1ºJarret Hoggins : There were no bombshells in the Twitter release and right-wing nuts are now accusing Elon Musk of holding back some of the files. There is no Hunter Biden laptop story. There actually isn't sufficient evidence to prove that Hunter ever owned the laptop in question.
Hunter is under investigation by the DOJ for tax issues and problems with gun permit paperwork. No decision has been made on whether to charge him.
One thing you do NOT hear is Joe Biden carrying on about it being a witch hunt. His place in the matter is to NOT INTERFERE. Trump interfered with DOJ investigations repeatedly.
2ºAn AP-NORC survey released Thursday finds that 71% of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, while only 28% think the United States is moving in the right direction. The numbers show persistent, widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the county and the economy.
Biden's approval rating remains negative but is unchanged from last month's AP-NORC poll. Overall, 43% of the public approve of the job Biden is doing while 55% disapprove.
With inflation expected to continue into next year and fears of a recession mounting on Wall Street, nearly three in four Americans describe the economy as poor.
3ºthey should just rotate amongst the usual GOP headcases n suspects as all they are gonna do is attack the libs n hold the country hostage for how many months when it comes time to raise the debt ceiling threatening to tank it all cause well its wot we do n dang it its so much fun aside going after our laundry list of the fibs who dared to bring dear leader donnie into account on anything ... n aside from that nothing will get done between the warring political sides while the bulk of the populace just tear out the collective hair n cry .... least Biden got some good stuff done in his first two years as that may well be it I fear ... : S
4ºOh Europe, Europe how much you fell for the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah .. Have you forgotten what I did with Sodomy, what I did with Gamorrah ?? Do you want this .. I will allow disaster and flood .. And the Earth will stink and what you built will be destroyed by My strong hand, for the iniquities, for the sins that you introduce into the laws and want to bring these decrees to the peoples and tribes ... you you brag about money and buy others and make the way for the enemy, but God Almighty allows for a time and then there will be a stop and a great defeat ... and you will weep and weep, but there will be no one who will hear you because great judgments and plagues will be on you .. . Oh, I will let the enemy in and take down, take down the guard, and he will enter and will be fierce, you will scream and cry and there will be no answer, because when I called, when I told you you were silent...Amen
5ºMike Daniels It's not so much about the drug addict Hunter,,,it is how his FATHER...our so called President...LIED over and over...knew about it...said he didn't,,,and also he and his brother Jim were all in it together GETTING RICH....with this corruption....AND,,,it this had been about the Trump sons....CNN would have it on 24 hours a day...7 days a week....and YOU KNOW IT....The dems keep saying "no one is above the law" yet...the democrats keep getting away with all kinda lies,,deception,,,and corruption...but people like you will just ignore that fact....What is wrong with you people that you ignore the actual truth,,with PROOF...and will continue to watch the lying left....I don't get it.
6ºCory Sandberg Stop the insane spending designed to fuel inflation. Build a border wall and open up the fossil fuel industry. What’s the democrats plan? Open the border to a third world invasion for future votes. Drive up energy costs to facilitate green energy and fuel inflation with insane spending to bring down the poor and middle class into government dependency. That’s the plan you voted for and gave them total power to do it. You can’t just sit there with cult chants. You think all that happened by happenstance? Well, it didn’t. It’s all deliberate, and our plan it to put a stop to it. Inform yourself and stop with the cult chants. It’s ridiculous.
https://rollcall.com/2022...-next-congress/
7ºOh really???
THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.
TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
2. Twitter once had a mission “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.
3. Take, for example, Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) who argued that Covid lockdowns would harm children. Twitter secretly placed him on a “Trends Blacklist,” which prevented his tweets from trending.
4. Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host, Dan Bongino (@dbongino), who at one point was slapped with a “Search Blacklist.”
5. Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) to “Do Not Amplify.”
6. Twitter denied that it does such things. In 2018, Twitter's Vijaya Gadde (then Head of Legal Policy and Trust) and Kayvon Beykpour (Head of Product) said: “We do not shadow ban.” They added: “And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”
7. What many people call “shadow banning,” Twitter executives and employees call “Visibility Filtering” or “VF.” Multiple high-level sources confirmed its meaning.
8. “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool,” one senior Twitter employee told us.
9. “VF” refers to Twitter’s control over user visibility. It used VF to block searches of individual users; to limit the scope of a particular tweet’s discoverability; to block select users’ posts from ever appearing on the “trending” page; and from inclusion in hashtag searches.
10. All without users’ knowledge.
11. “We control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do,” one Twitter engineer told us. Two additional Twitter employees confirmed.
12. The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team - Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It often handled up to 200 "cases" a day.
13. But there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank-and-file moderators following the company’s policy on paper. That is the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support,” known as “SIP-PES.”
14. This secret group included Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust (Vijaya Gadde), the Global Head of Trust & Safety (Yoel Roth), subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag Agrawal, and others.
15. This is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. “Think high follower account, controversial,” another Twitter employee told us. For these “there would be no ticket or anything.”
16. One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was @libsoftiktok—an account that was on the “Trends Blacklist” and was designated as “Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting With SIP-PES.”
17. The account—which Chaya Raichik began in November 2020 and now boasts over 1.4 million followers—was subjected to six suspensions in 2022 alone, Raichik says. Each time, Raichik was blocked from posting for as long as a week.
18. Twitter repeatedly informed Raichik that she had been suspended for violating Twitter’s policy against “hateful conduct.”
19. But in an internal SIP-PES memo from October 2022, after her seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that “LTT has not directly engaged in behavior violative of the Hateful Conduct policy." See here:
20. The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her posts encouraged online harassment of “hospitals and medical providers” by insinuating “that gender-affirming healthcare is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.”
21. Compare this to what happened when Raichik herself was doxxed on November 21, 2022. A photo of her home with her address was posted in a tweet that has garnered more than 10,000 likes.
22. When Raichik told Twitter that her address had been disseminated she says Twitter Support responded with this message: "We reviewed the reported content, and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules." No action was taken. The doxxing tweet is still up.
23. In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects. Here’s Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then Global Head of Trust & Safety, in a direct message to a colleague in early 2021:
24. Six days later, in a direct message with an employee on the Health, Misinformation, Privacy, and Identity research team, Roth requested more research to support expanding “non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification/visibility filtering.”
25. Roth wrote: “The hypothesis underlying much of what we’ve implemented is that if exposure to, e.g., misinformation directly causes harm, we should use remediations that reduce exposure, and limiting the spread/virality of content is a good way to do that.”
26. He added: “We got Jack on board with implementing this for civic integrity in the near term, but we’re going to need to make a more robust case to get this into our repertoire of policy remediations – especially for other policy domains.”
27. There is more to come on this story, which was reported by @abigailshrier @shellenbergermd @nelliebowles @isaacgrafstein and the team The Free Press @thefp.
Keep up with this unfolding story here and at our brand new website: thefp.com.
~Athena via Bari Weiss
8ºThe Lord will shake the land of America for iniquity, for the judgments are already going from small to large, in ascending order, for my people have turned their backs, turned away from me and burn incense to what a human hand has created, but they do not look at the God of Israel, until the Holy God they do not resort and there is no contrition and there is no weeping and there is no reverence for the Holy One of Israel... lust for lust, fornication for fornication. when you choose what is pleasing to the Lord, when you think about what is above, the door is open, and Christ is already at the door, and soon the church will be taken, the true church, without spot and wrinkle, the church, moved by the Holy Spirit, will be taken to heaven And you look into your hearts people, when was the last time you were filled with My Spirit, when was the last time you cried and sobbed, when My Glory visited you, when My Power filled you??? Oh, you have chosen the path of man, you have carved out cisterns that cannot hold water, you have thrown stones into the Spring of Living Water, you have planted thorns, you have forgotten what you should know, because the judgment will begin from the house of God and it will go through the earth the americas and the earth will tremble and the waves will rise and cover the shores and there will be great horror for the angel will descend to the earth, and the angel of death will truly blow the trumpet, the angel of punishment will come and God will be right, because he spoke, because he called, because he knocked, and there was no answer, there was no one who would open, who would turn and say: what do you command the Lord .. . But you hope, daughter of Israel, when you hoped for the wealth of this world, that your husband would earn and bring and give you, but you did not look at the God of Israel, and did not stand in the gap for your husband, and did not pray, and did not fast , but she lived carelessly and drew from this world a full cup, understand this , for I am a Holy God and walked the earth and allowed confusion to those who today hope for deities that are not living, but are human, I shook the earth there, I allowed horrors and fears, oh, this is the beginning of disasters...️ Africa will be burn with fire and there will be a great punishment to the east, for they chose human wisdom, but left the simplicity and Love of Christ, rejected the words of My Scripture ... Do not rebel against Israel, do not speak blasphemous, but my people, for my Angel guards him and everyone who rises from the lands Arab and Muslim will be punished and crushed, because he is my people, I gather him to open up to him, because the gospel for the Gentiles will soon be closed and opened to My people, and he will accept with tears and will cry, and weep, and say: my God and my Lord, You came to deliver and save us...Hallelujah