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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They’re not skiving! They’re just staying at home to protect granny! We should be grateful!
I wonder how many of these glaikit nutters that glue themselves to roads, destroy public property or deface Starbucks/KFC/McDonald’s ( because that’ll ”free Palestine” ), and disrupt society generally with their antisocial behaviour, have jobs. Because I think not only do they have zero respect for others but they’re completely devoid of any self-respect also. Seriously, what right-minded person goes on like this? Pure vandalism. I’m sure her parents are proud!;
https://twitter.com/ScooterCasterNY/status/1766113531433230615
As German, I have much more reason to be pissed of by English politics of that time than these nutjobs. Yet, I’d never destroy a painting of Llyod George or Winston Churchill (or even Arthur Harris, for that matter). I guess this must be because we’re all completely barbarian quasi-animals who only derive pleasure from destroying irreplacable works of art and culture and hacking of the feet and hands of children (all of these being actual tropes of British WWI wartime propaganda) …
Yes but do you know what Mogwai means by “glaikit” ?
Is this a question? Not until I looked it up but it’s not really necessary for the meaning of the sentence as it just adds emphasis to object of it. Glaikit nutter could also be rendered as nutty nutter.
Yes it is a question. —-It is not confrontational though. I am only asking if you have heard of this since you are German and that is an old Scottish word that most English people will not be that familiar with.
Only one solution for that oxygen thieving halfwit …
Short Drop.
Mogwai
If this was at Cambridge university, then perhaps she’s a student. Very worrying indeed, that supposedly the brightest young minds in the country can behave like this: spoilt little brats, who are desecrating priceless British artefacts. I mean, does she really have any idea who Balfour is? Clearly many British professors are under pressure to fall in line with the latest leftist mind fart; under pressure from the students, in fact. In the past, this little girl would have been expelled, fined, possibly even arrested. Now the professors sit back and nod their heads “yes Balfour was a racist misogynistic islamophobe Covid-denying far right extremist, and he should be erased”
Interestingly, it was at Beijing University (the Cambridge of China) where Mao’s ‘thought’ was followed most feverishly by the students, who then turned against their professors for ‘old ideas, old habits, old customs, old culture’, vandalising artefacts, burning books and trashing people’s homes. Sound familiar?
That is what also happened at Evergreen State College in Washington.
Too much employment legislation:
‘“It is a common misconception that more laws mean greater protection. Legislation has become increasingly complicated and ambiguous for employers. There comes a point when the added benefit is questionable and must be outweighed by the burden which it places on business. This is especially the case for small and medium sized employers who may not have a specialist, in-house HR function.”
“In the past five years (2005-10) there has been a continuous flow of new employment laws passed ranging from the new Agency Workers Regulations, the Age Discrimination Regulations to European case law on rights to accrue holidays even while on long term sick leave. New employment legislation is estimated to have added £70 billion to costs for businesses over the last decade.’
So, Blair’s Britain. A massive public sector: ‘At its most recent high-point in 2010, the public sector employed about 6.1 million workers, or 21% of all UK workers. This followed an increase of about 700,000 in the absolute size of the public workforce since 1998–99.’
But:
‘The government has confirmed at least 10 new (HR) laws for 2024’
So Cameron, May, Bunter, Sunak’s Britain as well; still a massive public sector after fourteen entirely pointless and incompetent years:
‘There were an estimated 5.90 million employees in the public sector in September 2023, which is 35,000 (0.6%) more than in June 2023 and 135,000 (2.3%) more than in September 2022.’
We know what to do:
‘It will be necessary to curtail the major areas of government spending: welfare, health and education. Indeed, emergency cuts, or at least freezes, in welfare benefits and public sector pay may be in order – the kind of measures seen recently in struggling central European countries. Indeed, we should start this year – welfare benefits, pensions and public sector pay should not rise by more than private sector pay rises. If public sector pay cannot be reined in this year it will never be reined in. If welfare benefits are not pegged to wage increases then employment incentives will be diminished.
However, the crisis also presents opportunities for Cameron to launch positive longer-term reforms that reduce the scope of government. He could start by tackling public sector pensions (a liability of over £1 trillion), move on to welfare reform and then health and education, promoting competition and efficiency through individual savings accounts and voucher-type schemes while getting rid of the costly bureaucrats.
How could this be done in practice? A voucher scheme could involve a voucher of a fixed money value being given for the first five years of the scheme. Its value in real terms – and certainly relative to national income – would then fall. This could be politically acceptable as it would happen at the same time as huge efficiency savings were achieved.
And let’s not forget regulation. Removing red tape – for example, the new gender pay audits – would reduce the government payroll while lowering costs for businesses.’
IEA 2010
But no-one has the backbone to do it…..so they will be removed…..and so will the next ones and so on until someone gets the message…….
‘
All Bureaucracies are the same. They expand out of control and grab more and more power and control. The virus of Politically Correct, wokery and human rights nonsense has spread all across the western world faster than a speeding bullet.
I worked as a senior exec at a ftse 100 company, the ceo appointed a new female HR Director. who still works at a senior level in Industry, she never remained in any post for more than 2 years. On arrival what was a small efficient department bloated to a large over reaching one, a more manipulative and machiavellian individual I have never before or since come across. She caused division between the execs through a whisper campaign, she would monitor and spy on staff members through their social media accounts. she introduced the concept of pay increases linked to ” the correct behaviors and values”, she denied job opportunities to be offered to non university educated staff.
She was a true horror of a woke virtue signaller, who justified her spying and displacement of members of the workforce for the good of the company.
The ceo was weak, she used knowledge of his extra marital affairs to keep her position. True to form when a new ceo joined she left. I regularly see her writing s in HR journals on the importance of equity and kindness. A more unkind person I have yet to meet, she is also a mentor for her discipline which helps explain the malignant growth and influence of a role that actually is of no financial or creative value to a business.
I know this isn’t necessarily gender-specific, although I’ve always got on better with male colleagues than female ( probably because they, like me, weren’t bitchy and didn’t flirt with the male consultants on ward rounds ), but your post reminded me for some reason of this. So in the spirit of ‘International Womens’ Day’ I must share this skit that’s floating around, plus I always was a Harry Enfield fan back in the day, so any excuse;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w&ab_channel=BBCStudios
Thankfully, this has meanwhile been fixed: I know a fair lot of men who are extremely fond of kittens and entirely unaware of what gold standard means.
genius. Thanks for posting
Why do you think your CEO chose her?
Christ only knows
I mean do you think the CEO just wandered into it without really paying attention to the possible consequences, or was he on board with her agenda, largely? I work in a small firm which doesn’t really do box ticking crap, but a lot of our clients, especially the US-based ones, seem to really push it and they are in the B2B space so no need to appeal to the general public.
Rights come from our humanity. Not from governments. Because if you get your rights from bureaucrats, politicians and governments then those same people can take those rights away again.
Indeed- Clarence Thomas said something similar in his gay marriage dissent.
Speaking of International Women’s Day, I had an e-mail from my old school today (an all boy’s grammar school since the sixteenth century) inviting me to help them celebrate International Women’s Day and champion the importance of gender equality.
It’s good to know the lads are being fired up to begin the much needed fight for equal rights and equal pay for women.Who knows, today’s might even win women the vote one day.
Evil globalists are destroying western civilisation. HR are just useful idiots.
There is arather angry and curt tone to this writing. Of course there is plenty to be said about these miserable tendencies but this seems to be a list of bitter complaints masquerading as a cogent proposition. Stoicism is an interesting philosophy to reflect upon. In Greece it was one of the three responses to the decline of empire, along with Epicureanism and Pyrrhonic sceptism. There were schools devoted to the science of the will in the early twentieth century but they were killed of by the world wars. Christian teaching provided a profound exposition of how stoicism and tenderness represent the fullness of being. Surely an attempt to understand such tendencies begins with an attempt to unravel their antecedents first. For some people it takes a lot for them to keep their physical and mental health in good condition in the times that we are living in.
Nuanced erudition, how passe
The author does have a point, but is also clearly conflating matters to attract traffic.
Now now, what could have caused that ca. 40% uptick starting in 2020 in the trend of the (sadly) long-term sick?