The ‘Twitter Files’ have exposed numerous contacts between US government officials and Twitter and requests for suppression of accounts or content: notably, in the context of alleged COVID-19 ‘disinformation’. But what they have not revealed is that there was in fact a formal government programme explicitly dedicated to “Fighting COVID-19 Disinformation” in which Twitter, as well as all other major social media platforms, were enrolled.
As part of this program, the platforms were submitting monthly (later bi-monthly) reports to the government on their censorship efforts. Below is a picture of an archive of the “Fighting COVID-19 Disinformation” reports.
I did not have to hack into the intranet of the U.S. government to find them. All I had to do was look on the public website of the European Commission. For the government in question is not, after all, the U.S. government, but the European Commission.
The reports are available here. Lest there be any doubt that what is at issue in “Fighting COVID-19 Disinformation” is censorship – but how could there be any doubt? – the Commission website specifies that the reports include information on “demoted and removed content containing false and/or misleading information likely to cause physical harm or impair public health policies” (author’s emphasis).
Indeed, the Twitter reports, in particular, include data not only on removed content, but also on outright account suspensions. It is thanks precisely to the data that Twitter was gathering to satisfy the EU’s expectations that we know that 11,230 accounts were suspended under Twitter’s recently discontinued COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy. The below chart, for instance, is taken from Twitter’s last (March-April 2022) report to the EU. Note that the data is ‘global’, i.e., Twitter was reporting back to the European Commission on its censorship of content and accounts all over the world, not just in the EU.
To be clear then: It is strictly impossible that Twitter has not had contact with EU officials about censoring COVID-19 dissent, because the EU had a program specifically dedicated to the latter and Twitter was part of it. Furthermore, it is strictly impossible that Twitter is not continuing to have contact with EU officials about censoring online content and speech more generally.
This is because the EU’s “Fighting COVID19 Disinformation” program was launched within the framework of its more general so-called Code of Practice on Disinformation. Under the Code, Twitter and other online platforms and search engines have assumed commitments to combat – i.e., suppress – what the European Commission deems to be ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’.
In June of last year, a ‘strengthened’ Code of Practice on Disinformation was adopted, which created formalised reporting requirements for Code signatories like Twitter. Other major signatories of the Code include Google/YouTube, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft – which is notably the owner of LinkedIn – and TikTok.
Furthermore, the strengthened Code also created a “permanent task force” on disinformation, in which all code signatories are required to participate and which is chaired by none other than the European Commission itself. The ‘task force’ also includes representatives of the EU’s foreign service. (For more details, see Section IX of the Code, titled “Permanent Task-Force.”)
And if this were not enough, in September of last year, the EU opened a ‘digital embassy’ in San Francisco, in order precisely to be close to Twitter and other leading American tech companies. For the moment, the embassy reportedly shares office space with the Irish consulate: meaning, per Google maps, that it is around a 10-minute drive from Twitter headquarters.
So, it is strictly impossible that Twitter has not had and is not continuing to have contact – indeed extensive and regular contact – with EU officials about censoring content and accounts that the European Commission deems ‘mis-’ or ‘disinformation’. But we have heard absolutely nothing about this in the ‘Twitter Files’.
Why? The answer is: because EU censorship really is government censorship, i.e., censorship that Twitter is required to carry out on pain of sanction. This is the difference between the EU censorship and what Elon Musk himself has denounced as “U.S. government censorship”. The latter has amounted to nudges and requests, but was never obligatory and could never be obligatory, thanks to the First Amendment and the fact that there has never been any enforcement mechanism. Any law creating such an enforcement mechanism would be obviously unconstitutional. Hence, Twitter could always simply say no.
But so long as it wants to remain on the EU market, Twitter cannot say no to the demands of the European Commission. As discussed in my previous article here, the enforcement mechanism that renders the Code of Practice obligatory is the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA gives the European Commission power to impose fines of up to 6% of global turnover on platforms that it finds to be in violation of the Code: n.b. global turnover, not just turnover on the EU market!
The Commission has not been shy about reminding Twitter and the other tech companies of this threat, thus posting the below tweet last June on the very day that the ‘strengthened’ Code of Practice was announced.
This was before the DSA had even been adopted by the European Parliament! But the DSA has been the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of Twitter and the other online platforms for the last two years, and it is now law. Once designated a “very large online platform” by the Commission – which is inevitable in its case – Twitter will have four months to demonstrate compliance, as the below “DSA Timeline” makes clear.
Moreover, the power to apply financial sanction is not the only extraordinary enforcement power that the DSA gives the Commission. The Commission is also given the power to conduct warrantless inspections of company premises, sealing the premises for the duration of the inspection, and gaining access to whatever ‘books or records’ it pleases. (See Article 69 of the DSA here.) Such inspections, which have been previously used in the context of EU competition law, are quaintly known in the literature as ‘dawn raids’. (See here, for example.)
This is why Elon Musk and the “Twitter Files” are so verbose about alleged “US government censorship” and so willing to “out” the private communications of US government officials, but have remained suitably mum about EU censorship demands and have not outed the private communications of any EU officials or representatives. Elon Musk is being held hostage by the European Union, and no hostage in his or her right mind is going to do anything to irritate the hostage-takers.
Far from any sign of defiance of the Code and the DSA, what we get from Elon Musk is repeated pledges of fealty: like the below tweet that he posted after meeting with EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton in January. (For an earlier such pledge in the form of a joint video message with Breton, see here.)
And if Musk should ever have any doubts about what he needs to do to satisfy the EU’s requirements, help is always close at hand – indeed a mere 10 minutes away. For the EU’s ‘digital ambassador’ to Silicon Valley, Gerard de Graaf, is one of the authors of the DSA.
But if Elon Musk is so fearful about crossing the EU, then why has he restored so many COVID-19 dissident accounts? Wasn’t that an act of defiance of the EU and notably of its “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” program?
Well, no, it was not.
Firstly, it should be recalled that Musk had originally promised a “general amnesty” of all suspended accounts. As discussed in my earlier article here, this quickly drew a stern and public rebuke from none other than Thierry Breton, and Musk failed to follow through. Instead, in accordance with Breton’s demands, there has been a case-by-case restoration of selected accounts, which has recently slowed down to a trickle.
@OpenVaet, whose own Twitter account remains suspended, has been maintaining a partial inventory of suspended Twitter accounts. As of this writing, only 99 of the 215 accounts in the sample, or roughly 46%, have been restored. (See @OpenVaet’s spreadsheet of still banned and restored accounts here.) Assuming the sample is representative, this would mean that over 6,000 accounts in all are still suspended.
And this is to say nothing of the more insidious form of censorship that is ‘visibility filtering’ or ‘shadow-banning’. Per the motto “Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach”, Elon Musk has never denied that Twitter would continue to engage in the latter. Many of the returning COVID-19 dissidents have noticed a curious lack of engagement, leading them to wonder if their accounts are not in fact still subjected to unannounced special measures.
But, secondly, and more to the point, have another look at the archive of the “Fighting Covid-19 Disinformation” reports shown above. That is the complete archive. The March-April 2022 reports are the final set of reports. Last June, as noted here, the European Commission discontinued the program, folding the reporting on COVID-19 ‘disinformation’ into the more general reporting requirements established under the ‘strengthened’ Code of Practice on Disinformation.
By this time, most of the most onerous COVID-19 measures in the EU, including ‘vaccine passports’, had already been ended, and most of the remainder have been gradually rolled back since. Elon Musk thus allowed (some) COVID-19 dissent back onto Twitter when, at least in the EU, there was hardly any public policy to dissent from anymore.
But the EU’s censorship regime as such is still very much in place, and censorship has by no means come to an end on Twitter. Thus, on the very night of the Brazilian elections on October 30th, Twitter was already censoring local reports of electoral fraud. The famous ‘misleading’ warning labels that had once been used to quarantine reports of COVID-19 vaccine harm now made a reappearance, insisting that according to unnamed ‘experts’, Brazil’s elections were ‘safe and secure’. (For examples, see my thread here.)
Whether electoral integrity/fraud in countries of interest, the war in Ukraine or the ‘next pandemic’ for which the EU is already reserving mRNA ‘vaccine’ capacity, you may rest assured that the EU will not lack new subjects of ‘disinformation’ requiring censorship and that Elon Musk and Twitter will oblige.
Whether this censorship takes the form of outright suspensions and content removals or content ‘demotion’ and account ‘visibility filtering’ is a secondary matter. The European Commission will be able to work out such details with Twitter and the other platforms.
Indeed, the DSA further requires the platforms to grant the Commission access to their back offices, including, as Thierry Breton triumphantly notes in a blog post here, “the ‘black box’ of algorithms that are at the heart of platforms’ systems”. As noted on the Commission website, the Commission is even setting up a European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency, in order to be able to better fulfill its ‘supervisory’ role in this regard.
Needless to say, such ‘transparency’ does not extend to mere users such as you or me. For us, the algorithmic functioning of the platforms will remain a ‘black box’. But the Commission will be able to know everything about it and to demand modifications to ensure compliance with the EU’s requirements.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe. Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com. This article first appeared on the website of the Brownstone Institute.
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It’s deja vu all over agin.
In order to arrive at an accurate prediction of the future, we’ll consult astrologers, haruspexes and augurs for input and then pick-and-chose from their predictions in whatever way we want until a consenus on how the future will become has emerged!
In modern pseudo-tech speak Modelling is considerably more robust when more than one model (ideally a minimum of three) is considered and a consensus is built and agreed across a broad community.
When trying to predict the future in three different ways leads to three different results, at least two of them must be wrong. As nobody knows which two are wrong, the only sensible course of action is to discard all three as there’s no point in basing decisions on information that’s at least 2/3 wrong.
Sometimes, I yearn for the times when superstitious people trying to influence others with their gobbleygook ended up being burnt by the church.
The climate change liars carefully selected 187 models predicting ‘global warming’ versus CO2 emissions from the many which came out of their modelling apparatus.
They were all wrong by some margin when compared with observation from the real World.
What I find puzzling, is that no matter how many times the ‘experts’ and their prediction are wrong, the nitwits in charge and other useful idiots still believe whatever else they come up with.
I think what you mean JXB, is that the nitwits in charge are perfectly happy to have a set of results that they can use to fill their pockets with for absolutely no benefit to the citizens.
If there are at least 187 substantially different ways to do the same, namely, simulate the weather in the future, this clearly communicates that the people who came up with all of these have absolutely no clue how what they’re trying to simulate actually works.
They were alll wrong by some margin is nothing but pseudo-learnt sounding way of saying They’re all wrong.
In fairness, one set of model results produced a curve below all the others, although still generally higher than recorded temperatures (themselves manipulated to exaggerate warming).
Which set of results, then, have been least infected by GangGreen lunacy?Why, those from a big Country with lots of coal, oil, gas to sell.
The Russian model. Go figure.
“When trying to predict the future in three different ways leads to three different results, at least two of them must be wrong.”
Why aren’t all three wrong?
It’s perfectly possible and actually, even very probable that all three are wrong. But that’s a tangential point when trying to highlight the complete idiocy of this statement: When three different computer programs generate three different answers to the same question, two of them must necessarily be wrong. Hence, using all three to come up with a meta-result which is then used for actual decision making has – at the very best – garbled the one accurate result.
That’s a classic example of throwing sand into people’s eyes by making something more complicated despite this exact process actually guarantees that the combined output won’t make any sense.
And if all three are wrong?
“All models are wrong, some are useful.” George Box
Exactly so
Mathematical models are easily demolished by one inconvenient problem.
If mathematical models have any predictive power then some bright spark would have applied them to the stockmarket and, he or she, would have quickly become the richest person on planet earth.
The fact that this has not been done tells you everything you need to know about the ‘power’ of these models.
As I already wrote last time: People are applying this to the stock market all the time and fool themselves into believing that the outputs make sense despite they’re nowadays even forced to include warnings to the contrary when advertising stuff like investment funds.
Have you not heard of Long-Term Capital Management with its Nobel prize winners?
Meanwhile…I like this graph of Joel Smalley’s. It looks nothing whatsoever like lockdown-fanboy Ferguson’s predictions either;
”In England & Wales during spring 2020, over a thirteen-week period, there were almost:
52,000 ‘COVID’ deaths
Mainstream Media reported each and every death daily as justification for the most illegitimate denial of British civilian liberties in history.
In England & Wales during winter 2021, after the introduction of a miracle “vaccine” and after such a massive depletion of the vulnerable/susceptible population, over a thirteen-week period, there were almost:
70,000 ‘COVID’ deaths
In winter 2023, with conspicuously few ‘COVID’ deaths, over a thirteen-week period, there were almost:
55,000 ‘winter’ excess deaths”
https://metatron.substack.com/p/all-deaths-are-equal-but-some-deaths
And the true number is about 10% and people who were going to die anyway.
Non-deterministic models are as useful as tits on a bull.
Arguably if the variations are not significant then it’s not a huge issue. The bigger issue, IMO, is that the models are not re-checked against reality and revised/ditched when it turns out that they are rubbish at predicting what actually happens.
Arguably if the variations are not significant then it’s not a huge issue.
I think you’re misunderstanding the term. Non-deterministic means the output cannot be predicted based on the input, ie, that this is essentially a random process driven by its inputs in an unknown (and unknowable) way. This means one can as well resort to guessing or rolling dice to generate outputs.
But you can keep running them until the “required results” are delivered.
I know what deterministic means. My point was that if the result each time is within a small margin of the other results, the randomness is arguably not that important. I just think that it’s not the most glaring problem with modelling – the bigger issues are not sufficiently questioning the assumptions around the inputs and most damningly not revising the model based on its abject failure to predict anything.
I know what deterministic means. My point was that if the result each time is within a small margin of the other results, the randomness is arguably not that important.
That’s Ferguson’s point: Run it mutiple times and average the results, it’s meant to be stochastic, anyway! And this doesn’t make any sense because non-deterministic means the output cannot be predicted based on the input. This is literally the equivalent of rolling a dice three times to ‘predict’ an unknown number between 3 and 18 and then boldy claiming that this is a valid method for predicing numbers because The average error is only about 1/3!
Let’s not forget that one thing modellers can do well, is to buy bigger, much more expensive computers to run their fanciful programmes (based on multiplying wild assed guesses together and applying lots of tweaks and fudges).
These huge increasingly fancy and expensive supercomputers, paid for by you, dear readers, and using more and more fossil fuels to run ’em, have been very effective in getting completely false results much faster.
The MET Office loves them.
They are perhaps the reason why the forecast for tomorrow is doubtful, that for four days is almost certainly wrong. Selwyn Froggatt with his pinecone and piece of seaweed did better.
The standards of the computer are irrelevant when the code is written by rank amateurs
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/05/16/coding-led-lockdown-totally-unreliable-buggy-mess-say-experts/
GIGO
I find stochastic models very useful. After all they should contain all your deterministic models, each with their own probability of occurring.
“…the impact of public health measures, including border measures,..”
I don’t think birds can read.
Ha Ha. Good point. Well, they”ll keep out the birds that travel by lorry, plane and ship. Any measure that reduces the opportunities for the virus to spread has got to be worth it. Isn’t that what we’re told by public health ‘experts’?
Can someone please permanently unplug Ferguson’s computer.
I suggest unplugging the guy himself. He’s probably just an AI chatbot.
That doesn’t seem to be the attraction for his married ‘friend’. They don’t call him Professor Pantsdown for nothing.
Next time the Guvmint wants a ‘projection’ from him, it should be strictly on the ‘cock on the block’ basis. Guvmint with (for once) hatchet in hand.
IMHO, the attraction for his married ‘friend’ is that he’s one of her business contacts. Practically, the difference between incel and professor of something having a fullfilling albeit somewhat limited private life is one of spending power.
:->
[This is a conjecture based on absolutely no real information save my general distrust in people.]
Neil Ferguson – paid to lie
Stand in the Park
Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Hi LS just one question why 10:30 ours starts at 10:00? I’m always getting flak for being late!!!
If computer modelling had been used in Salem to determine who was a witch, I’m pretty sure all the women and half the men in town would have been burnt at the stake.
Plagiarising J K Galbraith – there are only 2 types of computer modellers, those who are wrong and those who don’t know they are wrong
That’s why they should my “suggestion” above.
Exactly
Two words for this lot of fear mongering clowns….
…. OFF!!!!
As a retired dairy farmer, I find it incomprehensible that this numbskull Ferguson should be ever believed. What he cost dairy farmers in anxiety and reputation with BSE and the deaths of 100s of thousand of perfectly healthy cattle with the F&M debacle. This was followed by the Bird Flu and Sine Fever which was believed by Bliar and then Brown and since then 5 more PMs beggars belief that Governments are so stupid.
One has to wonder why the Governments believed Imperial College predictions over the Oxford University and people like Prof Sunetra Gupta who had been the forerunners of the unit that was created at Imperial College.
As soon as I knew on 3rd week of March 2020, that Ferguson was involved then I emailed my Tory MP and gave him lenthy reasons as to why this was a mistake and it would costly and wrong. The base figure Ferguson used was wrong which means that the outcomes become extrapolated to an advanced and ridiculous degree which is what happened in all his previous predictions and sure enough, it happened again.
This man ought to be charged with fraud but treachery would be a good charge for which he so richly deserves.