Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: ‘What Protections do Americans Have That Data Tracking the Unvaccinated Won’t Be Used Illegitimately?’

SOMERS, Connecticut – Stanford University School of Medicine Professor Jay Bhattacharya, M.D. said in an interview with The Star News Network Friday that Americans “should be asking” whether diagnostic code data now being utilized to identify patients who were either never vaccinated or not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will be used “illegitimately.”

Bhattacharya responded to a question about the recent implementation in the United States of new International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) diagnostic codes that requires doctors at clinics and hospitals to ask patients about their COVID mRNA vaccination status.

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Congress Takes First Shot at Federal Censorship: A Moratorium on DOJ Payments to Social Media

Stunned by a growing body of evidence showing federal pressure to silence Americans’ voices online, House Republicans have unleashed their first legislation to slow government requests to Big Tech to censor content.

The ELON Act, introduced this month by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and backed by nine other cosponsors, would impose a one-year moratorium on taxpayer payments from the Justice Department to social media firms as well as require an audit on how much money changed hands since the start of 2015 between DOJ and Big Tech firms.

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Commentary: Righteous Tyrants

They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.

Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities, commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.

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Democratic Congressman: ‘No One Can Defend Having Classified Documents’ at Penn Biden Center

A Democratic California congressman this week weighed in on President Joe Biden’s classified-document scandal, characterizing the president’s housing of restricted records in his University of Pennsylvania office and his Delaware home as indefensible.

A member of the House Oversight and Armed Services committees, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) told Fox News that Biden warrants scrutiny for keeping numerous records he obtained during his earlier service as a U.S. senator and later as vice president. Khanna noted that the law requires classified federal documents to be kept in “sensitive compartmented information facilities” (SCIFs). While presidents can sometimes temporarily designate rooms within their personal properties as SCIFs, Biden has never suggested any spaces in his home or office were deemed to be such areas. 

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New Bill Would Ban Feds from Working with Big Tech to Censor Americans

Leading Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives filed new legislation that would ban federal employees from working with big tech companies to censor Americans.

The bill comes as ongoing reports show that federal law enforcement and the White House have regularly communicated with social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, pressuring the companies to remove posts and accounts for a range of issues, including questioning the COVID-19 vaccine.

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Democrats Defied Twitter to Spread ‘Russian Bot’ Hoax

In the 14th installment of the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed how Democrats chose to falsely accuse their opposition of being “Russian bots” even though Twitter directly disagreed with this assessment.

As reported by Fox News, shortly after then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes released his famous memo detailing the efforts that were undertaken to spy on the Trump campaign by intelligence agencies, high-profile Democrats began spreading the lie that Nunes’ information was being promoted by “Russian bots” on Twitter.

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Is There Anything the FBI Won’t Do?

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant – ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

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Commentary: Twitter Files Point to Urgent Need for Platform Transparency

December has been a whirlwind month in the Twitterverse. A new academic study argued that hate speech was surging on the platform, while new company owner Elon Musk countered that such tweets were being quietly hidden, so they didn’t count. High-profile journalists were abruptly suspended and restored with little explanation, with condemnations from the EU and UN. All the while, the so-called “Twitter Files” allowed an unprecedented inside look at the messy and controversial world of platform moderation. What can we learn from all of this about the how the social platforms at the heart of our digital democracies are run?

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FBI Paid Twitter Millions, Had Close Relationship with Execs and Staff, Emails Show

The FBI paid Twitter millions as a reimbursement for the time the company spent processing the FBI’s requests, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Monday, in the most recent installment of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing “Twitter Files.”

In an email with the subject line “Run the business – we made money!” an employee, whose name was redacted, reports to then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million dollars between October 2019 and February 2021, Shellenberger reported. Baker, a former FBI agent, was the agency’s general counsel during Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page via improper use of the Steele dossier, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

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Twitter Users Vote for Elon Musk to Step Down as CEO

Twitter users voted for owner and CEO Elon Musk to step down from his leadership role by a 15-point margin in a Sunday poll.

“Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” Musk asked in a Sunday afternoon tweet. The query came after Twitter implemented several recent changes in its policies, specifically instituting a policy prohibiting the sharing of real-time public information that resulted in the suspensions of several journalists.

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Nashville’s Jason Whitlock Suggests Himself for Twitter CEO

In the wake of Elon Musk’s indication that he will resign as chief executive officer of the social-media platform Twitter, Nashville-based journalist and sportscaster Jason Whitlock is suggesting himself as an apt replacement.

Musk tweeted out a poll to Twitter users last weekend asking whether they wished him to remain as the website’s CEO or leave the post. The survey garnered 17 million responses, 57.5 percent of whom voted for Musk’s departure. The founder of the auto company Tesla and the spacecraft creator SpaceX acquired Twitter in late October for $44 billion and is expected to remain the platform’s owner while giving up direction of the company to another individual whom he has not yet selected.

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State Senators Propose Pennsylvania Law Against Social Media Censorship

Pennsylvania State Senators Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) and Scott Hutchinson (R-Oil City) Thursday announced they would reintroduce a bill proposed in the last legislative session designed to prevent social media platforms from censoring Pennsylvanians. 

Mastriano and Hutchinson introduced the original measure in May 2021. They secured the cosponsorship of four other senators, all Republicans, but the bill did not receive a vote in the Senate Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure Committee. The two lawmakers said new developments impelled them to try again in the new session. They cited the recently released “Twitter files,” internal documents pertaining largely to the social-media company’s decision in late 2020 to deny users access to a New York Post story concerning Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s personal computer.

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Twitter Changes Rule on Location Sharing After Musk Says Car Carrying His Child Was Followed

Twitter CEO Elon Musk changed the social media platform’s rules on live location tracking after what he described as a “crazy stalker” followed a car carrying his child and “climbed” onto the vehicle.

In making the change, Musk also said Wednesday that “legal action is being taken” against Jack Sweeney, the man behind the account using publicly available data to track the location of the Tesla CEO’s private jet, following the attack on his 2-year-old child, X Æ A-Xii Musk.

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Hispanic Media Cover Elon Musk Negatively and Remain Silent About Twitter Files and Freedom of Expression

America’s increasingly powerful Spanish-language media outlets have largely ignored coverage of critical free speech issues, such as Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post  ‘s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, and in instead they have focused on stories that negatively expose Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, according to an analysis of ADN America.

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More Evidence Reveals CDC Colluded with Social Media Giants to Silence COVID ‘Misinformation’

America First Legal (AFL) released a fourth set of documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that reveals more evidence of alleged collusion between the nation’s public health agency and social media companies to censor free speech and silence Americans under the government’s label of “misinformation.”

Last week, AFL’s 600-page document release uncovered evidence that Twitter operated a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other selective “stakeholders” that would allow them to delete or flag posts viewed as “misinformation,” noted AFL, which is led by former President Donald Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller.

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Twitter Exec Pushed to Ban Matt Gaetz’s Account After January 6 Unrest

Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, pushed internally for the company to ban Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, despite messaging another employee that such a decision did not align with the company’s policies, according to the company’s internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Friday as part of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files.”

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‘Twitter Files Part 4’ Details How Platform Changed Policy Specifically to Ban ‘Trump Alone’

The fourth entry in the ongoing “Twitter Files” series of explosive revelations dropped on Saturday night, with part four in the series focusing on the removal of Donald Trump from the popular social media platform in early 2021. 

The latest thread, published by writer Michael Shellenberger, details the process that “Twitter executives” took as they were “build[ing] the case for a permanent ban” against the former Republican president. 

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Twitter’s Chief Censor Met Weekly with U.S. Intelligence Officials While Trump Was in Office, Internal Comms Reveal

Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, had weekly meetings with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) at least as far back as 2020, when former President Donald Trump was still in office, internal communications between Twitter staff obtained by journalist Matt Taibbi Friday reveal.

Yoel participated in one such weekly meeting shortly after the company’s moderation team was thrown into a crisis following its decision to suppress an October 2020 New York Post story concerning a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, according to Taibbi. Roth appeared to explicitly ask the government officials in the meeting to “share anything useful” concerning the laptop story, but they apparently declined to do so.

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Commentary: TikTok Needs to Be Destroyed

Twitter was a huge lie, but it was fun. Maybe it’s like television. Elon Musk is having a blast unveiling the conservative-hiding, progressive-promoting plot that was rising up in the complex engineering behind the little blue bird, which leads me to believe that the lovable little critter was actually a big monster. That liberals are outraged by the revelations only proves one thing: cancellation is their erotic dream and their nightmare is freedom. They already enjoyed the former too much. Now, it’s time for the latter.

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Third Twitter Document Dump Details Decision to Ban Donald Trump

The third release of internal Twitter documents on Friday evening detailed the momentous decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the platform after the Jan. 6 riot, making clear that executives understood it was an unprecedented moment in the history of speech.

Alternative journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday released the third set of internal documents as part of an Elon Musk-sanctioned effort to expose the platform’s prior censorship practices.

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Second Wave of Twitter Docs Reveal ‘Blacklists’ and ‘Shadow Bans’

Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss on Thursday released internal documents on Twitter’s censorship efforts and detailed the creation of blacklists and use of shadow ban technique to throttle “disfavored” tweets.

Last week, Musk released information on the company’s censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story via alternative journalist Matt Taibbi. Thursday’s dump came through a team of reporters Weiss led and to whom Musk granted broad access to the company’s files to investigate on condition they first publish their findings on Twitter.

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Arizona Republican Party Calls for Mark Brnovich to Investigate Katie Hobbs over Twitter Suppression

The Republican Party of Arizona (AZGOP) called upon Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) to conduct a full investigation into Governor-elect Katie Hobbs (D) for requesting tweets relating to election information be deleted.

“The First Amendment protects citizens’ speech from the government – not the other way around,” according to the letter by AZGOP President Dr. Kelli Ward. “As Americans, we have the right to be critical of our government and vocalize those concerns.”

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Commentary: Obama-Biden Government in Exile Ran Hunter Laptop Suppression Operation

They got the band back together—to the extent the original members ever broke up in the first place.

Recent disclosures by independent journalist Matt Taibbi confirmed what other reporters have been covering for the better part of two years: According to files obtained by Elon Musk, the new owner and CEO of Twitter, the social media platform protected Joe Biden and his family from a major and potentially election-altering scandal as millions of Americans were voting early for president in October 2020. Years of denials and dismissals related to Hunter Biden’s lucrative shakedown of hostile nations, including Russia and China, were set to explode just a few weeks before Election Day.

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Commentary: The Legacy Media Is Ossified by Their Corruption and Blinded by Their Progressive Agenda

CNN logo outside of Atlanta, Ga., headquarters

by Victor Davis Hanson   The current “media” – loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and Facebook – are corrupt. They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda. The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful. This bias now accompanies increasing (and increasingly obvious) journalistic incompetence. Lax standards reflect weaponized journalism schools and woke ideology that short prior basic requisites of writing and ethical protocols of quoting and sourcing. In sum, a corrupt media that is ignorant, arrogant, and ideological explains why few now trust what it delivers. Suppression Once a story is…

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FBI Met with Twitter ‘Weekly’ Ahead of 2020, Warned of ‘Hack-and-Leak’ Operations

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, FBI agents would hold “weekly” meetings with Big Tech company Twitter to discuss content moderation, eventually leading to the agency warning the platform of so-called “hack-and-leak operations” by foreign “state actors” shortly before the company censored the Hunter Biden laptop story on these grounds.

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Georgia U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls for Federal Investigation Over Emails from Arizona Sec State Hobbs to Twitter

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) wants a federal investigation in Arizona where Kari Lake is disputing results of the gubernatorial election against Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, whose office reports preliminary results that Hobbs has won 50.3 percent to 49.6 percent. Greene’s call was also a reaction to a post of emails showing that Hobbs’ office reported misinformation tweets to Twitter on January 7, 2021.

“The SOS of AZ and Gov candidate, Katie Hobbs, used the power of the AZ SOS to collude w/ Twitter to unconstitutionally violate 1st Amendment rights of Americans for her own political gain. This is communism and Hobbs can not be governor. I’m calling for a Federal investigation,” Greene tweeted Sunday morning.

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Commentary: Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ Confirm Everything We Already Knew

Late Friday, Matt Taibbi used the Twitter platform to publish numerous tweets devoted to the site’s internal deliberations regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story that most major media suppressed during the 2020 election.

The story, which is what it was, is based on documents obtained from the platform’s new owner and is a marketing coup that will drive traffic to the site. It confirms just how savvy Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is.

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Twitter Quietly Stops Enforcing COVID-19 ‘Misleading Information’ Policy

Twitter has quietly halted enforcement of its COVID-19 misinformation policies, with Twitter users first discovering the change Monday night, according to CNN.

Twitter issued a variety of measures since the pandemic’s onset in 2020, including a policy that allowed users to report misinformation directly to Twitter to another taking action against tweets that alleged vaccinated individuals could still spread COVID-19. The policy, which has suspended more than 11,000 accounts and removed more than 90,000 pieces of content on the social media platform, was praised by U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy as a model for how other companies could combat misinformation, according to CNN.

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DeSantis Blasts Apple in Dispute over Elon Musk, Twitter

Elon Musk says Twitter may now be removed from the Apple App store, prompting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to defend the social media company.

“Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?” Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter and Tesla, tweeted Monday. “Apple has also threatened to withhold Twitter from its App Store, but won’t tell us why. Who else has Apple censored?”

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Musk Tells Twitter Staff ‘Bankruptcy Isn’t Out of the Question’ as Executives Leave over Privacy Concerns: Report

At an all hands meeting with Twitter employees following the departure of several top executives over user privacy concerns, CEO Elon Musk told employees that he was not sure of the company’s financial prospects, saying that “bankruptcy isn’t out of the question,” according to multiple reports.

At the same meeting, Musk also told employees that if they can “physically make it to an office and you don’t show up, resignation accepted,” Zoë Schiffer, the managing editor of tech newsletter Platformer, alleged in a thread on Twitter Thursday afternoon. The news comes after reports that a variety of high-level executives, including Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran, Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner — who also confirmed her departure in a Thursday tweet — and Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty all resigned Thursday in response to concerns that Musk was sacrificing user’s data security for profits, according to The Verge, citing anonymous sources and the company’s internal messages.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter Begins Mass Layoffs: ‘Incredibly Challenging’

Twitter began laying staff off Friday, with up to half its workforce expected to be fired in a cost-cutting move by new owner and CEO Elon Musk.

The move comes eight days after Musk’s $44 billion deal to purchase the company, and after more than a week of conflicting reports about the extent and timing of layoffs that employees considered to be inevitable, Reuters reported. In addition to layoffs, Musk is having remaining Twitter staff work on a “Deep Cuts Plan,” designed to save $1 billion per year in infrastructure costs including server space and cloud computing services, Reuters reported.

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Commentary: Social Media Companies Continue to Profit from Self-Harm Content

The web’s earliest days were marked by optimism that the digital world would be an unfettered force for good. It would sweep away censorship and oppression, connect the planet, and empower anyone, anywhere, to be heard by the world. Over time, however, the web’s darker byproducts have become more apparent, with companies’ own research confirming the harms that social media, in particular, is having on teens. A recent report sheds light on Twitter’s role in promoting adolescent self-harm like cutting – and the company’s seeming inability to stop it.

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Report: Biden Admin Weighs Potential Investigation into Musk’s Purchase of Twitter

The Treasury Department is weighing whether or not it has the authority to launch an investigation into Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter, The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening.

Under the terms of the deal, foreign investors, including a member of the Saudi royal family, could potentially have access to confidential financial and user data, according to The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources familiar with the deal. Treasury Department officials are examining their legal options to investigate the deal, but whether they were aware of this potential information sharing was unclear and the Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) typically investigates foreign nationals, not U.S. citizens like Musk.

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Commentary: Twitter Will Survive Longer than the Washed-Up Celebrities Who Are Quitting It

I have never considered that my patronage of a business, or the lack thereof, would make or break the enterprise. So, I find it amusing that D-list celebrities believe their threats to leave Twitter could make any difference when it comes to the company’s bottom line.

This week, stars who haven’t been relevant in years, such as Toni Braxton and Sara Bareilles, announced that they would leave Twitter in the wake of its purchase by SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Braxton, who last had a Billboard 100 hit in the 1990s, said she was leaving because she saw “hate speech” on the platform since the acquisition late last week. Bareilles, who I think had a hit with “Love Song” in the early 2000s, claims the platform is “just not for me” anymore. 

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Twitter Suspends Mark Finchem’s Account Three Days After Elon Musk’s Takeover, Eight Days Before the Election – UPDATED

Just three days after tech mogul Elon Musk acquired Twitter, promising to bring free speech to the platform, the social media giant suspended Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem. The election is eight days away, and the Trump-endorsed state representative is running on a platform of combating voter fraud – a contentious topic that raises hackles on the Right and Left.

Finchem received a notice from Twitter Monday afternoon telling him, “We’ve temporarily limited some of your account features.” It went on to say, “We have determined this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically for:” However, there was no reason specified.

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Twitter Removes Warning Flag on ‘Just the News’ Ballot-Harvesting Story After Direct Appeal to Musk

Elon Musk

Twitter has removed its warning label on a post from the account of Just the News editor-in-chief John Solomon about his story on a whistleblower alleging ballot harvesting in Florida, following Solomon’s direct appeal to the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.

Solomon made the post Thursday that included a link to his interview with the whistleblower. The label was put on the post Friday, and as of Monday morning, it was no longer there.

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Elon Musk Vows to Review Why Just the News Story Was Censored

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday said he would “look into” why a story from Just the News about election ballots was marked as “unsafe” on the social media platform.

“I will look into this. Twitter should be even-handed, favoring neither side,” Musk tweeted early Sunday morning in response to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who posted the Just the News article, “Election ‘misinformation’ policing returns as Twitter flags JTN ballot harvesting report.”

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On Musk’s First Day, Twitter Flags Just the News On-the-Record Story on Election Ballots as ‘Unsafe’

On the day Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media platform flagged a post by Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon aboutt Florida Gov. GOP Ron DeSantis’ administration asking for a police probe into a Democrat politician’s whistleblower complaint about voting irregularities.

Solomon argues Twitter action Thursday night unfairly flagged the post – with the note “Warning: this link may be unsafe” – and is asking Musk, who has vowed to stop the platform from unjustly censuring content, to intervene.

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Musk Plans to Cut 75 Percent of Twitter’s Workforce Following Takeover

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told potential investors that he will cut roughly three-quarters of Twitter’s workforce once he secures control of the company. 

The firm currently employs roughly 7,500 people. Documents the Washington Post obtained indicate that Musk plans to operate the platform with approximately 2,000 employees. Musk’s purchase of Twitter could reportedly close as soon as next week.

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Report: Pfizer Board Member Helped Convince Twitter to Ban Vaccine Critic Alex Berenson

Alex Berenson

Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb, M.D. played a major role in COVID “vaccine” critic Alex Berenson suspended from Twitter in the summer of 2021, according to emails obtained through discovery in Berenson’s lawsuit against the social media giant. Gottlieb worked with former Biden White House senior coronavirus adviser Andrew Slavitt to suppress Berenson’s influential voice as the administration was preparing to impose boosters and vaccine mandates on the American public.

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Twitter Blocks, Then Restores, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo’s Post Noting Rise in Cardiac-Related Deaths Among Young Men After COVID Shots

Social media giant Twitter first blocked, then restored, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s tweet regarding the state health department’s guidance in which is noted a study showing an “84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination COVID-19 mRNA shots.”

“Today, we released an analysis on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines the public needs to be aware of,” Ladapo tweeted. “This analysis showed an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39. FL will not be silent on the truth.”

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Musk Makes Offer to Buy Twitter per Original Agreement

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is proposed to buy Twitter at the price he originally offered, according to letter from his attorneys to those representing the social media company.

The letter, obtained by NBC News, was date Monday and confirmed news reports early Tuesday that Musk had offered Monday evening to purchase Twitter at $54.20 per share, which amounts to $44 billion for the entire company.

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