Below is my column in Fox.com on the potential criminal liability for Twitter executives, particularly Jack Dorsey, after the release of the Twitter files. While more material is being released, the files appear to contradict denials of Dorsey that there was no censorship or shadow banning targeting conservatives. As I note below, there are obvious defenses and much must still be learned about the underlying facts. However, Dorsey and others should clearly retain counsel in light of the contradictions in these files.
Here is the column:
The latest Twitter disclosures have raised potential legal liability for Twitter and its executives. No one appears more at risk than Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey.
It is an ironic turn of events since Dorsey supported the takeover by Elon Musk and has called for all files to be released without filtering. Dorsey has the feel of a “designated defendant,” someone who was pushed forward by others to take any legal hit.
On its face, Dorsey has vulnerability after the latest release. He was repeatedly asked by members of Congress about censoring and shadow-banning, which has now been confirmed in these files.
In September 2018, Dorsey testified under oath and denied what these files appear to now confirm. Rep. Mike Doyle, D., Pa., asked, “Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives. Is that true of Twitter?”
Dorsey responded, “No.”
Doyle then asked “Are you censoring people?”
“No,” Dorsey said.
“Twitter’s shadow-banning prominent Republicans… is that true?” Doyle asked.
Dorsey again said no.
Dorsey was also asked about my prior testimony on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate. Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “‘little brother’ problem, a problem which private entities do for the government that which it cannot legally do for itself.” In response, Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.”
It now appears that the entire company was operating as a censoring department. However, there were in fact super-censors. Dorsey did not mention the Strategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team (SRT-GET), which operated above what journalist Bari Weiss described as “a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper.”
That group reportedly included Vijaya Gadde, head of Legal, Policy and Trust; Yoel Roth, the global head of Trust and Safety; CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
Notably, others at the company made similar denials as Dorsey but may not have done so under oath. In 2018, Gadde and head of product Kayvon Beykpour expressly declared, “We do not shadow-ban. And we certainly don’t shadow-ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
Even if untrue, lying in public is generally not a crime. However, when you repeat a lie to federal investigators or Congress or the courts, it becomes a federal offense.
The question is whether Dorsey was left in the dark on these decisions. He was reportedly a member of SRT-GET. However, some of the files indicate that these decisions may have been made without his knowledge. That includes the decision on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which Dorsey called a “total mistake.”
Dorsey could quibble over the term “shadow-banning” but the question was obviously meant as a follow-up to the inquiry over “rigging” discourse on the platform. He could also stress other answers, where he tied “shadow-banning” to a more subjective notion of political bias. For example, Dorsey also repeated these statements in public, including an appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox, when he was asked if “Twitter has ever been involved in shadow-banning, Dorsey again categorically denied such practices: “We do not shadow-ban according to political ideology or viewpoint.”
For most people, Dorsey’s comments clearly suggested that there was no shadow-banning. However, he could claim that he knew that they were shadow-banning but that they were not doing so “according to political ideology or viewpoint.” That is clearly refuted by the new files showing a hair-triggered censorship system directed against conservative and Republican posters.
The other defense is lack of knowledge, but, even if accepted, that will raise the question of whether this was a case of a designated defendant or willful blindness.
In some cases, there is a suspicion that corporations will assign some executive to sign off on compliance or certifications as the fall guy or designated defendant if things go wrong. The chump is often a junior lawyer or executive who takes personal responsibility for certifying a false fact.
Dorsey is clearly no chump or junior executive. The question is then whether this was a case of willful blindness or an attempt by other executives like Gadde or Roth to give him plausible deniability by keeping him in the dark. He then became the public face in unequivocally and confidently denying practices like shadow-banning.
The greatest defense for Dorsey may be found in the Justice Department itself. Any prosecution of Twitter executives could prove a hard sell for Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose department has been repeatedly accused of pronounced political bias.
While Garland has aggressively pursued contempt sanctions against Trump associates, it is not clear if he would prove as aggressive with Democratic allies like Dorsey or other Twitter executives. He could face that question if the House under the GOP pursues perjury or contempt sanctions.
Dorsey once said about Twitter that “It’s really complex to make something simple.” He may now be hoping that his answers before Congress were simple enough to make any prosecution complex.
There is a man who was smart enough to creative the most successful means of world wide communication in history. Now they’re saying he was to stupid to know what was going on. He was smart enough to go into his cover your ass mode with his testimony in 2018. Now his defense is, I just didn’t know so I wasn’t lying. Jack didn’t know that they were shadow banning anyone who said lockdowns were hurting children. Jack didn’t know that they were shadow banning anyone who posted anything about the Hunter laptop. Jack just didn’t know about what was going on in his business. Jack just couldn’t feel it when the FBI attached a chain to the ring in his nose. I got some ocean front property in Arizona for ya.
Do you have a time machine? Do you think Dorsey has one? What Covid lockdowns were happening is 2018? What HB laptop story was there in 2018?
Anonymous, let’s take the time machine back to 2018. Not only were Republicans being shadow banned but so was BLM. https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2018/07/31/why-republicans-werent-the-only-ones-shadow-banned-on-twitter/?sh=5795385b434b. Thanks for joining me on the way back machine to show that Jack Dorsey was lying under oath. Beam her up Scotty.
LOL. Your own article agrees with me: “As Twitter explained in a blog post clarifying the matter, they do not “shadow ban” …,” linking to this useful blog post that defines shadow banning: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-the-record-straight-on-shadow-banning.html
Thanks for leading us all to that helpful blog post!
In 2017 Jack Dorsey was more focused on SQUARE,
as chief technology officer Parag Agrawal became CTO.
Bret Taylor, a member of Twitter’s board since 2016, was also named Chairman.
Hence, Dorsey stepped way from Twitter to build Square.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx46su211io
Given the fact that he is also a founder and CEO of the payments company, Square.
His critics also complained that the arrangement had divided his attention to Twitter’s detriment.
Twitter CEO heads to Tech Beach in Jamaica
Laura Dowrich-Phillips November 14, 2017 09:03 AM ET
https://barbados.loopnews.com/content/twitter-ceo-heads-tech-beach-4
His birthday (November 19, 1976) is around the time that Tech Conferences are held, so he combines the two (Conference & Birthday) and takes a ‘time-out’ to get some self-time. https://techbeach.net/
Why Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey practiced this ‘extremely painful’ ancient meditation technique for his birthday
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-spent-his-birthday-on-a-silent-meditation-trip.html
It doesn’t surprise me at all that during that time (2017-2018) Jack didn’t have clue what was going on at Twitter on the day-to-day basis.
His head was wrapped around Square.
Professor Turley: “The greatest defense for Dorsey may be found in the Justice Department itself. Any prosecution of Twitter executives could prove a hard sell for Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose department has been repeatedly accused of pronounced political bias.”
Bingo. Been three years since Hunter’s laptop was given to the FBI. No charges, and no explanation for no charges. That is because blue states and blue cities are lawless asylums for political lunatics.
Leftists like Dorsey are rewarded, not punished.
“Leftists?”
They intend to dupe you, steal your property and eliminate the United States.
They are most of the way there.
Americans are losing their property to crime, inflation and confiscation, their nation’s borders are gone, and their treasure is taxed and redistributed.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.”
– Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
_______________________________
“While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.”
– Vladimir Lenin
_____________
“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“Leftists like Dorsey are rewarded, not punished.”
How ’bout leftists like “Crazy Abe” Lincoln who was rewarded, not punished, for nullifying the Constitution, killing 1 million Americans, and “fundamentally transforming” the Constitution through improperly ratified “RECONSTRUCTION Amendments” straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto?
“Crazy Abe” shredded the U.S. Constitution and commenced the incremental implementation of the principles of communism.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
“…THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A SOCIAL WORLD.”
– KARL MARX TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
________________________________
The communists were expelled from Germany, prosecuted and fled to New York and Illinois.
Comrade General Secretary “Crazy Abe” Lincoln espoused Karl Marx’s pejoratives, “capitalist” and “fleece the people,” as early as 1837.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.”
– Abraham Lincoln, from his first speech as an Illinois state legislator, 1837
___________________________________________________________
“Everyone now is more or less a Socialist.”
– Charles Dana, managing editor of the New York Tribune, and Lincoln’s assistant secretary of war, 1848
______________________________________________________________________________________
“The goal of Socialism is Communism.”
– Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
__________________
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
– Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen’s Association to Lincoln, 1864
___________________________________________________________________
“ON DECEMBER 3, 1861, a former one-term congressman, who had spent most of the past dozen years studying dissident economic theories, mounting challenges to the existing political order and proposing ever more radical responses to the American crisis, delivered his first State of the Union address as the sixteenth president of the United States.
“Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich who had been imprisoned by German authorities in the early 1830s for organizing illegal demonstrations. After his release, Korner returned to his hometown of Frankfurt am Main where, according to historian Raymond Lohne, “he was one of about fifty conspirators involved in an attack upon the two main city guardhouses and the arsenal at the police facility and jail. This admixture of students and soldiers had planned to seize cannon, muskets, and ammunition; free political prisoners accused of breaking press-censorship laws, and begin ringing the great Sturmglocke (storm bell) of the Dom, the signal for the people to come in from the countryside. At that point, the democratic revolution would be announced…. Unfortunately, they were walking into a trap…. Betrayed by both a spy in their midst, and the reluctance of the common people to rise, nine students were killed, twenty-four were seriously wounded, and by August 3, 1833, Gustav Körner found himself riding into downtown Belleville, Illinois.”
“Within a decade, Korner would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that year’s presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincoln’s list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker, a lawyer from Mannheim who had served as a liberal legislator in the lower chamber of the Baden State Assembly before leading an April 1848 uprising in the region—an uprising cheered on by the newspaper Marx briefly edited during that turbulent period, Neue Rheinische Zeitung—Organ der Demokratie.
“Even as they agreed on homesteading, Greeley and Lincoln wrangled over the timing and scope of an emancipation proclamation. The editor joined Frederick Douglass in demanding that the president take steps to make the Civil War not merely a struggle to preserve the Union, but “an Abolition war.” Even as Greeley and Lincoln exchanged sometimes pointed letters, the Tribune’s longtime managing editor Charles Dana was now working for Lincoln. Officially assigned to the War Department — where he would eventually serve as assistant secretary — Dana’s real role was as an aide and adviser to the president on questions of what the former newspaperman described as the “judicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority.” That Lincoln spent much of his presidency reading dispatches from and welcoming the counsel of Marx’s longtime editor—like the fact that he awarded military commissions to the numerous comrades of the author of The Communist Manifesto who had come to the United States as political refugees following the failed European revolutions of 1848—is a shard of history rarely seen in the hagiographic accounts that produce a sanitized version of the sixteenth president’s story. In the years following Lincoln’s death, his law partner and political comrade, William Herndon, complained that Lincoln’s official biographers were already attempting “to make the story with the classes as against the masses,” an approach that he suggested “will result in delineating the real Lincoln about as well as does a wax figure in the museum.”
– ISR International Socialist Review
I only hope that little prick enjoys prison.
Should be convicted for facial hair violations and channeling Niander Wallace.
Ok, so not to disagree with anything you’ve said. But to be pedantic, there/s no such thing as a “false fact.”
Free speech for me but not for thee.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/10/elon-musk-threatens-twitter-employees-with-legal-action-if-they-leak-to-press/
Iow, you believe it was ok for this pos and others in big tech to do it but not big tech’s enemy. Ok, but rest easy and remember that with Brandon’s DOJ and being in DC, nothing will happen to your drugged up hero, Jack.
I posted a fact. What makes you think I believe in anything? I might believe the tooth fairy will eat you alive. I might not. All I did was post a fact of what Elon expects of his employees and then he wants you to believe that he is being “transparent” with his twitter file dump. I said nothing about my “hero” jack. For all you know I think he is a bigger boss than Elon.
“Brandon’s DOJ”, please get a life.
You are the reason free speech on the internet will fail. People say all sorts of crap that piss off people. Why would you advertise on a cesspool?
Stick to the facts. Does Elon believe in free speech? Maybe. Maybe not. He certainly does not want you to know about how he is running twitter.
Free speech is failing because the pissed off people are DemocRATs and they control the media and suppress any counter-argument.
Now BabyTrump has become a defender of free speech. A little late to the party there BabyTrump.
This may come as a surprise to you, but every employer in America has some sort of policy about unauthorized release of confidential information. If you leak, you get fired. Twitter had such a policy before Musk bought the company. You would be hard-pressed to find a company that lacks such a policy. There is some wiggle room for whistleblowers reporting illegal corporate activity. But if you plan to use that exemption, you had better expose an actual crime that results in prosecution.
I believe that Jack Dorsey is still guilty. Even if he didn’t know or was in the dark about this matter, his response before congress should have reflected this. As CEO, he is obligated to know the workings of the company. If he stated “no” that he had no knowledge of shadow banning and these other actions, then congress would have taken that knowledge as if Jack Dorsey had a surety of that response. As the CEO, Jack’s answer of “no” should be considered proof of his acceptance of responsibility that he vetted his response. If he was wrong, then as CEO, he is still liable for that response even if he was in the “dark”. If CEO is in the dark on a matter and comes before congress, then they must testify of such. It would have been right for Jack Dorsey to have made the claim that he was unaware of whether there was shadow banning then to say “no”. You can’t just say “no” and then come back and say you were unaware after the deposition. That still constitutes a lie.
Jack Dorsey is the “media scapegoat”. He’s the name you’re allowed to see and hear. And he’s nothing more.
Dustin Aaron Moskovitz is the 6 nose that you should all be paying attention to. But notice how his name is never mentioned.
That’s because you’re NOT ALLOWED TO HEAR IT.
Lots of people say his name, as is clear from a simple internet search on his name.
It’s really not that important that Dorsey go to jail. What’s really important is the exposure of Twitter’s relationship with the FBI and the DHS. We now know that the law enforcement agencies of the federal government were pulling the stings attached to the Twitter puppets. We now know that the Twitter puppets danced gleefully along in the masquerade. Jack Dorsey, the head puppet, kicked up his heels to dance to their tune. Don’t you understand. They were dancing to save Democracy. They wanted to share their little wooden earmuffs with all of us so we wouldn’t hear the big bad Republicans. Just pat the little wooden fellow on has head and let him be on his way. The head puppet knew everything that was going on in the puppet show where the fox turns out to be the hero. Look!! the boys nose is growing and he’s sick from smoking his big cigar.
Turley apparently doesn’t understand the difference between shadow-banning and deamplification. Twitter sometimes does the latter, but it’s no surprise that Dorsey said they don’t do the former. The “Twitter files” don’t show any evidence of them doing the former.
Turley tries to excuse the distinction with “Dorsey could quibble over the term “shadow-banning,”” but it’s not a quibble. Shadow-banning has a meaning (to make tweets viewable solely by the person who posted them). It simply is not the same as deamplification (which enables others to see the tweets if they look them up but doesn’t otherwise highlight them via Trends, etc.).
Twitter clearly does censor people: they remove some tweets and ban some users. I have to wonder how Dorsey interprets the word “censor” that he’d deny doing it. Perhaps he was assuming censorship based on viewpoint discrimination, given the questions that preceded and succeded it in the congressional hearing:
Mr. Doyle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Dorsey, welcome. Thanks for being here. I want to read a few quotes about Twitter’s practices and I just want you to tell me if they’re true or not.
“Social media is being rigged to censor conservatives.” Is that true of Twitter?
Mr. Dorsey. No.
Mr. Doyle. “I don’t know what Twitter is up to. It sure looks like to me that they’re censoring people and they ought to stop it.” Are you censoring people?
Mr. Dorsey. No.
Mr. Doyle. “Twitter is shadow banning prominent Republicans. That’s bad.” Is that true?
Mr. Dorsey. No.
Mr. Doyle. So these were statements made by Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader, on Twitter, Devin Nunes on Fox News,
and President Trump on Twitter, and I want to place those statements into the record, Mr. Chairman.
I wasn’t able to confirm the purported quote from Nunes, and it’s pretty ironic, given that Nunes sued Twitter to get them to censor a parody account. Nunes alleged anti-conservative bias, and he lost the lawsuit. The quote from McCarthy actually seems to be “Social media is being rigged to censor conservative voices.” The quote from Trump actually seems to be “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good.” Presumably Doyle was also inaccurate in the “quote” from Nunes, but I haven’t been able to find what Nunes actually said.
Turley knows that for a false statement to be criminal, it has to be willfully and materially false. I can see it being material, but the willful part will hinge on how Dorsey interpreted what he was asked.
If I worked for Twitter, I would have to label this Russian disinformation.
You don’t identify anything false in what I wrote.
Once I, or Twitter, have labeled you Russian disinformation it really doesn’t matter what you wrote. It’s all Russian disinformation. You can appeal, if you act right.
*I’m confident Prof Turley, at least, understands the difference between ‘shadow banning’ and ‘deamplification’. ..
If Turley understands the difference, then he shouldn’t misuse the term “shadow-banning.”
Glad to know that you’re unable to identify anything false in what I actually said.
Fwiw…
You said firstly >”Turley apparently doesn’t understand the difference between shadow-banning and deamplification.”
*That’s false. Evidently, with shadow banning you wind up talking to yourself, deamplification merely limits your ability to speak with others. .. and it looks like Twitter a thousand other ways from Sunday to throttle you the rest of the time.
*I* know what the difference is, and no, deamplification doesn’t limit your ability to speak to others. All they have to do is look for your speech, such as view your account via its URL. They can see your tweets if they look for them, and they can post replies to your tweets. Deamplification only prevents Twitter from boosting your speech, such as noting it in Trends. But *Turley* uses the word “shadow-banning” when he means “deamplification,” so apparently *he* does not understand the difference. You and I disagree that my actual claim was false.
Shadow-banning vs deamplification. It was still clearly election tampering either way. Dorsey is fooling no one by denying any shadow-banning went on. He also denied targeting Conservatives which is clearly a lie. The DemocRATs worked with Twitter to tamper with the election. That’s way more than telling a simple lie.
“DemoRATs”?? LOL. Grow up.
So now Anonymous tells us that shadow banning and deamplification are two different things. Both of these actions result in the voices of the opposition not being heard. True they were allowed to post but you just couldn’t see there posts regardless of how many followers they had. It’s like saying that drowning you is not the same thing as killing you. We’ll let you write the book but we just won’t sell it in our bookstore. Anonymous, please show us where any Democrat was deamplified. Anonymous wins the spin award again this year. Raucous applause and muffled laughter.
Yeah, for sure. What is the probability “it” lives in or near San Fransicko? Answer: very high.
One of your favorite ways of trolling is telling others to “do XYZ” on your behalf. I am not your unpaid research aide. Look it up for yourself instead of telling others to labor on your behalf. Why should I labor on behalf of a troll who regularly lies about me and others?
Again: other people could see deamplified posts merely by looking for them. That’s a key difference between deamplification and shadow-banning.
“We’ll let you write the book but we just won’t sell it in our bookstore. ”
Happens all the time and is totally legal. LOL if you think bookstores must carry all books that have been written.
Anonymous, says others could see deamplified post if they looked for them. How would they know to look for them if they weren’t made available to a posters followers. The censorship was applied to people with thousands of followers. Really silly Anonymous.
They WERE made available to anyone who looked at an account.
I’ve pointed this out previously, but Musk’s Twitter ALSO engages in deamplification. Musk: “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach. Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from rest of Internet.” (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673339826212864) He calls it new but it’s not new. This has been Twitter’s policy for several years at least. And if you object to that policy when Dorsey et al did it, you presumably also object to Musk doing it, and you object to the internet as a whole doing it. Musk correctly notes that it’s not different from the rest of the internet: you don’t see things unless you search them out.
Really silly that you think you can lie and not be called out on it.
Rule #1: do not play their game, period. Twitter World is a fool’s world.
I have to agree with this. It is very unlikely that Dorsey’s responses to questions using imprecise terms in this context could be proved criminal beyond a reasonable doubt.
What all this warrants is total exposure, including involvement by the FBI, DHS, public health agencies, etc., legal/administration action against government officials who violated the 1st Amendment, legislation to preclude government involvement with social media and legislation like that in Texas making the large platforms benefitting from 230 common carriers precluded from viewpoint discrimination except for the very narrow judicial exceptions for speech not protected by the 1st Amendment.
Daniel: Trouble is half the country thinks that dumping on conservatives is perfect. 99.5% of MSM agrees. The government doesn’t care and will never be held accountable. After the disastrous midterms, Americans will get an extra heaping dose of more of the same. Is there one real conservative who thinks Christpher Wray and his ilk are great folks? Uh, I don’t think so.
As I pointed out to Sam yesterday, law professor Steve Vladeck notes that it is legal for the government to make requests of private companies involving speech, absent coercive action on the government’s part: “A State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State.” (Blum v. Yaretsky, emphasis added). He also pointed readers to O’Handley v. Padilla, which was a suit against Twitter: https://casetext.com/case/ohandley-v-padilla
If Twitter and Facebook are forced to keep Nazi speech, they’re going to lose advertisers. The Texas law is contrary to the companies’ own speech rights. Just like Turley periodically removes comments here that are protected under the First Amendment, and it’s totally legal for him to do that, per his own First Amendment rights.
It is time for a federal investigation (or at least, state ones), just like the investigatiolns that uncovered the fraud at Theranos — for which the two miscreants received 11 years and 12 years in prison.
#Gamergate did the investigation after they were mass banned from the entire internet. The people uncovered in the Twitter files as the Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder are the same people as the MacArthur Foundation’s Data & Society network (Danah Boyd) and England’s Common Purpose network (Van Jones, Rashad Robinson). They originated as the Aspen Institute’s US-Palestinian Partnership (Joi Ito), a front for a terrorist organization banned by 22 USC 5201 but given a “national security” exemption by Bush and every president since then. What it turned into was everyone involved was taking payoffs from Russia, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ban whoever they wanted while Pentagon/State/DHS/CIA were paying them for the service. England (Soros, Branson, Bronfman, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Social Finance) was covering for them all at the direction of America’s elected officials (Clinton, Pelosi) who were letting the foreign agents run their campaigns because they brought in the foreign money.
Based off some of the reporting by Michael Shellenberger, Dorsey was in the French Polynesia January 4-8, 2021. He took some calls but left the actual running of Twitter during those days to senior execs.
He may not been in the loop.
Like to think he would been on top of everything going on, but as we saw James Baker was still employed and “vetting” information to Taibbi and Weiss. Cannot know what is going on if an employee does something against company policy or is keeping senior management or even the owner in the dark.
Not too fond of Dorsey’s tie-dyed tee shirts either.
Mafia used to call those people “buffers”. Dorsey used them to insulate himself from prosecution
The buck stops here, said Mr. Truman. But, he was a man. Jack is an “it.”
So far, most appear to be searching for culpability at Twitter without consideration of the role FBI, etc. agents who successfully applied government influence if not pressure to censor certain political viewpoints. Further, if Twitter is the gorilla, how about the elephant thundering about the room comprising the lockstep efforts by virtually all of the MSM to accomplish the same goal? Flushed with success, the FBI, et.al. would have expanded their efforts widely.
There is no way Twitter, or the media for that matter, could have known The Laptop was Russian disinformation without the FBI, DHS, DNI and over 50 top national security intelligence officials + team Biden.
It’s not like Twitter, or Dorsey for that matter, just thought this Laptop from Hell Russian disinformation story up out thin air.
‘The FBI is investigating’ ™.
Dear Prof Turley,
I don’t lie. And I certainly don’t lie about political viewpoints or ideology. In any case, all my lies are good ones.
>”“We do not shadow-ban. And we certainly don’t shadow-ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
Even if untrue, lying in public is generally not a crime. However, when you repeat a lie to federal investigators or Congress or the courts, it becomes a federal offense.”
I think it may be a crime for the FBI, DHS, DNI and over 50 top national security intelligence officials + team Biden to propagate whole-cloth disinformation – Russian disinformation – to their surrogates @ Twitter and media writ large.
Wars are started that way.
Jack Dorsey does NOT impress me at all with his supposed intelligence. He strikes me as a complete idiot. As CEO of a company, he should know almost everything that goes on in his company. IMO, he was a puppet or figurehead CEO. Someone else ran that company.
You may be on to something. He does appear like someone who smokes a lot of weed. Definitely, not very bright.
This is a slightly different take, but it occurs to me that such is the height of this particular generation in Silicon Valley’s hubris and idiocy: they literally and very intentionally created more damning evidence themselves than anyone else could have hoped to piece together. It really does smack of bad children getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar, positive they are outsmarting mom and dad, though obviously with far greater ramifications. Does anyone sane still think it’s a good idea to give the approximation of teenagers, who come replete with that level of ignorance/arrogance this level of authority in *any* area?
I am surprised they did not do a Clinton and apply BleachBit to all the Slack servers (assuming they would have a Enterprise level on site deployment).
To answer your question, nope.
More good points. Thx.
But also, who would use these big tech toys. Too controlling, too lemming-like, too many sheeple. It is, iow, too stupid to any reasonable person to want to be part of that gaggle.
Screw big tech. There are much better tools. Soo sad but soo good that Fakebook is in freefall. Damn fools.
To find him guilty would lead to the same avalanche of convictions that finding hillary guilty would entail. The malfeasance, collusion and corruption of most on the left and some on the right is so closely intertwined that there is the potential for blackmail by each to protect each other. Unless we were to fumigate the entire government/media system there will be no prosecution for what they do.Hillary, her servers and Benghazzi are the prime examples of how this will go – nowhere.
Sounds like a call for fumigation. I approve.
The Twitter Files do not have a timeline so we do not know when their “visibility filtering” began, or when the censorship committees were formed. So it remains unclear whether Dorsey was lying to Congress back in September 2018.
In addition, the questions asked of Dorsey were sufficiently vague to make it unlikely that criminal conduct could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
Just as the left often overstates criminal culpability, others should not make the same mistake.
The Professor gets his committees wrong again. Dorsey was not on SRT-GET but the one above it.
Daniel, thanks for adding these details.
Dan, the professor did not get his committees wrong. Dorsey was on both the SRT-GET and the SIP-PES.
Just prosecute some with long sentences to hard time facilities. I’m sure the rest would get the message.
The elite use useful idiots to make their billions and destroy western civilization.
Who is going to sue?
It will be a fine day when we see the heads of the tech giants sitting in a federal prison. And add some pharma people and government agents. But we all know that will never happen.
What crimes did they commit? Surely you don’t want them in jail simply because you dislike their views, right?
If they lied to Congress, treat like any other Republican and throw them in jail after SWAT-teaming their homes at 5 am with squads of FBI agents armed to the teeth. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right?.
Some have been indicted for violating 18 U.S. Code § 1001, but that’s not a crime of simple lying; it involves knowingly and willfully making materially false statements to the government, and people only go to jail for that after being convicted in court.
IF the DOJ has evidence of sufficient to indict tech executives for violating 18 U.S. Code § 1001, then I have no problem with them being indicted and tried for it.
D.E.F.I.N.I.T.E.L.Y.!!
And, unless and until the thugs are treated as they treat conservatives and an opposition Party, they will only continue their law breaking. They killed people, destroyed government property. Do to them what they did to us. N.O.W. Of course, with Brandon in the WH and rinos supporting the Dems and their modern day kkk, antifa and blm, not much is likely to happen. Dump Silicon Valley.
There you go again, projecting.
It is a crime for a gov official to use big tech to stiffle citizens. They worked against the Right of Free Speech. None of these crooks were in a burning theater. Hang ‘um high!