TRIGGERnometry - ＂Twitter Files Were the Tip of the Iceberg＂ - Michael Shellenberger

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00:01:00.000 I was shocked by how many people at FBI were at Twitter.

00:01:05.440 I mean, we're not talking just low-level people, although they were there too.

00:01:09.340 But we're talking the former general counsel to FBI.

00:01:12.500 This is like one of the most senior executives.

00:01:14.500 We're talking the deputy chief of staff.

00:01:17.620 I discovered a set of other extremely troubling behaviors, including by former FBI executives,

00:01:24.540 including the former general counsel to FBI, who was then the second, the deputy general counsel

00:01:29.920 within Twitter, basically, you know, him arguing for censoring the laptop within Twitter. And this

00:01:36.740 is the same person who was involved in initiating the whole Russiagate FBI investigation of Trump

00:01:44.380 in the first place when he was at Twitter. We know that there was that FBI and the intelligence

00:01:50.380 agencies organized a little group of all the social media companies and they would have

00:01:55.220 regular meetings, particularly in the run up to elections. The journalists themselves are

00:01:59.760 behaving in really weird behavior. I mean, when you imagine journalists get together to talk about

00:02:03.760 how not to cover an issue or how to kind of squelch an issue, you know, so that by the time

00:02:09.780 the 100 buying laptop came out, they had all been mentally programmed to view it as disinformation.

00:02:20.380 hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is a

00:02:31.940 show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our brilliant guest

00:02:37.260 today is the author of a number of books and the co-founder of the public substack publication which

00:02:42.220 i read almost every day michael schellenberger welcome back to trigonometry good to be with

00:02:47.220 you guys again. It's great to have you on. Listen, we obviously had the first conversation with you

00:02:52.380 and people can go back and watch that to talk about San Francisco, your book and things like

00:02:57.620 that. But tell us what you've been up to since we last spoke, because you've been doing quite a lot

00:03:02.920 of good journalistic work, particularly the Twitter files, which we'll talk about. What

00:03:07.180 have you been up to? Yeah, I mean, the big news personally is that I was under contract to do

00:03:12.540 two additional books, one on nuclear energy, and then a third for HarperCollins. That was sort of

00:03:18.580 going to be the last of a series on the ways in which civilizations undermine themselves from

00:03:25.640 within, which is kind of where Apocalypse Never End San Francisco ended up. And I just gave back

00:03:31.960 both book advances because I decided that I wanted to be writing full-time on Substack.

00:03:36.540 I just love being in the news. I love publishing on topics that are in the news. I think it's

00:03:42.480 a really great way to, you know, for me, it's good personally. I love the investigative work

00:03:46.940 and I love, we're doing this kind of combination of investigative and then we do explanatory

00:03:52.800 journalism after that. And then we also have a fair amount of, you know, trying to inspire people

00:03:58.300 about something more positive project and not just be totally negative. So my friend Leighton

00:04:03.320 Woodhouse joined. And since January 1st, it's been, we are now just doing public at Substack

00:04:10.720 full time. And then I'm also continuing to do work with my research organization, Environmental

00:04:15.620 Progress, really working on two big campaigns. The first is to have a much stronger response to

00:04:23.480 the addiction-driven homelessness crisis, which is particularly acute in the West of the United

00:04:28.880 States, but is also in other big cities. And then the other is to protect endangered species that

00:04:34.680 are being threatened by industrial renewable energy projects, particularly a large industrial

00:04:41.180 wind farm off the coast of the East Coast, which threatens the North Atlantic right whale,

00:04:45.980 of which there's only 340 left in the world, and they can experience no more population declines

00:04:51.920 without risk of extinction. The whooping cranes, which are threatened by big wind transmission

00:04:57.200 projects in the Midwest, and the desert tortoises in California, which are threatened by a big

00:05:02.300 industrial, well, not one, but many industrial solar projects. So that's what I'm up to. And

00:05:07.600 it's, we're having a great time. And, you know, as you guys know, we were involved in the Twitter

00:05:11.460 files. I've also been a big critic of the World Economic Forum. So I'm excited to get into those

00:05:16.980 topics with you guys. Well, we're going to talk to you about both the cabal of pedo lizards or

00:05:21.740 whatever it is at Davos. But first, let's talk about the Twitter files, because I don't know

00:05:28.360 what happened exactly. I spent quite a bit of time going, why is no media covering this? But

00:05:34.900 it was literally a complete blackout. And if you just watch the BBC, CNN, if you read the Times,

00:05:41.100 the Telegraph, the whatever, you would not have had any idea that any of this was happening.

00:05:46.800 So first of all, tell us what the Twitter files reveal, what were they about? And secondly,

00:05:51.600 what does this mean? Sure. So everyone knows that Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX,

00:05:58.840 bought Twitter at a much inflated price. He told us that he probably paid about three times more

00:06:04.320 than it was worth. He's taken over the company. It's been a chaotic situation by his account,

00:06:10.520 trying to figure out the algorithms. And he wanted to have a fresh start. So he invited in

00:06:16.400 number of journalists to basically go through the emails and internal records of Twitter executives

00:06:25.060 to understand how Twitter was responding on some pretty big events. I was brought in by my friend

00:06:30.340 Barry Weiss, who runs the Substack publication, The Free Press. I was a bit of an odd choice in

00:06:36.420 the sense that I was the only one of the journalists involved that have ever explicitly

00:06:40.120 criticized Elon Musk in print. I'd done so actually for almost a decade, including in

00:06:45.640 Mother Jones Magazine, but also I criticized his statements around solar panels in Apocalypse

00:06:51.560 Never. So some of the people kind of jumped to some assumptions that he picked each of us.

00:06:58.740 That's not the case. When I met him, he said he didn't know who I was. So if that's true,

00:07:04.720 then he wasn't cherry picking the reporters. And even if he did know who I was, then he was

00:07:08.900 picking somebody who had been a critic of his. We had pretty free access to the files. We would

00:07:14.040 ask for searches related to particular topics, time periods, and executives. And the big picture

00:07:20.940 is just that many of the things that people had suspected, that there was a explicit throttling

00:07:26.760 or what they call deamplification in popular parlance is called shadow banning. That was

00:07:32.120 definitely occurring with disfavored voices. Certainly with people right of center, it was

00:07:38.280 occurring, but it was also occurring with critics of the COVID lockdowns, with vaccine mandates,

00:07:44.040 you know, some of the most egregious was having, I mean, here you have Twitter executives responding

00:07:50.220 under pressure from the White House or from just other advocates, including CDC and others,

00:07:57.020 to basically censor or label tweets by people with reasonably different points of view on COVID

00:08:03.960 mandates. To give you one example, Martin Kildorf at Harvard University tweeted, you know, not

00:08:10.140 everybody needs to get a vaccine, you know, particularly young kids like zero to five

00:08:14.540 don't don't probably need it. Maybe the most reasonable thing one could say about the vaccine.

00:08:20.000 He was not suggesting that vaccines are involved in some conspiracy. I think he even says that

00:08:24.840 some people, you know, that people should get them. And it was labeled by by Twitter,

00:08:29.340 by people at Twitter who, frankly, were not nearly as qualified as Martin Kildorf.

00:08:33.280 I was involved in I did two Twitter threads, the first on the decision to de-platform President

00:08:39.200 Trump. And then the second on the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop. So those are

00:08:44.380 the two topics I know best. These are topics I had not written on before. And so there was

00:08:49.060 on the one hand, a kind of crash course on learning both issues. And then also, I think,

00:08:55.140 bringing what Buddhists call beginner's mind to those topics, which is something that as I've

00:09:00.620 gotten older, I've come to appreciate more because there's a shock when you see what's going on that

00:09:06.540 I think people that are more jaded that a minute longer don't have. And the first is, I think the

00:09:11.200 key thing for people to understand about both is that the internal Twitter staff analysis, both of

00:09:16.540 the Hunter Biden laptop and of the Trump tweets that got him banned from the platform, the internal

00:09:23.800 decision was that they had not violated Twitter's own terms of service. In other words, the staff

00:09:30.140 looked at it and went all the way up to the head of trust and safety, and they said these were

00:09:34.780 tweets that were not in violation of Twitter's rules. So they changed the rules in order to be

00:09:40.980 able to achieve the objective, first of deplatforming Trump, and then of censoring

00:09:45.600 Hunter Biden's laptop. Now, I am a bit more sympathetic to the position that there's some

00:09:50.600 amount of content moderation that must occur inside these platforms for reasons both good and

00:09:55.420 bad. But there is some content moderation that occurs. So I'm not suggesting that there's no

00:10:00.360 content moderation. And I also think the fact of the matter is these guys were just making up the

00:10:05.520 rules as they went. And there's no other way it could be because there were no rules. And rules

00:10:09.660 were also being adjusted to real world events. And that's also understandable. So the fact that

00:10:15.300 they changed rules is in itself not necessarily problematic. However, in the case of the Trump

00:10:20.320 deplatforming, my view, and this is now, I think, probably a majority or mainstream view,

00:10:26.900 at least among certainly the Jack Dorsey, the former CEO and founder of Twitter, shares this

00:10:33.100 view, is that they should not have deplatformed him and that they really had many tools at their

00:10:38.820 disposal to be able to control what Trump was saying, including taking down tweets, including

00:10:45.540 giving him a kind of timeout, what they call bouncing somebody, and that that decision was

00:10:50.060 not justified and had really serious ramifications where you're taking, obviously, the head of the

00:10:55.900 free world, someone who is democratically elected and not allowing them to communicate

00:10:59.860 in ways that, you know, really they should arguably be able to communicate, at least

00:11:07.540 if they're not in gross violation.

00:11:09.600 And it seemed to me that Twitter violated the public's trust in that decision.

00:11:13.000 The other decision, I think, was even more of a violation.

00:11:15.300 And that was the decision to to censor effectively the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York

00:11:24.740 Post on October 14th. This was a decision, of course, that also CEO Jack Dorsey said was the

00:11:32.980 wrong decision. It was a decision that they reversed. Nonetheless, what's important about

00:11:37.500 the episode is that the censorship of the piece and other things going on, including former

00:11:43.400 intelligence community representatives, claiming that the laptop was probably a result of Russian

00:11:50.160 disinformation and Facebook censoring of the piece and widespread denunciations of the laptop

00:11:55.920 story by others in the news media all contributed to the perception that the laptop's information

00:12:01.140 was not legitimate. You know, if you I mean, I reason I'm so confident of that is because that's

00:12:07.260 how I viewed it personally. And that's how other people viewed it at the time, including my family

00:12:11.600 members. It did not think that this was who are all Democrats who do not think that this is that

00:12:17.040 laptop was legitimate or that it was pointing to legitimate information. And moreover, I discovered

00:12:22.580 a set of other extremely troubling behaviors, including by former FBI executives, including

00:12:29.340 the former general counsel to FBI, who was then the second, the deputy general counsel within Twitter.

00:12:36.800 Basically, you know, him arguing for censoring the laptop within Twitter. And this is the same

00:12:43.120 person who was involved in initiating the whole Russiagate FBI investigation of Trump in the first

00:12:50.760 place when he was at Twitter. There's a lot of FBI people in Twitter engaged in activities that

00:12:56.240 we still don't totally understand. We also saw what was a kind of pre-bunking effort to discredit

00:13:03.480 the Hunter Biden laptop before it became publicly known by FBI agents going to Twitter and Facebook

00:13:09.860 and warning that there would be potentially a hack and leak operation by Russians that would

00:13:16.460 involve Hunter Biden. And it's important to understand that FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop

00:13:20.600 in December 2019. So almost a full year before the laptop was coming out, you have FBI warning

00:13:28.260 Twitter and Facebook of some sort of a leak operation. I'm not saying I don't have proof

00:13:34.120 that there was a conspiracy by existing and former FBI agents to discredit the Hunter Biden

00:13:40.100 laptop knowingly in order to help Biden and hurt Trump. But there is a pattern of behavior that is

00:13:45.920 so suspicious, that is so bizarre and weirdly coincidental that it merits congressional

00:13:53.400 investigation. And that is, of course, or maybe not of course, but that is what is occurring now

00:13:59.600 in Congress is that they are taking a look at this pattern of behavior. But at a minimum,

00:14:05.160 what you have is the entire intelligence community, many private actors, including

00:14:10.660 some funded by the federal government, most Democrats and others whipping up an absolute

00:14:16.880 hysteria around Russian influence operations. They call them, they used to call them psychological

00:14:22.460 operations or misinformation campaigns. And there was never any very good evidence that much was

00:14:29.320 occurring after 2016. And even in terms of 2016, it wasn't that there was a lot of Russian

00:14:36.160 misinformation that reached the American people. The main event was its role in hacking the DNC

00:14:42.260 and John Podesta's emails and generating media attention. So there was at best grotesque threat

00:14:49.540 inflation of Russian disinformation. And I think some confusion around what that means, along with

00:14:57.600 a kind of, you know, constant escalation of what was meant by Russian misinformation.

00:15:04.680 You know, as Martin Gurry, who is the author of Revolt of the Public, which I think is

00:15:08.800 one of the best books ever written on the internet, points out, you should want to know

00:15:12.720 what Russians think.

00:15:13.740 Like, you should want to know what Iranians think. 1.00

00:15:16.180 The idea that if Iranians are making, the Iranian government, like the people we may 0.91

00:15:19.960 not like, are making their views known in the United States in ways that you could potentially

00:15:25.160 label misinformation. You know, if the Iranians were saying, you know, all gays and lesbians

00:15:31.000 should be persecuted, like, we don't agree with that. I don't know that you wouldn't call that

00:15:36.380 exactly misinformation, but you'd had this constantly expanding definition, and this

00:15:40.920 wasn't just in the research I did, but in others, that would then allow FBI and other agencies to

00:15:46.440 play an absolutely inappropriate role of pressuring the social media companies to censor content

00:15:52.460 that they didn't like censor users who were not linked to the russians in any way whatsoever

00:15:56.960 but were saying similar things or engaged in similar kind of arguments you hear this kind of

00:16:03.420 creeping uh you know mccarthyism i would say all the time where people people say to me they go well 0.98

00:16:10.060 you're saying what you're saying sounds like something the fossil fuel companies would say

00:16:13.220 well i mean it's like the kind of classic you know who else had who liked german shepherds

00:16:18.140 hitler-like dreams you know so you would sort of get this widening view of misinformation as this

00:16:24.540 like menace this kind of boogeyman that i think merits significant investigation and then the

00:16:30.660 final thing i'll say for me that came out of it was just that there has to be transparency on

00:16:35.940 content moderation and i've told this to elon as well by the way and and hopefully he does it he

00:16:41.800 hasn't yet but there have to be transparency around what the decisions that are being made

00:16:46.540 how they're being made. It's absolutely not proprietary. It needs to be a condition of the

00:16:52.320 right that is established in U.S. law for these social media companies to operate with liability

00:16:58.040 from things like lawsuits for sharing copywritten information or slanderous material. It's known as

00:17:04.900 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They need to have transparency about how these

00:17:13.720 decisions are made. And I say this as somebody that has been personally censored by Facebook

00:17:18.000 for writing accurate information about forest fires that the Facebook censors argued would be

00:17:25.920 misleading, that there is misleading because it could lead people to believe things that they

00:17:30.700 didn't want them to believe. That's a very slippery slope. And that's unrelated to Twitter.

00:17:37.420 It was a piece of an email from Facebook executives telling the White House, under pressure from

00:17:43.300 White House and showing the White House saying we have been censoring accurate information about

00:17:48.520 the COVID vaccines because of the concern that people will draw conclusions from it that we

00:17:55.940 don't like, namely to not get the vaccination. So that's a very dangerous thing when you have

00:18:01.580 people censoring accurate information because they're concerned what people might be doing

00:18:05.820 with it. It's also potentially dangerous to censor inaccurate information in situations

00:18:10.460 where counter speech, we're simply participating in the discourse and the dialogue of debunking

00:18:15.540 things is much better.

00:18:17.340 I'm not saying you can always do that.

00:18:19.160 It seems like most platforms do not want to allow, for example, Kanye West to post the

00:18:23.320 swastika and have that next to the advertiser content, you know, because Versace doesn't

00:18:29.660 want to see its handbag advertised next to a swastika.

00:18:32.560 So I get that.

00:18:33.960 But we're talking about issues of major public importance, COVID, climate change, whether

00:18:40.320 a deplatformer president, whether the president is involved in his son's business dealings,

00:18:46.620 these are things that are absolutely in the public interest and we should err on the side

00:18:52.200 of more, not less information. And when they are making censorship decisions, they just need to be

00:18:56.920 public about it. They need to be transparent about it. It needs to be someplace where people can see

00:19:00.640 what those decisions were and why they were made. Michael, were you shocked by what you found out

00:19:06.940 with the Twitter files? Because I remember reading it when it was first released and I couldn't

00:19:12.160 believe it. The FBI, the CIA. Now, look, I'm half South American. This is what you do to my culture

00:19:18.840 of my country. I didn't expect it to happen with the FBI to its own people. Yeah, for sure. I mean,

00:19:26.680 you know, the way that people dismiss the Twitter files is they said, well, we always knew there was

00:19:30.700 content moderation going on. First of all, nobody had any idea that this amount of censorship

00:19:36.860 was going on of legitimate speech. That's just a fact. It was simply not reported. There was no

00:19:42.320 evidence, anything where it was just suspicions and they were being dismissed as conspiracy theories

00:19:46.900 by the mainstream news media and others who wanted to see more censorship by the social

00:19:51.960 media platforms. But yeah, I mean, there is something there's multiple shocks. I mean,

00:19:57.040 the first one is just to see how often FBI was asking for content to be for users to be

00:20:03.560 investigated, the kind of normalization of FBI and other intelligence agencies interacting with

00:20:11.360 senior Twitter executives. I will say, in particular, there were some cases where there

00:20:16.740 were Twitter executives who I think behaved nobly. Joel Roth is somebody who was the head of

00:20:23.220 trust and safety at Twitter, and he was demonized kind of early on in the Twitter files process.

00:20:28.480 But there were many times where he pushed back against the intelligence agencies.

00:20:31.700 However, he did ultimately cave in on two of the big issues.

00:20:36.320 I view Yoel Roth as a very interesting kind of company man.

00:20:40.520 You 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.

00:20:48.740 And 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.

00:20:58.900 So that's very, very shocking.

00:21:00.160 I was shocked by how many people at FBI were at Twitter.

00:21:04.560 I mean, we're not talking just low-level people, although they were there too.

00:21:08.440 But we're talking the former general counsel to FBI.

00:21:11.600 This is like one of the most senior executives.

00:21:13.960 We're talking the deputy chief of staff.

00:21:16.280 That's arguably the third most important person.

00:21:19.140 I mean, both of them are arguably the third most important people at FBI.

00:21:22.820 And when you really understand how political the director is and the lack of clarity we

00:21:29.080 have about whether things are being compartmentalized or not, it is shocking. To give you one example,

00:21:35.580 I mean, just to come back to the laptop, there's this problem in intelligence agencies where

00:21:40.060 we know during 9-11 and the run up to 9-11 that there were people in intelligence agencies who

00:21:44.660 knew that an attack on the Twin Towers was being planned, but they were so compartmentalized or

00:21:49.420 stovepiped that that information didn't get to the right people. So it was a huge effort after 9-11

00:21:54.720 to go and break down those stovepipes. 0.99

00:21:57.980 That's why they, part of the reason

00:21:58.980 they created the Department of Homeland Security.

00:22:01.140 Where here you have a situation

00:22:02.360 where FBI is in the possession

00:22:04.380 of the Hunter Biden laptop on the one hand.

00:22:07.360 And there are other FBI agents

00:22:09.220 who are telling Facebook and Twitter

00:22:11.120 that there could be a leak,

00:22:13.160 a Russian hack and leak operation

00:22:15.280 of information relating to Hunter Biden.

00:22:17.620 That is extremely suspicious.

00:22:19.420 Now, response, the mainstream response would be,

00:22:22.700 Well, that's OK, because those those that's compartmentalized.

00:22:27.220 The people who were warning of the Russian disinformation probably had no idea or had no idea that that they had the Hunter Biden laptop.

00:22:34.640 But 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.

00:22:44.960 Wouldn't you want to know that other people in the agency had the Hunter Biden laptop?

00:22:48.940 That's an important question that would need to be asked.

00:22:51.360 nobody's asked it. No one's investigated it. So I found that really shocking. You know, I mean,

00:22:57.200 there's other stuff that I think other people found shocking, like the level of just conformity

00:23:02.920 and unanimity around issues like gender ideology, around the kind of conflating of conservative

00:23:10.320 views with hate speech, the kind of conflating of questioning whether the vaccine is appropriate

00:23:17.880 for everybody with vaccine misinformation or denial, that surprised me less because I live

00:23:24.760 in the San Francisco Bay Area. You know, I mean, like I think Matt Tybee posted, I think I reposted

00:23:32.480 something like it was like 90, 98 or 99 percent of Twitter staff political donations are to

00:23:39.200 Democrats. So, I mean, the culture is just monolithically, hegemonically woke. So that

00:23:46.000 That surprised me less, but definitely the engagement of the intelligence agencies I

00:23:50.600 found rather shocking and disturbing.

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00:25:52.020 Michael, one of the things that I find very, very concerning,

00:25:58.240 indeed, you've talked a little bit about it,

00:26:00.320 but it's the collusion between government,

00:26:05.440 intelligence agencies and big tech companies.

00:26:08.820 to the point where it's kind of hard to know where one end to another begins, because there'll be a

00:26:13.500 revolving door between them. And, you know, I didn't realize America was a country in which

00:26:19.520 the White House told, you know, journalists what they're allowed to say in the public space,

00:26:24.700 which is effectively what happened, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. So this is, there's a lot to

00:26:32.800 unpack actually in that. So we have Supreme Court rulings that are basically there to prevent

00:26:40.400 the, and there's a lot of them over hundreds of years, right? So it's not, I'm not going to say

00:26:47.320 the final word on it, but generally you don't, we don't allow the federal government to exercise

00:26:54.460 undue pressure on people to censor their speech. So then the question is kind of what is that?

00:27:02.120 because of course uh the people that work at the government the president the the press secretary

00:27:08.100 the heads of different agencies they have speech rights too and so they can go out and they can say

00:27:13.840 facebook shouldn't publish this you know so you kind of go are you free to say that

00:27:19.360 you know um you kind of go well i guess so i mean the sense that they can kind of say

00:27:25.060 they say the new york times you know shouldn't say that or the washington you just sort of that's

00:27:30.140 what politicians do. And we actually give politicians and elected officials quite a bit

00:27:33.880 of freedom of speech for themselves. You know, so it's also so I guess it's more of a kind of,

00:27:40.040 you know, the definition of pornography, as you know, when you see it, when you see the White 0.85

00:27:44.320 House doing I'll give you this this really specific kind of series of events. You see the

00:27:50.580 White House and members of Congress threatening to take away from Facebook and Twitter this

00:27:57.520 Section 230 provision, which is basically the legal basis for the existence of social media

00:28:04.380 companies. If Washington Post makes some outrageous accusation against me and it harms me,

00:28:11.740 I can sue. Those laws are obviously much more strong in Britain than in the United States,

00:28:16.800 but we still have the same rules. If somebody does that on Twitter, I can ask Twitter to take

00:28:21.840 it down. But Twitter is not responsible for that. That's a big difference between a traditional

00:28:27.920 media organization and a media platform. So you can see how quickly and how easily you move from

00:28:36.940 the New York Times is wrong when they said that to Facebook shouldn't, or Twitter shouldn't publish

00:28:42.460 that New York Post piece. You're moving from media to platform. And most people just are regular

00:28:47.820 experience of it. We don't experience those as sort of different things. It's kind of like,

00:28:52.040 yeah, I go read Twitter. I read the New York Times. These are all the same thing. You get

00:28:55.780 them sort of threatening to take away that section 230 because of concerns around so-called vaccine

00:29:01.880 misinformation. And then it's relentless. And there's other people that were just more aggressive.

00:29:05.680 There's this guy in particular, Andy Slavitt, who's just a demagogic activist, zealot, frankly,

00:29:13.940 demanding that this guy, Alex Berenson, who, by the way, I mostly don't agree with,

00:29:19.060 or maybe I agree with him on like 50 percent of his writings, just demanding that he be

00:29:23.580 deplatformed from Twitter, which they did. Berenson actually sued. And so we actually

00:29:29.100 have all of his internal information from Twitter from his lawsuit. And we were able to see how it

00:29:34.020 related to the stuff that we saw. But you see them pressuring that or saying to Facebook,

00:29:38.740 you've got to stop this accurate information about vaccines from spreading because it could

00:29:43.620 lead to vaccine hesitancy, you kind of go that just like, you know, it has to get in front of

00:29:48.600 a court and there is court cases on it. But I just think as an ordinary, you kind of go that

00:29:53.060 crossed the line, you know, that sort of population of events. It's not to say it's always going to

00:29:58.100 cross the line or that there's some easy thing, but you kind of go this intense pressure,

00:30:03.140 particularly to censor accurate information and with the threat of taking away what is the legal

00:30:09.260 basis of these corporations strikes me as potential First Amendment violations.

00:30:14.640 Right. And Michael, the other thing I wanted to ask you is, in this situation, one of the big

00:30:20.120 concerns for me is that we know for a fact that all of these social media companies, not just

00:30:26.080 Twitter, but Facebook and, you know, obviously Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and others,

00:30:31.520 they would meet together and come up with strategies. So it's not an accident that

00:30:36.780 Donald Trump was deplatformed from several things at once. Right. So is it reasonable to assume

00:30:43.560 that what was happening at Twitter and we now know what was happening to it because a guy that

00:30:49.560 wasn't part of the system bought it is almost certainly what was happening at Facebook and what

00:30:54.060 was happening at YouTube and probably continues to happen on those platforms. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:30:59.800 And we know that there was that FBI and and the intelligence agencies organized a little group

00:31:06.280 all the social media companies, and they would have regular meetings, particularly in the run

00:31:10.420 up to elections. And just as a kind of, I'm a trained anthropologist. And so as an anthropologist,

00:31:16.140 you kind of go, what they're sort of doing is they're kind of trying to create a culture

00:31:20.820 and the culture they're trying to create, or a sort of a tribe, you know, and they're trying to,

00:31:25.680 and we know how that works psychologically, right? So you're starting to kind of get this

00:31:29.500 inappropriate levels of identification with the intelligence agencies, where it's sort of like

00:31:35.580 all of us good people on the side of protecting the you know the children you know the public

00:31:42.020 it's very paternalistic from this dangerous misinformation from malevolent actors you know

00:31:47.640 that was kind of the picture that they're sort of trying to construct deliberately or accidentally

00:31:52.020 that's sort of coming from these intelligence agencies it's also coming from these frankly

00:31:56.640 very suspicious and in many cases noxious bad actors who are private organizations receiving

00:32:03.820 federal funding includes the stanford internet observatory an organization called graphica

00:32:08.460 some of them did some probably okay work but they were involved in this thing of like

00:32:13.380 there's something really fundamentally wrong where it's like you kind of go and i say with

00:32:17.880 journalists too they go oh i'm an expert on misinformation it's like no you're 25 years old

00:32:23.480 you don't have you know like you don't have any you can't just go and be like i'm an expert in

00:32:27.660 all misinformation i mean like it's so weird when you think about it it's sort of like i'm the

00:32:32.780 truth teller you know i'm here to and you guys are all suspicious it's like i worked on like

00:32:38.020 apocalypse never my book on the environment was literally 20 years of life experience it has 1200

00:32:43.800 footnotes you can imagine it's like you might disagree with it or whatever we can disagree

00:32:48.520 over the evidence but to go and have some you know uh in like just someone that is doesn't know

00:32:54.620 the topic at all they're basically just going they're allowing basically special interest to

00:32:59.620 then control what is allowable. So I don't even get it's not like I even get to have a debate

00:33:04.900 with my with my star chamber of accusers. You know, I tried to appeal their censorship of me

00:33:10.960 and they said it would go talk to the censor. I mean, the Inquisition had a better appellate 0.70

00:33:15.500 process than that. You know, so you sort of get this kind of creepy organization of this kind of

00:33:22.540 star chamber or star chambers. And then, like you said, yeah, there's people revolving in and out.

00:33:27.480 It's both from the government to the social media companies to these nonprofits that are funded by the government.

00:33:32.940 You get a strong alliance with the Democrats in the Senate who are really trying to control it.

00:33:38.120 I'm not saying there weren't some bad things done by Republicans, even Trump, when he was president.

00:33:42.820 But it was clearly coming from the woke, progressive national security left, as strange as that may seem.

00:33:52.120 It's such a bizarre thing.

00:33:53.960 And 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.

00:34:06.580 And 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?

00:34:16.580 Well, 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.

00:34:23.400 But 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.

00:34:31.440 And it's like there's just a lot of information would come out decades later and years later.

00:34:35.260 So as a historian, you look back, you do have some confidence that more and more information will come out.

00:34:40.340 And so we're still in early days. Right. I mean, Elon, just we were just there in December.

00:34:44.740 So like two months, less than two months from when we started looking through the files, you have congressional investigations beginning.

00:34:51.260 And then there's other things that are sort of there's other things that are not exactly like investigative work.

00:34:56.380 Like 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.

00:35:14.360 It was a four-part series just absolutely just trashing the media's coverage of alleged Trump-Russia collusion, sometimes called Russiagate.

00:35:25.800 That 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.

00:35:40.080 So, 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.

00:35:49.780 I 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?

00:35:57.160 And it was like it was kind of a smash and grab operation at Twitter.

00:36:00.600 You know, we'd be like, can we need these files?

00:36:02.180 And you get these files, you're going through them.

00:36:03.660 And because we were like, were they filtering the files for you?

00:36:05.800 And there was no way.

00:36:06.780 I 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.

00:36:12.500 And then we're kind of going through them and reporting on them.

00:36:14.800 But 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.

00:36:25.020 You 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.

00:36:55.020 They did it on a phone call and in person, I believe, in August and October.

00:36:59.860 And it was the weirdest.

00:37:01.040 I mean, it gave me chills.

00:37:02.260 It was the creepiest thing I'd ever seen.

00:37:03.800 I was kind of like, boy, if that was being really run by FBI, that's election interference

00:37:09.260 and interference in the operations of a journalist organization.

00:37:13.420 The journalists themselves are behaving in really weird behavior.

00:37:16.980 I mean, when you imagine journalists get together to talk about how not to cover an issue or

00:37:21.820 how to kind of squelch an issue you know so that by the time the 100 buying laptop came out they

00:37:26.300 had all been mentally programmed to view it as disinformation i have still just because of other

00:37:33.960 things i still have not yet reached out to the people involved in that tabletop exercise to ask 0.64

00:37:38.500 them what the fuck was going on because they need to be asked so there's a long way of answering 0.71

00:37:44.360 question francis but but i'm um i don't think that this is over at all i do think we're still 0.98

00:37:50.520 at the very beginning.

00:37:51.600 I think there's a lot of work here

00:37:52.760 for historians, for journalists,

00:37:55.280 for media critics and others.

00:37:57.600 You know, even my own reporting,

00:37:59.920 I have to go back and reread my Twitter files

00:38:02.260 to remember there's so many details.

00:38:04.660 There's so many things that you discover later.

00:38:06.540 So no, I think we're at the very beginning.

00:38:08.780 I think it's very exciting too,

00:38:10.760 because Elon, who obviously I don't agree with

00:38:14.580 on everything, is still making

00:38:16.540 those Twitter files available.

00:38:17.980 So more searches are still possible.

00:38:19.880 Yeah. 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.

00:38:45.420 and i looked day and i put it on my twitter and the two the tweets were very popular because i

00:38:50.860 think a lot of people felt the same day after day twitter files after twitter files i would look

00:38:57.360 on the bbc the telegraph the times the guardian the all the big newspapers in the uk and a lot

00:39:04.000 of the ones in the united states and they would talk about you know elon musk fired some cleaners

00:39:10.700 who are upset now that, you know, here's 10 cool things you didn't know about Elon Musk and

00:39:15.840 whatever, but not one of them covered the Twitter files at all. How is that possible? How did that

00:39:22.320 happen? Are the three of us insane? Are we the crazy ones? Are we obsessed about this stuff 0.92

00:39:27.980 that no one cares about? Is that what's happening here? Because either I'm insane or something

00:39:32.360 seriously weird is going on here. No, I mean, you're, I mean, not only that, but there was

00:39:36.400 some polling done by Harvard around the Twitter file. So first of all, the shocking thing is how

00:39:42.360 many people did hear about the Twitter files, despite it not being in the news media. On my

00:39:47.060 Twitter thread, which was not the biggest, but one of the top biggest ones, 100 million people

00:39:53.400 viewed it. And I was like, when I was at Christmas with my family, I was like, yeah, 100 million

00:39:58.060 people read my Twitter thread, and not one of them is in my family. Literally, like nobody in

00:40:03.640 my like literally like nobody in my family knew about the twitter files even though i had done it

00:40:08.880 and i had already sent it out to my email they just literally so you kind of go who's censoring

00:40:13.740 what i mean my progressive friends and family are are censoring and then the news media are

00:40:20.380 censoring you know um and you know it was covered in the washington post very dismissively um just

00:40:27.420 sort of saying that we that there was nothing new here um you know that we always knew there was

00:40:33.300 content moderation or michael schellenberger is alleging a conspiracy and there's no evidence of

00:40:38.240 a conspiracy um you know as opposed to like you know i'm very clear i'm not saying i have proof

00:40:44.520 i'm saying there's a pattern of of events and information that is extremely suspicious and

00:40:49.800 merits further investigation um and then of course they say these investigations are just

00:40:54.300 witch hunts um so yeah i mean it's it's it's shocking we should continue to be outraged i

00:40:59.720 think it's a permanent feature now of the media environment that that there's this level of

00:41:04.560 fragmentation and and censorship. And, you know, like I mentioned, this Columbia Journalism review

00:41:09.600 article about Russiagate that came out yesterday. Media haven't written about that either. I suspect

00:41:14.500 they won't. And so I think that older journalism, which was attempting to be fair and objective and

00:41:20.860 give voice to both sides, is really gone. And that to the extent to which people want diversity

00:41:26.140 in their media diet. They just have to get it from different outlets.

00:41:31.620 Davos is a grift and a cult, but it's also a bid for global domination.

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TRIGGERnometry - February 13, 2023

＂Twitter Files Were the Tip of the Iceberg＂ - Michael Shellenberger

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