Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and accompanying housecleaning pulled some real skeletons out of the company’s closets — exposing both willing suppression of accounts according to Twitter employees’ biases, and disturbing strong-arm efforts by the US federal government to have users and posts it found troublesome banned or suppressed, sometimes over the objections of Twitter itself.

Longtime Twitter users (myself included) had witnessed capricious suspensions, deplatformings, and shifty shadow-banning practices, and had long suspected still more suppression of users and content was going on behind the scenes, but it took Musk’s opening of Twitter’s internal records to journalists such as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger to reveal that things had gone much farther than we realized — extending to placement of FBI agents within Twitter, exertion of federal government pressure on Twitter to suppress discussions of COVID-19 origins and policy that didn’t fit the approved narrative, and suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story in a way that polls show swung the results of the 2020 US presidential election.

These revelations need to be preserved and remembered, so I’m posting this link archive that I intend to continue adding to. I welcome corrections and proposed additions. — Please contact me on X. Thanks!

Note that Matt Taibbi and Elon Musk have been targets of IRS and FTC retaliation for exposing these shenanigans. We owe them a debt of gratitude for sticking their necks out to bring this information to light.

The Twitter Files, and Related Posts

• Matt Taibbi: Part One (via @elonmusk) — December 2, 2022
• Bari Weiss: Part Two: Twitter’s Secret Blacklists (via @elonmusk) — December 8, 2022
• Matt Taibbi: Part Three: The Removal of Donald Trump, Part One: October 2020-January 6th (via @elonmusk) Deplatforming the President. — December 9, 2022
• Michael Shellenberger: Part Four: The Removal of Donald Trump: January 7 (via @elonmusk) “As the pressure builds, Twitter executives build the case for a permanent ban.” — December 10, 2022
• Bari Weiss: Part Five: The Removal of Trump from Twitter (via @elonmusk): “Under pressure from hundreds of activist employees, Twitter deplatforms Trump, a sitting US President, even though they themselves acknowledge that he didn’t violate the rules.” — December 12, 2022
• Matt Taibbi: Part Six: Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary (via @elonmusk) — December 16, 2022
• Michael Shellenberger: Part Seven: The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop (via @elonmusk): “How the FBI & intelligence community discredited factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings both after and *before* The New York Post revealed the contents of his laptop on October 14, 2020.” / “Government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor info from the public.” — December 19, 2022
• Justin Hart: Your tax dollars paid for Twitter employees to win Biden the election — December 19, 2022
• Justin Hart: We Are Still Locked Down — December 19, 2022
• Lee Fang: Part Eight: How Twitter Quietly Aided the Pentagon’s Covert Online PsyOp Campaign (via @elonmusk) — December 20, 2022
• Matt Taibbi: Twitter Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter — December 25, 2022
• David Zweig: How Twitter Rigged the COVID Debate (via @elonmusk)
  “– By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy – By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed – By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*” — December 26, 2022
• Justin Hart: Covid Twitter Files #1 are Out! — December 26, 2022
• Dr. Rollergator: The Twitter Files: The Lost Chapters “The Twitter Files exposed Orwellian levels of control at Twitter, but some things were left out.” — January 1, 2023
• Matt Taibbi: How Twitter Let the Intelligence Community In – January 3, 2023
• Alex Berenson: how @scottgottliebmd – a top Pfizer board member – used the same Twitter lobbyist as the White House to suppress debate on Covid vaccines, including from a fellow head of @US_FDA — January 9, 2023
• Paula Bolyard: Now There’s Proof: The White House Was Behind Facebook’s COVID-19 Censorship — January 9, 2023
• Matt Taibbi: Twitter Files #14: The Russiagate Lies “At a crucial moment in a years-long furor, Democrats denounced a report about flaws in the Trump-Russia investigation, saying it was boosted by Russian ‘bots’ and ‘trolls.’ Twitter officials were aghast, finding no evidence of Russian influence. Twitter warned politicians and media the not only lacked evidence, but had evidence the accounts weren’t Russian – and were roundly ignored.” — January 12, 2023
• Lee Fang: How the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy. “The push included direct pressure from Pfizer partner BioNTech to censor activists demanding low-cost generic vaccines for low-income countries.” — January 16, 2023
• Matt Taibbi: Twitter Files #15: Next Great Media Fraud (Hamilton 68) — January 27, 2023
• Jonathan Turley: Twitter discloses another possible government censorship effort “Rather than investigate the full scope of the government’s insular censorship programs and efforts, we are told to trust the government. In the meantime, we are left with the same game of whack-a-mole: We strike down a Disinformation Board, and a Disinformation Index pops up … we strike down a Disinformation Index, and a disinformation blacklisting appears. Using third-party groups gives the government added cover — to a degree. The government is not allowed to engage in censorship, but Twitter has shown that censorship-by-surrogate has its own potential risks, including the possible legal status of a company as an agent of the government. While Twitter, as a private company, is not controlled by the First Amendment, it can become an agent of the government and trigger constitutional protections.” — March 4, 2023
• Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: “Now that it is clear to everyone with eyes to see that Fauci organized a cover up to squash the lab leak hypothesis, here’s a reminder that he tried to fool the public on the science of lockdown and covid mitigation too.” Newsweek Article: “How Fauci Fooled America” — March 6, 2023
• Matt Taibbi: Twitter Files: Statement to Congress: The Censorship-Industrial Complex (via @elonmusk) — March 9, 2023
• Michael Shellenberger: EXPOSED: America’s Secret Censorship-Industrial Complex. U.S. government officials, agencies, and contractors are violating the First Amendment. My testimony to Congress. “a highly-organized network of government agencies and contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it.” — March 9, 2023
• Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: “Instead of investigative reporting and objective news on the covid origins debate, #scicomm journalists played the part of narrative enforcers for Tony Fauci and others. Top journals like Science, Nature, and Lancet did the same. Their editors failed.” (Tablet article: “Treason of the Science Journals”)— March 9, 2023
• Matt Taibbi: Twitter Files #19: The Great Covid-19 Lie Machine: Stanford, the Virality Project, and the Censorship of “True Stories” (via @elonmusk) — March 17, 2023
• Michael Shellenberger: “Humans understood natural immunity hundreds of years before believing Earth revolved around the sun. And yet the US government censored American citizens who pointed to the scientific studies proving natural immunity also worked against Covid.” — March 18, 2023
• Michael Shellenberger: “A growing body of evidence shows U.S. govt officials, agencies, & contractors demanding Facebook & Twitter censor ordinary Americans. Now, an influential censorship advocate has admitted that she worked for the CIA. Who is she? Why is she so influential?” (Substack: “Why Renee DiResta Leads The Censorship Industry: How a former CIA fellow came to lead US government efforts to stamp out disfavored speech on the Internet”) — April 3, 2023
• Michael Shellenberger: “The idea that governments around the world have for years been secretly censoring ordinary citizens sounds crazy, but it’s true. Worse, they are now on the cusp of imposing what can only be described as a totalitarian system to end freedom of speech as we know it.” — May 3, 2023
• Mario Nawfal: How the ADL campaigned to get Trump banned from Twitter — September 8, 2023
• Tom Fitton: @Jim_Jordan explains how Biden regime used the IRS and FTC to retaliate against @MTaibbi and @ElonMusk for exposing censorship by releasing the @Twitter Files. — October 17, 2023
• Michael Shellenberger: “The mainstream media insist that the Censorship Industrial Complex is a conspiracy theory, but it’s not. It’s real. And, now, 138 artists, journalists, and public intellectuals from around the world, and from Left to Right, are calling on governments to dismantle it.” — October 18, 2023
• Michael Shellenberger: “Representatives of a US government front group, ‘Stanford Internet Observatory,’ denied ever demanding censorship of anyone. They lied, and we have the proof. They got social media companies to censor accurate Covid information in a clear violation of the First Amendment.” – November 10, 2023