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Lawful But Awful

When it comes to suppressing free speech, the folks at the very top of Twitter, now rebranded as Elon Musk’s favorite letter, can’t seem to resist a good slogan. Perhaps inspired by the apparent success of the FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD chant from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Elon and his somewhat new CEO Linda Yaccarino might have forgotten from their lofty perch how it all turned out for the poor animals who were suckered in by a catchy turn of phrase. 

But we nonfiction animals haven’t forgotten. 

Yaccarino sat for an interview on CNBC and, in just the span of the two-minute clip I saw, the new X-CEO managed to scare the hell out of me and I’m sure many others who still held out hope that the former Twitter platform was making slow, bumpy, but nevertheless forward progress towards removing all of the algorithms and ingrained political sentiments that continue to bedevil so many of us trying to get our voices heard. 

That would be heard, as opposed to not heard. Just to be clear. Yes, we still have our voices. They haven’t taken those away from us yet. But very soon after taking possession of his newest toy, Elon would start tossing around the first of Twitter’s deplorable free-speech suppression catch phrases, Freedom of Speech, Not Reach. 

What that means, and has meant for so many of us, is that you can speak as freely as you like on Twitter-X. But committed X staff and their algorithms will be watching and waiting and, following instructions coming down from people unseen and powers unknown, they can make sure that whatever you decide to post on Twitter can very easily and far too often be fixed so that it will be seen by you and only you, with the exception of the X minders themselves assigned with watching and censoring us too-free tweeting users. 

I said what I said. Censoring. If there was a natural flow of information on Twitter as there had been over the first decade of its existence, our tweets or replies would be visible to our followers, to those looking for a topic by typing a hashtag into the search field, or to those just scrolling through a thread where our comments would be visible along with everyone else’s. 

That is not, however, how Twitter has worked for most of the last decade. Politics inherent among those who worked at the social media giant, and quite probably many special favors asked of either employees or their higher ups, often resulted in accounts being downranked, shadow banned, and whatever other technical terms or internal methods might apply to censoring people’s voices at Twitter.  

Then, in an effort I’m now assuming was all about garnering street cred among angry and disillusioned Twitter users who had long felt the wet blanket of the company’s former management impacting our accounts, Elon released tons of evidence that, not only was Twitter indeed smothering the free speech of many users, but it was also partnered with and answering the many requests by elements of the US government to silence user voices on Twitter engaging on a wide variety of subjects. 

It would even become common knowledge that Twitter had actually put on the payroll many former employees of government agencies like the FBI. If we weren’t already seeing the pages of Orwell’s 1984 come to life before our very eyes as we read the Twitter Files, compiled by Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, the two investigative reporters made sure to remind us of the frightening similarities. 

In her sit down on CNBC, Yaccarino showed that she could check every box on a psych eval for the most Orwellian Big Sister of our darkest nightmares. From saying exactly all the wrong things, to the authoritarian demeanor, speech inflections, mannerisms and body language, all very clearly signaling her presumed superiority, including some very trippy head-tilting befitting a lord of the star chamber grown weary of bothersome questions. 

Yaccarino passed along to everyone watching, and I for one believe her, how committed X is “to encouraging healthy behavior online.” One aspect of X’s methodology in encouraging healthy behavior that Yaccarino was especially pleased with is how ‘staggeringly’ effective X employees are at both deciding what is unhealthy content and then, if not removing it entirely, hiding from view any such unhealthiness found on her platform. She smoothly glided past a question by the interviewer regarding who gets to decide what ‘healthy’ content is as if she herself had been created in an AI lab solely to assume the position she now inhabits lording over free speech on the most important socio-political discussion platform ever. 

And then came the rhyming.

Touting the success of Freedom of Speech, Not Reach, a corporate free speech suppression gimmick that literally means that you can say what you want on X, but X is in no way obliged to actually publish you to anyone but yourself, Yaccarino added another rhyming humdinger from the twisted company brain trust that brought you FOSNR.

If it is lawful, but it is awful…

Beyond this being an insult to the memory of Johnny Cochran, does the rest of what she said even matter? You know what’s coming. Censorship. Some form of (they think) clever censorship that will surely befuddle the inferior masses. 

Linda, the drill makes a sound and we know that sound. You can change the name of your platform to any letter of the alphabet you like, but as you haven’t as yet figured out how to cut off the electricity to our homes or shut off our internet access and you haven’t gotten (at least not yet) to where you can turn off our access to our own money (working on it) you’re limited to either throwing us off the platform entirely, which is completely unnecessary at this point, or making sure that no one else on X can see our contributions. 

If someone posts a comment on X that is, as Yaccarino puts it, lawful but awful, she openly admits that the busy bees at X will make it “extraordinarily difficult” for anyone else on the platform to see it. And the way she lays into extraordinarily you know she means it.

Who exactly, or what, is handling the incredible workload of deciding what users will be platformed on X and what content they’ve posted is either healthy or awful? Yep. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Twitter employees and algorithms.

“We have an extraordinary team of people who are overseeing, hands on keyboard, monitoring, all day, every day, to make sure that that 99.99 percent of impressions remain at that number.”

Oh, did I forget to tell you about the 99. whatever percent of impressions thing?  

That’s the number of all posted impressions that Yaccarino can confidently sit before us today and say are healthy. 

Hmm. Somehow she says healthy and I hear pure. I must have been infected with some less-than-optimal thoughts after reading a book or two. What then exactly is being hidden on X? Yep. You must have read the same books I did. Impure thoughts. You can have them. You can even post them on X. But we will, to staggering degrees of success, hide them from the world.

And, by the way, we’re shooting for the old Ivory Soap standard. Nothing less than 99.99 percent pure will do.

If only this were Orwellian fiction. If only so many of us were not suckered into believing that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter would result in the platforming of free speech at a moment in both American and world history that has never more desperately needed a communications platform that would allow absolutely unfettered freedom for citizens the world over to voice our disagreements with those who govern this planet; our dissidence, our outrage, our questioning of authority, our disagreements with each other, and then to formulate and express together, as truly free citizens exercising our once unassailable right of free speech, our own thoughts, objections, suspicions, our own demands for change, and our own solutions and hopes for better tomorrows. 

Say goodbye to all that. 

I would love to suggest that these people don’t even know what free speech means. Oh that we were that lucky. They could then be educated. They could be turned. But that’s not what’s happening. They are corporate animals. And I am sure that every single person reading this has had some experience with corporations. The team at X has crafted a narrative that absolves them from doing exactly what they are doing. In this case, it is suppressing free speech. In any case, it is what corporations do. 

But why are they doing it after Elon Musk promised to do the polar opposite with Twitter? I can say something about the inevitability of this giant billionaire-owned business eventually reverting back to behaving like a giant billionaire-owned business. I could say, as many long have, that Elon never intended to allow free speech and was only messing with us. I think there’s plenty of truth in just these two explanations coming off the top of my head. But I can’t know the specifics. 

The early adoption of a freedom of speech suppressing catch phrase long before Yaccarino took the helm of Twitter was a solid hint that more of the same would be coming. Her selection as CEO set off alarm bells for many familiar with her background. 

I will say that I believe with the utmost certainty that the two now most prominent figures at X know full well that they’re actively plotting and engaging in the suppression of free speech on their platform and that they are further tweaking and designing a social media X-Twitter-scape that will continue to obscure both their true intentions as well as hiding away from public view what they and the rest of the establishment classes would doubtless agree are the unhealthy thoughts and opinions of much too many of us. 

I believe that Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino fully understand what free speech is and exactly what they’re doing to it on their platform. They certainly understand what free speech means to them and their platform.

But they certainly don’t understand what free speech means to me. I promise you; they have no fucking idea. And they have no idea what free speech means to this country. Still means. Will always mean. If they did then no matter what these two have done in their lives so far or ever hoped to do going forward, they wouldn’t be doing this. They wouldn’t be doing to free speech in America what they’re doing to it right now.

Yesterday, watching Yaccarino’s first public performance as X-CEO was a dark day for me. I believe it will come to be seen as a dark day for free speech everywhere. But I have to say this, I think it was an especially dark day for the platform formerly known as Twitter.  

So this is my message for the platform now known as X; its owner, its corporate leadership, and everyone who works there.

People the world over have been through so much. We’ve just come through a once in a century pandemic that killed possibly tens of millions. And throughout that pandemic we were locked down in our own homes, our businesses and schools shut down, all involuntarily. We were mandated to take vaccines that were poorly tested or lose our jobs. 

And yet we weren’t permitted to speak amongst ourselves about so much of this on the social media platforms that have become our connections with each other, yours included. 

We were lied to about the most likely origins of the virus. And we weren’t allowed to talk about that either. 

We then found out, by way of YOU, Elon, that our government, federal law enforcement and homeland security, along with elements of the Democratic Party and party friendly NGOs were all working to silence the voices of Americans on Twitter. We learned, for instance, how the effort to crush the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election was the result of coordination between these political and governmental entities and social media platforms. 

And this is just a fraction of how the ability of Americans to openly discuss and debate issues pertaining to their very lives was suppressed by Twitter’s own efforts. There is so much more that has been done to us on this platform and others.

Yes, people have been through a lot these last five years. We will be in the process of recovering from it all for a very long time. But couldn’t you give us back those five years? Elon? Linda? I’m speaking directly to you both. Couldn’t you just allow people on your platform to speak freely for five years, without your staggeringly effective suppression of our most basic freedom as Americans?

Couldn’t you give back to the people of a nation that has depended so much on free speech throughout its history the years of that precious freedom the platform you now control took from us? 

Send In the Clowns: Don’t you love farce?

One of Matt Taibbi’s best pieces for Rolling Stone Magazine during the 2016 presidential primary season was the equal parts scathing and hilarious takedown, Inside the GOP Clown Car. In the piece, Taibbi writes: 

In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party’s right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump.

The Democrats didn’t seem to remember that Matt Taibbi when he and fellow Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger faced clowns from the other side of our nation’s political circus Thursday as the two sat before the House Select Subcommittee on “Weaponization of the Federal Government” looking into both federal efforts as well as a number of non-governmental organizations’ influence over the policing of free speech on social media.

Florida congresswoman and former Democratic Party chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz began her five minutes attempting to smear Taibbi with red MAGA paint, deploying one of the most common tactical weapons used against anyone who dares offer a rationally honest take on the now very unfunny political struggles taking place in America at this time. Addressing Taibbi directly in her opening comments, Schultz scolded the decorated journalist. 

The Society of Professional Journalists code of ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political activities that can compromise the integrity of credibility. Being a Republican witness today certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity. 

In a wild and tense session that saw infighting between representatives of both parties on the panel and allegations of biased unprofessional so-called journalism leveled at the two witnesses, Wasserman-Schultz accused Taibbi of allowing himself to be “spoon-fed cherry-picked information” that is “designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed, or invalid conclusion.” When Taibbi attempted to explain himself—to testify, as the witness he was there to be—Wasserman-Schultz cut him off by reclaiming her time, a move that was used against the two journalists often by the Democrats on the panel.  

One of the most striking moments was when Wasserman-Schultz accused Taibbi of profiting off his role in reporting on the Twitter Files, saying that Taibbi “hit the jackpot on that Vegas slot machine.” Taibbi was able to quickly blurt out that whatever money he’s taken in has gone to the costs of doing the work he’s doing before, you guessed it, the Florida lawmaker quickly shut him off by reclaiming her time. 

In the lecturing rant that followed, Wasserman-Schultz suggested that the journalists were addicted to the “powerful drug” of attention and the journalistic prominence of being associated with the Twitter Files. She added that the social media companies in question were not, in fact, biased against conservative voices. She did not offer Taibbi an opportunity to respond. 

It was only later, when Democratic Representative Gerald Connolly of Virginia repeated Wasserman-Schultz’s assertion that the social media entities involved were not being weaponized against conservative voices, that Taibbi would remind the congressman that the purpose of the committee he himself was sitting on was to address the concern that forces within the US government as well as non-profit organizations funded by taxpayer dollars were being weaponized—not simply against conservative voices—but against the very concept of free speech itself. 

Wasserman-Schultz ended her attack on the two journalists with a stunningly strange and ironic diagnosis, apparently of a condition she believed them both to be currently suffering from.  

Hypocrisy is the hangover of an addiction to attention. 

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is certainly no stranger to the many flavors of hypocrisy as well as questions regarding her ethics. In 2016, after leaked emails showed she and the DNC she chaired unethically favored Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign her chairperson’s position. 

But before that career gut punch, in the same year, the Florida congresswoman had earlier come under scrutiny due to her attempts to gut new pending Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations designed to reign in abuses by payday lenders. Payday lenders, as it turns out (and pardon the pun, Congresswoman) were well represented in Wasserman-Schultz’s congressional district. This from the Huffington Post:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is expected to present a final set of payday lending regulations in the next few weeks. The idea is to prevent lenders from trapping borrowers in a vicious cycle of debt, in which borrowers take out a loan expecting to pay a one-time fee, but end up taking out several more loans when they are unable to make ends meet at the end of the loan period.

Wasserman Schultz is trying to gin up support on Capitol Hill for a bill that would nullify the CFPB’s rules in states that adopt payday loan rules similar to those in her home state. The Florida law is supported by the payday loan industry and has not prevented lenders from preying on the poor. The CFPB’s regulations would be stronger, but Wasserman Schultz is seeking to block them.

You can read more here. 

There was something about 2016 that allowed us to laugh at the clownish characters traveling together in Taibbi’s Republican clown car. Yes, they and their candidacies were dangerous, there’s no question about that. But they were, nevertheless, clowns that we could laugh at. Feckless boobs, each and every one of them, and each in their own unique ways. Taibbi captured them all perfectly in the piece I mention above and so many others. 

But there are funny clowns and there are the scary clowns. And there is nothing scarier than the American government—the government of the most powerful country in the history of the planet—slowly, but most assuredly, turning away from its founding principle of unfettered free speech and towards a concerted governmental effort to eliminate that fundamental American right. And what could be more terrifying than witnessing what was once the party of the people leading the effort to crush the rights of those same people to freely discuss amongst themselves the realities and issues of their times. 

Make no mistake. These are the scariest clowns ever. 

Viewer’s note: 

It wasn’t easy to watch the hearing yesterday. I’d set my DVR to record CSPAN’s coverage of the House of Representatives which begins at 7:00 AM Pacific and was scheduled to run in a single continuous block on my cable provider’s viewer guide until 1:00 PM my time.

I went about my morning knowing that I would be able to watch the hearings when my day settled down. But when I had a minute I decided to check on how things were going at the hearings and turned my set on and navigated to the list of recorded programs in order to watch the opening statements. 

So nothing was recorded. CSPAN had changed the name of the content that would appear in that time slot from NEW U.S House of Representatives to, incredibly, and inaccurately, CAMPAIGN 2024, a title that had absolutely nothing at all to do with the content of the programming on CSPAN at that time. But underneath that completely wrong programming title was also a correct subtitle: The House will complete work on legislation to protect free speech on social media.

Then suddenly, with a Democratic representative ramping up for a full-frontal attack on Taibbi and Schellenberger, CSPAN cut away from these dramatic and important hearings to go to the House floor coverage where the chaplain led the august body in prayer. It was at that moment that I found myself wishing that I was a believer.