Michael Shellenberger touches on several of the most important themes that emerge from the Twitter Files in the interview with Joe Rogan that RealClearPolitics has posted here (with transcript). Shellenberger is one of the journalists who participated in the excavation and reporting of the Twitter Files. It is useful to have his assessment of the findings, among which is this:
Over time we kept finding all these weird, “Oh, FBI wants us to do this.” These other government agencies. Oh, all these people used to work at the FBI. CIA shows up. Department of Homeland Security. We’re like, what the hell is going on?
The story quickly shifted from what Elon thought, which was that it was just very progressive people being biased in their content moderation and their censoring, to: There is a huge operation by U.S. government officials, U.S. government contractors, and all of these super-sketchy NGOs, getting money from who knows where, basically demanding that Twitter start censoring people.
At that moment, the story shifted for all of us.
This is the finding that RCP highlights in the headline, but there is much more of interest in the interview. The press has of course downplayed or ignored just about every relevant finding; the press is instrumental to the scheme that Shellenberger sketches out in the interview. His backgrounder on the findings so far is interesting throughout. I have posted the video below.
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