Michele Schellenberger is the author of a number of books, and the co-founder of the Public Substank publication, which I read almost every day. In this episode, we talk about how she got started in journalism, why she left her job as a reporter, and what she's been up to since then.
00:18:33.960But we're talking about issues of major public importance, COVID, climate change, whether
00:18:40.320a deplatformer president, whether the president is involved in his son's business dealings,
00:18:46.620these are things that are absolutely in the public interest and we should err on the side
00:18:52.200of more, not less information. And when they are making censorship decisions, they just need to be
00:18:56.920public about it. They need to be transparent about it. It needs to be someplace where people can see
00:19:00.640what those decisions were and why they were made. Michael, were you shocked by what you found out
00:19:06.940with the Twitter files? Because I remember reading it when it was first released and I couldn't
00:19:12.160believe it. The FBI, the CIA. Now, look, I'm half South American. This is what you do to my culture
00:19:18.840of my country. I didn't expect it to happen with the FBI to its own people. Yeah, for sure. I mean,
00:19:26.680you know, the way that people dismiss the Twitter files is they said, well, we always knew there was
00:19:30.700content moderation going on. First of all, nobody had any idea that this amount of censorship
00:19:36.860was going on of legitimate speech. That's just a fact. It was simply not reported. There was no
00:19:42.320evidence, anything where it was just suspicions and they were being dismissed as conspiracy theories
00:19:46.900by the mainstream news media and others who wanted to see more censorship by the social
00:19:51.960media platforms. But yeah, I mean, there is something there's multiple shocks. I mean,
00:19:57.040the first one is just to see how often FBI was asking for content to be for users to be
00:20:03.560investigated, the kind of normalization of FBI and other intelligence agencies interacting with
00:20:11.360senior Twitter executives. I will say, in particular, there were some cases where there
00:20:16.740were Twitter executives who I think behaved nobly. Joel Roth is somebody who was the head of
00:20:23.220trust and safety at Twitter, and he was demonized kind of early on in the Twitter files process.
00:20:28.480But there were many times where he pushed back against the intelligence agencies.
00:20:31.700However, he did ultimately cave in on two of the big issues.
00:20:36.320I view Yoel Roth as a very interesting kind of company man.
00:20:40.520You know, like he was kind of a real professional, but it shows the limits of what real professionals do in situations where they're under really intense pressure.
00:20:48.740And all the way to the point where I was describing where you see the Facebook executives sort of being like, oh, please, White House, see how good of a job we've done censoring content on vaccines.
00:22:19.420Now, response, the mainstream response would be,
00:22:22.700Well, that's OK, because those those that's compartmentalized.
00:22:27.220The people who were warning of the Russian disinformation probably had no idea or had no idea that that they had the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:22:34.640But then that raises other concerns, like like if you have the Hunter Biden laptop and you've got people going around, they're saying, oh, we have Russian disinfo on on Hunter Biden.
00:22:44.960Wouldn't you want to know that other people in the agency had the Hunter Biden laptop?
00:22:48.940That's an important question that would need to be asked.
00:22:51.360nobody's asked it. No one's investigated it. So I found that really shocking. You know, I mean,
00:22:57.200there's other stuff that I think other people found shocking, like the level of just conformity
00:23:02.920and unanimity around issues like gender ideology, around the kind of conflating of conservative
00:23:10.320views with hate speech, the kind of conflating of questioning whether the vaccine is appropriate
00:23:17.880for everybody with vaccine misinformation or denial, that surprised me less because I live
00:23:24.760in the San Francisco Bay Area. You know, I mean, like I think Matt Tybee posted, I think I reposted
00:23:32.480something like it was like 90, 98 or 99 percent of Twitter staff political donations are to
00:23:39.200Democrats. So, I mean, the culture is just monolithically, hegemonically woke. So that
00:23:46.000That surprised me less, but definitely the engagement of the intelligence agencies I
00:33:53.960And also as well, Michael, the thing that I find really troubling about the about this entire story is that it didn't get basically the response that it deserved.
00:34:06.580And there's a part of me thinking, do you think that this is just going to go away and we're never going to really find out the answer and there's going to be a cover up?
00:34:16.580Well, that's a very interesting question. So, I mean, if you look at how it's developing, there's so many different kind of threads here as well.
00:34:23.400But so so I mean, I think we know like historians, you know, I've done a lot of stuff on nuclear, as you guys know, like after World War Two and whatever.
00:34:31.440And it's like there's just a lot of information would come out decades later and years later.
00:34:35.260So as a historian, you look back, you do have some confidence that more and more information will come out.
00:34:40.340And so we're still in early days. Right. I mean, Elon, just we were just there in December.
00:34:44.740So like two months, less than two months from when we started looking through the files, you have congressional investigations beginning.
00:34:51.260And then there's other things that are sort of there's other things that are not exactly like investigative work.
00:34:56.380Like I was making a big deal of we're going to a piece that we're going to publish today about a major four part series in the Columbia Journalism Review, which is like the most important kind of journalist magazine in the United States, in part because it's at Columbia University, which gives out the Pulitzer Prize, which is our highest journalism award.
00:35:14.360It was a four-part series just absolutely just trashing the media's coverage of alleged Trump-Russia collusion, sometimes called Russiagate.
00:35:25.800That piece was, I mean, for me, too, it just was sort of game-changing in the ways in which it not only debunked a lot of that stuff, because some of it had been debunked already, but the way it kind of put it together and exposed how the media was doing it.
00:35:40.080So, Francis, I guess in answer to your question, I'm actually pretty confident that more information is going to come out through these investigations and other investigations.
00:35:49.780I also think that you sort of like because there was a thing where we were sort of just trying to kind of there's a way because like people were like, how did it work?
00:35:57.160And it was like it was kind of a smash and grab operation at Twitter.
00:36:00.600You know, we'd be like, can we need these files?
00:36:02.180And you get these files, you're going through them.
00:36:03.660And because we were like, were they filtering the files for you?
00:36:06.780I mean, they were giving us these huge, like, they just didn't have enough staff barely to do the searches, and they were giving them to us.
00:36:12.500And then we're kind of going through them and reporting on them.
00:36:14.800But it's taken me some time, and I've got more to say about it, of what I think some of the implications are and how these things kind of were connected to each other over time.
00:36:25.020You know, one of the things I discovered in the Twitter files was that the Aspen Institute had organized what they call a tabletop exercise, which is like a workshop that included the heads of trust and safety at Facebook and Twitter, the top national security journalists at The New York Times and The Washington Post to basically do an exercise about how to how to not cover a Russian leak of information relating to Hunter Biden.
00:36:55.020They did it on a phone call and in person, I believe, in August and October.
00:38:19.880Yeah. And Michael, I want to move on to Davos, the WF and the Great Reset and all that. But before we do, one final question, just on the journalism side of things. I am not naive, as naive as I was five years ago when we started the show. And yet I still thought this story coming out would get massive coverage in the mainstream media around the world.
00:38:45.420and i looked day and i put it on my twitter and the two the tweets were very popular because i
00:38:50.860think a lot of people felt the same day after day twitter files after twitter files i would look
00:38:57.360on the bbc the telegraph the times the guardian the all the big newspapers in the uk and a lot
00:39:04.000of the ones in the united states and they would talk about you know elon musk fired some cleaners
00:39:10.700who are upset now that, you know, here's 10 cool things you didn't know about Elon Musk and
00:39:15.840whatever, but not one of them covered the Twitter files at all. How is that possible? How did that
00:39:22.320happen? Are the three of us insane? Are we the crazy ones? Are we obsessed about this stuff
00:39:27.980that no one cares about? Is that what's happening here? Because either I'm insane or something
00:39:32.360seriously weird is going on here. No, I mean, you're, I mean, not only that, but there was
00:39:36.400some polling done by Harvard around the Twitter file. So first of all, the shocking thing is how
00:39:42.360many people did hear about the Twitter files, despite it not being in the news media. On my
00:39:47.060Twitter thread, which was not the biggest, but one of the top biggest ones, 100 million people
00:39:53.400viewed it. And I was like, when I was at Christmas with my family, I was like, yeah, 100 million
00:39:58.060people read my Twitter thread, and not one of them is in my family. Literally, like nobody in
00:40:03.640my like literally like nobody in my family knew about the twitter files even though i had done it
00:40:08.880and i had already sent it out to my email they just literally so you kind of go who's censoring
00:40:13.740what i mean my progressive friends and family are are censoring and then the news media are
00:40:20.380censoring you know um and you know it was covered in the washington post very dismissively um just
00:40:27.420sort of saying that we that there was nothing new here um you know that we always knew there was
00:40:33.300content moderation or michael schellenberger is alleging a conspiracy and there's no evidence of
00:40:38.240a conspiracy um you know as opposed to like you know i'm very clear i'm not saying i have proof
00:40:44.520i'm saying there's a pattern of of events and information that is extremely suspicious and
00:40:49.800merits further investigation um and then of course they say these investigations are just
00:40:54.300witch hunts um so yeah i mean it's it's it's shocking we should continue to be outraged i
00:40:59.720think it's a permanent feature now of the media environment that that there's this level of
00:41:04.560fragmentation and and censorship. And, you know, like I mentioned, this Columbia Journalism review
00:41:09.600article about Russiagate that came out yesterday. Media haven't written about that either. I suspect
00:41:14.500they won't. And so I think that older journalism, which was attempting to be fair and objective and
00:41:20.860give voice to both sides, is really gone. And that to the extent to which people want diversity
00:41:26.140in their media diet. They just have to get it from different outlets.
00:41:31.620Davos is a grift and a cult, but it's also a bid for global domination.
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