seen by half of the Western hemisphere, and that's not an exaggeration.
00:21:28.000People says right here, Charlie, I don't understand why Twitter is such a big deal.
00:21:44.000Where do you think the reporters and the journalists get their information from?
00:21:48.000If you're able to make things go viral on Twitter, you're able to meaningfully move the Overton window of which public policy is decided, of which elections are decided.
00:22:12.000You don't have to think Twitter is good for society, but it is unmistakable that Twitter is critical to who is going to control the civilization.
00:22:25.000No Twitter, no Trump presidency, period.
00:22:30.000And they found what we had to say to be such a legitimate threat that they had to say internally without ever telling me privately, suppress you.
00:22:43.000Let's go to another piece of tape here.
00:22:45.000I want to go to Trace Gallagher reporting on this, PlayCut 87.
00:22:48.000The common denominators you point out in the early thread is that Twitter employees build these blacklists to prevent the disfavored tweets from trending.
00:22:57.000And then they actively limit the visibility of the entire count or even trending topics.
00:23:03.000And as you said, they do this all in secret without informing users, which is interesting because over time, they have said again and again that they do not do this.
00:23:13.000And now we're learning that they do this all the time.
00:23:17.000That's really well said by Trace Gallagher, where he said it was a way to thwart or stunt our distribution.
00:23:26.000You see, as we reflect back on 2020 and 2022, you could only wonder what the election results would have been if we could have spoke freely about ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, intravenous therapy, the danger of lockdowns, how we were creating the most suicidal, depressed, alcohol-addicted, and drug-addicted generation in history.
00:23:47.000No, they had to make sure that we were not able to communicate, to do what we as human beings have a moral right to do, to speak.
00:23:59.000Another person said right here, Charlie, Twitter means nothing.
00:24:08.000Every journalist, every person on television, every producer, every congressional staffer, people at major corporations are influenced by the chatter, the conversation, the news cycle.
00:24:20.000As we have said before, it is the incubator for elite opinion.
00:24:24.000And when Axios comes out and they say out of the top 10 Twitter accounts, the three that are political, Donald Trump, AOC, and Charlie Kirk, they had to, and guess what?
00:24:54.000This is unadulterated cheating, using the power of a social media platform to, without ever telling me, without any of my knowledge, obviously without my consent, I would have given consent, without my knowledge, suppressing this.
00:25:12.000Someone says here, Charlie, I find all of this very boring.
00:25:16.000Well, I encourage you to get right up on it.
00:25:19.000This is the largest technology scandal probably ever that is unfolding.
00:25:23.000Or now we have the smoking gun of a smoking gun where we now know that Twitter influenced and rigged the 2020 election, the COVID lockdowns.
00:25:36.000And I'll be honest, some of the attitude of the people here that are emailing me is one of the reasons why the left gets away with it.
00:25:44.000It's disappointing because this is the verifiable, irrefutable, evidence-based story where finally we have the direct files themselves that show that conservative ideas were so popular, that conservative perspectives were so viral that they had to cheat, rig our voice from being able to be spread.
00:26:13.000Not to mention, I believe these censors have blood on their hands.
00:26:16.000For those of you that say, oh, Charlie, what does this matter?
00:26:19.000Well, tell that to the victims' families whose children committed suicide the last two years, where if we were able to push back on the lockdowns more effectively on the world's public square, maybe the lockdowns wouldn't have happened.
00:26:32.000Don't tell me it doesn't matter for the victims that had to die alone in a hospital where treatments that very well could have helped them were not allowed to be discussed on social media, where Jay Bacachara was not able to communicate or become trending on Twitter.
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00:29:32.000What we have seen with Twitter and what we are learning, in my personal opinion, is the fatal flaw of the Chamber of Commerce, overly libertarian slant of the Republican Party.
00:29:47.000For years we were told that private companies need to be treated with zero oversight and zero regulation.
00:29:58.000That private companies through competition will be able to improve and get better.
00:30:02.000Now, in defense of that argument, Elon Musk buying Twitter actually does strengthen their very weak argument only slightly, only slightly.
00:30:15.000It is in many ways an unexpected development that we should not count on.
00:30:21.000However, with that being said, for years we were told and said, just go to a different platform, just go to a different one.
00:30:29.000So the principles of why we are conservative are as follows.
00:30:36.000We believe that people are made in the image of God.
00:30:40.000We believe there's something special about a human being.
00:30:43.000At the very least, you believe the human being is more than just a combination of chemicals and cells.
00:30:49.000You believe there is a soul in the human being.
00:30:51.000The founding fathers believed this when they yielded to the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:30:58.000We believe that human beings have natural rights given to them by their creator, life, speech, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of virtue, not licentiousness.
00:31:09.000We also believe that human beings, the raw material we're dealing with, we have a heart, we have an operational programming, you could say, that tilts towards greed, avarice, deceit, arrogance, corruption.
00:31:24.000As Lord Acton famously said, and you'll hear it repeated, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
00:31:30.000Therefore, we as conservatives have an apprehension towards centralized government.
00:31:36.000But the proper way of looking at it is a slightly different way of wording it: it's not centralized government, it is centralized power, centralized power, because we do not want one person or one group of people to be able to do something without a check and a balance.
00:32:00.000This is why we talk about separation of powers, separating the power so that people can be free, free to flourish, free to speak, free to explore different ideas.
00:32:12.000And yet, when all of those things manifest into a private company, centralized power, the ability to shut people up, suppress other ideas, influence our elections.
00:32:25.000Too many Republicans say, well, it's a private company.
00:32:28.000How do you act then when a private company starts to possess all of the attributes of the very government that you also feel?
00:32:40.000Well, for traditional Republicans that are purchased by big tech, which is far too many of them, they say, well, it's a free market and we can't do anything.
00:32:54.000Instead, it should be when our principles of human freedom are violated either by a Politburo, the FBI, the CIA, or Twitter, we're not going to put up with it.
00:33:08.000And the byproduct of that was an interfered with, rigged 2020 election that we are just still starting to grapple with.
00:33:19.000And we don't even know the impact of this last midterms.
00:33:23.000Dr. Robert Epstein was just on our podcast and he says Google rigged the midterm elections in favor of the Democrats.
00:33:29.000We don't even, we can't even comprehend how much power these tech companies actually have.
00:33:34.000And so the question is: will Republicans and conservatives and this new Republican House have the courage to say we are not going to only execute oversight over the FBI and the Department of Justice and DHS and Maorcus and all the nonsense happening,
00:33:57.000but we are going to offer a check and a balance and oversight over a private company, private company that acted in a more tyrannical, authoritarian, and damaging way than even our government did in 2020.
00:34:14.000And then the even sicker question is: was Twitter acting at the behest of our government?