Notes on the Twitter Files (14-A)

Matt Taibbi has posted a 10-part supplemental thread to the fourteenth installment of the Twitter Files. The supplemental thread can be accessed via the first tweet in the thread (below). Bruce Golding covers the thread for the New York Post here.

In this thread Taibbi devotes special attention to the dogged efforts of then House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and the DNC to censor a tweet posted to a parody Twitter account. The tweet has a mocking GIF of Joe Biden lolling his tongue in slow-mo. In this case Twitter declined the request to censor. They thought it was stupid.

Schiff is a psychopathic fascist. Any idiot can see that the GIF was a joke, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to protect Biden from mockery. This is the tweet and GIF that Schiff et al. sought to have removed.

It seems there is a little more to the story. Looking around online I found PolitiFact’s assessment of a Facebook post that put the Twitter GIF to good use in an altered video. PolitiFact soberly explained that “in the altered video, Joe Biden is rolling his tongue in circles while his wife speaks instead of staring silently at the camera as he does in the original.” PolitiFact added that “[t]he footage of Biden rolling his tongue is not real — a meme-maker manipulated the video by superimposing a digitally altered GIF on top of the original clip of the Bidens.”

On Facebook the video had been “flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.” PolitiFact judged the Facebook video “inaccurate and ridiculous.” The insertion of “ridiculous” into their judgment suggests that even they got the joke, but they proceeded to rate the video “Pants on Fire!” It’s a “Pants on Fire!” joke.

PolitiFact supplied a screenshot of the video from Facebook (below). Yes, indeed, we can see the need for the oversight of social media “helpers” such as Schiff, the DNC, and PolitiFact. Lèse-majesté is a serious offense when committed against Democrats.

Golding’s New York Post story on Taibbi’s supplemental Twitter thread adds the usual note in good journalistic style: “Requests for comment from Schiff’s office and the DNC weren’t immediately returned.”

As I have observed several times in this series, we owe the publication of the Twitter Files to Elon Musk. It is a project that I believe to be the biggest story out there. Today’s Schiff-related supplement is a valuable addition and reminder that we badly need a look into the Facebook Files. They must be full of buried treasure.

Taibbi has more in his supplemental thread, but I think this is the highlight. As always, I urge interested readers to take a look at the whole thing with your own eyes.

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