Elon Musk the new owner of Twitter has unleashed somewhat of a political firestorm in the USA by dribbling out information about how the platform was managed prior to Mr Musk taking over. Even though this story has not been highlighted by the mostly left leaning mainstream media in America, it is providing great fodder for discussion online.
What’s interesting to me is that, so far, we have not heard the stuff that we expected to hear, such as direct, traceable and obvious influence over the platform by the Democrat central management over the Hunter Biden laptop story. This story seems to have been suppressed on Twitter because of a decision made by Twitter management themselves although this management class at Twitter did tend to lean very much towards the Democrats. As sceptical commentators have said we’ve not seen any obvious and dangerous breach of the US First Amendment by the federal government although some of the advice given to Twitter by various government agencies regarding certain stories might come close.
On the other hand, information has come out that we didn’t expect such as the story discussed on a recent episode of The Quartering. This particular aspect of the Twittergate story is about how senior possibly politically motivated law officers in one individual state were getting Twitter to censor information or discussions that they did not like or want discussed. I’m not an expert in American law, come to think of it I’m not even an American, but for a government officer to get discussions that might be politically inconvenient censored by Twitter, looks to me to be much closer to a breach of the First Amendment than the shenanigans surrounding the Hunter Biden Laptop story.
Yet to come out of the ongoing revelations about what the previous management was up to at Twitter is any international aspect. I have a big question over this aspect of the Twittergate scandal and it is this: If the cries of celebrities, regional politicians and other people and groups of influence to censor information on Twitter were being indulged in the USA, was something similar happening in places like the United Kingdom?
Until information relating to Twitter’s censorious activities outside of the USA come out then my interim answer to the question above would be that some sort of censorship shenanigans is quite possible. After all many of us have seen how identity politics groups and identity grievance mongers, some with quite strong connections to the British state or which have state funding, have over the years boasted of their meetings with Twitter’s London staff. These boasts were also accompanied roughly contemporaneously to publicised meetings with Twitter, by shrill and intense campaigns on Twitter itself by these identity politics groups to remove various right wingers and dissident thinkers from Twitter. These individuals, many of whom I personally disagree with but who should have a right to speak freely, were eventually removed by Twitter. The meetings between Idpol groups and campaigns to remove ‘wrongthinkers’ does beg the question whether there were British subjects whose voices were removed at the behest of various political activists working in concert with Twitter’s London staff?
Another UK related Twitter issue that I would like to see clarified by the new Twitter management is what certainly looked to me when I was noticing such things as if there was cooperation between Twitter’s UK office and various UK police forces. Now I’ve nothing in principle to the police working with tech companies to stop things like child abuse images or to keep an eye on Britain’s many potentially self detonating peaceful religion followers, but I have the nagging suspicion that cooperation might have been misused. It may have gone beyond tacking nonces and terrorists and into viewpoint policing and opinion suppression.
Over the years I’ve seen a worrying trend of British subjects using Twitter to voice what might be called a pungent opinion or express a sentiment that doesn’t really mesh with the leftist narrative and world-view on matters pertaining to politics, culture and religion. On what seems to have been a regular basis those who uttered these opinions ended up being arrested and or convicted of one of Britain’s various and noxious ‘speech crime’ offences. Time after time I saw stories of individual British subjects who had voiced an opinion on subjects such as Islam or transgenderism or whatever, hauled off by police officers often at a remarkably short time between the ‘offensive’ utterance on Twitter and arrest. It’s been such a problem that it has become somewhat of a meme with various forces criticised for ‘policing Tweets not the streets’.
Many of us know that a lot of our police forces in the United Kingdom are failing and failing badly. This failure is in large part because the management of these forces have become and allowed their forces to become politicised. This has resulted in a situation where various British police forces will be much more willing to target ‘wrongthinkers’ than actual criminals. It’s a sad fact of life in Britain today that too many of our police forces will finger wag at the public for ‘misgendering a convicted paedophile or arrest those who say ‘Buddha is a big fat bastard’ or similar comments about other faiths or those who mock the cult of trans. Only in Britain would the statements ‘Women don’t have a penis’ or ‘that’s not a woman that’s a man’ become police matters rather than observations of biological fact. What’s far worse than just the politicised idiocy of our police forces is that these forces are also at the same time as they are virtue signalling and acting as the Left’s hired muscle, ignoring or downplaying problems relating to real crime.
We in Britain know that many of our police forces are politically compromised and have all but abandoned the concept of neutrality. It is this factor that makes any suspected cooperation between left leaning Twitter staff in London and Britain’s PC police forces all that more a matter of concern.
Did Twitter staff have links to British police forces which allowed left wing activists on Twitter staff to engage with police in ways that went beyond that cooperation that many of us would agree with, such as helping with investigations into child abuse imagery? Were Twitter staff in the UK in addition acting as a conduit to police in order to silence those with unconventional and challenging views? Were identity politics groups and other similar leftist groups pulling the strings at Twitter UK and in concert with the police getting Britons arrested for or convicted of one of Britain’s many and censorious ‘speech crimes’?
The various and ongoing revelations about how Twitter has been managed in the past with relation to US politics and culture are both what we expected but also not what we expected. However what they do reveal is that Twitter was censoring and shadowbanning voices that the US left did not like and were willing to do this because of a left wing bias among Twitter staff. I hope that soon we will get enough information from Mr Musk’s Twitter management reveal to see if similar issues that have plagued US Twitter operations have also been a problem for Britons. After all if Twitter staff were willing to censor in favour of the Democrats in the United States then it’s quite possible that senior Twitter staff with similar mindsets in the UK as possessed by those in the USA, might also have been managing the platform with a political bias with regards who can speak and who cannot.
Much of what I have said above is speculation based on observation. We know for example that there were close relationships between Twitter UK and various identity politics groups and identity politics grievance mongers, some of whom have been extremely well connected politically. We know that Britain’s police cooperate with social media platforms with regards to suppressing genuine crimes such as jihadi terrorism and child sex abuse images. We know also that Britain’s police are politically compromised and all too often bent politically. Whether or not there has been collusion between Twitter, identity politics grievance mongers, Britain’s leftist Establishment and various politically biased UK police forces remains to be confirmed or denied by future information about Twitter’s previous management that might be revealed by Mr Musk. However the story so far from the US is so worrying with regards deep seated political bias within Twitter that I would not bet against there being similar problems in Twitter UK with bias, unnecessary collusion with state agencies and overmighty influence on Twitter content by various identity politics grievance mongers. Twitter bias and favouring of one political current over another may end up not being merely an American problem.
